Friday Links

Posted on January 29, 2016 by nicdempsey

Happy Friday! Today I am working from home and then having the afternoon off to have a haircut, it’s all excitement, all the time around here!

Here are this week’s links…

As we give up on saving, we give up on our future. Pensions and what not having them signifies. Yep, I have a pension that it not really gonna cut it in 26 years time but I can barely afford the contribution that I make at the moment. But I at least I get an employer contribution too!

Older children are better than babies and toddlers. This was delightful. I’m having a bit of a time with it at the moment from several sources I’m hearing about how much hard work it is and I get it but I think the quote in the article equating babies and toddlers to first five minutes of the movie. I reckon that’s spot on and honestly folks you all signed up for this…

 Why I put 400 condoms in my kitchen drawer. I’m not sure that I’d have put 400 out but I think that adults need to recognise that teenagers have sex however horrific the idea is.

The people behind the claim that Planned Parenthood were selling baby parts have just been indicted. So I’m going to say it again, it didn’t happen…

What IQ do you have to have to take care of a child? I don’t know and I don’t have any answers, but this is worth reading anyway.

Canada is adopting Finland’s Baby box idea. Not quite, but this is a smart idea and every country that could should do this.

The loss of libraries is another another that inequality will become entrenched. My love of libraries is documented and I remember the library being another place I could go to when home was difficult because my dad wasn’t working. They are far more important than you could ever realise if you don’t need them.

Ma has been quoting this article all week, George Osborne’s character flaws may cost him the top job. Basically he’s over confident and doesn’t understand the true impact of his policies. Yep.

Speaking of which, Britain and big business and lack of tax money.

My first thought when I’d heard that Cecil Parkinson had died was that I hoped Sara Keays gets to dance on that man’s grave. Not at all compassionate or very Christian but the family statement that talks about his daughters, grandchildren and step-grandchildren missed a child. Suzanne Moore nails some of what makes me so uncomfortable about him.

If you think light therapy might help with SAD, be careful. Interesting, I did a lot of talking therapy after Stef died, when I was depressed outside of the SAD and me therapist encouraged me to get a wake up lamp but not a light lamp. Good to know why. Although honestly, the more I learn and understand how my SAD (and depression) manifests the more I realise the importance of not indulging it. Yeah, I know that’s the opposite of what the ‘be kind to yourself’ brigade would say but if depression lies and it’s telling to you sad in bed and do nothing then you need to do the opposite. You need to practise tough love on yourself AND get the medical help you can…

The Making of Grease. It could have been awful awful instead of good awful. I still love it (my 5 year old self thought it was the best film of all time!)

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Marmalade

Posted on January 28, 2016 by nicdempsey

Two weeks ago my friend Sue posted a picture of her batch of just made marmalade, which reminded me if that I wanted to make some this year, I needed to get a move on. I didn’t make much jam this year, in fact the only preserving I did last year were the pots of blackberry jam I made in the summer and that proved to be such a hit (and such a limited amount) we scoffed it all!

Marmalade seems to be a love hate thing, either you love it and it’s bitter sweet taste on your toast or you can’t bear it and think it is the devil’s jam. I’m firmly on the love side and even more so since I put on my big girls pants and started making it.

Marmalade is considered to be a bit of a faff. First you have to find seville oranges, then juice them, then shred the peel, then cook the peel, then finally you have to make and jar the marmalade. Some recipes suggest that before you cook the peel, you soak it overnight. So it’s all a bit of a palaver, so much so that MaMade and Lakeland do all the work for you.  I made marmalade like that for years, it was better than the shop bought stuff but it didn’t feel like I was making marmalade it felt like I was cheating. This is not to knock it at all, in the summer time when seville oranges aren’t available and marmalade must be had it’s a life saver and if you were experimenting with favours and/or just couldn’t do all that chopping, they are godsends.

I felt that I hadn’t made marmalade properly and that I should at least do it once. One of the true joys of cooking is learning about what and how you like to cook and eat and also in learning what it is important for you to make from basic principles and what you are happy to buy from the shop. These things vary from person to person and change depending on what stage of life you are at but there is a rightness about knowing these things for yourself. There is also something lovely about the finiteness (is that a word?) of cooking and especially preserving that I love. The blackberry jam that I made last year is gone but the memory of Ma and I going out to pick them and then getting jam from that is still with us. Last year, I finished a rhubarb and ginger jam, that honestly was getting on a bit but it was the last jam I had that Tina had made and I will confess to hanging on to it because Tina had made it and I’ll never eat a jam she made again. There’s also the changeable nature of it, one year it will behave, one year it won’t, over the weekend Jen made her marmalade noted that this year the shred didn’t float all the way to the top like it had last. Or the year you do everything right and the stuff just won’t set for no earthly reason you can find. It’s happened, there was that plum jam that time….

All of which to say, I don’t make marmalade every year but when I do, I make it from seville oranges and shred the peel and simmer the peel for hours and for me it’s worth it. It’s a process I enjoy and find relaxing. In fact, I started this on Saturday at about 4pm, spend about an hour with the cutting and juicing, set the peel to simmer while I made dinner and finished it at about 9pm. So it takes a while but only about an hour and half of that was hands on time. I used Felicity Cloake’s perfect recipe.

I’m spending a lot of 2016, talking about money and food, so it seems remiss not to talk about the cost of this. The cost of the oranges didn’t come out of this week’s food budget which I’m ok with because it’s not all for me but the total cost of the the ingredients was £4.78. That made roughly 11 8oz jars (there was a bit over but I’m not going to worry too much about that) which works out as 43p a jar, marmalade that you buy generally comes in 16oz jars, so mine would work out at 96p a jar. Which is more expensive than the Sainsburys basics and own brand ranges that come in at 30p and 75p respectively. However, it’s cheaper than any of the premium marmalade and it tastes better so for me it’s worth it.

It’s also really good on toast…

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January doesn’t last forever…

Posted on January 27, 2016 by nicdempsey

Yesterday, I woke up grumpy. I didn’t feel good and I just wanted to go back to bed. I actually consider it to be a sign of what a grown up I have become that I got up and out of the house and was at my desk at 7.55am. (Some days I barely know who I am anymore!)

Anyway at some point in the morning, I added my water intake to the Fitbit app on the phone and when it had synced up realised why I was so grumpy. 3 hours and 47 minutes sleep. Mmm, basically I’d been running around with a hangover acquired without taking a drink. Fun.

Then I spent an hour dealing with some IT problems and I realised that it wasn’t PMT or lack of sleep or work or anything that was making me grumpy. It was January.

Because it’s a dog of month and we’re in the last week of it and all the happy Christmas joy is dead and it’s still dark and I have to keep up with all the promises I made myself on New Year’s Eve and it’s hard, really hard to do. What I would like to do is go to bed with a tub of ice cream and maybe a manhattan or 2 and then sleep until sometime in March…

Unfortunately, it’s just not possible so I’m going to slog through, I am because January does not last forever… 

  

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Food and Budget update: 16/01 to 22/01/2016

Posted on January 25, 2016 by nicdempsey

So this food week wasn’t overshadowed so entirely by the mice but I’m still gradually replacing things. The shopping list looked like this

DSCF5143DSCF5157 DSCF5158

So there were some changes, I decided I wanted to try a new recipes so needed porridge oats, other things I bought that weren’t on the list; spinach, stuffed pasta, passata, olive oil, fizzy water. Things on the list I didn’t buy caster sugar (again), pesto and one of the replacement herbs and spices, I’m replacing the thrown out packets with jars, so loosing one isn’t a huge deal. The spinach, stuffed pasta and olive oil were all on offer and the fizzy water just tastes more interesting at the end of the day and is better and cheaper than coke, root beer etc.

The total came to £14.79, so 21p in the jar, every little helps and all that!DSCF5144DSCF5148 DSCF5154

This weeks breakfast were yoghurt and granola with peaches and lunches were a salad with bulgar wheat (along the lines of this cous cous salad) which I ate with a spinach salad. The pineapple and pears were for snacking on. 

 I’m still working on emptying the freezer, so I can defrost it properly at the end of the month. Therefore dinners where mostly from there with some additions.

Cottage pie and green beans on Saturday.

Chicken and peppers with rice on Sunday night and remixed on Tuesday.DSCF5131Soup on Monday night (and that is the last of the soup I made in preparation for my six weeks recovering from the osteotomy….)DSCF5139

Black Bean burgers and veg on Wednesday.

FNP on Friday.IMG_3716The week felt like it was tough so I’m just pleased to have got to the end of it on budget and eating well!

 

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Life Happened: All work, all the time

Posted on January 25, 2016 by nicdempsey

Last week had two goals

  • keep on top of the housework (and mice)
  • get through the week on full time hours

I did managed both but not without some issues. The week started off alright even if I had to leave the house in the dark!IMG_3726I was in migraine fortnight and the consistent night-time wake ups (from next door’s screaming kid, and she does scream for at least 40 mins at a time, every night) took their toll and on Wednesday I had a migraine. Which was disappointing, actually it was more than disappointing it was also painful but I’m going with disappointing because I was hopeful that I would get through the month without one as I’ve been watching for all the little triggers, however, this was one outside of my control, which sucks…

The rest of the work week passed pretty much without incident, on Friday I spent some time in the pit of hopelessness also known as the Apple Store, I say some time, I mean 2 hours but there was the three hours that I went home for while they put a new battery in.  The good news is that they did and it was free and my phone lived to serve another day!

On Friday evening, I went to Jenny’s ‘no more treatment’ party. It’s been a slog for Jenny and for the rest of her family. I’ve always said that Jenny is the kind of person I want to be when I grow up, which is why I’m so happy that she’s done with chemo and radiotherapy  and that the world gets to keep her for a while yet!

On Saturday, I started marmalade, it’s the season and did other boring housework stuff. 

  Ma came for dinner on Saturday 

 I spent Sunday doing very little, apart from food prep for the week ahead…It was gloriously unproductive but just the thing!

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Friday Links

Posted on January 22, 2016 by nicdempsey

Happy Friday!  This week was apparently the worst week of the year or at least the most depressing, given that it started off with Blue Monday. Hopefully, your week wasn’t too awful and here are this week’s links…

How to beat the Blue Monday blues. Or any kind of depressive episode!

The Housing and Planning Bill reveals the contempt the Conservative Party holds the public in.

Giles Fraser on the Anglican Church and its latest nonsense on gay marriage.

Robin Lustig on liberalism. Don’t disagree with any of it.

The problem with capitalism.

The end of standing on the right? Years of London Tube tradition is not efficient, I’m shocked and disturbed..

Book depicting ‘happy’ slave of George Washington. Ignores that actual slave ran away and Washington conspired to keep him in slavery basically breaking the law. I found the contradictions of Mount Vernon, the emphasis on how great a man Washington was with the slave quarters obscene. And on Monday they withdrew the book. Well done them.

Pope Francis draws criticism over Protestant concessions. Finally, the RC church is catching up with me. I’ve always taken communion at any church I’ve been too because people should not be able to stand between me and God, it also didn’t bother me if a non-Catholic took communion in a Catholic mass either. So I’m pleased that Francis is doing this even though it’s going to take a lot more than that to get me back into a Catholic church..

We had a tiny bit of snow this weekend, London snow, you wake up and see that there has been snow because it’s still on top of cars and roofs but not on roads or pavements! The Guardian had a disappointing snowmen photo round up. It’s very British..

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Cottage Pie

Posted on January 21, 2016 by nicdempsey

I made this over the Christmas break, using the leftover roast beef. I’ve never made a cottage or shepherds pie using the left over roast before and as roast dinners were never much on Ma’s repertoire of meals she cooked, even seen one made. So I turned to Delia, who for tradition English cooking is fail safe. The recipe is in her Complete Cookery Course but is pretty close to this one.

I don’t often think of my cooking as traditionally English, I have talked about the importance of routine in cooking and eating, I think that it’s a good way of marking the week and gaining confidence with cooking. You have to make something a couple of times to get a feel for it and routine is comforting. I like getting to the end of the week knowing that there will be pizza on Friday. Cottage (or shepherds) pie was a Monday night dinner, it used up the remains of Sunday’s roast dinner and stretched food a bit further. I don’t often have roast dinners and if I’m eating a cottage pie, it’s probably got lentils in it or is made with raw mince. This was good and if I ever have leftover roast meat, I’ll make it again.

As ever, I deviated slightly from Delia, I don’t have a mincer so I blitzed the meat in the food processor and then did the same to the onions, swede and carrot. Not having any gravy, I just added 10fl oz of water and 3 crumbed OXO cubes into the pan. I didn’t add cinnamon or fresh herbs but added a good shake of mixed herbs. I’m not sure that the tomato purée would have worked so well with lamb but it was perfect for the beef, and I ended up with a rich beef mixture.

I don’t think I’ve ever made mash to a recipe, it could be that my Irish heritage means that I was born knowing how to do it or I could have grown up watching Ma do it all the time and picked it up, although I should point out that I’ve never bought the lumps (sorry it’s a very bad family joke – my dad used to complain about lumps in the mashed potatoes and Ma used to pretend that she’d bought them specially!)  I boiled some potatoes with the rest of the swede and mashed them with some milk, butter and lots of black pepper.

I made one big pie which we ate on New Year’s Day, and two little ones (I used these) for the freezer.

So another option for leftover roast beef should you have any!

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A Day in my Life

Posted on January 20, 2016 by nicdempsey

As I’m back to ‘normal’ working hours this week, I thought it would be interesting to document what a working day looks like for me. It may actually only be interesting to me but as this is my space, I’m gonna go ahead and do it anyway!

5:45am  The alarm goes off, the wake up light as been gradually lightening up my bedroom so I’m either awake or semi-awake but at 5:45am, the radio comes to life and Farming Today starts, and among other things I learn about the use of drones on farms. I generally grab my phone and check mail and fitbit to have a look at how I slept. The blue light of the screen needs to be avoided at night but embraced in the morning. However, this morning I’ve woken up with a headache, this is not unusual for this time of the month (I’m bang in the middle of migraine time) but I know the drill, water, tablets, vicks and close my eyes for a bit.

6:10am  I drag myself out of bed after the news. The headache is a bit better and in order to avoid getting back into bed, I make it and lay out my clothes for the day. Then do my set of exercises.

6:20am  Into the kitchen for a rodent check! I make a cup of mint tea, fill up up water again and sort out my lunch.

6:30am

To the bathroom to  perform morning ablutions (it’s a fabulous word that!)

6:40am  Into work clothes, make up and hair to make myself presentable. This is as good as it’s going to get today. Then wash up and put away tea cup and water glass. I’ve become a little bit fanatical about getting things away recently (my mother is so proud!).

7:00am The 7 o’clock news is my cue, I have a final check to make sure that I have charger, travel card, book, phone etc, then leave the house and walk to the station, I’m usually out by 7:05am and at the station for the 7:26 to Paddington. Leaving the house when it’s dark in the morning sucks every bit as much as you think it does but it’s worth it, to get a start on the day and a seat on the train. And it’s still dark and I’m still not happy about it… 7:40am – 7:50amArrive at Paddington and walk to the bus stop, it’s still not light yet. Usually, I’d walk from Paddington to the office but my foot still isn’t up to it so am taking the bus. I moan about public transport constantly but London is well served by buses. Although in the 3 minutes I have to wait for the bus, I say a small prayer for the teachers of the two teenage schoolgirls chatting away at the bus stop. It’s the combination of total ignorance and complete confidence that blows me away, I’m comforted by the knowledge that teenagers are working with nearly adult bodies but underdeveloped brains, essentially they’re disabled, most of them will turn out fine!

8:05amArrive at the office. Log in, make tea (tea is important even though mine is herbal or green rather than ‘proper’ builders tea!) and get water, check email and to-do list while eating breakfast. Get to work on the list. Remember at about 8:50am that I haven’t called my mother, do that and get back to work.

10:20amColleague suggests coffee and I’m still headachey, caffeine is one of the few things that help with fending off the migraines so we go get a coffee and I eat my pear in the hope that they will help. They don’t.

11:30amFruit has arrived so I grab some grapes and an apple and a plum. I also make another mint tea and refill my water bottle. I snack on the grapes, the other fruit is saved for tomorrow.

12:10pmStill headachey, I eat my lunch (surprisingly delicious, the spinach idea is keeper for work lunches) and take a painkiller. I take some time to check my email, exciting email from library informing me that two books on reserve have just come in! Walk to the break room and read for 15-20 minutes, give up because headache so decide to get back to work.

The afternoon is spent mostly at my desk writing up minutes and dealing with anything else that comes up, at some point, I wash up my lunch things and refill my water and tea. At 4:45pm, I review the work that needs doing in the rest of the week and double check my diary to make sure that I’m not missing anything. That done, I work out a task list for tomorrow and shut down my laptop. While I’m waiting for that to happen, I have a quick tidy of my desk etc.

5:04pmDesk clear and it’s time to leave the office. The journey home is uneventful, I get a seat and am home by 6:00pm.

I get home to discover that the landlord and handyman have been round. The boiler has been serviced, the mouse entrances covered, the light socket in the cupboard and bedroom radiator valve fixed and the bathroom cold tap now works again! Hurrah!

Ma calls and we catch up on the day, then after I change into home clothes, I potter about for a bit tidying up and rearranging cupboards back to how they were this morning, and then make dinner. Dinner is soup (this is not a photo of the actual soup I made but it’s close enough!)DSCF5139After dinner, I wash up.Tomorrow is rubbish day so I sort out the recycling and mop the floor. By 8:30pm, I’m all done.

8:30pm

I sit down to read for a bit, this doesn’t go as expected and I wake up at 9:30pm feeling confused! So I go and have a shower and get myself to bed. 12 hours after I woke up to R4, I go to sleep to R4, lights out at 9:50pm

So all in all a pretty average Monday and work day generally. How was yours?

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Food and Budget: 09/01 to 15/01/2016

Posted on January 19, 2016 by nicdempsey

I was so fed up this week, I’d thrown a ton of food and other stuff away, I’d felt like I’d been in kitchen all week, cleaning it and I knew there was more to go. I did have a rough  meal plan and I was determined that I wasn’t going to let the week send me off into wild spending, the whole point of this budget limit is to prove that it’s doable even when I’m stressing out about critters invading the kitchen.

One of the other joys of this week was my phone decided to randomly crash, so I had a paper list, here it is

.

I needed to make some granola (to replace the stuff I’d thrown away) and planned on slow cooker chicken and peppers for Saturday night, a soba noodle salad for lunches and needed to get ingredients for that. However, I had a genius moment and forgot to take the chicken out of the freezer, I also hadn’t planned on buying fruit and wanted some.   So I had a quick change of plan. I abandoned the idea of making granola and bought a packet of Dorset Cereals granola instead, 4 chicken legs were half price so I got those and I bought a pineapple and a pomegranate again. They didn’t have any parsley but they did have coriander and it was on special offer so that did just fine! The total was £14.96. Close but still within budget…DSCF5119DSCF5118For a number of reasons, mainly to do with forgetting to switch the slow cooker on, we didn’t eat the chicken and peppers on Saturday night, we ate pasta and butter and cheese!

I find weekdays are easier if I have the same thing for breakfast and lunches. I prepped those meals on Sunday afternoon. Breakfasts were pomegranate arils, yogurt and granola. I chopped up the pineapple and potted it up as a snack. For lunches I had the soba noodle salad and roast vegetables (a squash that’s been hanging around since October, tomatoes, peppers and onions)DSCF5134The chicken and peppers I ate with rice on Sunday and Tuesday night. The rest went in the freezer.DSCF5131I really want to make a dent in some of food in the freezer and so had soup from the freezer on Monday and Wednesday night, with extra vegetables and seeds. (the colour of it is not great but it tastes good!)DSCF5139Tuna burgers also from the freezer with chopped up carrots was Thursday’s dinner.

And on Friday I made a new to me pizza base because it didn’t require sugar, which I didn’t have. This one is a keeper, it’s quick, simple and tastes really good. If you don’t make your own or are having problems with yours, try this one, just use plain flour instead of strong bread flour.

So what did I learn this week? In my professional life, I’m a huge advocate for having and understanding a process for regular jobs, that way it’s easier to deviate from plan and work around if you have too. The key is understanding the steps before you have to jettison them. This was the key takeaway from last week, having a plan in plan made it easier to tap into what I needed (fruit) and easier to adapt when I realised that I’d forgotten to defrost the chicken because I had a good idea of what I was going to eat and how much it cost. If I had just turned up to the supermarket without a list or a plan in the completely grumpy and stressed out mood I was rocking on Saturday morning…well there’s no way I’ve have stuck to the £15 budget and that would have put me at a disadvantage for the rest of the month.

The other lesson from last week is that a little bit of food prep goes a long way. That couple of hours on Sunday, got me ahead of the game, knowing that food was sorted made my week easier because it was one less decision to think about each day.

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Life Happened: Organisation

Posted on January 18, 2016 by nicdempsey

After last’s week’s mouse apocalypse, I wanted this week to be easy. It was my busy week at work and the last one on reduced hours.

Last week I wanted to:

  • Have my lunch made the day before
  • Get to bed and lights out at 10pm
  • Get out of bed by 7pm each morning
  • Ensure that the kitchen was spotless to deter the mice
  • Increase my water intake – I haven’t been drinking enough and it’s showing on how sluggish I feel and on my which looks dehydrated and tired.

With the exception of the kitchen, this was all geared towards ensuring that regular hours wouldn’t be such a huge shock this week.I did pretty well, Sunday food prep and a robust meal plan helped me with the lunch goal, it was easy to keep the kitchen very clean, partly because paranoia reigns and it was so tidy to start with. I’ve gone back to having a shower before bedtime which means that mornings are easier and I made sure I drunk a pint of water as soon as I woke up which seemed to help kickstart the water drinking.

I made a dent in my January books to read pile. I know, I’m basically helpless in the library, it’s like they’re calling my name…DSCF5159I found myself doing things that I would ordinarily put off like the ironing straight away and so I felt more in control of life, which is good because by the end of the week, I was tired and headachey.

That pretty much continued through the weekend, I’m sorted for the coming week but that’s about all I did at the weekend. Hopefully I’ll perk up for the coming week….

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