In about a month, I will have more yellow plums growing in my back garden than I will know what to do with. Which makes buying yellow plums now, probably something of a mistake. The sensible thing to do would be to wait until we move. I’ve never been too good at taking the sensible approach, or waiting, so this week there has been a flurry of baking experimentation in preparation for the glut ahead. My conclusion is that the combination of plums, a little sugar, butter, eggs and ground almonds is extremely good. It will be hard to get bored of it – but watch this space, I’m just road testing the proportions and contemplating dark chocolate chunks.
Will miss our view, the sea, our friends (more than anything else), our house, our local cafes, the boys lovely school and the kindergarten, the crazy wild parsley, and probably many more things that I won’t realise until we’re on the other side of the hill. I’m looking forward to a little more sun and a little less wind. A vegetable patch in which things (aside from crazy wild parsley) might actually thrive. A garden big enough for the boys to have real adventures. To be continued.
I have a confession to make. I’m a lazy blogger and I don’t plan on changing. I don’t do any of the things you’re supposed to do. I don’t comment on other blogs very often at all. I don’t proof test my recipes. Sometimes I don’t even write the recipes very clearly. My grammar is patchy. I waffle on about random things. I don’t style the food. I don’t style anything actually. I’m not consistent. I don’t index my photos so they can be picked up by search engines. I don’t send witty and original tweets. I don’t link up very often. I am still baffled by widgets (possibly why I don’t link up much). The thing is, that all the ‘blog’ side of the writing feels like a bit too much like work. I really just like messing around with food, and messing around with words.
My mother had (and still has) numerous postcards on the wall of the downstairs loo. They made a big impression on all of us (my two brothers and I). I know this to be true, because we still reference them. One of them said ‘Life’s too short to iron your underpants’. I’ve always vaguely had that in my mind, but the last couple of weeks have really reinforced it. Another one said, ‘Women need men like a fish needs a bicycle’. That one I’m not sold on. I like a man around. In fact I like having five of them around (and I count myself beyond lucky that I have all my boys .. big and small, in my life).
Why am I writing this post? Because a few things have happened recently. Big things. Things that make you realise that every second is precious. That it’s OK to carve your own way. To please yourself. There is no formula. No right or wrong. It’s just putting one foot in front of the other the best way you know how.
Enough waffle for you? Ready for some actual food.
How about some creamy, spicy, roast pumpkin, chicken and corn soup with fresh parsley.
Pop a whole chicken in a pot covered in water and simmer slowly for a couple of hours with some salt and pepper, a little turmeric (why not) and perhaps a stalk of celery, a carrot, and some fresh herbs if you have them to hand.
Roast some small chunks of pumpkin. Take the chicken out and shred it. Strain the stock. Chop some onion and garlic and fry with chilli powder (to taste, I used about 1/4 teaspoon). Add some shredded chicken, the pumpkin and the chicken stock. Throw in some corn and cook for a few minutes. Stir in a couple of spoons of sour cream and chop over fresh parsley. Perfect for an autumn day – It’s spring here of course, but I sometimes find myself eating for the English seasons rather than the NZ ones. I’m a little weird like that.
And now for a salad.
Buttery pan fried sweet potato chunks, raw raddish, pear, raw courgette, a few garden greens (baby spinach and parsley). Dressed with olive oil mixed with pomegranate molasses and a little apple cider vinegar.
The final offering of the day is this. Excellent with simple roast chicken.
A couple of cloves of chopped garlic, a little chili powder and turmeric, 2 fat shaved courgettes, a handful of bean sprouts, a cup of frozen peas, the juice of a lemon and some crumbled feta cheese.
Just before you go, here’s another little ‘thought for the day’. My six year old has a sweater that has ‘think of your own ideas’ printed across the front. I hope he grows up to realise you don’t need to run with the herd. Being your own person is the biggest favour you can do yourself.
The start of this year was a golden time for us. We had visitors, holidays, wellness, and life (even with four young kids) seemed rather effortless. As did cooking. Everything from chocolate cake through to chicken soup (the two pillars of my life in food) tasted pretty fabulous. I blogged, I held my iphone at strange angles in natural light, to try and capture the flavour in a photo. Good times.
Now, mostly, I pull something out of the oven, the pan, the bowl, and think ‘hmmm, not bad. It’s OK. Could be better if I did this, or that, added more something’. Then I loose my train of thought altogether. My camera stays wedged down the side of the sofa.
So it got me pondering, does food taste better when you’re happy? It’s not that I’m unhappy at the moment (happy is such an absolute word), it’s just comparatively speaking, the the last month or so has been more of a bumpy road, exhausting I guess. Four kids has not felt effortless. There have still been good times, proud moments, and comic interludes. It’s just all a bit harder right now. Which makes me think, is what’s missing from the dish a sparky mood on my part?
I really don’t know. I do know that there will be nights when you crack a bottle of bubbles on the deck, in the sunshine, and share a few laughs with those you love the most. There will be nights when you linger over your plate, putting the world to rights. And there will be others nights, when the meal itself feels like a tiny little ‘blink and you miss it’ moment, in between the making it, and the clearing up, and the mountain of craziness that surrounds it. I guess the later makes you appreciate the former all the more, and perhaps, when you stop and take stock like this, perhaps that’s when your sparkle comes back.
Actually, scrap that, I’m not sure I’m cut out to be a sparkly person. I probably just need to carve out a little more time to linger over my cake.
*Jake’s gooey chocolate loaf. Uplifting just to look at.
I’ve been thinking for a while that I should start a ‘blogroll’. It seems like a nice friendly thing to do – to link up with other blogs, and I hope I’m a nice friendly person. In part, what’s been stopping me is the name. ‘Blogroll’ has to be one of the most hideous words on the planet. Mainly though, I’m still totally lost in the vastness of the blogsphere. It’s kind of overwhelming. So I’ve decided to start to collecting posts I like and paste them over onto the imaginatively named ‘posts I like page’. There’s not much on there yet, but there will be.
You don’t often come across good gluten free lemon drizzle cake do you? I’m on a mission to make one. Today’s effort had mashed strawberries to replace some of the sugar and had ground pumpkin seeds/ground almonds. Pretty good flavour, but didn’t quite get the texture right. To be continued..
I can be a highly organised and efficient person, when someone’s paying me to be so. However, I’m not one of those people who brings their business skills into play when running the home. On the contrary I like to run a pretty loose ship. More slummy mummy than yummy mummy. The iron stays in hibernation from one year to the next, the kids have rarely been seen in anything other than odd socks, and we are usually to be found running up the hill to school at 8.57, after some kind of epic library book search. You won’t find any charts or lists in this house. You won’t even find a functioning calendar or diary system (we have tried, but always seem to default to the rather stupid idea that I can hold a schedule for a family of six in my head).
So it’s pretty relaxed around here, and needless to say there isn’t any meal planning. This post is a little ode to the art of keeping it random.
The free-style cook has almost no waste. You use whatever is leftover from the day before as the starting point for the day ahead.
It’s economical. Partly because there is no waste, partly because you shop frequently and can base the meal around whatever is on offer / looks good.
It’s more enjoyable, because you always cook what you feel like cooking.
You are free to follow the weather, as well as your mood.
It encourages you to be creative, especially when you have a strange selection of ingredients to hand, and no desire to schelp out to the shops. Being creative in the kitchen helps kids expand their culinary horizons, and grow up with an interest in food. (Which is not to say they will embrace everything that you create.)
Best of all, you can genuinely answer ‘I don’t know’, when the kids ask you what’s for dinner. Unless you happen to be making their absolute favourite meal, and unless all your kids have the same absolute favourite meal, then it is best to keep the dinner menu pretty close to your chest until the dinner hour has arrived. By that time, they are likely to be hungry enough to put their impassioned preferences to one side, and eat what is in front of them.
I realise that cooking for a family of six, and taking this approach makes me a bit strange. I think just about every article on how to ‘best’ or ‘efficiently’ approach feeding the family, revolves around some form of meal planning and ‘the weekly shop’. That’s OK. I’m happy to swim against the tide. Sometimes it’s nice to put a different point of view out there. It does help if you have a well stocked pantry , enjoy cooking, and are a long way away from being a perfectionist…(working from home is kind of a bonus too).
*A random chicken, coconut, aubergine, sweet potato and red lentil casserole from earlier this week.
We’ve been home for a week now and the jet lag has been brutal. It’s not helped by the vaguely discontented feeling of homesickness that always settles around me on return to NZ (or indeed by the kids all waking at different points during the night). Frankly the two combined have put me in a bit of a grump. I’ve tried the two food cure-alls of chicken soup and chocolate cake (not together obviously) and they haven’t really helped that much. I’ve also tried coffee, mint tea and even red wine and whilst all provided temporary relief it was just fleeting respite. I therefore conclude that it is not possible to eat or drink your way out of jet-laggy, post-holiday malaise.
The chocolate cake was good though. Something of a recipe breakthrough actually (baking soda and orange juice = airy fluffiness) which got me thinking about this blog and how sometimes in the midst of all my harping on about the colour of the sky and the song on the radio, that the actual recipes can get a little lost. Well, actually sometimes the recipes aren’t even real recipes, just random collections of ingredients that I may or may not remember to note down in the right order, whilst pondering something completely unrelated. But the chocolate cake got me thinking. I’ve probably made 20 chocolate cakes in the last 6 months. I’m not going to scroll through the archives and check – it might be embarrassing to see the actual number (and besides, there have been many more that haven’t made this particular diary). Who makes that many chocolate cakes (aside from people who work as bakers)? It’s kind of bordering on obsessive isn’t it? If I keep up with the blog then what will it look like in a few years – will there be thousands of chocolate cake entries, or will someone have carted me off to Cadburys World as an exhibit by then?
So I’ve started a new ‘best of’ collection of pure recipes over at Welly Kitchen. (Now I feel like an aging pop star). Welly Kitchen is going to be in proper recipe format with all the important details like measurements and timings and temperatures. It’s also going to be a place to outline how I adapt the meals for the small folk.
This blog will remain my test kitchen and my diary. The place to experiment, freestyle, and ponder the mood of the day. Facebook / twitter accounts are the same for both so if you’re a follower you’ll get updates from both. If you’d like an email when a recipe goes up on Welly Kitchen then you can subscribe on the home page just as you can here to On the monkey trail.
Thanks for reading. Here’s a leaning tower of chocolate cupcakes in a misguided attempt to ‘style’ the food whilst feeling a bit lack-lusture about being awake. For the recipe pop over here
A few weeks ago, I was feeling quite chipper and I wrote this post. It was definitely on the perkier side of normal for me, but it’s nice to spread some good vibes now and again. So it is with mixed feelings that I begin this post. I don’t want to burst any bubbles because I really believe in all that stuff. I do live by it, and it definitely does help me to cope with the chronic sleep deprivation that is my reality…most of the time.
But, some days, days when you are clinging on to the rope that you find yourself precariously hanging to, are days for some deep dark indulgences. Some days, you feel compelled to do exactly the reverse of what’s good for you. Some days, for the atheists amongst us, when prayer is not an option, then a strong hot coffee and a seriously large slab of chocolate are really your best bets to carry you from one breath to the next. And let’s just leave the word moderation out of this post shall we. There are days when moderation is a very fine thing, and days when we laugh in the face of moderation, and it’s the best laugh we’ve had all day.
I have lived under the haze of chronic sleep deprivation for the last six or seven years. Having four young children very close in age is the primary cause. For four of those seven years I’ve been breastfeeding; all my boys have been keen night-time feeders ( one – three feeds a night until sometime around their first birthday). I’ve chosen to do this (I don’t live under a rock, and am well aware that there are other approaches to parenting that might be more likely to give me uninterrupted sleep – but this post isn’t about right / wrong parenting choices … it’s about coping with sleep deprivation when that becomes your reality, for whatever reason).
For the first five(ish) years of this new life, this life in which a full night’s sleep had become a mythical thing of the past then, there were two words that described me perfectly – ‘run down’. I was the picture of exhaustion; anxious, erratic moods, chunks of each day where I could barely keep my eyes open. Every bug that was cruising the playgroup circuit would settle upon me and wipe me out. Every sniffle would lead to acute sinusitis / tonsillitis etc. This came as quite a surprise because I’d always been pretty robust, rarely ever ill and generally quite energetic and healthy. The kids were thriving, shaking off any snuffles way more quickly than I could, and so I decided my poor health was due to a combination of all the ‘kiwi’ bugs invading my foreign English immune system, and the repeat pregnancies zapping my reserves.
I self-medicated with a mix of coffee and chocolate (in various forms but more often than not just straight creamy milk slab,by the kilo – literally I would probably eat a kilo over the course of a week). Aside from the excessive chocolate and coffee my diet was (I thought) pretty good. It was certainly in line with what I had grown up to believe was a healthy diet (plenty of carbs / whole grains / salad / fruit etc). I would make big homemade pasta dishes for our evening meal, hoping to fuel myself up for the night ahead. If anything, despite all that chocolate, I struggled to keep weight on (I do have pretty lucky genes .. thanks grandma!). and as I have a big appetite I would just eat more and more (even sometimes sending the man of the house out to the kitchen at two am to make me a couple of pieces of toast!).
Then around two years ago we started to change the family diet quite significantly. This was in part due to the man of the house being diagnosed with a chronic inflammatory condition which (through trial and error) we found was helped by eliminating gluten from his diet). Around this time I also started working with a fantastic naturopath / nutritionist (Helen from Nourish-ed) who opened my eyes to a completely different way of looking at healthy eating (based around the principles outlined in Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions).
Now, after gradually making some changes I can step back and see I am way healthier and better able to function, despite the birth of baby number four, and the continuation of the chronic sleep deprivation. I am not bullet proof, getting up several times a night to breastfeed (calm nightmares / fetch water / take wandering toddlers back to their beds etc), is tiring. I still get a bit grumpy from time to time. But, I am way better. I have hardly been ill (no doubt I am totally jinxing myself by writing this) aside from the odd cold. I haven’t needed antibiotics in over a year and a half (the year prior to that I had to take 4 courses), and I’ve even started popping out for the odd jog. I can think beyond the basics of work and family, and am on occasion able to hold a reasonably sane conversation. I write this blog, for fun, and I have even played a couple of games of scrabble without falling asleep.
So what’s the secret? Here are my top tips for a diet to minimise the impact of sleep deprivation on your body and soul.
Lots of fluids that are not coffee or tea. I still treat myself to the odd coffee (a couple of times a week) and have one or two cups of earl grey tea a day but the bulk of my fluid is not caffeinated and I never start the day with caffeine. Previously I would rely mainly on tea, with the odd glass of water, which I would never finish. Now, I drink mint and cardamom tea made with fresh mint leaves and cardamom pods by the bucketful. It’s just my thing. I love it and I always have a pot on the go. I like it hot / cold and every temperature in between.
Less carbs and more protein. I haven’t gone totally gluten free and do still have the odd slice of bread / toast but I try and ensure my meals are based around protein.
Lots and lots of bone broth.I always choose meat with bones in if I’m making a casserole / curry, and I roast a whole chicken a couple of times a week so that stock is always plentiful around here.
Found a breakfast that suited me. Which is this. Previous I’d dabbled with various / cereal / yogurt / toast / porridge combos that never seemed to keep me going very long. Everyone is different – this works for me.
Less chocolate / more baking. I was addicted to chocolate until recently. Really seriously, I had a massive chocolate addiction, and had to ‘come off’ cold turkey – headaches / withdrawal etc.. It was harsh. Now I eat it in moderation. Mainly in baking. I bake a lot (as you’ll know if you read this blog) but I make good, nutrient dense cakes that satisfy my sweet tooth without excessive sugar or empty calories.
Those are the main things I’m doing differently. I was already eating lots of live yogurt , fruit , vegetables, oily fish etc ; so I didn’t have to change any of that. Aside from chocolate,I have always kept away from processed food.. it wasn’t enough!
So that’s where I’m up to. I’m still very much learning about a more nourishing diet – I am yet to experiment with a bigger range of fermented foods (but I’m kind of intrigued to), and I’m still holding on to a few old habits and treats… but I’ve done enough to feel a whole heap better. If I keep eating like this who knows what I’ll be like when my kids are all finally sleeping through the night – I’ll probably be running ultra-marathons or something.
Persimmon, plum and gooseberry crumble. Somethings you know will be good just from the sound of the words together. Added a cup of water to the bottom of the fruit and made a topping of butter rubbed in amaranth flour and ground almonds with a few spoons of ground seeds (pumpkin, flax and sunflower) and some cracked hazelnuts and a little demerara sugar.
Permissions also went in a salsa verde; with parsley, grated garlic, olive oil, lemon zest and juice, chopped capers and avocado. Great with pan fried fish.
As for the more profound stuff… I’ve started contributing to the big swell a great project promoting healthy families. Pop over and take a look. Below is a copy of a post I wrote for them today.
The Fortunate Ones
A large green Aga stood at the heart of my childhood kitchen. It was oil fuelled and therefore constantly exuded warmth. From it, my mum (with a little ‘help’ from the rest of us) produced an endless stream of nutritious meals, usually organic and always cooked from scratch. We would eat these meals together on an over-size pine table in the centre of the room. There was never a shortage of anything; food, conversation, debate, laughter. Above the Aga, at Christmas time, mum would tack up a little newspaper clipping, about the size of a business card. It read; ‘If you think Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without a turkey then try it without anything’.
I look back now and understand a little better that my mum was constantly trying to balance giving us a very privilidged upbringing with an understanding that we were the fortunate ones. She was always (and remains still) haunted by the inequalities in the world. In addition to being a very hands on mum, she somehow juggled a career working with profoundly disabled young people. She campaigned tirelessly to bring those who are so often left in the shadows of our society out into the light. She taught us, and anyone willing to listen, not to view people who struggled (be it through famine or flood or disability or neglect) as a burden in this world, and not to ignore them.
Sometimes the problems of the world seem so huge it’s easier to block them out and press on with all that’s good in our own lives. The news may not be full of images of African famine like it was in the 80s, when I was a kid, but there are still a lot of people out there, whom spend every waking moment feeling hungry. Some of them might live down the road.
It’s hard to talk about this without sounding irritatingly worthy. I think that’s part of the issue – few want to tackle it for fear of how they come across. As a group of middle class mums sometimes it’s easier to get bogged down in passionate discussion about whether to wean our baby at 4 months on apple, or 6 months onto carrot, than to talk about the less fortunate ones, for whom there is no apple or carrot.
I don’t have any answers, but I do look back at what my mum tried to teach us and feel inspired. She might be a long way off changing the world, but her quiet activism certainly made many lives a little bit better (including ours). Happy Mother’s Day Mum!
