Tag: life

Madeleines and lemonade

When my husband and I were first going out, I always used to worry that his female friends with children, or the wives of his male friends with children, wouldn’t like me.

I was worried that they wouldn’t like me because I was ten or so years younger and I didn’t have children. I assumed they would find me annoying and resent my child-free state, my bouncy boobs, my very long, luxury hair that I had 45 minutes spare each morning to blow dry, style and finish with two coats of shellac.

But none of them did. They were all just charming and if I said stupid or ignorant things about children it didn’t show in their faces. Not a flicker. Not for a moment. I assumed that if I was them I would find me irritating, but I was wrong.

Then I had a child of my own and I understood why they were all able to be so beatific.They looked at me and saw not a carefree young woman with life at her feet: they saw – consciously or unconsciously – a lamb to the slaughter. And the pity in their hearts for me translated effortlessly into a sunny kindness.

They knew this: either I would have kids and would have my ass handed to me by Mother Nature without them having to lift a finger, or I would not have kids and have my ass handed to me by the whole freaking world asking endless, rude questions about when are you going to and if not why not and don’t you want them and shouldn’t you get on with it? and can’t you have them? and all that shit that people say to the childless like no-one has ever asked them any of those questions before.

They are mostly out the other side of little kids, are Giles’s friends – their youngest children are about five and they all just go on holiday all the time and are whippet thin with amazing jobs and beautiful clothes. And they’re all still nice to me and sympathetic and generous about the hassles and burdens of new motherhood.

And now it’s my turn to be nice. I meet child-free people – both male and female – who, consciously or unconsciously, say blithe, tactless and ridiculous things about children, the freedom of their lives, the things they will or will not be doing in the future, the holidays they have been on and all that. And it’s so easy to be nice about it all.

Because although I will soon be starting with a newborn all over again, I can start crossing things off the list: never have to be pregnant again, never have to give birth again, never have to breastfeed again, knicker area more or less in working order, (give or take a few patch-up procedures), back in old clothes, back working, baby sleeping through (ish), baby sitting up… I may have all sorts of unspeakable horrors in front of me but there is light at the end of the tunnel. And it’s not a train coming the other way.

But you… I think, looking around at my childless peers approaching the twilight zone of their mid-thirties… you have got to do all of this, from scratch, if you want kids. And the end of fun, the end of your life as you know it when it comes, is so abrupt and feels so much like it’s forever, (though it’s not), that the pity in my heart allows me to genuinely enjoy, with you, your latest holiday, your skinny bum, your bouyant bosom, that light of blissful, ignorant confidence in your eyes.

I genuinely enjoy it with you as I genuinely enjoy the unfettered delight that my toddler takes in balloons, or seeing a baby rabbit, or receiving an ice cream. I can delight with you because, as with my toddler, I know that quite soon it’s all going to be over and you’re both, in your own ways, going to have to grow up in the most necessary and horrible way imaginable.

The view from the other side is, I know, delightful. Children are worth it if only because the early years with them can be so very ghastly that it makes you really appreciate life anew (the joys of which, in your late twenties and early thirties, may have become dull and commonplace). When your youngest child hits 18 months it is, I imagine, like being Scrooge and waking up to find that it’s Christmas Day and you’ve got a chance at life all over again.

It is in contemplation of these simple pleasures that I have recently been making madeleines and lemonade for tea.

People coming round for tea is a thing that happens endlessly when you have children. The morning is a time for adventure and activity, but in the afternoon, people slob about and have tea. I, especially, cannot leave the house most afternoons because we are in a phase of Kitty’s nap-drop that means that she won’t sleep at all during the day but now has a danger zone from 4pm onwards, where if she’s in a buggy or a car she will pass out.

Anyway, if you are feeling generous towards your teatime guests you could make them madeleines, which only involves the purchase of a madeleine tray and the making of a very simple cake batter. They are good for tea because there is nothing more delicious than freshly baked sponge batter, but fairy cakes are stupid and you might not want to bake an entire massive cake.

I bought my madeleine tray off Amazon and I’m not that pleased with it, just between you and me. I think the shell shape it gives is unsatisfying and indistinct – even though it came highly recommended. Maybe you will have more luck with yours.

Then you make the following sponge mix – (courtesy of Michel Roux) – it is a very good, very easy mix, with no need to cream the butter and sugar. Mine came out brilliantly and I had Kitty sabotaging the whole thing, yapping at my heels shrieking “Can I have a go?” every two seconds, so YOU can certainly ace it.

Michel claims this mix makes enough for 12, but I had too much for my 12-hole tin. I gave the remainder to Kitty to wipe all over herself, which she found amusing.

100g MELTED butter
100g plain flour
3/4 tsp baking powder
2 eggs
100 sugar
juice and chopped zest of one lemon (this is optional, but is very nice)

1 Preheat your oven to 200C. This is important – the oven needs to be really nice and hot when your madeleines go in

2 Grease your madeleine tray with some extra butter, then sprinkle with some extra flour and shake out the excess – never a precise job, this – just do your best

3 Whisk together the eggs and sugar. You can do this with an electric whisk if you like. We did it with a hand whisk – Kitty started it off and I finished it. Kitty was a bit useless so I gave it (but not her) a good solid beating towards the end, which worked fine.

4 Then add your other ingredients and give a firm, brief whisk to incorporate everything. Beat until just mixed – don’t worry about the odd lump.

5 Leave the mix to sit for a few minutes to allow the baking powder to act before spooning into the tray

6 When filling your madeleine tray, fill to just under the top, so that when the sponge rises it just fills the dip, rather than spilling out over the top.

7 Bake for 8-10 minutes

You can dip madeleines into or drizzle with all manner of exciting things – chocolate, rose-water icing, orange icing – anything you like really. If you wanted to add extra flavours, maybe leave out the lemon element of this sponge mix as it might interfere.

For the lemonade

The cocktail mixer known as gomme, or sugar syrup, is what makes lemonade really easy. It is available from Waitrose or, I suspect, any bottle shop like Thresher’s (do they still exist?)

Without gomme you have to do a thing where you simmer the lemonade and the sugar together so that the sugar dissolves and then let the mix cool down, which is a bore.

This is more, really, a recipe for citron presse, another French thing, with which I’m sure you’re familiar, where you’re given a load of lemon juice in the bottom of a glasss, a weeny pitcher of water and a bottle of gomme, with which to mix for yourself a refreshing bev.

What I do is squeeze a lot of lemons and limes (about 2 per person) into a jug, (using my excellent bright yellow openy-closey lemon squeezer, which I really recommend if you haven’t got one already), then pour about an inch of lemon juice into glasses filled with ice cubes and a single spoon, top with fizzy water and then let everyone apply and stir in their own gomme from another jug. You could add a sprig of mint if you were feeling really caring.

Then we all sit around while I patronise everyone like mad, and they all take it because I’ve just made fucking madeleines and lemonade.

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Cheese scones

There is this girl I know – not very well, I just follow her on Twitter – and the thing about her is that she is about to have her first baby, like any day now. And the reason that she is on my mind is that I am so appalled, really AH-PPALLED at the things that people say to her about the imminent arrival of her child.

Anything she tweets, anything at all – “had some toast just now” or “feeling happy today” – gets an avalanche of responses like “Ha ha! Forget eating toast once baby’s out. You’ll be living off dust bunnies! LOL” or “You’ll never feel happy again after you have a baby! Best u know now! Ha ha ha LOL.”

I mean what the fuck is wrong with people. Really what the fuck. The only correct response to anyone who is having a baby, first, second or whatever is “Oh that’s so wonderful congratulations how brilliant.” If the pregnant person actually presses you for more detail, (which they never do), then, and only then, you say “Yes okay look, life isn’t really the same again, and sometimes it’s better and sometimes it’s shit and you wonder what the fuck you’ve done. But once they hit 18 months everything’s pretty easy.”

And they look at you like “18 months… 18 MONTHS?!?!” Because they haven’t had a baby yet and they don’t fully understand how glacial everything becomes. How s-s-s-l-o-o-o-w-w and b-b-o-o-o-r-r-i-n-n-n-g it all is when they are really small. But it’s not their fault. And nobody, least of all my acquaintance on Twitter, ever declared or really seriously thought that having a baby was easy, (except Tanith Carey in that thing in the Mail the other day, but she just wrote that for money, like we all do).

I understand the motivation: I get it. When you are the parent of very small children, you are so vulnerable, you are in such a tight spot, so much on the back foot, that there is huge tempation to claw back a bit of an upper hand by laying into those lower down the food chain. You might not be having a glamorous time, your marriage a shambles, your hair neglected and your face a roadmap of despair, but you can – at least! – turn to those less experienced and laugh nastily and say those dreaded words “Just you wait,” and feel briefly victorious before going home and spending the evening chipping Weetabix off your surfaces and sobbing into a tumbler of gin.*

The “just you wait” thing barely happens second time round. People keep their distance. Although there is a little bit of a thing where people say “With the first one you can carry on pretending that life is sort of normal but with the second one you just give in and it’s all about survival.”

And I’m like, I’m sorry – at no point have I ever with Kitty pretended than “life is normal”. We live, still, as if we are under siege. (The deputy books editor of the Evening Standard, Katie Law, once said to me “You get your life back a bit once your youngest is three,” and she is right about most things, so I believe her.) I can’t see how having a second can possibly make me leave the house less, have less fun, curtail my freedom more.

It’ll all be familiar. It’ll be the difference, says my husband, between driving somewhere unfamiliar, and then driving back home. It’ll be the easiest time I’ve ever done – I’m going to chew up the next three years and spit them out. Bring it on.

While I wipe the foam from my chin and repent my hubris, please turn your mind to cheese scones. These are a thing my friend Becky B makes all the time, as she says that she always has all the ingredients – and she has a very good point: in a tight spot when only something homemade will do, these will save your skin without, probably, having to dash madly to the shops.

This is not Becky B’s recipe, but they are nice all the same.

Cheese scones
Makes 6 biggish ones

225g self-raising flour
40g butter at room temp or as close as possible
a pinch of salt
some milk – about 150ml
2 large handfuls of cheddar – reasonably strong – grated on the fine whatsit of a box grater

Preheat the oven to 200C

1 Sieve the flour into a bowl (or just dump it in and swizzle with a whisk)

2 Cut in the butter and rub together until it is crumb-like

3 Add the pinch of salt and 3/4 of your grated cheddar. Now incorporate this together using your hands, trying to distribute the fine strands of cheese evenly through the flour.

4 Now add a long sploosh of milk and mix in with a knife. Then add another sploosh and you ought to start being able to gather the mixture up into a sort of dough.

5 Turn this out onto a floured surface and roughly shape into a round. Don’t worry if the dough looks a bit scratchy, just make sure it is at LEAST 1in thick (use a ruler because I guarantee you don’t know how thick this is). Scones don’t rise much in the oven and so you need a scone to be reasonably thick before it goes in the oven or you’ll get some miserable little pancake. Cut out your scones, re-roll and cut until you’ve used up as much of the dough as possible.

6 Arrange on a greased baking tray and finish off with the rest of the grated cheese piled on top of each scone.

7 Bake for 15 mins

*In their defence – “just you wait”ers are often the most helpful, solicitous and kind once the baby is actually out.

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Onion and gruyere tartquiche

My husband and I have been at each other’s throats recently. It happens sometimes and there is usually a period of a few days when we simply cannot exchange a civil word.

I, of course, think it’s because my husband is a fucking arsehole. And he maintains it’s because I’m such a cold, horrible bitch – times a hundred at the moment because I am pregnant and therefore “barely able to tolerate” his presence.

In actual fact, these rocky patches are so short and intense that it feels more like some sort of bad planetary alignment.

But the bad cosmic voodoo is not helped by the fact that we are both irritable shitbags and very good at saying very mean things to each other. Sometimes arguments are like an arms race, us firing the very horriblest things we can at each other, he culminating in something about me being boring and fat and me asking him if it isn’t time he went to see his shrink.

I, of course, think it cannot possibly be me. I am not grumpy, I am just bravely tolerating the horror that is pregnancy. But after a period of quiet reflection, I think maybe I do play a part in these marital breakdowns.

On paper, I probably come across as reasonably chatty. But in real life I often don’t say terribly much – I am conversational in bursts but most of the time, I am quite quiet. And I sulk. And fume.

I live in my head quite a lot, I suppose, whereas my husband lives his life out loud. He could never, for example, have an affair and keep it secret because at some point, while emptying his brain out through his mouth, he would just confess it.

So if I do something annoying he will tell me in plain language what I am doing that is annoying, (coughing, clearing my throat a lot, leaving the car unlocked, interrupting him, blatently glazing over while he is talking etc), whereas if he does something annoying, (leaving me to clear away his cereal bowl, not understanding that giving Kitty her lunch or tea ALSO involves wiping down the bloody highchair), I don’t say a word – I just rage internally about it. And it’s not impossible that this rage, suppressed, translates itself to frostiness and unpleasantness.

Marriage is played out so much in the domestic sphere, especially when you have children, that is it very difficult not to focus and obsess about small matters, like cereal bowls and irritating coughs. I often fail to take my own advice in these situations, which is to think immeditely about the nice things one’s husband does that cancels out the need to wipe down a highchair.

Like how my husband does bathtime, on his own, every night. I’ve always taken this for granted but I am now aware that other men do not do this. Some because they can’t because they work long hours, but some because they just don’t want to deal with the screaming and the bending over and the sweat and the toothbrushing and so they magically manage to walk in the door at 7.20pm every night.

I also never see a bill for anything, I live an entirely paperwork-free life untroubled by insurance, tax, mortgages or credit card statements; someone else looks after the garden; I haven’t taken out the bins or touched a recycling bag for 5 years; I get to give birth in any private London hospital of my choosing.

And there’s me moaning on about the occasional cereal bowl. I think Giles is right. It’s not him: it’s me.

So to make amends I made Giles a tart. Not a tart though, really, in the end – much more of a quiche.

I felt terribly grown-up making this because it felt very French, very accomplished. Like one really ought to know how to talk to the Queen, get out of a sports car and make a quiche.

It was also the first time that I have successfully blind-baked something and I am NO LONGER AFRAID!!

It was an onion and gruyere tart and it was absolutely terrific and I really recommend it – especially if you are racking your brains for good mass-catering buffet lunch solutions as we stare down the festive season like it’s the barrel of a shotgun.

Onion and gruyere quiche
make about 8 picnic-sized pieces

1 23cm flan tin. Ideally with a removeable base but don’t fret if not. Most flan tins are 23cm, but this is reasonably important so if it looks to you at a vague guess like much BIGGER or SMALLER, then you might have to think again
1 packet shortcrust pastry from the excellent and life saving Jus-Roll
3 large onions, sliced as thinly as you can
200ml double cream
3 eggs (I know, rather a lot)
salt and pepper
200g gruyere, grated
50g parmesan, grated
some thyme leaves – maybe 10?
50g butter

Preheat your oven to 180C

1 Cook your onions on your lowest available heat setting with the butter and a large pinch of salt for TWO HOURS. I know this is a long time, but you just put it on the thing and forget about it.

2 Roll out the pastry and lay it in the flan tin. Trim the excess and then line with paper and then baking beads or beans or whatever. You can ALSO use cling film for this. I was worried that it would melt but it doesn’t. Use a triple thickness of film to line the pastry and then pour in the beads.

3 Bake this for 15 mins then take out the paper/film and beads and cook for another ten minutes.

4 Mix together your now gloopy sticky onions with the double cream, beaten eggs, cheeses, pepper, (the onions will already be quite salty), and thyme leaves.

5 Pour into the pastry case and bake for 30 mins.

Really delicious with a winter coleslaw or any kind of cold, sharp salad.