Tag: Kitty

Bang Bang chicken

I have been sulking a lot recently for an unidentifiable reason.

Maybe it’s the incredibly swizzy unfair weather we’re having. Winter was such a fucking slog this year, what with Kitty not yet walking or watching telly or doing anything remotely compatible with bad weather. All we did was sit around going mad and getting ill, praying for bedtime and lusting after spring. Then spring never came, or summer. We might get a blast in September or October if we’re really lucky but in reality we’re just going to go straight back into winter.

And we’ve done all our holidays this year – we’ve had three already, taking advantage of having a pre-schooler to go away in May, June and early July. We invested, for the holiday, in a preposterous amount of childcare. And on the most recent holiday, to a house in Devon, we had a cook. It wasn’t my idea!! So please don’t have a massive go at me. We were with another couple who work incredibly hard and get paid stupendous wodges of cash and who do not want to assemble salads or wash up when they are on holiday, or stay in a hotel. So we had Cara, the dark-eyed, pink-cheeked 23 year-old Leiths graduate marvel with whom my husband fell passionately in love on the first day.

Anyway it was amazing. But after seven full days of not doing any cooking or much childcare I have come back in this sulk you see before you. I have forgotten how to look after Kitty – and she knows it. She is well aware that I think that if she cries or is in a bait it’s my fault. And at the moment it is my fault because she is incredibly pissed off with me because I have taken away her morning and lunchtime bottle.

There’s this tedious thing when you have children about the amount of milk they have. They fucking love milk, little children, and they especially love it out of a bottle. On the grand scale of things, I think that being attached to your bottle isn’t especially bad, but people get in a right piss about it and say children ought to have all their drinks out of a toddler cup from 1 year on and no more than this amount of milk but no less than this amount of milk.

I couldn’t have cared less about it: Kitty can tell me what she wants, says please and thank you, can sing Baa Baa Black Sheep, doesn’t embarrass me in public and goes to bed at night in her own bed and wakes up at a civilised hour. Thus, anything she wants – a constant stream of rice cakes, Peppa Pig, drawing on the walls, three bottles a day – she can have it.

But then I went to see a paediatrician, who also happens to be my husband’s cousin. I rang him in a complete blind panic two months ago when Kitty had a temperature of 104 and a head-to-toe rash and he was really nice about it. And when I say “really nice” I mean he said “If she isn’t better by tomorrow, give her antibiotics.”

No other fucker will do that for you, when your child is sick. They mimsy about like total utter dildos, saying “Well you could do this or you could do that”. But Dr Mike just told me what to do. So obviously I fell passionately in love with him. When he rang to check up on Kitty and to say that maybe he ought to see her in person I screamed “Yes!” and raced about doing my hair, putting proper shoes on, picking the crud out of Kitty’s ears and ironing her into her Bonpoint.

And when Dr Mike told me that Kitty was having too much milk and ought to drop her multitude of bottle events I meekly nodded and gave him my shy Princess Diana “okay” face, rather than snarling and mentally flicking him a V-sign like I do with everyone else.

Kitty’s not that pleased about this bottle cessation. She rages through the kitchen, rummaging deep in cupboards and drawers until only her dirty little feet are poking out, looking for the few Avents we still having hanging about, assembles one with a shaky, addict’s hand then staggers about sucking hopefully at air before throwing the bottle across the floor and weeping theatrically.

There was an awful lot of weeping yesterday, imprisoned as we were in the house by the rain and we were at each other’s throats. Back when I was reasonably good at childcare, I used to have this thing where when I was was in sole charge of Kitty I would lock away my iPad and only check my emails when she was napping. Otherwise the temptation, like yesterday, to poke the iPad all day and barely focus on the child is overwhelming and she’s not stupid and starts wailing and flinging herself about from a lack of attention.

Christ are you still awake? I’m even boring myself with all this. No wonder I’m in a sulk.

Anyway let’s just leave things there with the weather, back where we started, and move on to a recipe shall we?

I did this last night for my husband and was terrific except that I didn’t use enough vegetables. So if you want to do this, make sure you have 3 parts vegetables – any you like – to 1 part chicken. I ate mostly poached chicken and it was quite strange

Bang Bang Chicken

1 quantity of chicken. It is supposed to be poached and it is supposed to be cold. I did this by poaching an entire chicken; you brown it in oil in a massive casserole whatsit then filling the whatsit with water so that just the top inch of the chicken is visible. Throw in a carrot, a halved onion, some peppercorns, a star anise (??) then put it in the oven for 1hr 45min at 180. Poached chicken is just as nice as roast chicken when it comes to leftovers

A large pile of shredded vegetables – carrots, cucumber, mung beans? sweetcorn? whatever, dressed with:
– a drizzle of toasted sesame oil
– lime juice
– shredded mint

For the bang bang sauce – enough for 2 people.

– 1 tbsp groundnut oil
– 1 tbsp peanut butter
– 1 tbsp toasted sesame oil
– 1/2 tbsp dried red chilli flakes
– 2 tbsp rice wine vinegar
– 1 tbsp light soy sauce

Whizz all this up in a food processor

Assemble the salad by layering your vegetables, then the sliced/shredded chicken then the sauce, then sprinkle over some coriander, toasted sesame seeds, chopped chillies. You know the drill.

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Chocolate nests for Easter

I don’t know why this photo has come out blue

It occured to me the other day that I might be a tiny bit of a control freak. I arrived at this conclusion while thinking the other morning about why is it that I hate being pregnant quite so much.

Because I suspect I hate being pregnant an uncommon amount – I think I hate it and find it more onerous and tedious than other people do. I think I hate it out of proportion to its actual discomforts and indignities.

And I think that I am this way because if you are inclined towards control freakery, pregnancy is like a worst nightmare: your body runs off in all directions like an errant toddler and does all sorts of things you would never allow in real life: it gets fat, it won’t sleep, it twitches and jumps about at all hours of the day and night, it becomes tearful and exhausted for no reason, it is forgetful and irritable and slow and late. It does things that a control freak simply cannot laugh off or feel philosophical about.

I was initially rather pleased and smug at this self-diagnosis. Control freakery implies to me a level of organisation and “sortedness” that, as a control freak, I find wildly appealing. But control freaks aren’t always successful. My friend the writer Olivia Glazebrook, (her excellent novel The Trouble With Alice is available on Amazon), once said to me “so you’re a perfectionist?” and I laughed and said “I can’t be a perfectionist- my house is a mess”. And then she laughed (we were quite pissed) and said “You can be a perfectionist without having a perfect life.”

I didn’t really understand at the time, but what she meant was that seeking to control things, or to be perfect, is a psychosis, a sort of madness: and like the lunatic who likes to believe that he is St Jerome, (but isn’t and will never be), just because you seek control and perfection, doesn’t mean you get it.

It is the action of planning to control or seeking the illusion of control that control freaks need – not neccessarily the end result. It’s why I stockpile butter and cleaning products and toiletries: buying and storing them is to me more important a ritual than the actual fact of them being there. And it’s why although the last time I was pregnant I planned my hospital maternity bag down to the last can of facial spritzer, I failed to execute it in time and was left post-partum with no clean underwear, no nursing bra and no hairband. And no, needless to say, facial spritzer. I remembered the iPad, though.

Control freaks are often some of the most ineffectual people there are. Not to get too self-important about it, but Gordon Brown was a famous control freak and couldn’t get anything done. We are like dogs chasing our tails. It’s really quite sad.

All this self-knowledge doesn’t stop me from trying. Making lists, hoarding, planning, doing everything in advance: it’s soothing. It soothes me in the place of a repeat prescription of benzos.

But I have let go of certain things. For example, when Kitty is ill, which she is now. She has come down with a thing she had last year, which involves a high fever, red sticky eyes, luminous magenta cheeks, a stupendous amount of neon snot, resistance to infant analgesics and a lot of midnight wailing.

This would have traumatised me beyond belief this time last year, so insanely uptight am I about nothing getting in the way of my sleep. In fact, recalling Kitty’s selfsame infection last year, I am staggered, in hindsight, at how mean I was about her having to stay in her cot, even though she was weeping and holding her arms out to me and saying “Mummmmeeee”. My own mother, not a control freak in any way, was appalled by this. “Why don’t you just tuck her up in bed next to you?” she said. My mother never, ever comments on my parenting – she only ever says “Kitty looks well” or “that’s a nasty cough” – so she must have been shocked.

I didn’t want to put Kitty in bed with me because I was crazy (DESPITE THERAPY) and I thought that if you have a baby or toddler in bed with you even once even for half an hour, they will be in bed with you until they are 25.

But I was wrong. I had Kitty in bed with me for three nights when she was ill last year, I didn’t feel nearly as bad as I thought I would, and the minute she was better she went gladly back into her own bed and slept like she always had. It made me understand that there is just no room for absolutism when it comes to children. You have to be flexible. When they are very ill or very scared it’s different. There are exceptions.

So now when Kitty is unwell we all three of us just knock about all night, drifting from one bed to another, in and out of rooms, my husband and I silently handing our hot, weeping child to each other as some shared internal timer tells us that a shift has come to an end, giving each other the odd pat on the shoulder. It’s fine, we’re fine. She’ll get better at some point. Sleeplessness will age us, yes, but it won’t kill us.

That doesn’t mean that there isn’t ample opportunity for benign control freakery in my life, like my passion for accessorising Kitty’s experience of national holidays.

Kitty has been talking, for a while, about an Easter egg hunt, as this is a thing she has seen on Peppa Pig. Having children gives you a new perspective on the winter: cold wet weather is so particularly ghastly when you have a toddler that you feel as ravingly joyous at its conclusion as ancient farmers on Welsh hillsides must have done 200 years ago.

And Easter really means winter is over – so this year, we are going to go nuts. I am going to have an Easter table centrepiece (fashioned from blossom twigs and hung with decorated eggs and festooned with ribbons) roast lamb on whatever day you’re supposed to have it and the most glorious Easter egg hunt you’ve ever seen.

And these chocolate nests, a forgotten thing from my childhood that I saw in a book. I do love Mini Eggs – with their dusty, pastel speckled shells they really do look like little wild birds eggs, don’t they? Or am I just a credulous townie?

Anyway, you don’t need a recipe. Just melt some milk chocolate in a bowl over warm water, then sprinkle in cornflakes, turn the flakes in the chocolate until covered (add a handful of raisins for extra pizzazz) then decant into fairy paper cases and dot with mini eggs.

If I can just get myself together to actually do all this and not miss the whole of Easter because I am too busy planning Kitty’s amazing bucket and spade summer holiday, we’ll be laughing.

Surrendering onions

I’ve been away. I know. I have noticed. Thank you for your patience during the disruption to your service.

I’ve been terribly ill, you see. Sick, so sick. Morning sickness it is. Was. It’s over now – sort of. I still get the odd billowing wave of it, bobbing up around my solar plexus but I’m no longer a drooping, greyish figure haunting my house. Urgh. I hate – hate – people who say that horrid thing to pregnant women – “You’re not ill, you’re pregnant.” Really? Because it feels an awful lot like norovirus to me.

Anyway I feel better now. And I had my 12 week scan – just one spratling, thank god, in the right place – and so I can start moaning on about being pregnant again. The other thing that’s happened is that I’ve finished putting together that book I was talking about. In the end it really wasn’t very much work, it was just impossible to do anything feeling so sick. Ten minutes typing, 1 hour lying down, ten minutes typing, one hour lying down. SO SO SICK. I got some pills off my doctor, The Beast, in the end. I just couldn’t take it anymore. But they only took the edge off, it wasn’t like I was bouncing out of bed in the mornings.

I honestly am still reeling from how awful it was. It just wasn’t that bad with Kitty. And I wasn’t that tired either. But for the last six weeks I’ve been wiped out, asleep from 1-3pm every day. Wiped out like chalk on a blackboard. And then wake up feeling like shit. Poor old Kitty. Or rather lucky Kitty – she has eaten biscuits and watched telly solidly for six weeks. But thank god for telly. Thank GOD! What would we have done without it.

I am trying not to think too much about being plunged back into a babyhood. I am trying to look on the bright side. I must have learned something since Kitty was born. It surely won’t be as awful as it was. I don’t want to go mad again, I really don’t.

It has to be different this time – for one, Kitty was brought home to a house that didn’t have any children in it. It was a grown-up house, really quite spooky in a lot of ways – silent and strange and unfit for a baby. These days it has a chattering lunatic nearly-two-year-old in it, dropping crumbs and kicking balloons and watching telly and running from one end of the house to the other for no reason other than youthful high spirits. The changing mat now has its own room, rather than squatting on the kitchen table. The kitchen extension means that everyone can slob about in the kitchen, rather than me being at the stove, running out every ten seconds into the living room to make sure everyone’s okay.

And maybe I’m different. Broken in, broken down. Resigned. Institutionalised. Used to that special sort of monotony you get with small children, so intense particularly in babies. My expectations from life are different now. I am surrendered, like onions.

Surrendering onions is a slow but pleasing task. It is what you do if you want very soft, aromatic, almost creamy onions (for an onion gravy for example, or a tangle alongside some sausages) and the trick is to cook them for a good 1.5-2 hours on the lowest heat on your smallest available burner.

You slice them into rings, reasonably thinly and scatter them in a pan with some oil – and butter, if you like. Then sprinkle over a generous pinch of salt and put a lid on and leave them. Do not turn the heat up and do not poke them about too much. Take the lid off if at any point the onions start to even think about sizzling. Towards the end of the cooking time, the onions will almost in a matter of seconds collapse into themselves – they will surrender. I can’t help but think of motherhood like that. But not in a bad way.