I’ve been making stock for years but it’s never made it to this space as a recipe although I talk about and use homemade chicken stock a lot. There are a couple of reasons for this, the first is that like a lot of things that I cook, it’s a really simple, pared down method and not really a recipe. The second related reason is that if you are the chicken stock making type, you probably have a really good recipe that you love and if you’re not, there are hundreds of more accomplished recipes out there. But Christmas is just around the corner and I want to encourage you to make stock with your leftover turkey or chicken bones after Christmas dinner!
I really like food and cooking but there are loads of great options out there for people who don’t make stock, from stock cubes to ready made stock you can buy from supermarkets and I have used them all at one time or another, so I’m not saying you should make stock or ‘bone broth’ because it’s better than a cube. The entire reason I make my own stock and think that maybe you should give it a try is that it’s frugal (you are essentially using things that you’d throw away) and easy (because if it wasn’t easy, I wouldn’t do it because I am a very lazy cook!)
When I roast a chicken (or chickens) I put the carcass in a bag and freeze it. Then the bag gets filled with scraps of vegetables (onion, mushrooms, carrots, celery and leeks are the ones I most commonly eat and so are the ones that go in). 
The bag sits there and then when it’s full, the contents get dumped in the slow cooker. 
I fill the slow cooker up with water, switch to low and it sits there happily becoming stock for (and this is the bit people get a little bit funny about!) a couple of days. Look, it’s never made me sick, you may feel differently, in which case, put it all in a saucepan and do it all on the same day.
Once I decide it’s ready, I strain it into 1 and a half cup portions and freeze.
Anyway stock, simple, easy, free.
However, in my 40’s I’ve begun to notice that my skin around my eyes do have wrinkles and the skin doesn’t bounce back like it used to. Eye cream is one of those beauty products that feels expensive, I see those cute little pots and am shocked at the prices, it seems like a lot of money to spend if it doesn’t work and how am I going to know if it works? Sure you only use a little but then with the pots, there’s all that time I’m sticking my fingers in it. So I went for something lower down the scale and bought a bottle of the 
If anyone has a suggestion for an eye cream they swear by please let me know…
The cream, most of the potatoes and blueberries were used for the lunch on Saturday.
For the rest of the week, I intended to use what was in the freezer and the vegetables, fortunately there were a couple of things on for Christmas at work so I didn’t have to put too much thinking into meal planning for the week, thank goodness, because work was tiring and I didn’t have much brain space to think about it!
Thursday, I was out for another work Christmas lunch and I didn’t eat at home all day. Friday I was home resting my poorly foot and realised that the yogurt in the fridge was nearing it’s dead date so I made 
I’m very easily tired though and last week, as planned, featured three Christmas lunches and straight back into the big monthly meeting I minute and generally arrange it was much more tiring than I expected, I really could not have done any of it without my lovely colleagues who did most of the heavy lifting and running around (literally!)
Monday was the department lunch with bonus belly dancer! Tuesday and Wednesday were straightforward workdays. Thursday was big meeting in the morning and Christmas lunch with that team.
Ma and I got some of the Christmas food shopping done on the way back & bumped into my old primary school teacher at the same time!
Having said that, I have had a number of conversations this year about how self contained I am and how distant I can be. While I would love to dismiss this as stuff and nonsense when the two people you are most open with (your mother and the closest thing you have to a father) agree with each other, then you should probably reflect on it before you dismiss the criticism.
However, after Stef died it got worse and I became more cautious about trusting others. For friends that were around, I think it was generally difficult to cope with me at the time, I’m quite hard to read and my coping strategies didn’t help. Also, sticking by someone as they grieve is profoundly uncomfortable and hard to do, if you’re not in that space. For some it was too much and that, with a whole lot of other stuff lost me some friendships. There’s no blame here but at that point a switch flipped in my head and relationships became a hell of a lot easier for me to cope with, minus drama and overthinking but also minus expectation of emotional or physical support. While I was happy to offer it to other people, I didn’t show much of myself to others because I wasn’t sure that anyone was interested to know.
That habit has really solidified in the last couple of years as friends have got married and had kids and have other things to worry about. Honestly, I’m happy to talk about those things because it really isn’t all about me but it shouldn’t never be about me. I’ve had six weeks on a sofa and I can count the number of people who got in contact and visited me in that time on one hand and honestly, I can’t decide if I’m hurt or cross about it.
which means making 
If you don’t drive and anyway you can’t drive at all for the first two weeks or drive a manual car for 6 weeks. Sort out someone (friend/taxi etc) to pick you up from the hospital and transport you to and from your appointments. Which is the point that I thank my brother for coming all the way over in the cab and taking me to and from the hospital. That was great because Ma and Ben went for a coffee while I was having my stitches out! Also remember parking charges, I was in the hospital for about 55 minutes and it cost £6!
In the first two weeks, your foot should be raised above your pelvis about 95% of the time, including when you sleep. Don’t skip this, when I got out of hospital on the first day, I felt so good and thought it would be fine, however, the nurse had told me that I was to view myself as pretty much housebound for the first two weeks and that was good advice, it’s a pretty traumatic thing to do to your foot and it’s important that you give your body time to adjust and recover. It’s important for your healing that the blood goes to your foot so the only thing you can do, is put it up as much as possible and wait! I couldn’t wait to get the itchy bandage off and felt a lot better once I could see my foot, even though it looked terrible!
This is the hardest part, I just wanted to get better and quickly and everything stayed much the same for the first 3 or so weeks, but by the end of week 4 I was seeing real improvement in my ability to walk, move my foot, stand and have my foot down. I don’t think I would have if I had tried to do too much in the first weeks.
To eat there was pizza because I was mobile enough to make it. I used my last bag of frozen dough and it was amazing.
There were bacon rolls on Tuesday as a brunch before we set off for the hospital.
Tuesday was my final appointment at the hospital and it was pretty much as expected. The headlines are that the foot is still not straight but the surgery corrected it as much as it could be corrected. At the moment, the foot is still swollen and I can’t get my shoes on yet, but it’s looking good. More disappointingly, getting back to walking and exercise isn’t going to happen as quickly as I hoped. I’m going back to work on reduced hours for the next six weeks because of the difficulty of walking and standing during the commute and my hour of walking a day is off the cards until about March and I won’t be able to start body balance classes until at least June. The last of the bad news is that I had hoped that once I’d recovered, I would be able to run again but the consultant has said no running ever again! In fact he’d prefer that I learnt to walk on my hands! The bad but not unexpected news is that the likelihood of reoccurrence of the bunion is high. The surgery has bought me another 10 years or so but the mechanics of my feet are such that it’s probably not a permanent fix, it’s gone from a severe to a moderate bunion and it is less painful so all of that is good.
The rest of the week was pretty quiet, Ma came over on Friday for a birthday lunch and stayed over for her second birthday lunch with the rest of the family on Saturday. 
Cue cuddles with Joe and tickle fights with Oli! 
I spent Sunday sorting myself out for a working week, expect me to be mostly exhausted this week…
Nic Dempsey 