Bakng Subscription 2019 - January

Lemon Drizzle Loaf

We haven't tasted this yet and I've no reason to think that it will be anything but delicious but really it was a bit of a faff. This was the second time a recipe from the Baking Club has called for you to make swiss meringue buttercream, and although it was easier second time around (well most things are) I'm still very doubtful about whether it is worth all the hassle. 

I've baked most of my life and I suppose the good thing about doing this subscription is that it does get me out of my normal baking rut, and I welcome that, I really do. But I sometimes think they go a bit OTT with the finishing off.

I make a perfectly acceptable lemon drizzle cake which has a lemon syrup drizzled over it. And that's really nice. This lemon drizzle cake also has lemon syrup drizzled over it. Plus the aforementioned swiss meringue buttercream piped (piped!!) through the middle. And a water (well lemon juice) icing on the top. And flaked almonds on the top of that. Four finishing touches for one cake - maybe a bit much?

That will not stop us eating it though. Or looking forward to next months instalment.

Sox

Yes I have been away and yes it was amazing and yes I will be posting about how amazing it was, but I don't  have time right now and anyway I don't want to forget to post a picture of these as they are hot - well, warm - off the needles as they were finished last Thursday night. This did mean I had no knitting to take to Glasgow with me, but in the event we were quite busy so I didn't miss it. 

Better But Busy

So, I hope I'm not jinxing anything, but I seem to be emerging from the flu. I even had some energy this morning and it s now 60 hours since I had any paracetamol, so that's all good. 

The OH isn't quite as recovered as I am, but then I didn't (stupidly) drive to Leeds, attend a day long series of meetings and then drive back to Orkney over three days in the early stages. In the early stages I did what all the advice tells you to do, and rested. Not that I had any choice, doing anything other than lying still, was not a viable option.

Anyway I still haven't written up our last trip to Glasgow, which is unfortunate as we are off there again on Friday, and it's going to be another really packed few days. Perhaps I'll talk about both trips next week sometime.

Nor have I mentioned the, literal, non-event that was last week's supervisory meeting. Should you ever wonder if the worlds of IT and Academe are a good mix, then the answer is no. Because of the vagaries of the buses I left the house at ten to ten for a one o'clock meeting (although to be fair I had made an appointment for an eyelash tint at 11.15 as it seemed sensible to get that done while I was in town anyway. This did leave me with a fair bit of time on my hands, although I filled most of it with a not very nice lunch of Spicy Mexican Tomato Soup and a Blueberry Blondie -one after the other, not together!) 

We tried for 25 minutes to get everyone together on Skype but it didn't happen. One participant had forgotten to tell my DoS that he had a new Skype e-mail address, and another one said he was trying to phone but was getting no reply - not quite sure who he was phoning but we were sat right next to the phone and it wasn't ringing ....

We abandoned the attempt (funny, I seem to recall that's what we did last time too ... ) and the good news was that the early finish meant I could catch the 2.15 bus home which otherwise I would have missed. So I was home by just after three, rather than five,  and the fire was still alight. Which was all good news. 

What wasn't quite such good news was that it started raining the moment I hit town so I walked for ages in the rain and my shows started to leak ... I'm sure this all helped the flu to germinate.

And now I'm back at working really hard on my rewrite. I'd like the next chapter done before we go away again on Friday. It's good to have goals ..... 

This is not just flu....

this is M & S flu*

So remember how I said the OH was lergied and had left some of his germs behind? Well he wasn't  just lergied, he had the flu. As,  now, do I. 

You know that flu where you have a bit of a fuzzy head, and feel a bit miserable, so what you do is catch up on all those things that normally just bore you to bits, like putting things away properly rather than in a tidy pile on a table, or the domestic filing, or wash the fingermarks off the glass panels on the internal doors, because however miserable they make you feel normally, you're miserable anyway so doing those things won't make you feel worse? 

This flu is not that flu.

You know that flu where you have a really bad cold and headache and feel a but shivery and so you curl up in front of a box set, or rubbish TV or read a book from the genre of 'popular fiction' and don't feel guilty for not emptying the dishwasher because you're poorly and you can't do it? 

This flu is not that flu.

You know that flu where you wake up in the morning, have a swallow of orange juice, which makes you wince because it's so cold and then turn over in bed and sleep until three in the afternoon, despite having just slept all night, and then you stagger up for two hours and go back to bed because you're 'just so tired'? 

This flu is not that flu.

This flu is a really high temperature , where you honestly think that you could probably fry an egg on your skin but actually you feel like you're in the Arctic. This flu is sweating buckets while you shiver uncontrollably. This flu is trying really hard not to touch anything cold because that will send shivers down your spine and then over the rest of you. This flu is aching in every part of your body, even bits where you are sure that you don't actually have muscles to ache. This flu turns your mattress into a layer of lava and your pillows into wooden blocks. This flu is taking a paracetamol to stifle symptoms,  not in the morning so that you can get up, but at night so that you can get to sleep. This flu is the worst I can remember feeling for a very very long time and given that the OH is still sickening with it and he was two days ahead of me, I'm thinking I'm not going to be feeling a lot better for a while.

* for the benefit of non-UK readers, the British retailer Marks and Spencer, commonly known as M & S ran a series of ads a few years ago for their ready meals which featured glamorous photography, close ups of luscious ingredients, a sexy voice-over describing it all, and the tag line  'This is not just tagliatelle carbonara. This is Marks and Spencer tagliatelle carbonara'. It was supposed to imply that M & S ready meals were the best of the best, although as a friend said to me it generally meant overpriced and in packaging that was almost impossible to breach. 

The Learning Curve

So the OH has gone off to Leeds for some meetings. He was horribly lergied before he went and took all the paracetamol away with him. He left some of his germs behind and I am now lergied and far too poorly to walk to the shop and back to get any more. So it's suffer and sleep until the bugs go away, or he brings back the 'mol.

Meanwhile in keeping with my determination to record all finished knitting on the blog as soon as,  I give yew

No we didn't need a tea cosy because we rarely drink tea and even more rarely do we make it in a teapot. And in fact I was rather surprised that this even fitted the tea pot because it looked horribly small as it was being knitted.

I did this as part of a KAL (knitalong) in one of my Ravelry groups, where the challenge was to learn a new technique. At about the same time as this was decided someone had this kit up for sale so I bought it and it taught me, not one new technique, but three. One was I-cord, one was vikkel braid - that's the stuff that looks like plaits - and the other was steeking. For the uninitiated steeking is where you knit in the round then cut holes in your knitting for sleeves, front fastenings, or as in this case, handles and spouts. It is a scary thing to do if you have not been brought up to it and many knitters are afraid of it, and not without cause. That said I managed it OK, buoyed up by the knowledge that this was knitted in Shetland wool which is notorious for sticking to itself, so that chances were that however badly I did the prep it would not end in an unravelling disaster.  

I have to say that although I did it relatively competently and it was not, in the end, as scary as I thought it would be, I do not see a huge place for steeking in my knitting future. Never say never, but after all the new technique excitement I am currently at work on a nice plain pair of socks. And eyeing up a small embroidery.

Where I've Been: Where I'm Going.

No don't panic, it's not a post full of  pious reflections for the new year!

Where I've been is down the rabbit hole that was the revised Part 1 of my thesis, which went off to my supervisors on Monday lunchtime. It would have been sooner, but for the s*dding referencing. Also if my subject poet had not written quite so much in Gaelic. As it was, checking the quotes, the Gaelic spelling and putting in the references took me over twelve hours. I know, I know, I should reference as I go. But that breaks up the flow of the narrative for me too much. Also it would help had I not been 'strongly advised' to use a referencing system known as MLA. This was developed specifically for humanities subjects and  is supposed to make the work an easy read. Which, to be fair, it does. It doesn't make it an easy write, especially if, like me, you are dependent on a lot of manuscript sources, for which it is not really suitable.

Anyway next Tuesday - aaaarggghhhh! less than a week away! - I have a supervisory meeting to discuss it, and the Lit Review which was sent off before Christmas, so I may beg for permission to use something else. I am not looking forward to the supervisory meeting but at least it is here in Orkney, with the Aberdeen and Glasgow 'people' joining us via Skype. I will however have to go in on the bus, as the OH is off to Leeds that day for a meeting and will be absent until Thursday. Because my meeting is at one and will last an hour I will miss the 2.20 bus, thereby falling foul of the infamous School Bus Gap, which means I will not be able to get a bus back before 4.40. This is a Nuisance and Annoyance of the First Order as it means I will be out of the house most of the day, which will miff the cats and possibly mean that the fire goes out, but I am telling myself that at least I have a home to come back to, and I should be grateful for both that and the fact that I can afford to heat it.

In happier news we are off in about half an hour to catch the late afternoon ferry for a trip to Glasgow. This is going to be even madder than our usual quick trips to Glasgow as we won't get there until very late tonight, we will be running round all day tomorrow while there and then getting up at the crack of dawn to return to Orkney on Friday. To be fair it is is not all our own fault as our usual ferry is in dry dock  and the alternative one runs a very reduced service in winter. So it was very early morning, or late afternoon. Again I should be thankful that the weather is calm and the ferry will run.

As for what we're doing; it's the Scottish Opera Emerging Artist January Recital, and I hope we will have more luck with the EAs than in December , when one was away and one had knocked herself out the previous day and couldn't appear so that the program had been subject to a lot of change. After that its the 'getting to know them' lunch, which, judging by previous years will be long, noisy and delicious, and in the evening we're going to the ballet. This is a rare thing for us, and I'm looking forward to it. It's the very festive Cinderella and will, in my mind, finally close Christmas. And once we're back, I'll be down the rabbit hole again, accompanying my  poet to North Africa during WW2. (Or, as the MLA style guide would have it, World War Two)

A Quiet and Creative Day

So yesterday we took things easy. Since I had not go around to icing the Christmas cake, the OH did it instead and made an excellent job of it

Son No 2 made an excellent apple cake, under maternal supervision

we had some of it with some Haagen Daas salted caramel ice cream for pudding after New Year's Dinner. In passing I might mention that sometimes salted caramel, while generally a good idea, has too much salt in it.  I say this as someone whose OH often remarks that her salt consumption must be responsible for keeping open half a dozen salt mines. The HD ice-cream was not immune sadly, but it was still pretty much a gorgeous combination with the apple cake.

And I made a card. It is many years since I have actually done any card making but moving all the supplies around , and into the now  almost complete craft room was both a delightful reminder of some of the lovely things I have, and a reproach over the quantity I have unused. Making cards I find therapeutic, but slow. I hope to do a lot more once I have all the stuff in one place and a nice table on which to lay it/leave it all out, but meanwhile I managed this one on a corner of my desk 

for a friend in Norway who wrote at Christmas to say that she had recently been diagnosed with cancer and was undergoing chemotherapy. 

Today real life has kicked back in and I am once more struggling with G C Hay's appallingly small and twiddly handwriting as I re-read his all too frustratingly short diary before tackling a description of his life on the run in Argyll. I say 'frustratingly short' but actually in a way I'm quite glad he didn't keep it up as my eyes boggle with the few pages we have. 

Normal Life. It Has Been Resumed. 

Happy New Year

I've probably said before how the New Year always fills me with dread and has done for many years, despite me being perfectly aware that it's nothing but an arbitrarily designated day for the convenience of marking time and parcelling it up into manageable chunks. 

The dread tends to have worn off by about the 5th of the month so I'm trying to ignore it and to think instead about the good things I know we have lined up for this year, as well as rejoicing in the fact that I will, in a stunning contrast to most of 2018,  actually be able to see stuff. 

We will be making quite a few trips to Glasgow, that I do know. We have a four day opera break in Amsterdam booked for the end of April (we're flying, so I do hope that all these doom laden predictions about planes not being able to fly after Brexit are untrue) and we're planning a trip to Oz later in the year. And in due course I will be submitting the Ph D and then that will no longer be preying on my mind. And I'm sure there will be lots of other great things happening too. 

I have actually made two resolutions for the new year. The first is to try to  be less judgemental, which will be difficult, but good if I can pull it off. And the other is Do It Now. I'm a terrible procrastinator and I can always justify putting things off somehow or other, but really it's a bad habit.

And in line with that latter one, here's some knitting pictures, of some just-finished knitting.  Both of these were made for the forthcoming baby of a friend. It's a girl, but I gather she's trying to avoid pink so: - 

I was particularly chuffed with the colours of the blanket. It was one of those big colour changing balls and called Tractor. My friend lived here for many years and her Ph D topic was connected with Orkney so it seemed fitting that I should use colours that reflect the islands; grass, ploughed fields, sky, sea,  and sand. 

Anyway, Happy New Year. I'm off to help Son No. 2 make an apple cake.