Friday Links

Posted on October 25, 2013 by nicdempsey

Happy Friday, I hope you are having a good day.  I’m a bit more busy doing the work they pay me for than I’d like to be on a Friday, I like my Fridays at work to be tidying up the work I’ve done during the week and planning and prep for next week and that’s not happening today. Today is more a sprint to the finish with the promise of a haircut at the end, which is good because I’m beginning to look like Cousin It!

Links started off really well and then I got caught up in work and being too tired when I got home to read!

1) A language without numbers

2) Sod off Morrissey. Couldn’t agree more, I can’t stand him and wasn’t keen on the Smiths either.

3) Zoe Williams talking about ‘motherism’. not sure I agree but enjoying the comments.

4) We do seem to live in a world where you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. I wrote this in 2012 when I was feeling quite frustrated at being treated like a second class citizen ’cause I was single and childless.

5) Marginal Losses. Jenny Baker on women and living in a culture of ‘marginal losses’. Full disclosure Jenny is my friend and is also the only women I know who could write so clearly about women, society, church culture AND manage to reference cycling too.

6) I can’t help but think that this is rubbish but some of the comments, nail the whole ‘being a single woman’ experience.

Anything you guys think I should be reading this week?

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Useful but not beautiful

Posted on October 24, 2013 by nicdempsey

William Morris said that you shouldn’t have anything in your home that “you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful”

As a rule for living, I’ve heard worse but as a rule for what you bring into your home, I think it’s one of the best. My house has things in that I think are beautiful. The poison bottles, my bowls, and lots of other things. There are some things that are just useful though.

My draft excluder’s are a case in point. I live a an old house with big gaps between the doors and the floor. Heating is expensive and central heating is really expensive and not terrible efficient. I miss gas fires, Ma has gas fires and her gas bill is much smaller than mine! Anyway, in an attempt to keep the heat in the house I have these.

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They aren’t very pretty, I made them both out of scraps and old things that would have been thrown away. The red one is an old duvet cover stuffed with old jumpers, the second a pashmina sewn around a pillow. They keep the draft out. They aren’t really beautiful and half the year they live in a cupboard, they are quick and dirty solutions to a problem but they are free and they do the job so as far as I’m concerned that’s fine.

What about you? Is there stuff in your house that’s useful but not beautiful? Tell me about it!

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A year ago

Posted on October 23, 2013 by nicdempsey

I posted this recipe for Chocolate Fridge Cake. It was not a disaster.

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And I really want some right now!

 

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Disaster bread

Posted on October 23, 2013 by nicdempsey

On Monday night, I was angry, very very angry.

Anyone who saw my post last week can guess what the issue is. It was the builder, he didn’t show on Monday. This is the frustrating thing about renting, I don’t employ the builder but I’m the one living with his half arsed work ethic. The three day job he started last Monday is still not finished, my bedroom is a mess and I don’t appreciate adding ‘cover bed with dust-sheet’ and ‘move furniture’ to my morning task list. We are now in day 7 of a 3-day job, and the delay is entirely due to the personal issues of the builder. If I had employed him, I would have fired him by now, but I can’t, so I seethe.  The chances of the job being finished by Wednesday are getting more and more remote.

Anyway, enough whining about the flat. on Monday I decided to cheer myself up with some baking. It didn’t go well. I knew what I wanted, an apple-y cinnamon sweet bread. It didn’t happen and I know why, which means, I’m frustrated with myself because I know better and should have warmed the milk to activate the yeast. I am an idiot. Knowing that the rise, or lack thereof, was an issue, I bunged it in the oven anyway and didn’t cook it long enough.

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It really wasn’t good.

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It bits that were cooked actually tasted good, if a bit stodgy, so I’m going to re-visit the recipe on the weekend. Moral of the story, baking when cross and tired, not a good idea.

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Spinach and Mushroom Eggcups

Posted on October 22, 2013 by nicdempsey

During the week, I mostly eat vegetarian food. As I’ve said before, it’s partly budget and it’s partly my choice of trying to buy locally, which means I use the butchers rather than the supermarket, which means that the meat I do eat, is more expensive.

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This change of diet has increased the amount of beans and eggs in my diet. I’ve been trying to avoid substituting cheese for meat as I eat quite enough cheese as it is! I love eggs and eat loads of them, in the morning, they can be poached, scrambled with lentils, and most often, for a weekday breakfast eaten hard boiled or like as eggcups like this although minus the goats cheese. Which means they have meat and processed meat at that.  I think it’s a good idea to keep my diet as unprocessed as possible, so I wanted something that worked as well for quick and easy breakfasts. While I was at it, if I could up the vegetable content, so much the better and this is what I came up with. My idea was a sort of mini frittata and the vegetables that came to mind were mushrooms and spinach.

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I always have mushrooms in my fridge, I mostly eat them raw, either in salads or just by themselves and I always have frozen spinach around as it is really great to add to soups and stews. I also added half of a leftover courgette that was in the fridge but I think that this would work with any sautéed veg you had lying around. I made 10, enough for breakfast every day this week and used 10 eggs, but if you wanted to use some egg whites in place of some of the whole eggs I’m sure that would work too.

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What

10 eggs

10 portions of frozen spinach, defrosted

250g mushrooms, sliced

1/2 a courgette, sliced

olive oil

salt and pepper

How

1. Pre heat oven to 190C. Grease 10 of the cups on a muffin tin and set aside.

2. Heat a tablespoon of olive oil in a pan and sauté the courgette and mushrooms until the liquid is cooked off and they are browned.

3. Divide the cooked mushrooms and courgettes between the 10 muffin cups.

2. Using a muslin cloth, squeeze as much liquid from the defrosted spinach as you can.

3. Put the spinach in a bowl and break the eggs into the same bowl.

4. Beat the eats and spinach together until they are well combined and the spinach is broken up.

5. Pour the egg and spinach mixture into the muffin cups and bake for 20 to 25 minutes, until cooked through (my oven runs hot so don’t worry if it takes a bit longer!)

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The Weekend

Posted on October 21, 2013 by nicdempsey

Hello Monday! How was your weekend?

Mine was lovely, I’m back home, although the bedroom window is no-where near finished, I decided that I’d tough it out at home because it’s not as bad as I thought and I just needed to be home.

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On Friday night, Ma and I were in Watford to babysit Oli. Oli wasn’t happy to see us and refused to leave his childminder’s and cried and cried. Eventually, with Kai and Ma failing to stop the tears, I stepped in, picked him up and walked out of the house with Oli and told him I wouldn’t put him down until he stopped having a tantrum. He stopped having the tantrum pretty quickly but he wasn’t best pleased with me. Fortunately, his Grandma was there to soothe him and we went to Pizza Express for dinner. Ol was great after that, he raced with Grandma and was very keen to make sure that I knew that he was playing with ‘his’ Grandma. We played with his trains and he played games on my phone and went to bed.

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Ma and I stayed at the Travelodge in Watford (just as delightful as it sounds) and in the morning, went to see Oli’s swimming lesson.20131020-202100.jpg

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Oli was great, he’s really getting confident in the water, although not keen on putting his face in the water!

Ma and I went back to hers, picked up my things and came home. We did some shopping and I spend Saturday night enjoying peace and quiet. Ma and I were having a real case of ‘how can I miss you, if you never leave?’

On Sunday, it mostly rained and I mostly stayed indoors reading and sorting myself out for the week at work.

Hopefully, the work in my bedroom will be finished by Wednesday and I’ll stop wanting to strangle the builder. Other than that, I have loads to do at work, a haircut on Friday and a nice quiet week!

What are you guys up to?

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Sunday Music

Posted on October 20, 2013 by nicdempsey

Let’s talk about Sting.

He wrote a musical, called The Last Ship and released the album of the songs. It’s about the world he grew up in and it’s worth pointing out that he’s 2 years younger than my parents who were both born in the same year.

The world that Sting sings about on The Last Ship a city that relied on industry and ship building and the people that build the ships, is gone. I’ve talked a lot here about my parents and where they are from and how that has shaped me, I’m a proud Londoner. I’ve also written about how that world is gone. It’s the world where a working class boy could grow up in a Northern city and become a teacher and then a rockstar.

The Last Ship seem to be a lament for and a celebration of that world, as Sting knew it, it’s not exactly the same as the world my parents grew up in, the geography is vastly different! It feels familiar to me, because I feel that I know the people in it. That’s not to say that those people where perfect, I remember on one of the rare occasions, I went to see my Great Aunt Ellen and she talked about the neighbour who was given money on a Friday to go and get drunk so she’d be ‘ready’ for her husband when he came back from the pub. This weekend, my Mum told me the story of Ellen coming to visit my Grandma, being told, as she waited for Iris (in Paddington, known for it’s prostitutes then), to move along because that wasn’t her spot!

Anyway, The Last Ship is great and I can see it’s gonna be a musical in this song and I love that he uses the actual North East accent that he grew up with and that Jimmy Nail also sings on this. I can’t recommend this more!

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Saturday – Eating this week

Posted on October 19, 2013 by nicdempsey

One of the disadvantages of living alone and on a budget is that my eating isn’t exactly exciting. I like how I eat but it’s very rarely spontaneous, I have a menu plan, I stick to the menu plan, which is great for my health and budget but sometimes it’s not very exciting.

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I don’t think that food needs to be spontaneous though, if you’ve read this blog for any amount of time, you’ll be aware of how much I love a routine and how that helps me eat well. It’s more than that though, there is something very re-assuring about knowing what you are going to eat on a given day. I grew up like that, I remember the Tuesday night dinners when Grandad came over, the ham and coleslaw sandwiches on Sunday night, it was always ham that Grandad brought and Ma boiled on Saturday. On Saturday nights, there was fish and chips, and I will go to my grave swearing that my mum made the best chips and there’s no way that your mum’s could be as good! Sunday lunch that was generally served in the late afternoon and was never a roast because Ma couldn’t be doing with the faff.

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When you are on a budget and you need to plan what you eat, you can find yourself falling into those rituals. For me, that means, that Friday breakfast can be a pain au raisin, but only if I’ve done 5 days at work (bribing yourself is a perfectly valid way of making sure you act like a grown up!), Friday Night Pizza is another. At some point over the weekend, I try to have a treat breakfast, pancakes or sausage, bacon and eggs. Making soup on the weekend. Making bread. These rituals are good for my soul and I love them. They don’t make for great food posts and I’m clear that all the food I write about here should be a part of my menu plan, it’s about the food I’ve eaten or how I cook regularly and that’s why some weeks, you see lots of food posts and sometimes no food posts at all, those are the weeks, I didn’t take photos or my eating was all based on my old and already featured favourites!

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Cassie has an occasional series called ‘This Week’s Eats‘ and I love the idea of documenting the high points of a week’s worth of eating. So in the best tradition of bloging, I’m going to steal it!

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1) Beer with the team on Friday afternoon

2) Sourdough

3) Morning Coffee

4) Cod in tomato sauce, cooked by Ma who seems to be cooking a lot more now she doesn’t have to go to work.

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5) Wednesday night was cheese for dinner

6) Breakfast this week was boiled eggs and carrots (I eat a lot of eggs, not sure that I could ever be a vegan

7) Gin and Tonic on Thursday night,

7) Thursday night’s dinner was the first dinner I’d cooked all week, pork with mushrooms in a mustard and wine sauce, with sautéed leeks.

What was the most memorable thing you ate this week?

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Builder woes or why I am more than usually grumpy..

Posted on October 18, 2013 by nicdempsey

Remember how last Sunday, I moved out of the house so the builder could fix my bedroom window and re-plaster that wall?

Originally, I was planning on being back on Thursday but that didn’t happen because the work wasn’t finished and it’s been cold and drying out plaster takes time. So I adjusted and I was really looking forward to being back home this weekend, to sleeping in my own bed, cooking my own meals and even doing my own washing.

Today I discover that the builder has only pulled the old plaster off the wall today. He had a personal crisis and didn’t do any work for 3 days last week.

So most of my bedroom furniture is in my living room, I’ve spent the week sleeping on a air mattress in my mum’s living room and paying to travel to work from Surbiton which is an extra £25 a week and the fucking builder still isn’t done and probably won’t be until next Thursday.

Really, I don’t think I could be more pissed off with this builder right now. In the past two weeks, I’ve already had to point out that he needs to double lock my front door, not smoke in the house and not leave towels on the floor when he’s finished drying his hands. My landlord and I have had a long conversation this morning about me needing to be able to live in the flat for which I am paying rent. To be fair, my landlord is one of the good ones, most other landlords wouldn’t be spending so much money fixing the flat or replacing the roof and I am grateful, but I want to be at home.

I know that there are worse things in the world than having to stay at your mother’s because your landlord is fixing your flat but I’m so fed up right now, so very, very fed up and tired and grumpy about it. I feel like I’ve been camping all week and now I’m going to be camping for most of next week.

The bright side? Well on Monday and Tuesday, Ma is going to stay with some old friends so I’ll get to sleep in an actual bed on those days. If the building work isn’t finished by the end of next week, that will be the end of the blog because I’ll have snapped and committed an act of violence upon the builder!

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Friday Links

Posted on October 18, 2013 by nicdempsey

Happy Friday. Today was my last night at Ma’s. Tonight we are in Watford and tomorrow, I will finally be at home although apparently the builder is having personal issues and the work may not be finished. I’m not at all happy about that, but I’m going home this afternoon to assess the damage and pick up a DVD for the nephew!

This was sunrise this morning.

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1)  Regulation and Stalinism are not the same.

2) Do we judge people by what they eat?

3) America needs to see itself as the world sees it

4) I’ve never thought about make-up in this context. Interesting

5) 10 things children should know how to cook. Adults too!

6) The Government is in denial about food banks.

Have a good day and a great weekend!

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