Tag Archives: food

The 52 Week Project: Week 1

January 7, 2012 By in Harpenden, Photography Tags: , , , , , , 16 Comments

It seems that half the blogosphere are doing the 366 Project this year; the attempt to take a photo every single day in 2012. It’s a brilliant idea, and one I would love to attempt, but I know that it’s too much of a commitment for me. Perhaps if I had a phone with a decent camera I’d give it a shot, but I know that my battered old Nokia isn’t up to the job, and I don’t have the perseverance to take my ‘proper’ camera out with me every day.

Instead I’m going to do the 52 week project, which only requires me to take a photo a week. For accountability’s sake I’ll post it on here every week, but I’m also going to tinker with the rules slightly. Instead of saying that I need to take ‘one photo per week’ I’m saying I need to take photos of ‘at least one thing that isn’t DorkySon or DorkyDad per week’. I do take loads of photos as it is, but they’re almost all of my family. For the purposes of this project, I’m going to try and take photos of different things – objects, places, and other people.
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Happy Thanksgiving

November 24, 2011 By in Family, Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , 9 Comments

Today is the first time in five years that I haven’t been in the United States for American Thanksgiving. It wasn’t a celebration that I’d paid any attention to until I met DorkyDad, but it is one that I have to come to love dearly.  I’ve been feeling a bit nostalgic, so I’ve had a wee look back through some of my photos from the last five years and picked out some favourites.
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My Edinburgh Guide: K – N

November 22, 2011 By in Scotland Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 10 Comments

We’re over halfway – hurrah! If you missed my previous ‘Best of Edinburgh’ posts, you can find A-C here, D-G here, and H-J here. Who knows, I might have this thing finished by next week…!
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Guilty Pleasures

October 20, 2011 By in Nostalgia Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 19 Comments

The blog prompt over at BritMums this week is ‘Guilty Pleasures’ and they suggest either a post recommending your Top 5 blogs, or a post describing what you’d do if you got a full day to yourself.

In a slightly loose interpretation of the theme, I’m going to list the Top 5 guilty pleasures that would feature if I got a day to myself. Because, y’know, they’re lovely folk over at BritMums and I hope they won’t mind me bending the rules slightly…

My fleecy dress

I love my fleecy dress. DorkyDad hates it. DorkySon hates it. Pretty much everybody except me hates it. It’s Bench branded, so I thought I might be able to find a Google image to share with you, but apparently it didn’t get pass their ugly-filter. My Mum bought the fleecy dress in a charity shop, about ten years ago. She wore it for a week or two before deciding it ‘wasn’t really her’ and passing it on to me. I’d just started university. I was eighteen, and a size eight, so it probably looked quite cute in a warm hippy kind of way. Now, ten years and one pregnancy later, it makes me look like a blue, slightly lumpy, fleece-wrapped sausage. But I love it. I can wear it over pyjamas when I’m making coffee in the morning. I can throw it over my jeans when I’m taking DorkySon to nursery (that whole school run fashion envy thing that other parent bloggers stress about hasn’t reached me yet…). On winter days it stops me getting that chilly strip around my waist when my t-shirt comes untucked from my trousers. It has survived numerous clothing culls. It will survive many more. I love my fleecy dress.

Chip sandwich

I’m lucky enough to be married to a brilliant cook. DorkyDad does nearly all the cooking in our house. He’s the kind of person who, rather than walking up the road for a fish supper, will buy fresh fish himself on the way home from work, mix up his own spices and flour for batter, heat the oil to exactly the right temperature, and produce something beautifully light, crunchy and tasty. If he is ever out for the evening, I am not even tempted to try and recreate his loveliness in the kitchen. Instead I indulge in one of my guiltiest pleasures: a chip sandwich. There are a few rules with a chip sandwich that must be adhered to. It has to be made with the cheapest, crappiest white bread. They have to be proper fat chips; not silly, skinny little fries. There has to be plenty of ketchup spread on one side of the sandwich, plenty of mayonnaise on the other, and a liberal sprinkling of salt and pepper. Ideally you should eat two of them, punctuated by a cup of strong tea, while watching a reality TV show.

Tumble dryers

I used to be quite green. In fact I used to be very green. I worked for a coalition that campaigned on environmental issues. I stood as a parliamentary candidate for the Scottish Green Party. I even went to the Arctic myself to see the effects of climate change on the ice cap. And, during that period of my life, I dried my clothes on radiators or hanging on a clotheshorse. They always ended up completely stiff. My jeans would stand up by themselves. My towels would leave pink welts across my skin when I dried myself after a shower because they were so rough. And I had to spend hours ironing out the strange creases in my shirts that resulted from them being hung up. But then we moved house… and the house had a tumble dryer. I had warm, fluffy towels in my life. I could wash my favourite sheets and have them back on the bed the same day, rather than having them dripping around the house for a week. I didn’t have to do any more ironing. There is an inverse relationship between my use of the tumble dryer and my participation in green politics; I am pretty sure that’s no coincidence.

Books

It’s a bit of a cheat to include this, because I don’t actually feel very guilty about it. For some reason books are the only things I can spend money on without a hint of remorse. DorkySon has cottoned onto this pretty quickly, and knows I will rarely refuse him a new book. Three-for-two offers, and Amazon’s one click ordering have made it even easier than it used to be, but to be honest there’s not much I like better than going into a proper, old, independent bookseller and paying full price for a hardback that has never been opened. I suppose I justify it as being in some way educational. That doesn’t really account for the copies of the Loose Women book, Jeffrey Archer’s Prison trilogy and David Beckham picture autobiography that are currently sitting on my shelves… but hey, I have a degree in English Literature. I’ve actually read Ulysses. Sometimes you need a break from all that literary merit nonsense.

Expensive Wine

As a student I used to drink some awful stuff; three quid bottles of wine that would have been better used as drain cleaner; 50p shots of vodka and tequila from the student union bar; supermarket own brand cider; whatever shockingly coloured alcopop was on offer in the clubs that weekend. I don’t know how my liver survived. Then I met and married a man who really knew his wine… so now I still feel guilty about my drinking, but only because I like the really, really good stuff. I am a sucker for a nice, oaky Californian Chardonnay. That said, I am not a wine snob. We went to a tasting once and I almost got thrown out for giggling (‘Oooh,’ I said, holding my glass up to my nose and trying to think of something appropriately pretentious to say. ‘It smells like rolling in hay on an autumn day.’ The serious-faced men and women around the table nodded along with me in agreement…). I feel like I am betraying my Bacardi breezer past slightly, but nice wine really is, erm, nice.

So I guess (in an attempt to stay on theme), in the unlikely event that I had a full day to myself I’d sit on the sofa in my fleecy dress… drinking wine, reading trashy books and pausing for the occasional chip sandwich. The soundtrack to the day would be the constant clanking of my tumble dryer. Don’t ever let it be said that I don’t know how to have a good time.

The end of the Edinburgh Festival (and I feel fine)

August 28, 2011 By in Poetry, Scotland Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

So it’s the final weekend of the Edinburgh Fringe! Thank goodness. Fun though it has been, it’s time for life to calm down again… or at least time to start drinking a little less and sleeping a little more.

I did a post halfway through the Fringe, about some of my highlights at that stage, and I’ve already done one over-emotional post about some of the lovely people I encountered throughout August, but here are some of my other festival moments I haven’t had a chance to ramble about yet.

Nom Nom

We might as well get the food chat out of the way. Lord knows you’ve probably worked out by now that the only think I enjoy more than eating is writing about eating. Next year I’m determined to spend an entire day wandering from food stall to food stall, trying everything that the Fringe has to offer. This year I only made it to one or two old favourites, but found time to taste the offerings at a couple of new stalls too.

The fabulous Passion 4 Juice bar had been moved from its usual spot outside the Gilded Balloon to a new, much quieter, location on the south side of George Square. They were rightfully indignant at being bumped down the culinary pecking order. From what I overheard, while I was subtly eavesdropping on the muttering punters outside Teviot, the indignation was twofold, and Passion 4 Juice’s presence was much missed in that part of town. Irrespective of Edinburgh’s geographical politics, though, their fresh, zingy smoothies with shots of ginseng and echinacea remain awesome… If you need to recover from over-indulging in their evening offerings (Hot Apple Cider) then I recommend the watermelon, pineapple and mint.

The strawberry and Nutella crepes at C Too provided some sweet and very welcome warmth for DorkySon and me as we queued for a show in the rain. We made almost daily visits to the Mackies Ice Cream bike, shared several hummus and carrot sandwiches in the Pleasance Courtyard, and thought we’d found our favourite festival food when we had the lamb burger from the lovely Outsider people in George Square. BUT… that was before we’d found the Laughing Stock stall tucked away in a corner under the purple head of the Udderbelly. Not just the tastiest burger and chips I can remember eating at the Festival, but the tastiest burger and chips I can remember eating anywhere in a long, long time. I really hope they’ll be back next year.

Earworms

“Sure!” I said. “I’ll do the kids shows! One a day for the entire Fringe.”

Little did I know that I was exposing myself to some of the most persistent earworms known to man. I owe a large and sincere apology to the numerous festivalgoers who have caught me wandering around the city, pushing DorkySon in his pram, belting out songs from whatever kiddy theatre performance I’ve just left.  My voice is not the best. In fact, it’s pretty horrendous. Normally I mime when singing Happy Birthday at family parties. But still…

“I am a mole… and I know… that it is none of my business.”

“Hairy Maclary…. from Donaldson’s Dairy.”

And my enduring favourite… “Stick Man” – pause – “lives in the family tree” – pause – “with his stick lady love, and stick children three.”

Cue jazzhands.

Perhaps by this time next year they’ll have stopped going round, and round, and round in my head. And I’ll be ready for Toddler Tunes Take Two. Bring your earplugs in 2012, people.

Loveliness

If the downside of reviewing kids shows is earworms, then the upside is meeting some of the nicest people at the Festival. I’ve already rumbled on about meeting John Hegley, and being taken aback by how lovely and normal he was. My second interview was science communicator and BBC presenter Marty Jopson. If he’d not had another interview and a performance to do, I would have happily sat under an umbrella in George Square and chatted to him all day. He was interesting! Self-deprecating! Smart, funny, and kind! Obviously he hadn’t received the memo instructing him to display all his performer lanyards prominently and act like a complete arse.

I thought encountering two nice performers was already pushing the boundaries of possibility… and then I found myself reviewing Kevin Cruise. I expected to hate it. I actually loved it. And because I was the only reviewer who bothered to show up to the Bosco Tent in the middle of the afternoon to see him, KC was terribly grateful. I woke up, the morning after my review was published, to a lovely email from him saying thank you.

It was all very civilised indeed. If I am lucky enough to be given the opportunity next year, I will definitely be sticking with the Kids section.

DorkySon upstages his Dad

So I’d made plans to meet a friend for coffee in the Forest Café, not realising that DorkyDad was doing a poetry reading in there the same day, as part of the 36 hour No Sleep In Bristo event. We showed up just as he was coming to the end of his set  – DorkySon couldn’t even see his Dad, as a decent-sized audience and a dividing wall blocked his view – but he sure as heck heard him.

“DADA!” he yelled!

“Shhh…” I whispered. “Daddy’s reading his poems.”

“LET ME OUT, MAMA!”

“Let’s just listen for a minute.”

“I WANT TO SEE DADA”

“In a minute…”

“WHERE IS DADA? DAAAADAAAAAA? WHERE ARE YOU?”

So I let DorkySon out of his pram; just as DorkyDad was starting to read a poem about him. He rushed up, snuggled into his Dad’s legs for a minute, did a couple of twirls for the audience, just to make sure he’d been noticed, and then scooted back over to me. He doesn’t like to be the centre of attention for too long, DorkySon, but he likes to know that you’ve noticed him.

My other highlights, in no particular order, are: The Incredible Book Eating Boy; meeting up with old university friends; Bubblewrap and Boxes; walking along Jawbone Walk and seeing lots of eggs hanging from the trees; a very temporary exhibition of canvases, hammered to the trees, also on Jawbone Walk; overhearing someone tell John Malkovich that their favourite film of his was Con Air; the colour John Malkovich’s face turned when he heard that; hearing my sweet DorkySon say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ everywhere we went; the Fest end-of-festival staff meal, even though I bailed out to go to bed at 9.30pm; getting squashed on the bus by an embarrassed looking man with a tuba; Fest’s Kid Critics; being very proud of DorkyDad for his show; seeing the outpouring of love for the Forest Café; being grown-up enough that I don’t feel the need to wear my press pass anymore; someone at the BBC saying to my husband “You’re married to DorkyMum? She’s a legend!”