Not life-changing but...

I've gone part-time and am now working three days a week.

Well, after health scares last year and earlier this year, plus some niggling work issues, I sort of thought 'What's the point in going through all this if I'm still just plugging away working full-time'. So, after a fraught weekend considering a rival job offer, I accepted my current employer's offer of job-share - the current employer was offering 3 full days Monday to Wednesday, which makes things much tidier and means a nice long four day weekend. I like spending more days at home than I do at work :0). Not that I'm doing anything exciting on my days off - painting doors, pottering in the garden, doing the cleaning, looking at the weather forecast and working out which day will be the best to put the washing out, that sort of uber-feministy stuff ;0). But it does mean that we shouldn't have to spend all of our weekends doing the chores and we can get out of the house occasionally. Although I am beginning to wonder whether working three days a week is interfering a bit too much with my sofa time, we'll see...

Anyway, whilst I was pondering all this The Staves 'Teeth White' was being played incessantly on the radio and I was surprised that a group of children (when seen from the vantage point of nearly 50!) could capture the essence of mid-life crisis quite so well as they do. Now I'm not claiming that the record influenced my decision unduly, but it did strike a chord.

And, in my small way, I do now feel like I'm 'sticking it to the man' as our colonial cousins would say.



There's another version of it here on a really rather brilliant set with 'Black and White'. Or am I just biased/jealous 'cos it's in a pub and they're drinking pints of proper beer?

Good Day/Bad Day

At about 4.15 each afternoon Steve Lamacq (Radio 6) gets a listener to nominate two tracks - one if it's a good day and one if it's a bad day. He then rings them to find out what kind of day they're having and plays the track they nominate.

Well, despite an slightly inauspicious start (i.e. it's weeing down out there so the house if full of damp washing, but then it's a bank holiday weekend so what did we expect?) I think it might end up being a good day. It's the Folk Festival this weekend, so the town is full of people with bells on and funny hats, and our local pub has got a beer festival on. So I think we'll be walking into town to partake of some jollity (yes, I'm spelling that b.e.e.r. Hopefully Mr H's won't have more than half a pint of the Russian Stoat (9.0%) this time, as he's rather heavy to carry home! [Oooo, I'm going to be in trouble for that quip when he reads this in 3 months' time!]).

We have had some sun recently though, which has allowed me to get out the garden chair cushions that I made about 2 years ago! Remember the old sofa-bed we disposed of in 2009? Well, I kept the foam mattress, bought some 'gardeny' fabric and made four bench cushions from it, and very nice they look too, even if I do say so myself. And they're much thicker than commercially bought bench cushions, which is a blessing when you're getting old and knackered!

Oh, and someone's just asked if they can use one of my photos in an architecture textbook. Even if it never comes to anything, it's nice to be asked.

So Steve, in keeping with the general theme of the jubilee bank holiday, I think I'll warble along to Handel's 'Zadok the Priest' please.

Food

I managed to cook several new recipes recently, as per one of my goals that I set at the beginning of the year. In February we had Goulash Soup based on a recipe which first appeared in Delia's Frugal Food back in the '70s. This is a book that I got two of for Christmas, so obviously rumours of my tightwaddery are spreading! I've loved goulash since we first ate it in a Hungarian restaurant in Ross-on-Wye almost 25 years ago, although one of my favourites was in Prague when it was served in a hollowed out loaf. Anyway, we had goulash soup a couple of times in Austria and Germany, so I thought I'd try cooking it and it was extremely good. I made a couple of changes to the above recipe: I added a carrot, I used pork rather than beef and I added a bit of celery.

March's new recipe was Jamie Oliver's Cheat's Pizza which was great. I seem to recall cooking an similar Elizabeth David pizza base (without yeast) and it came out tasting like pastry, but Jamie's version tasted like a thin pizza dough. Our toppings were ancvhovies, olives and chilli. I've got to say that I've enjoyed watching back-to-back re-runs of his Jamie's 30-Minute Meals on Sunday afternoons whilst I've been doing the ironing. I may have to invest in the book.

April's new recipe was Simon Hopkinson's version of Janssen's Temptation from Week in Week Out, but this one by Jane Grigson isn't too different.

Instead of going to Syria we went to one of our favourite hotels, Northcote Manor in Devon. This time in Jon's Dad's MX5 rather than George's Morgan - one day we'll go in our own car! The food was as wondeful as last time. And for my birthday we're off to At the Sign of the Angel in Lacock. I can't believe that we've lived 5 miles away for 22 years and have never been there yet - I hope I'm not disappointed!

Chillies

I'm completely knackered after partaking of a cooking marathon this afternoon. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but I think I've over-done it. We've now got enough tomato and pepper soup to float a small navy, there's a lamb tagine cooling in the oven, a chicken rogan josh marinating in the 'fridge alongside tomorrow night's dinner of stuffed peppers. Oh well, the tomatoes were going manky, so I did need to use them up, ditto the peppers and it's been a few weeks since I had a curry and I'm beginning to get withdrawal symptoms.

The idea was to freeze a lot of this (all the soup, the tagine and half the rogan josh) but I've just discovered that there's no room in the freezer 'cos it's taken up by the gammon joint I bought to cook for Boxing Day (a Gordon Ramsey [ugh, spit] recipe that ends up with it being baked in treacle - God it's tasty). Bugger. Some major re-arranging is going to have to be done once I can stand up again.

Anyway, chillies. Someone asked how I dry chillies, so I'm posting the answer here for future reference.

Method 1 - just freeze them instead

Method 2 - thread (or tie) them by the stalks onto a length of cotton and hang in a warm place - airing cupboard, above the cooker vent at the back of the hob, or just dangling prettily in the kitchen somewhere.

Method 3 - spread them on a baking tray and pop them into the oven every time you finish cooking and have turned the heat off. I've got a double oven, so I just leave them in the top oven/grill and the heat from the main oven below dries them out over a few weeks.

Method 4 - put them in the oven on the lowest light possible and keep a very careful eye on them. I'd say this is the most risky.

You can then either leave them whole and just use as normal, or put them through a blender and use them as crushed chillies - but be very careful not to breathe in the fine dust as you decant them into a jar.

Now, if you're really lucky, I'll post a picture of my new fairy lights that are shaped like chilli peppers - once we've put the Xmas tree up.