On giving away an heirloom.

So next week is the Russian Orthodox Maslenitsa in your little corner of London that is forever Moscow. Pre-Lenten pancakes for breakfast for a whole week. Well, Russia is a tad colder than the UK and clearly just the one day of stuffing their faces isn’t enough to see them through forty days of fasting. And the Orthodox church is pretty big on fasting; we aren’t just talking the very Anglican habit of banning chocolate biscuits for the duration.

Maslenitsa is, of course, a full week before the week when everyone else in the UK will be aiming their frying pans at the ceiling.

Sometimes you think it would be easier all round if you both converted to paganism. At least then you and B would be taking your clothes off and humping the nearest silver birch, molesting Stonehenge or whatever in concert. Although knowing your luck you would accidently join two different sects and continue to be conflicted about when to order the ritual sacrifice for Samhain.

To prepare for pancake week, the MiL has been teaching you her blini recipe. It is a little involved, although slightly less faffy than the ones you’ve previously written about.

First take a four pint carton of milk and put it on a radiator. Which should be on.

Leave this overnight.

When it has separated into a sort of yellowish water at the top with a rather squidgy mass at the bottom, pour the milk into a pan and apply heat. Not too much though, it mustn’t boil. Leave it to cool down.

Pour the mixture into a colander lined with four layers of muslin. Make sure there is a pan underneath to catch the liquid.

Gather the edges of the muslin together and twist them to make a closed bag. Don’t squeeze too hard or everything will come through the sides of the muslin and be lost. Weight the ball of milk remnants down with something like a jam jar filled with water and leave for at least four hours until all the water has been pushed out. Open up the muslin and scrape whatever is there into a bowl.

Congratulations, this is tvorug.

It’s sort of cream cheese, which Russians eat a bit like yoghurt by mixing fruit and such into it. Or make a sort of baked cheesecake out of it by adding raisins. Or use it along with jam to stuff Russian ravioli with. The possibilities are endless.

Unfortunately, one of the few things tvorug isn’t used for is making blini.

No, it’s the by product of the tvorug, the milky water carefully collected during the straining process that is the crucial ingredient for B’s Mother’s Russian pancakes.

The liquid will keep a day or so in the fridge. When it’s needed, heat it until it is tepid. add at least two eggs and beat until frothy. Add self-raising flour and beat, enough to make a fairly gloopy pancake batter. Add two desert spoons of vegetable or sunflower oil.

And that’s it. The resulting pancakes won’t be very good for flipping, and should have little holes throughout. You ate yours with maple syrup, the Star had some with sour cream and B wanted to have his with condensed milk but you were out.

On falling in love.

The Star has always been enraptured by cars. Well, all forms of man-made transport really, so it’s lucky we live on a train track next to the biggest station in Europe, under the flight path to the busiest airport in Europe and near a helipad. You have no idea if that’s the most landed upon in Europe, but you would be willing to bet that it feels like it to all the people who have their otherwise extremely swanky riverside pads down there. But this is London, and above all there are plenty of roads chock-a-block with traffic to keep him happy.  

That said, what he most likes doing when you are out is investigating parked vehicles. Wheels hold a particular fascination. And he insists on pressing all the lights, clearly hopeful that, like his toys back home, they will burst into song. He also gets quite excited about the shiny little badges on the front.  

So far, he hasn’t displayed much discrimination in the makes and models he salivates over. He positively blanked the yellow Ferrari you cruised past the other day. But on Sunday, his attention was well and truly caught by the little red MG being hauled onto the back of the AA truck you encountered whilst on your pre dinner constitutional.  

It may have looked something like this. On the other hand, it may not. You have no eye for cars.

 

Nothing odd in that. The AA truck had flashing lights and moving parts.  

But as the Star watched what was clearly a vintage sports car about to be driven off in disgrace, his little face crumpled and he let out an agonised wail. He then resisted all efforts to pull him away, clearly transfixed by the horror of it all and continued to whimper until he was slightly mollified by being allowed to get on the truck and caress the hub caps.  

The owner was delighted. He was this close to ordering the car set down again so the Star could have a go inside. You suspect it was only the thought of his partner, clearly a woman who has had to get used to standing in all weathers by the side of the road on random but regular occasions which stopped him. He also managed to mention that it was an MG at least five times in five sentences.  

You rather agree with his assessment of the Star though.  

‘Now there’s a classic car owner of the future’, he said.

On honest scrap.

So way back when you were still sometimes writing blog entries, E of Whining at the World nominated me for an award.

There are conditions attached. There normally are, but thankfully this time it doesn’t involve a hefty donation to the right… sorry, correct political party.

No, this time you have to write ten honest factoids about yourself.

Now you pondered this, you really did, but there are very few things about yourself that you haven’t shared already. That you are willing to share, anyway. Unless everyone wants to hear about how the big mole on your left big toe which you always found a bizarre sort of comfort in thinking would be an excellent identifying mark if teeth and such were unavailable has now faded, and how this has caused you, in the face of all logic, a bit of existential angst. No? You didn’t think so.

Instead, you are going to tell the world ten things about the Star. Impossible though it seems there are still ten things the gentle reader out there might not know.

1. The  Star’s eyes are brown. This came as a complete surprise to you as up until the age of one you thought you had a grey eyed boy. A proper slate grey, mind, and one which in the right light looked positively green. Of course that in itself was a bit odd. Normal people, like the ones you see in the mirror, have brown eyes, despite the amount of time you spend gazing soulfully into B’s baby blues. Still, the Star seems to have seen the light now. Although there’s still that reddish tinge to his hair to sort out.
2. The Star is afraid of the noise of vacuum cleaners. No sooner do you start one up, than he comes and stands next to it, staring up at you in horror and with a palpable sense of betrayal, howling his little head off. It must be the noise, as he has much the same reaction to handblowers in public toilets, although the guilt inducing eye contact is much reduced by being on his back with his head stuffed between his knees as you wipe his bottom free of poo.
3. The Star has decided that sleeping in his cot is for mugs when he could be rolling around in the nice big double bed in the same room. This wouldn’t be a problem as it is nice and low and entirely unoccupied by parents, except that it is also where his Babushka has been sleeping. At the moment he is willing, nay, oblivious to sharing, but you are not sure what will happen when she goes home next month and he gets really established in the dead centre of the mattress, arms outstretched, legs akimbo.
4. The Star actually does stick his bottom lip out and let it wobble a bit before starting to cry properly. Or, sometimes, instead of crying properly, as he isn’t much of a crier. You don’t think this has quite the effect intended though as it is so unbearably cute that what happens is that all adults in the vicinity break into besotted cries of delight, which surpass, hard though it is to believe, even delighted cries of besotted he gets when he grins at them. Of course, this may be why he doesn’t cry that much.
5. The Star is cutting his seventh tooth. You know it’s his seventh tooth because when he bites things, which he does constantly at the moment, you can count the teeth marks. Who needs plaster casts of his darling little foot, when you can proudly sport scars of his mouth prints?
6. The Star infinitely prefers brightly coloured clothes with big pictures of lions, diggers or Mr Bump on them to tasteful shirt and tank top combinations. This actually came as something of a surprise to you, but has helped in the battle to get things on over his head.
7. The Star has discovered how to open the kitchen door and escape into the hallway outside. This is a shame as there are a number of things you have put there specifically to keep The Star’s sticky fingers away from. The rubbish bin, for example. And the basket of onions, which the Star takes great delight in rolling down the stairs from the kitchen hallway to the entranceway, which in your house is below with its own level all to itself. Of course, he only likes to do this when there’s someone there taking of their coat, making it harder to dodge the small, bouncing and really quite hard orange bomb hurtling their way. Still. There must be a way of wedging the door shut somehow.
8. The Star recently had not only his second MMR jab but also a swine flu shot too. You are going for the most number of vaccinations given to a small child prize, as previously you had also took the NHS up on its offer of a BCG injection against tuberculosis, which apparently they have discontinued for the population as a whole. Of course, the reason why he was offered the tuberculosis jab was because he is half Russian. This offended B so much that he went googling for statistics and discovered that, indeed, Russia does have rather more cases of TB than the UK, but the UK’s cases are by no means none and most of the people who have it in Russia are in prison. But you have a firm belief in the fact that inoculations are one of the greatest miracles of modern medicine so the Star is now safe from TB, Swine flu, measles, mumps and rubella, diphtheria, some forms of meningitis, polio, whooping-cough, tetanus, Hsemophilus influenza type B (whatever that is) and Pneumococal infection (whatever that is) and won’t be infecting anyone else’s kids with any of those diseases either.
9. The Star seems to understand the concept of counting. He certainly looks at both his hands, one after the other, when asked how many he has and will point obligingly a selection of animal biscuits, one by one, while someone else numbers them off. He does have a tendency to poke at some of them more than once and others not at all, but still, he does also tend to stop at the right sum if it has already been identified. He also recognises letters as letters, although he has a tendency to get them confused with numbers. Babushka has even got him recognising and pronouncing А, Б, Ф  and У in Russian. You find this a bit freaky though and are hoping it is some kind of trick brought about by hand feeding him bits of fish in response for a particularly nifty somersault through the hoops for the crowd.
10. The Star does not really like the lovely cold weather we have had this winter, and still prefers puddles to a layer of snow. This is mainly because he refuses to wear gloves for more than a few seconds and snow is surprisingly chilly when you pick it up and try to fling it at Mama and Papa. Of course, he doesn’t really know what is making him miserable, but he has realised that if he gets really stroppy you will pick him up and carry him. When you do this, he will fling out his arm in the direction he wants to go with all the arrogant assurance of a Victorian explorer heading for the source of the Nile. You certainly feel that you have been reduced to a combination of elephant and lowly native guide.

So that’s the Star up to date.

Of course, as with any meme, you are supposed to tag people.

You are tagging seven people who you got to know through Nablopomo and who you don’t know nearly enough about yet:

Johnny Pez

Rammi

Raising an Army

Witchhazel

One Tough Von Cookie

Purplume

Timnah

On tempting fate.

So, B goes home early after visiting his inlaws for Christmas and after he has done a bit of drilling by way of announcing he is back the neighbours knock on the door.

‘Your fire alarm went off yesterday’, they said.

‘We had to call the fire brigade’.

Luckily your flats have connecting fire escapes so when the firemen went crashing into your house in order to shut off the REALLY LOUD REALLY PENETRATING AND EXTREMELY PERSISTENT NOISE, they didn’t have to break down the front door.

You feel oddly violated by the thought of strangers tramping around your space while you weren’t there. Although also a bit miffed that you missed all the excitement.

On getting into the holiday spirit.

You decorated for Christmas today.

A little late, perhaps, but then your holiday season only starts on the 25th. Still being thrilled by the twinkly tree lights on the 7th Jan, or, this year, the 9th, when people are coming round to celebrate the Orthodox church’s lamentable inability to count,* is a challenge. Your plan, then, was to decorate, and before taking off for the Ancestral New Town, have no time to become bored before you return for the Hogmanay blow out, or, as B thinks of it, the real mid-winter celebration.

The Star was gratifyingly over excited by the process of sellotaping homemade snowflakes to windows and draping the usual paper chains made out of old magazines**over the taller bits of furniture. He was likewise thrilled by the hanging a couple of somewhat squashed foil Woolworth specials and the attaching of all of your many ornaments, so much tinsel you can barely see the needles and  a rope of lights wrapped at least three times round every branch of the worlds smallest tree, chosen for its ability to be situated somewhere well out of the Star’s reach.

You have a book on child rearing which says that taking notice of changes to surroundings is the mark of an exceptionally bright small person. Shame it’s a book written for the under ones and the Star didn’t seem to register the presence of shiny shiny things in the flat at all last year. Of course, he also hasn’t stopped exclaiming over his new snowmen slipper socks yet either. It’s amazing what 50p in Primark will do for a one and a half year old.

It does bode well for the excitement levels come present opening time this Christmas Day. You are quite looking forward to it.

That said, even the prospect of watching the Star gleefully savage wrapping paper will have a hard time competing with the hunt for the tree. Because no sooner did you and B step out of the door than the rain turned to sleet and the sleet turned to snow and by the time you had trudged up to your third DIY superstore, it was whirling out of the sky in big fat clumps and sticking like it meant it. There was that special wet crump of treading on soft new snow that you’d really really missed, and that sudden deadening of sound that makes any moment, even walking through along the local multi-lane highway, seem intimate and slightly romantic.

It even cancelled out the irritation you gave in to when you realised that the stores which have been peddling Christmas tat since October have, a good three days before the big day, removed every trace of festive fun from their stores. They weren’t even playing carols any more.

But then you stumbled across the man selling tress out of the back of an abandoned warehouse*** And so you trailed happily after B, catching snowflakes on your tongue, as he hefted your snow-covered choice over his shoulder and you both tramped contentedly home past the commuters trapped in what was shaping up to be London transport hell, a proper snowfall.

Except that the minute you got through your front door it started to rain, which rather spoiled you plan of introducing the Star to his birthright.

Not to worry though.

Babushka had filled two buckets up with snow from the balcony for the Star to play with, which he was busily emptying over the floor and eating when you got back.

*Assuming that you actually remember to invite people. What date is it today again? 

**You are not sure it counts as recycling if you had to go out and buy some magazines specially though. Which you did.

***Undoubtedly scheduled to be bulldozed in favour of luxury riverside flats next year.

On freezing your bits off.

You were standing on the train platform today admiring the light, the very very light, the really almost non-existant, dusting of snow sprinkling the tracks, when suddenly the tannoy lit up.

‘We apologise for the delay of 25 minutes to the train which will take you home.

This is due to severe adverse weather conditions.’

This would have been funnier if in a fit of optimism as far as British transport and anything resembling weather is concerned you hadn’t left the fur-lined boots at home.

On ready steady cook.

So about this time last year your were contemplating stuffing the first few mouthfuls of wallpaper paste, sorry, baby rice down the Star, which means its way past time for you to write about Annabel Karmel and her New Complete Baby and Toddler Meal Planner*.

It’s also way past time your returned it to the library.

Unfortunately cookery books in your kitchen tend to get food liberally dribbled on them and this one is no exception, although the main problem and the reason you’ve already paid out more than twice its RRP in library fines is that the Star has ripped the front and back covers off.

This should in no way be taken as a commentary on the Star’s enjoyment of the recipes inside.

The Star is a thoroughgoing Karmel baby. Well, not thoroughgoing. Annabel’s children come across as being rather fussy eaters who need to be tempted to nibble reluctantly at the dainty morsels on offer and the Star, well, the Star isn’t like that. The Star still eats practically everything except papaya, although he has been refusing cabbage lately as well. So you cannot speak for the quality of the deserts in the book, because the Star tends to be quite happy with a selection of fruit and you are quite happy to leave it that way.

Another area where the Star and Annabel do not see eye to eye is the subject of maple syrup. Annabel tends to drench anything tha stands still long enough and has fruit in in maple syrup. Personally, you are not quite sure if maple syrup wins in anything other than obscure ingredient credentials over sugar in the nutrition stakes, although you appreciate her efforts to give an alternative to honey, potentially, you gather, fatal; in children under 12 months. Either way it doesn’t matter as the Star prefers his porridge neat. You even stopped adding raisins after a while.

But in the main, right from the first the Star wolfed down every weird combination suggested by Annabel for his delectation and you haven’t looked back since.

You feel the blithe disregard she has for the UK obsession that in case the child should turn out to have allergies, any new food should only be introduced every four or five days helped here. Despite being the occasionally nervous mother that you are, as there is no real history of allergies on either side of the family and having the best-selling children’s cookery book to bolster your confidence, you decided to live dangerously and introduced a new food, ooooh, every two to three days.

So far your bravery seems to have been amply rewarded as the only reaction the Star has ever had to a food is to get wicked nappy rash if he eats too many strawberries. You did go a tad slower than suggested by the weekly planners, included to help you have some idea of how to implement a regime based on the recipes, but by and large it did mean that the Star got used very quickly to a range of foods and food combinations.

And so did you, because the other thing the weekly planners and recipes did was give you ideas. Left to your own devices, you suspect the Star would have been fed only on carrot and apple for the first six months. Or else you would have been trying him out on truffles and anchovies in the first week or something. instead, you and, reluctantly, B, have been introduced to a bewildering but baby-friendly range of fruit and veg the like of which you, the British child of the nineteen seventies who mainly eats carrots and B, the man who only eats tomatoes, have rarely tasted before. Butternut squash is nice, isn’t it? And mango.

You have also taken the plunge and started to cook fish, a thing you almost never did before on the grounds of it being too fiddly.

In fact,  it turns out to be incredibly easy. Even you can wrap a marine animal in foil with some butter and herbs and put it in the oven for a while. Or, better yet, poach it in milk in the microwave. Who knew? It came in useful, though, when you MiL bought three whole salmons and stored them in your freezer on the grounds they were cheap at Easter time.

Of course, you haven’t progressed to some of the chewier recipes yet. The Star’s back teeth are stubbornly refusing to show themselves and there’s a limit to what you can do with six front teeth and gums.

But it’s only a matter of time.

In the meantime, you really must go to Amazon and order the library a new copy for Christmas. 

The non-existant front cover of the book.

*Actually, you gather there’s a New New Complete Baby and Toddler Meal Planner, but it’s not the one you have (appropriated).

On the wet patch.

What is more exciting to a one and a half year old than a pile of crackly autumn leaves?

A damn big puddle that’s what.

Splosh splash splish.

Thank you the great British weather, which has outdone itself in wetness this past month, for bringing you this revelation.

And thank you wellington boots.

They do save you from having to drag an incandescently cross toddler past every enticing limpid pool of water between you and, well, anywhere you might care to go at the moment.

Of course, you don’t have any boots. You just have sopping trouser cuffs.

Because previously, you had considered the fashion for wearing brightly coloured wellies on the streets of the capital the pedestrian equivalent of driving a 4X4. Pointless and without the saving grace of having any kind of style.

Although fashion has moved on a bit and now it’s riding boots. Next year young urban women will be tramping down to model farms to hug a well washed lamb.

Marie Antoinette playing at being a shepherdess.

But you can’t let the Star jig up and down in the middle of a puddle on his own, can you?

Bring on the inappropriate footwear.

On advent calendars.

Your Mother always made sure you and your Brother had an advent calendar.

It was, inevitably, religiously themed. Extracts from the Christmas story part of the bible with page numbers.

In buying it she was also, inevitably, contributing towards some worthy cause. And, also inevitably, it couldn’t have got much more ethnic if it were hand-woven by indigenous mountain people in Outer Somewhereorother from the hair of hand reared goats to the strains of Peruvian nose pipes while someone nearby prepared something mushy, using their hands and bowls carved from the living bark of thousand-year-old rainforest trees, out of beans, for tea. Although sometimes they were African subcontinent themed. Baby Jesus surrounded by elephants, gazelles and lions in perfect harmony sort of thing.

But there never were any chocolates.

And the two things combined, rampant middle-class consumerist icons and a total lack of frivolous sweet provision, rather annoyed you as a kid. When you were small, you used to gaze longingly at the brightly coloured, Father Christmas and all his Elves themed, glitter coated, sugar high bearing calendars as you were whisked past them in supermarkets and shops throughout December.

But there’s nothing like nostalgia, and so you were all prepared to go out there and buy a calendar which resembled a cross between a gathering of the United Nations and the interior of a Catholic cathedral, when your other pitched up with a present which rendered that unnecessary.

An advent calendar of his very own. Filled from the 1st door to the 24th with large chocolate hearts.

You were speechless, and that doesn’t happen very often.

Luckily for family harmony it also has the words FAIRTRADE emblazoned prominently all over it.

Anyway. New family tradition. When Granny gives the Star an advent calendar with a chocolate behind each door, you will phone her up so she can listen to him eating that day’s.

On NaBloPoMo 2009

So. I did it. Thirty posts in thirty days. In fact, I think it’s thirty-one posts.

Unfortunately, I missed a day by a few minutes back there somewhere so I didn’t exactly do it.

It’s a technical loss, or a moral victory depending on whether the glass is half empty or half full.

Been fun though. Same time next year?