Weekend projects

Posted on July 1, 2014 by nicdempsey

This weekend, I made cocktail cherries and cherry brandy.

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These are long term projects, neither will be properly ready for 3 months but there is something nice about making food or drinks that can be put up, I like the idea of taking the things that are good in the summer and preserving them for future use and I’m slightly obsessed by cherries..

I made some cocktail cherries the year before last but didn’t last year and regretted it. So this year I wanted to make some and I wanted to make some cherry brandy too.

The cherry brandy was really simple. I used 1kg of cherries, removed the stalks and pricked the cherries and put them in a 2 litre jar. I added 200g sugar, 1/2 litre of brandy and 1/2 litre of applejack. I shook it every day until the sugar dissolved and it’s in a dark cupboard for the next 3 months, at that point I’ll remove the cherries, filter the brandy and bottle it. I didn’t take any photos because I forgot but if you want to see pretty pictures of the process, go here.

I changed up the cocktail cherry recipe this year. I decided to use brandy for the cherries and this is how I did it.

For 1lb of cherries.

Wash, de-stem and pit the cherries. Put the cherries straight into sterilized jars. Take 1/2 cup cherry juice and 1/2 cup sugar, heat in a saucepan for 5 to 10 minutes until the sugar has dissolved. Take off the heat and add 3/4 cup of brandy and 1/4 cup triple sec, mix up and pour into the jars of cherries until the cherries are covered.

I used 4lb of cherries and for the triple sec used half Cointreau and half Grand Marnier.

Hopefully, it should last the from Christmas until next year but I do really like cherries!

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Small Changes

Posted on June 30, 2014 by nicdempsey

Remember back in April, when I admitted that I needed a kick up the behind?

It has taken a while, but I spent June actively trying to make some of the changes that I needed to make. I’ve done enough counselling to know that, my slump wasn’t really about being lazy and that it needed something other than willpower but I’m allergic to the ‘listen to your inner goddess’ or ‘examine your navel’ form of….well anything.  I’m the girl, who’s criteria for a therapist/counsellor was that they were sensible, I also knew that I didn’t need to go back and see the therapist because this isn’t about how I cope with awful tragedy, it’s about how I cope with the everyday practicalities of the human condition. The therapist suggested some coaching and I been reading Krissie‘s blog for ages and I trust her not to be too woo woo and I’ve watched her do stuff that makes her heart happy, so I signed up to her beFULL course.

It’s been a reassuring and challenging month and I’m sure I’ll witter on about it more later on. However, I’m me and I’ve made some practical changes this month that have really helped.This month the action has changed my attitude because I was ready for it too and because I could link the action to what it did, but generally I’m a huge fan of how much you can change your attitude by taking action when you really don’t want to, I’d thought that I’d lay out what I’ve been doing this month.

Yoga

Yeah, I never thought it would have such an impact or that I’d enjoy it but 15 to 20 minutes every night before I go to bed has been transformative. It’s a gentle, stretching, calm down end of the day routine and I’m sleeping better and my back and knees don’t hurt so much.

Tidy house

I’m pretty good about keeping the house tidy but where I do fall down is during the week. So I’ve been really intentional about getting the things I don’t like to do, done every day. So I’ve been diligent about making sure that the dishes are done and tomorrow’s lunch is sorted every day, before bedtime, I have a quick 5 minute walk around the flat putting things away, I’ve been ironing and putting laundry away as soon as it’s dry instead of leaving it until the weekend. It’s a pain when I want to go and read after dinner but waking up in the morning to a tidy flat and knowing that I have clothes to wear that don’t need ironing makes difficult mornings go better and good mornings fantastic.

Self Care

I’ve been looking after my nails and feet. I live in flip flops in the summer and also they are comfortable my feet get dirty and dry, hobbits have better looking feet! So I’ve been making sure that my feet are moisturised each night and pedicuring them once a week. My feet will never be beautiful but the look much better.

Changing my journey home

I’ve started to walk to Kings Cross to go home, it’s a longer journey but it gives me a 15 minute-ish walk every day and very little helps!

 

 

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Sunday Music

Posted on June 29, 2014 by nicdempsey

Sometimes you just need something thrashy..

Come on Over – Royal Blood

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Friday Links

Posted on June 27, 2014 by nicdempsey

Happy Friday!  I’m so glad to get the end of another week, while I don’t like that the year seems to be flying by and technically after last weekend we’re moving into winter, I’m always pleased when I get to the end of a difficult work week. I have grand plans this weekend. I want to clear the front garden, (it’s not my job, the people downstairs should do it but I can’t stand how it looks at the moment!), go for a run, do some crafty things and the usual weekend tasks. On Sunday, Ma is coming over, with a car, to take the garden rubbish to the dump and then it’s all lunch and relaxation until Monday.

Meanwhile here is some stuff to read!

1) It’s a Labour party crisis, not an Ed Milliband one. I should be a natural Labour party supporter (and in fact used to be) but I’m not. Losing the support of me and people like me, should worry the Labour party but it doesn’t seem too.

2) The Fiver on Luis Suarez.

3) Saturday jobs in retail. I managed one day in a clothes shop, really not me. After that I stuck to working the library (if I was independently wealthy, this would be my job of choice!), babysitting and once I’d turned 18 a Saturday job in a bookies, this was before the smoking ban and the relaxation of the laws on betting, by the end of the day, I smelt like an ashtray and if I ever develop lung cancel that job will be why, still the money was good!

4) Put water on the table at dinner times. I know that I’m old and was brought up in a different time, but when did this change? We drank loads of water when we were kids, adults seemed always to be saying “plenty of water in the tap” throughout my childhood. It’s funny how all the stuff they say you should do about feeding children, my mum just did, Ben and I spent most of the 80’s feeling seriously sugar deprived!

5) Miss Piggy was meant to be delicate and lovely. You mean she isn’t?

6) 30 things only anti-social people understand. Before it was the Irish goodbye, it was known, by my friends, as the ‘Dempsey disappearing act’, and yes there was that time I left the post exam sleepover celebration at 3am in my Grandad’s pyjamas..

7) Ann Coulter explains why so many people from the rest of the world hate Americans. All she really proves is that she’s an idiot that really, really doesn’t understand football and chooses call it un-American to cover up her ignorance. Also the French Revolution she mentions (and is generally scornful about) caused because of the money the French spent on supporting this guy…what was his name?….Oh, that’s right, George Washington. There’s a key from the Bastille hanging in the hall at Mount Vernon. Those that don’t understand their own history and pontificate on the history of other nations, without actually understanding any of it…what’s that word..idiot..

8) The US Supreme Court judgement on this will not ever trouble me. I had an abortion in the UK, I decided to go to the place I could have it soonest which was Essex on a Tuesday, what I didn’t know is that the anti abortion protesters only protested at this clinic on Tuesdays and Saturdays. We were mobbed. People shouted at me. A woman told me I was killing my baby. It was horrible. None of those people knew me or took the time to try and know me. They just called me a murderer. Most of them claimed to be Christian. I live in Ealing, there’s a clinic pretty much at the end of my road, I try not to walk past it on Saturdays or during Lent because it makes me so bloody angry! This is part of why.

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Thought for the day…

Posted on June 25, 2014 by nicdempsey

…I’m not sure that I’d have anywhere to hang this in the flat but this is turning into this year’s work theme…

Inspirational Chalkboard Quote: Nelson Mandela (Small)

from dangerdust’s etsy shop, which is full of amazing stuff that was originally drawn on chalkboards.

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Simple Potato Salad

Posted on June 24, 2014 by nicdempsey

Seasonal eating is something that I do to a certain extent, I don’t buy expensive, flavourless imported strawberries in winter but I would suffer if I could only eat a peppers in the summer, as it is I do eat less peppers in the winter but mostly because what I want to eat changes with the seasons. In summer, I tend to eat much more simply, instead of stews and soups, I lean more towards salads and cold things.

One of the best things about this seasonal change of appetite is that every winter and summer, I re-discover foods that I haven’t made or eaten for a year or so and this weekend it was the basic potato salad.

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This weekend, Christelle came over and I hadn’t really planned on what to feed her, I had some potatoes that I’d planned to use in the week when friends came for dinner, that didn’t happen and it was too hot to use the oven just for my dinner. Christelle and I bought some nice ham, cheese and bread and I made this.

I was suddenly reminded of how good potato salad can be. I was at Adam and Kathy’s for barbecue yesterday evening and made it again to take as my contribution. It complemented pork and apple burgers perfectly and was a hit with the toddlers!

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It’s also really simple. Cook some new potatoes (you may want to cut them in half or quarters) bung them in a bowl, chop a couple of spring onions in, some pepper, then a scoop of mayonnaise and an equal amount of wholegrain mustard. Mix it up, until the potatoes are coated, add more mayonnaise or mustard to taste. If you have an objection to mayonnaise  that comes from a jar (I do not, I used Hellmans Light!) you can make your own.

That’s it, nothing fancy or complicated about it, just simple and easy and really good to eat in the summer.

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Monday, Monday

Posted on June 23, 2014 by nicdempsey

Welcome to the new week. I hope you all had a good weekend and are refreshed and ready to start your week.

If you couldn’t have already guessed from my cheery greeting, I had a great weekend. It was that rare combination of getting everything done, seeing the people I like and having a rest. As a result, I feel good AND ready to face another busy work week.

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I ate good food, cleaned the house, went for a run, found the time to paint my toenails and generally attend to my feet, I saw Christelle and Kathy and Adam (and the children, I read a lot of books).

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Aims for this week, yoga every day, run twice and get to bed by 10pm every night (hard to do with all the football!) and find out what’s happened to my Old Crow Medicine Show tickets!

What are you doing this week?

 

 

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Friday Links

Posted on June 20, 2014 by nicdempsey

Happy Friday, I’m celebrating surviving the work week with a coffee and a pain au raisin. Tonight I’ll be celebrating the end of the week and mourning England’s completely lacklustre performance against Uruguay with a pizza and a drink. This weekend I’m seeing Christelle, maybe making some cocktail cherries and reading (there are so many books I’m anxious to read at the moment!)

This week’s links, more football I’m afraid.

1) Mark Steel on Sepp Blatter and the World Cup. 

“The World Cup always provides spectacularly memorable drama, anticipation, tension, emotion and life-affirmingly heart-stopping pointlessness. It always requires putting to the back of your mind the sordid business and politics behind it, but Blatter has attained such squalid heights of repulsitude he’s made it harder than ever, so it’s only right all reasonable people should hate him for that.”

2) Owen Jones on the anti war protesters in 2003 and how our worse fears have come true.

“The invasion was justified as an indispensable part of the struggle against al-Qaida. Well, to be fair, large swaths of Iraq have not been handed over to al-Qaida: they are now run by Isis, a group purged from al-Qaida for being too extreme. Iraq and Syria are trapped in a bloody feedback loop: the growth of Isis in Iraq helped corrupt the Syrian rebellion, and now the Syrian insurgency has fuelled the breakdown of Iraq, too.”

3) John Oliver explains Fifa and the World Cup to America.

4) Grace Dent on what she’s loving about the World Cup.

“My pre-match research led to some perusing of the works of Andrea Pirlo, who, to my reckoning appears to be 50 per cent hirsute, smouldering, oddly cerebral seeming God-like being, partly super-powered ball-passing Robot from the Planet Woof.”

5) My friend Jenny preached at her son’s wedding last weekend. This is what she said, apparently there wasn’t a dry eye in the house and I can see why.

6) Alan Bennett on the basic unfairness of private schools and lots of other things besides.

“Unlike today’s ideologues, whom I would call single-minded if mind came into it at all, I have no fear of the state. I was educated at the expense of the state both at school and university. My father’s life was saved by the state as on one occasion was my own. This would be the nanny state, a sneering appellation that gets short shrift with me. Without the state I would not be standing here today. I have no time for the ideology masquerading as pragmatism that would strip the state of its benevolent functions and make them occasions for profit. And why roll back the state only to be rolled over by the corporate entities that have been allowed, nay encouraged, to take its place? I am uneasy when prisons are run for profit or health services either. The rewards of probation and the alleviation of suffering are human profits and nothing to do with balance sheets. And these days no institution is immune. In my last play the Church of England is planning to sell off Winchester Cathedral. ‘Why not?’ says a character. ‘The school is private, why shouldn’t the cathedral be also?’ And it’s a joke but it’s no longer far-fetched.”

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Good morning, sunshine

Posted on June 17, 2014 by nicdempsey

I’m not a morning person. Those people who get up at 5am every day and are cheerful and happy about it, I’m not one of those people. I do wish I was, because they seem so in control of their day, but they are not my people.

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My people are the ones who stumble out of bed having pressed the snooze button roughly 60 times and don’t really wake up until mid morning. These are the people I understand.

So I’m not naturally a morning person, my sleep patterns are messed up and for roughly two weeks every month, I have an almost constant headache and morning nausea. Yes for me, PMT presents like morning sickness, I’m just very lucky that way. In winter, all of this is made much worse because of the SAD, but summer or winter, I have found the best way to deal with all of this is to sleep through it until about 9.30am. I cope with feeling ill much better at a civilised hour, unfortunately, I live in a world that starts earlier than that and I need to be at my desk by 9am.

As part of my ‘buck up my ideas’ routine, I was looking at a way to help me be more present and awake in the mornings. So I looked at aromatherapy, because lavender oil has been helping get to sleep and the citrus linen spray has been making ironing easier so there must be something that would help wake me up!

After some experimentation, I found a blend of oils that work. Eucalyptus, peppermint, grapefruit and lemon. The first two also help with clearing blocked up noses and hayfever season is upon us! Grapefruit and lemon are uplifting and refreshing which I think are good things to be in morning.

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I mix them together (20 drops each of eucalyptus and peppermint and 10 each of lemon and grapefruit) and put them in a little dropper bottle.

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Then in the morning before I turn the shower on, I put a couple of drops in the little bowl that sits in the shower. It’s really great for waking me up and as a bonus makes the bathroom smell nice. I use it every morning.

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It’s not a miracle cure for the morning blues but it does help and I need all the help I can get!

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Monday Monday

Posted on June 16, 2014 by nicdempsey

It was a good weekend. I think it was because I started it well. I knew that I was going to be quite busy and so I spent some of Friday night listening to the football and doing chores that really needed to be done but always seem to find themselves at the bottom of the list, sweeping the kitchen floor, giving the plants a haircut, really tidying the kitchen. So on Saturday morning when I had to be up and out of the house at a weekday time (8am), I didn’t feel I was leaving the flat messy or neglected.

I also realised this weekend how many of the things I don’t conciously do, I learnt from my mother, I guess it’s true, we really do turn into our mothers.

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I have newly cut hair but I’m still growing out the fringe so am still dealing with the flick of doom.

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Also I’m wondering if it’s time to bite the bullet and have my hair coloured every 6 weeks instead of every 12 weeks, the grey is becoming more prominent (to me at least) and it’s not so much the colour as the texture of the grey hairs that I dislike, all wiry and sticky up!

The rest of Saturday was spent with a negroni (ok two) and the football. England, unsurprisingly lost, but I don’t think there has been a boring game played so far and no 0-0 draws. At work this morning, someone commented that it was still the best they’d seen England play since 1996 and I can’t disagree although certain England players (ok mostly Wayne Rooney) need to buck up their ideas and Roy needs to address the defence and the gaping holes on the left side.

On Sunday, I had a lie in, breakfast and didn’t do my ironing.

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In the afternoon, Ma and I went up to Apsley House for some of the Waterloo Festival, where we saw the Battle of Waterloo re-enacted with vegetables. It was a really good way of showing it and very funny. Wellington’s troops were represented as carrots because they’re easier to put in square and Napoleon’s troops were onions, Imperial cavalry were baguettes (ours were parsnips) and the artillery were garlic (Wellington) and spring onions (Napoleon), in case anyone knows what I’m babling on about and is wondering Blucher (and his Prussians) were an aubergine! Very silly but very educational.

Wellington's forces

Wellington’s forces

The French

The French

This week is going to be quiet and busy. Busy at work, quiet at home. I’ve been working at an evening routine and it has occurred to me (with some prompting – thanks Krissie!) that if a bedtime routine works for small children, then something similar will work for me too. Actually, I know this, but like a lot of things, they are lessons that I constantly need to relearn, I’m not known for consistency when it comes to routine but this week that’s what I’m going for.

Consistency. The list is mostly the same, no screens after nine, making sure that I’m prepared for the next day (lunch, clothes, tasks etc), yoga and bed by 10pm. So I’m going to make that wind down hour my priority for this week.

Anyone else care to share the thing that you’ll working on achieving this week, whether it’s daily meditation, perfecting a recipe or doing sit-ups every day (all stuff I might think about in the coming weeks!) what is your week going to be about?

 

 

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