answers on a postcard please

Some of the many things I don't understand:

• Twitter. I just can't wrap my ailing braincells around it. I get lost in shopping malls, so I certainly can't navigate which bit of who said what and where it was answered and re-tweeted and, well, no. Just no. It's not going to happen.
• Multi-functional maternity'x'nursing wear. In my limited experience, these two states are mutually exclusive. The desire for something half decent to wear while nursing means I am obviously not pregnant anymore. The stupidity of this issue makes my head ache. (If anyone can recommend a company that does good-quality nursing clothes that don't make me look like a trog who's given up on herself and flung on an ill-fitting sack, I'd be very grateful.) 
• People who leave their dog mess in our street. Clearly cretins, they have to walk down the street everyday too, so surely skipping round various evacuations bugs them as well? I'm going to take affirmative action with some blue spray chalk. Sorry, that should be hashtag affirmativeaction hashtag turdwars. Or something. 
• Now I do actually really need advice on this last one. "200g baked sweet potato, flesh scooped out". What does that mean? A 200g potato baked and scooped, or 200g of scooped out flesh from a couple of potatoes? It's for this recipe, so I think it's kind of important. I'm veering towards that latter... Answers on a postcard please.

That is all. Thangyaverramuch.

almost parenting... gingerly

Turns out there's one real drawback to parenting a really brainy child. (That is in addition to the fundamental flaw of her being brainier than me, you understand. "Flight of the Bumblebee was written by a man called Rimsky-Korsakov you know Mummy." Erm, no. I didn't as it happens.)

No, as far as I can tell, the main issue is this. The brighter the child, the sooner they realise that you, as a parent, have absolutely no effing clue what you're doing.

Which is fine while we're bumbling along in our everyday shambles of Oxford Reading Tree, damp laundry and glitter glue. But when it comes to actual parenting (I'm talking discipline, behaviour, Ural maestri, that sort of thing) she can tell, without a shadow of a doubt, that I'm making it all up on the spot. And she's not convinced.

After a week of particularly feckless parenting, I'm working on a solution while she's at school: crystallised ginger, date and walnut cake. And while that's baking, a batch of Nigella's meatballs from the Kitchen book.

Why?

Because the former might trick her into thinking, for a valuable minute and a half, that I'm one of those awesome, capable Mums that knows what she's about. And the latter? Well, they're turkey meatballs, so presumably there's no dobbin in them. Though it turns out you can't be too sure...

Crystallised ginger, date and walnut cake (a variation on an old favourite)
Ginger is supposed to boost the immune system isn't it? So with the fibre-rich dates and walnut Omega-3s, you can pretty much convince yourself that it's good for you.

120g chopped dates
large pinch bicarbonated soda
170g sugar
50g  room temp butter
170g self-raising flour
50g chopped walnuts
finely chopped crystallised ginger to taste (I used 15g)
ground ginger to taste (depends how spicy you want it, I used just half a tsp)
1 egg
1tspn vanilla essence
1/2 tspn salt

• preheat your oven to 180*C and line your cake tin
• cover the dates with one cup of boiling water with a pinch of bicarb and set to one side while you weigh everything else
• blitz all the other ingredients together with a hand-held mixer
• mix in the dates and their juice (then put it in the oven for two minutes before realising you've forgotten the walnuts, so burn yourself whipping the tin out and stirring the nuts into the batter, like one of the more hopeless GBBO contestants you love to scorn)
• bake for 35 minutes or until the skewer comes out clean.

Joining in with April's 'Fred & Ginger' edition of Just Desserts over on Domestic Sluttery.

saucy knitting and a family memoir

Turns out that lovely wool I bought a couple of weeks ago isn't right for the Varjo shawl I had in mind. Too masculine in colour for the intended recipient. But it was perfect for the very mannish Earth & Sky by Stephen West, a pattern I've been wanting to make for a while.

Apparently it was a mystery knit-along a couple of years ago, marketed using the only remotely saucy knitting photo I've ever seen. (Relax and take a look, it's PG, honest.)

While I think the finished product will be beautiful, I'm not in love with the actual pattern so far. Just the first couple of inches resulted in eleven ends to weave in. Surely it could have been more elegantly constructed to try and avoid that? It means that the reverse isn't going to be bonny, and neither are the edges, and I'm obsessed about edges. For me the finished product is ALL about perfect edges. Indeed, the other weekend (at quite the strangest Chinese New Year clan gathering of ang mohs on the wrong side of the world) I overheard my Mother-in-law and my Granny comparing the Different Lines shawls I made for each of them, and the praise was all in favour of how nice the edges are. That's a warm fuzzy feeling.

During that same weekend, I got a hold of a manuscript that I've been itching to read. The personal account of a journey my Great Uncle and Aunt made in 1949, driving overland all the way from the Middle East to the UK. I'm reading it very slowly and carefully, photocopying the crumbly, yellowing typewriter pages along the way and frantically gleaning all I can from my InDesign class, so that I can have it printed as a proper book really soon. (Seriously, they teach you how to design and create an actual proper book, isn't that amazing?)

Linking in with Yarn Along, the global community of bookworms and wool twiddlers.

random recipe fail

You know when there's a trend, a consensus, dare I call it a "movement", that you're just not part of for some reason? Well, here's my guilty secret, I'm just not as in love with Nigel Slater as is expected of me. The blether-sphere is ram-packed full of people raving about his Kitchen Diaries, literally RAVING, but I haven't made time to read it. I have it on good authority that it's magical, but I find him so thoroughly unwatchable on tv that I haven't made much effort.

Which is also why I rarely choose to use the one Nigel Slater recipe book we own: Real Food. But you can't cheat on the Random Recipe Challenge, so when my husband picked some numbers at random, Real Food it was, and a recipe for grilled mustard and herb chicken.

It's very simple: a store-cupboard marinade of delicious things, chicken thighs, and a griddle pan.

When you're mixing oil, tarragon, mustard and parsley together, you kind of know that good things are in store. I was willing to accept that my reluctance to join Cult Slater might have been a bit baseless. Especially when he writes things like "They will probably take about eight minutes total cooking time, depending on the size of your thighs (or, rather, the size of the chicken's)."

That did make me chuckle. But it was at that point things started to go a little wrong. My instinct was to flatten the chicken thighs a bit with a rolling pin, or even chop and thread them onto skewers satay-style. But Nigel didn't instruct me to do that, so I did as I was told and just flung them on the griddle. It turns out that lovely organic chicken thighs (unflattened) are too plump to cook through on a griddle in eight minutes.

Mine (or, rather, my chickens') needed more like twelve. And while the recipe states that "There will be much smoke and sizzling", after twelve minutes the outsides were burnt to buggery.

Which is fine. I mean, they were largely inedible, but we had a bigger problem. We live in one moderately small room, by which I mean that our kitchen, sitting room, dining room, and study all occupy a single 8m x 3m space. And Nige was not wrong about the smoke.

After leaving all the doors and windows open for three hours (on a freezing February evening in the North of Scotland) every fibre and pore of our lives is still thick with the smell of burning. Every surface within a metre radius of the cooker is coated with a fine layer of fat, and I've lost the cat. I occasionally hear her miewing in the middle distance, but my streaming eyes can barely focus as I claw my way through the haze.

The verdict from the panel?

"Mummy, I don't really like the chicken."
"No sweetie, neither do I."

the magical moment when...

The weather here has been unbelievably bad for the past couple of weeks. Howling gales, horizontal hail, sleet and snow. And the kind of driving cold rain that makes my frontal sinus ache on the way home from school. It makes The Boss whimper on the way home from school (because she doesn't know what a frontal sinus is yet but just knows that it's miserable).

I always feel bad for the Posties on days like this. We have two regulars and I wouldn't do their job for the world, yet one of them is always cheery, and the other is always (there's no way around this) hot. The kind of purdee that you almost never discuss with your female neighbours over coffee... very rarely anyway.

Anyway, cheery Postie made my day today by delivering the most magical moment of any project. After weeks of browsing online, humming and hawing about colour combinations and which brand would give me the best result for the lowest price, at last the little squashy parcel of wool from Loop arrived. They always deliver within a matter of hours and wrap it in beautiful apricot coloured tissue, the opening of which, for me, has become a wonderful rite of passage for any special project. The possibilities!

do you know what I mean about this moment? or have I totally lost it?

This time it's for a Varjo shawl by Veera Valimaki, something I've been aching to make for months.

The Postie delivered a magical moment for The Boss too. A lovely wrapped Amazon surprise for when she gets home from school, a belated birthday present from a busy Uncle. She's going to love it (I know what it is!).

And as luck would have it, the sun's come out at last.

Joining in with Ginny and Yarn Along; a global exploration of reading and knitting.