On stuffing chestnuts.

So you are trotting through Hyde Park and you look down and realise you can settle another long running argu… discussion with your husband.
‘Those are the chestnuts you can eat. See, look, not conkers.’ Of which you just happen to have a few in your pocket. The Star likes conkers.
And when the flush of triumph [...]

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On weaning.

In truth you are actually pretty smug about how the Star’s weaning is going.
The boy will eat… well, it’s probably easier to say what he won’t eat:
Papaya.
That’s it.
Unsurprising, though, as in your – and apparently the Star’s – opinion it smells like sick.
On the other hand, he does like broccoli, liver, semolina and the small beads from [...]

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On щи.

Today you spent fifteen whole minutes letting the Star push the door shut and then grasp the door handle to pull it open again.
Now there’s a game that doesn’t seem to get old.
Neither does Babushka playing with the light switch for his enjoyment. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. [...]

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On Bara Brith.

Sometime after you Grandma died, you took it into your head to make Bara Brith.
Now your Grandma wasn’t Welsh.
She didn’t even live in Wales.
She lived, in fact, about 100 metres from the Welsh border.
But her Bara Brith wasn’t an heirloom recipe or anything. She only moved into the borderlands about 25 years before she died.
It was [...]

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On discoveries.

You are not in the least Scottish.
This has always been a source of faint irritation because you are able to conjure up in almost equal amounts a Welsh background, an Irish one, a Northern English past, a Southern English birthplace and a strong connection to the Channel Islands out of France. So to miss out on being [...]

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On being in Oz, Toto.

So there you and B are, sitting on a bench eating grapes and a pork pie, admiring the view of large tombstones which populate the square you are in, and basking in the unexpected sunshine.
Suddenly you become aware that the young lady next to you has not only come prepared with cutlery and a china plate [...]

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On irrisitable urges.

You should have been reading about the barbarian hordes rampaging across Britain in the 500s. You should have been preparing lessons - this week’s topic is ’love’. You should at least have been scrubbing the bathroom.
Instead you decided to cook a Moroccan feast. It’s from your new cookbook. Arabesque by Claudia Roden. You’ve been staring longingly (and [...]

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On being beside the seaside.

  You have always considered that Turner’s paintings of the sea are often a bit on the beige side.
You are aware, of course, that water is not necessarily blue in the same way that holiday brochures of Caribbean islands, children’s paintings and remote mountain tarns would have us believe. Nevertheless, you always assumed that the correct [...]

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On women’s work.

Yesterday you indulged your cultural heritage as a middle class British woman from the Home Counties by standing in a drafty village hall surrounded by thatched cottages, 17th Centrury pubs and rolling farmland, serving polystyrene cup after polystyrene cup of stewed tea for seven and a half hours.
Even better was the fact that the tea pot was [...]

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On the creative urge.

You have just finished a marathon cooking session.
So far today you have made a banana and walnut cake with added sultanas so B would eat it. You burnt it, but it’s quite nice now you’ve cut the edges off. Still, it is rather superfluous to need since you have 1001 chocolates in the house if you [...]

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