Competitive Baking Part 1

 

When we did our major kitchen refurb a couple of years ago we got two ovens. One was a combined oven and microwave and was 'his' for cooking. The other was a fancy one for baking. And that was mine.

 

I've always hated cooking, which I look upon as an infringement on my time. I  resent for example having to hover in the kitchen sticking a fork into a pan of potatoes every 5 minutes to check if they're  done yet, when I could  be in the living room reading a book.   For me cooking is like most other forms of housework; dull and endlessly repetitive. Nor am I all that interested in the end product. Left to myself I'd live on bread and cheese.

 

 Happily for me, OH made an error of gigantic proportions not long before we tied the knot, by telling someone, in my presence, that he was  'a much better cook than Anne' . Not surprisingly perhaps, he's done the cooking ever since.

 

 

Baking though is a different thing. I like baking and I'm quite good at it. In the past I've tended to stick to what I know, but I'd recently resloved to expand my repertoire and was doing OK until the Great Ankle Snap. But now that I'm immobile the path to the baking oven is open and undefended, and  OH has taken full advantage of. As you can see....

 

 

 

 

Top - Lemon Cake

 

Bottom - Raspberry Mousse Cake

 

It has to be said that the lemon one, being batter based, tasted a bit like a pancake, but annoyingly I couldn't fault the raspberry one. I don't like him baking because he never uses a recipe which irritates me, especially when the results are good. Sometimes I can be a bit of an ungrateful cow....

 

The roses in the bottom picture came from my friend J, she of the cat-who-needed-to-be-fed, and they're lovely. The raspberries in the cake came from our garden, a trivial matter to most people but not to me. When we first moved to Orkney we joined the local gardening club, and I happened to mention that we were planning to grow raspberries. Huge intake of breath from several present, all of whom sagely opined that 'we would never grow raspberries in Burray'.

 

I damn well will I thought as we came away. And we did.

 

 

 

 

 

 





Warmth on the Wall Revisited

I was watching Phil Spencer - Secret Agent on TV this afternoon, and yes I do sort of blush to admit it, but what can I tell you? I'm stuck in the living room with my ankle in the air and I can only spend so many hours of the day on Facebook.

Anyway, casting his eye over yet another cluttered but sterile living room, Mr Spencer actually said 'There's nothing on these walls to give them warmth'.  If I'd thought he could hear me I'd have yelled 'Try some cheerful beige gingham wallpaper, Phil'.

Probably lucky that TV sound only goes one way.

Not just me then...

I've been reading Touched with Fire, by Kay Redfield Jamison which is an examination of the links between the creative temperament and manic depressive illness. 'My' poet wasn't necessarily manic depressive, although he may have been, and this seemed a good basic text to introduce myself to the whole area of links between creativity and mental  disturbance.

But the thing I most enjoyed was an extract from the diary of Alice James, younger sister of the novelist Henry. Can you guess who she's talking about?

'...what a lifeless, diseased, self conscious being she must have been...her dank moaning features haunt and pursue one...she makes upon me the impression of mildew, or some morbid  growth - a fungus of a pendulous shape, or as of something damp to the touch'

That dear readers was all about the great 19th century english novelist George Eliot.And while I like some of her books, and admire others, I can't help feeling young Alice has summed her up to a T. I've always thought of her as humourless and far too self engaged; glad to know I'm not alone.

Apparently Alice James' diary has been published; I wonder if it's as entertaining as this all the way through?

Goodbye To All That

A few pictures to sum up the happy summer we had with the grandchild

at the beach

out and about



a new coat

first bacon sandwich!

The Sunday List

Five Favourite Cities

in no particular order

1 Sydney

2 Seville

3 Stockholm

4 Helsinki

5 Edinburgh

Contrariwise

So if someone had said to me a couple of weeks ago 'Anne, how would you like seven weeks with a perfect excuse for not doing housework or shopping, and all day to yourself to get on with your reading and your knitting, with generous swathes of time thrown in for you to surf the net and watch reams of TV I sort of suspect my response would have been 'Bring It On'.

 

This is, in fact, exactly the situation in which I currently find myself, and it's not the unalloyed pleasure you might imagine. Of course there is the slight problem that I'm basically immobile with a sore ankle and a heavy cast on one leg. Injecting myself daily with a blood thinner so that I don't end up with a DVT isn't a barrel of laughs either. But leaving the obvious to one side, it's much more difficult than I imagined it would be to settle down and do all this wonderful stuff I normally don't have enough time for.

 

Reading - either I don't like the book or I'm too tired to take in the graphs and charts, not to mention finding Wordsworth, even in quotable nuggets, hard to take when I'm feeling 100%, let alone when I'm below par.

 

TV - remarkably I have discovered that even the best of property programs can become boring, and do you know how many repeats of unwatchable stuff gets churned out on daytime TV?  The evenings are almost as bad. As for radio - Radio 4 is shortly going to get a whole post to its pretty little self - and it's not going to be a complimentary one.

 

Knitting - second sock syndrome. And a sweater on the needles that looks like it might be far too big, but as I'm doing it in the round I can't try it on to check. Both hugely discouraging.

 

I was chatting to a friend last night and we agreed it's all because I've got no choice. If I could choose to sit and read as opposed to doing anything else I'd probably be happy curled up with the books. But as I have no choice, even the most satisfying of occupations loses its savour.

 

Contrary things, humans.

Men - How Do Their Minds Work?

So today OH had to go to town to see the dentist. Since I am still hors de combat I suggested he might look in the toyshop for a birthday present for the grandson. Good Idea he said and he came home with something.

We will leave on one side the facts that

a) it bears no resemblance to what the child's parents said would be good
b) it bears a lot of resemblance to something we bought said grandson for Christmas
c) it is so heavy it will probably cost more to post than it did to buy

None of this really surprised me.

Once I had admired present ( I know, how do women's minds work, and more to the point, why do they work like that ) I asked if he had bought wrapping paper and a card.

'No' he said 'you never said anything about getting a card or paper'.

You may infer from this that all his presents are given to him in plastic bags and that he never gets a card on his birthday. But you'd be wrong twice over.