May 28, 2020
Social Distancing – May Positivity
I thought rather than bore you with a whole post about one single loaf of bread or other mediocre effort, I’d try and practice restraint and sum things up a smidge. I’m not sure if I like this format though, we shall see.
Starting off in crafting news – I made these dinky little things. Hubby referred to them as ‘the world’s smallest rainbow’ and the only other person who knew about them before this blog said it was ‘sweet’.
Back in the Yule time I watched Kirstie Allsop and the crafting show. Someone made an advent calendar out of mini cross stitch embroidery hoops and I squealed a great deal through the show at how amazing they were. I glossed over the fact I’d not cross stitched for ten years. Thankfully Hobbycraft had a January sale (other retailers are available blah blah) and I ordered a pack of these frames – without any idea how big 1.5 inches was.
You’ve read about my ugly cake efforts, you know I have NO CONCEPT of size.
So I dug these hoops out the other week, ignored the suggested designs and made these up myself. Yes people, you read correctly – I did art stuff! I did design them and then sew them and I love them, don’t want to give them away, want to do millions more. Hubby says they’re unnecessary clutter, I think they’re gorgeous. What does he know?! They took a day and a half each but I don’t care, they’re so lush.
I also decided (whilst making puffin number forty-seven) that I needed a pin cushion. It turns out that using my dressing gown is actually not sensible. Especially as I’m always wearing it. So I went onto a certain internet auction website (actually, is there anything other than eBay?) and was searching for pin cushions when I stumbled upon a cactus pin cushion. Ohmydays it was brilliant. It was also twelve quid and that was probably ten quid more than my brain said was sensible. One youtube tutorial later and an argument with the photocopier and tah dah! Look what I made!!!
If you are confused about how these don’t really look like cacti unless you squint and look at it upside down then I’ll confess, I didn’t follow the instructions entirely. Yeah I know, you’re surprised at that.
The tutorial said make the cactus from just one colour felt. Yawn! Boring. Especially when you have glittered green felt. It also said use the same coloured thread to see them together and then hand sew prickles on in a contrast colour. Hmmm. Why am I sewing twice? Nope! So I made this one (above) first because that was the template and it’s flipping massive! How many pins do other people actually have? I also didn’t like the plain green felt finish so added brads as buds and prickles. But it is crazy big so after another photocopier session I reduced it again and made the ickle one (below) which is far more suitable for me. Then the next challenge – finding terracotta clay pots small enough for these things to force a sense of reality. If BHGS were open I’d be fine. Cue a bit of faceache begging and some wood disc padding with quite a bit of hot glue and they’re quite fabby.
This wouldn’t be a blog of mine if I didn’t mention one kitchen disaster or three. This time I attempted lemon muffins but I foolishly asked himself to help. Gently stab the muffins with a cocktail stick I said, there then followed a scene from the remake of psycho and some very badly punctured cakes. It was so the drizzle would go inside, it didn’t, it just went all over the paper cases making them very sticky and soggy. Delicious but dangerously gooey.
In May I’ve made these lemon muffins, four loaves, a batch of breakfast muffins and rolls, a rhubarb cheesecake and a batch of black forest muffins. No-one believes me when I say I hate cooking. I really do! It’s so precise and science like and I’m not supposed to eat any of it. Lockdown is boring though.
In fabulous shopping news I found 16kg of bread flour. I didn’t actually *find* it, I did purchase it with money like a proper person! So all future bread making plans are good – I If you want or need bread flour, you know where to come! Also have other flour and eggs <grin>
Happy news now – I joined a book group on faceache. I was invited by a fellow M.E. warrior on M.E. Awareness Day and so it felt like was meant to be. Basically it’s a bunch of strangers sharing their Amazon wishlists and you pick one list or twelve or whatever and play secret squirrel! You can gift proper books or kindle books or a gift voucher and the basis of it all is to share the joy of reading with random acts of kindness. I have many 99p kindle books on my list so it’s not like anyone has to spend much to make me smile. So far I’ve bought nine proper books, two kindle books and one gift voucher for six different people and not spent very much, honestly. It’s been such fun and I’ve been sent three kindle books and one proper book so far. So exciting. So very, very exciting. And controlled surprises for those of us who can’t pretend with off-list items. I honestly did not know you could send kindle books as gifts but you can and it’s very easy. If you want to give it a try, here’s my wishlist link although you might need to copy-paste it
https://www.amazon.co.uk/hz/wishlist/ls/14LTNBJXY76G9?ref_=wl_share
I hope this will be a long term thing because books are precious. Even at my lowest, books in my duvet palace with a mug of tea is my go to medicine of choice.
And then on Friday 15th, there was a very loud knock at the door. I reluctantly answered it because himself was down the garage and there was a (strange/unknown) man (at a safe distance) who said ‘Are you Michelle?’ I nodded and he said ‘That’s for you, there’s an explanation in the box.’ On my doorstep was an enormous cardboard fruit and veg hamper. Turns out, I’d been nominated for a local community hero thing with our local farm shop and they’d decided I was worthy. They gave out six of these boxes out of all the nominations and I was one of them!
I was gobsmacked. Totally shocked. But I didn’t keep it all, I have shared it with three lots of neighbours and feel so lucky to have been a recipient of this. I don’t consider myself a hero, I’m just checking in with my neighbours because I’m bored and lonely. The strawberries were amazing, I was fighting himself for them. He was less bothered about the spinach unsurprisingly even if it was covered in rump steak. Diesel cat is also benefiting even if Albie is rather jealous!
I wanted to finish off with a rather braggish photo of our veg patch but the frost the other night/week ruined everything and I have nothing to show you veg wise. So instead you can have some arty flower shots of water droplets on lupin leaves and my gorgeous sea thrift plant. Then a photo from the bottom of the garden in chickenville – please ignore the awful hair and classy outfit! Our newbies are bonkers, Reg certainly thinks he’s a parrot not a chicken. They’re lovely but their toes are especially sharp and my neck and chest was absolutely ruined by Nigel one evening, not fun.
May 12, 2020
May 12th
Today is M.E. Awareness Day. It is also Fibromyalgia Awareness Day.
I’ve been diagnosed with both these chronic, debilitating conditions.
FM is pain in bones and muscles with no cause or injury. It’s not just painful joints or muscles, it’s also difficulty sleeping, tiredness, stiffness, headaches, pins and needles or tingling.
M.E. means you can’t recover normally from any activity, physical or mental, however small. It’s a constant exhausted status,
They are all of the above and more. They are separate conditions but often overlap. They are incurable and invisible. They are not recognised as a disability but are totally debilitating. They are overlooked and ignored and a diagnostic last resort.
It took six years for me to get my diagnosis. I was tested for just about everything else before they gave up and gave me M.E. with FM.
I have B12 injections and vitamin D tablets to try and combat the fatigue.
I have high dose opiate painkillers for the pain levels.
Everyone’s FM and ME is different. Mine also includes hyper sensitivity to light, noise, smell and touch. There are some fabrics I cannot wear. I have chronic, constant migraines. I have a lack of sensation in my hands, I have redness and swelling in some finger joints. I burn/bruise/cut easily and take forever to heal. I can be dead on my feet and then have nights of insomnia.
Today is a particularly bad day. I woke utterly exhausted. I ignored my first alarm and almost ignored the second. I woke unable to feel my feet and with acute pain in my legs and back. I eventually managed to get into a sitting position and tried to get socks on. I cried at the pain of this. I’ve not managed to get anything more on. I had to sit down to brush my teeth, I’ve vaguely tried with my hair. I came down the stairs on my bum and poured boiling water everywhere but my tea mug. I’m sat in sunglasses because it’s too sunny. I want to go back to bed every single second. I’m sore and sad and exhausted and in pain.
I will achieve nothing today. Quite possibly will achieve nothing tomorrow.
I have been robbed of my energy and enthusiasm for life. It’s a struggle to get out of bed and stay out. Everyday is different but no less difficult.
May 11, 2020
Social Distancing – So very dough-ver it
Apparently that’s one of the new words to come out of this coronavirus time, being ‘dough-ver’ everyone else’s pictures of perfectly baked banana bread and fairy cakes. You all know you can rely on me to throw a dose of reality into your screens though!
Yes we threw another mix into the white machine this weekend, yes we received a rather nice loaf out of it three and a half hours later. I’m still searching for buttermilk though and my bread flour stocks will only last another two loaves – I am now considering buying direct from the mill and having 16kg delivered to my porch. Desperate times and all that.
Today is Monday 11th May. My day 56, my week 9 eve and somewhat hilariously it’s National Eat What You Want Day. Haven’t we just been living that 24/7/365 anyway?!!
I’m still desperate to see my hairdresser, waxing lady and nails bestie. I look like a castaway extra.
I’m doing okay, I had a wobble when I had a bad head and it was cold and damp and my ebay parcels hadn’t arrived and my seventeenth batch of lettuce seeds hadn’t germinated. I’m annoyed that my neighbours keep having visitors even though they had one of those government letters. I’m really fed up that peeps think lockdown rules don’t apply to them – Evesham is very good at not going to work but equally, they’re not working from home either! Town is full of groups and families and no one could tell you what 2m is even if you gave them a tape measure. There will be a second peak in all this and the epicentre will be Evesham. Sigh.
But my main role in this blog is to remind you that however much you are struggling, however much you aren’t enjoying this time period, your kitchen will never look like an explosion in a flour factory and your baking will never be called ugly.
Those are my responsibilities which I take very seriously on your behalf.
I wanted to challenge myself last week, I wanted to try something new – because that always goes so very well for me!
Himself really likes sponge cake. His Mum would bake one frequently and cover it in icing. I’ve never made a sponge cake, not even from a packet mix or at school so I decided I should really try and bake a Victoria Sandwich cake.
So I begged a neighbour for some tins and found the recipe in my Nigella book. Remembered the whole alternate eggs and flour so it doesn’t curdle thing that I’ve probably picked up from Junior Bake Off and voila! I had cake mix. Of course I didn’t entirely follow the recipe …… it called for milk and I added lemon and lime juice because I wanted a bit of a citrus tang to it. It also asked for vanilla which is icky so I added more lemon and lime juice. Yummy. The cake mixture off the spatula was utterly delicious I have to say.
I did put the tins on a baking sheet. I honestly do not know why. Maybe my subconscious reminded me that the last time I attempted baking (black forest brownies) I made two lots of brownies – one in the tin and one on the bottom of the oven ……. Hmmmm.
So these tins went in the oven, on a baking sheet and they grew ….. and grew ….. and grew …….
Nigella said it would take 20 minutes to cook. We kept testing it with a stick and giving it 5 more minutes. It was eventually in the oven for nearly 45 minutes. Nigella fibbed.
Yes, we had bakers titbits from the sheet that was snapped off. It looked far worse than this initially – this has sunk down a smidge on cooling. Not sure if you can see from the photo but I had lined these tins with greaseproof too which the cake kinda ate and absorbed.
It was eventually wrestled out and the paper retrieved and licked to death. This is why I refer to my cake as an ugly cake because it was not smooth sided and round, it was patchy and almost hexagonal or whatever a non rounded cake is called.
I filled it with the grapefruit curd that I made the other week. I was always going to do this hence the citrus in the cake mix. I also stabbed holes in the bottom layer so the curd could go into the cake more – I’d seen Nadiya do this on the tv she called it a poke cake – get me, copying someone who actually knows what they’re doing!
I asked some friends what had gone wrong because I hadn’t messed with the quantity of the ingredients, just the stuff and I hadn’t used any baking powder or bicarb to make it puff up.
Turns out, Victoria Sponge cake tins come in different sizes.
These tins were apparently not the 21cm ones that Nigella asked me to use. I didn’t measure them from my neighbour, of course I didn’t! Why would I ever in a million years think that Victoria Sponge cake tins were variable?!!
To be fair, the cake was super light and fluffy, it was airy and melt in the mouth and oh so yummy. It just looked like a bag of spanners.
So, if you’re feeling a bit down today or a bit fed up with lockdown, just remember that I am still as useless in the kitchen as I ever was and you are not at all close to being the baking disaster that I am. When you compare yourself to me, your life is good and you can smile again.
May 5, 2020
Social Distancing – Combating boredom through bread Part 2
Tuesday May 5th 2020. Distancing/isolation day 50 and the start of my week 8
Ugh.
Whilst bread is fun, it’s getting a little bit brain-easy, do you know what I mean? Weigh it out, press a button. There’s none of the magic of watching it prove or pressing the fluffy squidginess because you can.
If you want a bit of a back-story to this bread making lark, check out the first part of combating boredom which was about four or five blogs ago. It’s not titled part 1 because I never knew there would be multiple chapters to the tale!
A friend posted on faceache that they’d made English Breakfast Muffins and I was immediately licking the screen. I love toasted muffins (and cake muffins, obvs) and so decided I’d give it a go. The original recipe was from the bible that is the bbc food website but it called for cooking these on the stove top in a pair of flat pans and I knew I’d never manage that safely so I found another recipe from America from King Arthur’s Mill which baked them in the oven and kinda merged the two.
Had a teeny incident with the dough hooks on the stand mixer ……. Shush. I’ll dig out the paperclip again later.
Mixed the ingredients together, left in a bowl covered with cling film and a damp towel (trick I learnt off Junior Bake Off there) and set the timer for an hour. Now the two recipes said ‘about an hour OR until doubled in size’ and I was a bit puzzled (good start) because I failed to take note of the original size to then calculate double. So I gave it an hour and bit – basically until the thing I was watching on the tv finished.
Turned out the gooey, puffed up mess, somehow managed to get the scales to work long enough to weigh 54g balls – the recipe said ‘a scant 54g’ which I thought meant ‘no larger than’ so I was very careful to be bang on 54g here. But I’ve ended up with 8 at 54g, 1 at 76g and a teeny one that was formed from what I got off the worktop, my hands, the floor, the bowl, the spatula and the cats. Being as both recipes said they only made 8 muffins I’m really confused by how I got almost 10
It then said leave to prove in muffin rings. Which I have no clue about but I knew I had a set of Lakeland crumpet rings so I used those. Bought after watching CelebBakeOff in March 2015 and then never removed from the packet I then also used some round cookie cookie cutters turned upside down. And some empty Gu glass jars. Top tip here peeps – if you’re going to try these – and I do recommend you do – make sure you grease your rings! I used spray oil which worked perfectly well. I failed to spray one and it’s not pretty in any way.
It also said if you didn’t have rings, just roll into balls but spread apart on the baking tray which you have to line with greaseproof, then spray oil them then scatter polenta or semolina on. I have neither so I used ground almonds. I have mentioned before I’m not good at following recipes accurately which is probably the entire reason for my downfalls and catastrophes but we are in a time period of adapt and make do.
You leave them to prove for another hour but with a tray and greaseproof on top. I’m assuming this is to keep them round and flat rather than round and puffed up like rolls or tennis balls. These things are quite mental and neither of the recipes said if you were supposed to weigh down these top trays or just leave as is. The ones in the rings puffed up and over and pushed the top tray up a good half inch. The stand alone ones just did what they wanted.
Then by the magic of Gas Mark 6 for 13 minutes this is the result of which I am proper chuffed. The little one did make it but was sacrificed to the baking gods immediately. You can tell which ones were free to do what they wanted and which ones were in the rings ……. I may just make smaller ones (50g maybe?) to go in the rings next time and then more generous ones (oooh, 60g?) to do their own thing. Oh heck, I said next time. Yes. I do want to make them again but this wasted four hours of my day. And I had told my boss I’d go to the office today for ‘mid-morning’ which actually turned out to be 2pm after all this. Oops.
Before you go ‘Wow, that’s brilliant’ you need to know about:-
That.
That is the state of my kitchen corner after doing the above. The floor looks no different. Nor do my trousers or slippers or cats. Absolute bomb site in a flour mill.
Day 50 sponsored by a flour fight.
May 2, 2020
Social distancing – the new arrivals
Let me start this blog by sharing my contribution to the rainbow windows. This is paper bunting that I’ve hung on the inside of the downstairs window and I like it, makes me smile. I understand there are themes for each week for windows to keep kiddiwinks busy but I’ve done this now, it took forever *and* I cleaned the inside of the window before I did it so I’m not taking it down.
It’s now my day 47-something of the potentially 85-whatever-ness. Blah blah usual meh. Although bat season is starting soon and I’ve some survey work booked in the diary 🙂 I also picked up my third care bat of the year this afternoon, the three have been different species but all boys! If you want to follow the adventures of the bat care life please like the page of Evesham Bat Care on faceache.
There’s a pub roast dinner collection booked for tomorrow as a treat so bread was made today instead of the usual Sunday. Feeling a bit more confident about the process now so wanted to try switching up the recipe by using buttermilk but none of the supermarkets have any (or eggs or flour or kitchen paper) so it was a standard yummy loaf that disappeared far too quickly! Will keep looking and will tell you the results when it finally happens.
Today is quite a special day for me too as it’s almost my eleven year anniversary of having chickens. I’ve calculated (rather roughly) that I’ve had 29 or 31 chickens in this eleven year period and in order to commemorate this, four more landed today. Here are my current six feathered residents
Nestle is on the left side of the compost bin, Fat Alice is on the right with her bum to us. Ickle Alice is in front of her (all white chickens have to be called Alice, it’s the rules) then Nicky Hayden is the black and white speckeldy in front of her. Phat Penyard is front and centre and then Goldilocks is left middle hiding behind the rhubarb. We established today that Nestle is 6 years old and she’s the feisty, shouty matriarch of the gang even though she’s not very big.
These are the new four. The grey is a Bluebell and is called (Goth) Nigel. The darkest one is a Rhodes Rock and is called Reg. The light ginger (standard Hyline hen) is called Edith Gade, she has the whitest, fluffiest pantaloons, the dark coppery ginger is a Columbian Blacktail called Mr Gade. All these names are people from the magical island of Lundy, a super special, unique place that means the world to me. And when I was going slightly bonkers with the lockdown these were mostly the names I gave my imaginary hens.
Introducing new hens to an existing group is a NIGHTMARE. I’ve currently got an alarm set for 5am in order to open them up and get them out the coop to try and avoid any big fights, if they’re in an open space they have places to run around rather than being cornered in the coop. Fingers crossed some miracle happens and the fighting ends swiftly and we get more eggs from the spoilt reprobates.
I did an anonymous random act of kindness today. But I kinda want the recipient to know it was me because I want to see them smile and have a spark of happiness bounced back. It was my first secret act so I guess it’s understandable it’s feeling odd. Maybe I need to stick with being honest about my random acts?!
I had a bit of a wobble this week, I knew it was going to rain for most of the days and I was worried how this might impact my joints. I was okay Tuesday and Wednesday but Thursday wasn’t a good day. I’m falling asleep in weird places again in the afternoons and then not sleeping at night, I’m sick of seeing 3am on the clock I assure you. I’ve been told that wearing a wooly bobble hat with pyjamas and dressing gown indoors is not an acceptable outfit. I am going to start setting daily goals again for the week to come in the hope it will keep me focused and more positive.
Sunday is litter pick day, Monday has to be report typing day. Tuesday will be accounts day, Wednesday will be my pyjama day, Thursday is NTLive at home transmission day and Friday I might attempt baking a cake! I need to find an inexpensive source of specific sized baking tins in the future though, Amazon and ebay are charging the earth for baking tins right now. My preferred charity shops or discount supermarkets either aren’t open or aren’t doing anything other than essential things. I’ve added some to my Amazon wishlist as a just in case for August.
Today was nothing special in terms of day number or activities but it was a good day. And that’s enough for me.
viewfromthisdesk 