Mistakes

PostingMaking play dough: a sticky business

PlayDoh_Small.jpgDid you know that play dough is made with salt? Not just a pinch. Cups of the stuff. After the kids used up all the official stuff (pictured) in their toy sausage-maker last week, we brought out the scales and mixing bowl.

Making stomach crawl?

Beanie and her pal Morgenstern poured in flour, water and oil. Plus, of course, salt. Lots of salt. Cup after cup of white crystals. We skipped the boric acid and silicone.

After we added the pink colouring (a job for the grown-ups) the dough looked like post-partum stomach flab. Or the remains of gastric band surgery.

Innards on kitchen table?

We kept adding flour. But the dough stuck to our hands like something excreted from alien space ships. Days later it remains embedded in my cuticles.

Our efforts did not smell like shop-bought Play Doh. A disappointment.

We have not yet replaced our salt supplies. Unsalted food may be doing wonders for our sodium levels, but it remains an acquired taste.

Not for consumption

Beanie was frustrated at not being allowed to eat the dough. But with so much salt, it was inedible. Husband did a double-take when he saw innards on the kitchen table.

The children did not seem to mind.

Posted 26 April 2010 17:23 | Number of comments: 29 | Comments

Daughters Domestic chaos Food Fun Mistakes

PostingHell's kitchen

"I've got us a lovely supper," warns Va-vay.

"Oh yes, love, what's that?" I say from my bed, trying not to glance at the 'sick bin' that rarely leaves my bedside these days. Some days the mere idea of food is enough to make me hurl. I'm hoping today isn't one of them, though the rising bile at the back of my throat suggests otherwise.

"Spinach and potatoes," he announces.

"And?" I think, waiting for him to unveil the crowning glory of our evening meal that he's led me to believe awaits.

Some salmon? Steak? Even bean burgers or pasta would be alright. Maybe stew or pizza?

The pause stretches on uncomfortably long.

"Were you expecting... something else?" he starts, accusingly.

"No! Spinach and potatoes. How... lovely."

"I'm going to cook the potatoes so they come out all fluffy. You know how I showed you the other day, when you make them explode." Va-vay's little-boy enthusiasm for the ways of the kitchen is sometimes endearing, on other occasions (this one) just perplexing and annoying.

Briefly, I remember Va-vay doing a Nigella on me and bashing an innocent-looking baked potato with the blunt handle of a carving knife, because, or so he said, doing so led to a superior interior texture of spud. I tried to marvel at the sight of the thing's innards spread across the plate, but couldn't see quite what we were meant to be excited about.

"I thought that would be a good supper," he says, going all huffy.

"It is! It will be," I say, with a touch too much jollity.

He disappears into the kitchen. For much, much longer than it would take to cook some spinach and get some baked potatoes going. Eventually, well over an hour later he reappears.

"There's been a small delay," he says.

"What's going on?" I ask meekly.

"Oh, nothing," he says airily, as if I couldn't be expected to understand. "Just the potatoes cooking."

At nine thirty - more than two hours after Va-vay got home - supper makes it entrance. I'm desperate for food, as I alternate between cravings and aversions to the stuff.

"This isn't baked potatoes," I point out, in what even I realise to be a statement of the blindingly obvious.

"I could tell from your tone of voice you didn't want baked potatoes. So I've made this instead!"

"This" turns out to be potato and spinach gratin. Unfortunately, undercooked potato and spinach gratin.

We try to ignore that fact as we sit up in bed and listen to each other crunch through the potato. I wonder if a wobbly lower crown will survive the night. My mind turns to the Irish potato famine.

"Are you enjoying it?" asks Va-vay, in utter defiance of any realistic observation of the situation.

"Va-vay, I don't mean to be ungrateful or anything, but it's a bit undercooked."

"No, it's not!"

"Look, I'm sorry, but it is undercooked."

"Then just don't eat anymore," he tells me.

Sad to say, I'm so hungry I would eat a bag of mouldy old potatoes by now. I push on through to the end, then fall asleep.

A couple of days later, Va-vay has recovered his good humour and admits the gratin was not his finest culinary hour.

"Why didn't you just do the baked potatoes like you said?" I ask him.

"I wanted to do something nice for you," he says. "I could tell you didn't want a baked spud and spinach. It's alright for me, being a veggie face. You wanted something else." My heart wells.

Later, I confide in him that I'm nervous about a big Christmas meal with assorted people I haven't seen in months.

"You don't have to go," he says.

"I do, Va-vay. Really, they're expecting me to be there."

"If you stay here, I'll cook you a nice potato gratin."

He knows the way to a woman's heart, that man.

Posted 13 December 2007 14:52 | Number of comments: 12 | Comments

Food Husband Mistakes

PostingNever-good-enough Mum

You just can't get it right as a parent. Hours of my life spent grafting at the coal face of motherhood, hacking up wholesome organic vegetables and reducing them to pureed slime, of which my daughter might, on a good day, consent to eat a grudging spoonful, and now look what happens.

I finally master an RSS feed from the BBC and one of the first things I see today is the latest directive from Mothering HQ telling me I've wasted my time, my sweet potatoes and my freezer space by pureeing all this food.

In all honesty I always knew The Bean preferred fromage frais to anything I made. Now it seems that pureed food is not just unpalatable, but bad, bad, bad.

For it seems purees are in fact the work of evil food manufacturers who want parents in their commercial  thrall for years to come.

The Unicef Baby-Friendly Initiative almost equates pureeing food with  formula-milk makers peddling their evil powder to third-world countries.

Truly, motherhood and martyrdom go hand in hand. I know now how poor old St Sebastian must have felt. Not so much plugged full of unfriendly arrows, as, in my case, pierced to the heart by my own Moulinex whizzing wand, stoned by a flurry of small plastic food receptacles, shamed in the village stocks by the liberal daubing of pureed parsnip thrown at me by my own daughter.

Like all parenting gurus, Unicef wheels out a battery of dire consequences for any parents foolish enough to consider ignoring the received wisdom on pureeing.

You see, babies get addicted to pureed food.

And spoon-feeding babies pureed food is unnatural and unnecessary.

Why, it could delay the onset of their chewing skills. Babies unlucky enough to be fed pureed food by their reckless parents have little control over how much they eat.

Which in turn makes them vulnerable to getting blocked up. Oh, and they could also become fussy eaters in later life.

If Unicef had their way babies would survive on a milk-only diet for six months and then move straight onto solids. Bypassing evil gloop altogether.

I've yet to meet a mother who made it to the six-month mark before breaking out the Organix baby rice. If anyone reading this has a child who made it that far on milk alone, I congratulate you. Please could you let the rest of us know how you managed it.

So, here's my idea, how about we expand the Unicef remit. It could include not just a Baby-Friendly Initiative, but a Mother-Friendly one too.

Ideally, one that publishes research proving what we all know - that once babies are onto baby rice at four or five months, their mums can get a decent night's sleep, without waking twice a night to open up the mini-bar.

Actually, no, forget about baby rice. If I'd known Unicef's ideas on purees sooner there'd have been no mulched-up carrots or rice. No, I'd have served up a nice, tasty steak and chips to my daughter. Start as you mean to go on. Medium rare, I think.... Softer on the (non-existent) teeth that way.

Posted 19 June 2007 02:38 | Number of comments: 24 | Comments

Daughters Food Mistakes Parenting gurus Perfectionism Breastfeeding

PostingAll in good time

Set in stone My husband and I cannot agree on what “leaving in good time” means. Last week was our  first parents’ evening at nursery – a momentous event in our small household. We built up to this for days beforehand. Somehow we still ended up half-running through Edinburgh’s early evening drizzle, sans umbrella. We arrived dishevelled, damp and out of breath.

When I'm not blaming my husband for our poor time management,  I blame poor Granny. After she arrived to babysit for our big night, an hour slid by. We rifled through cupboards filled with small plastic containers, tidied away toys. I produced breadsticks, cereal bars, potted apple puree; lifted down boxes of formula. Made cups of tea; relocated the remotes, chatted, got daughter to bed, and there we were, time to go. Another ten minutes vanished looking for glasses, applying lipstick, brushing hair, smoothing on “product”. Whoosh.

Jack and I clattered downstairs, giddy with the freedom of a rare night out. Then we looked at his watch, and panicked.

“We should have left earlier,” I began.

“I was ready a good half hour before you,” he said, in a mild way.

“No, you weren’t,” I retorted, knowing what he said was true.

“I think you'll find I was. I was waiting for you but didn't say anything as I didn't want to rush you.”

"You should have said something!" I blustered.

We began half-running/half-walking along Edinburgh's cobbled lanes, skeetering in our haste over treacherous, uneven stones lying sleek and smooth with rain. Every so often Edinburgh Council erects huge tents over the road, digs up these cobbles, cleans them and replaces them to make road surfaces smoother. Within months they revert to the default of their old uneven ways, set, as it where, in stone. The butterflies in my stomach refused to settle. Not a product in the world could have stopped my hair frizzing.

We could have driven, but decided lack of both parking skills and spaces might make it quicker on foot.

“You can slow down. We’ve got a good ten minutes to get there,” my husband tried to persuade me.

“No! We can’t be late. We’ve got to keep going, it'll take at least ten minutes to get there,” I insisted.

Of course I caved.  Ground to a halt. Wheezed.

“We should slow down. I don’t want to be all out of breath when we get there. I want to make a good impression. What will all the other parents think if we arrive like this?” I preached to my converted husband.

"Why do you care so much what other people think?" he asked.

I had no answer.

The grown-ups had reclaimed nursery for the evening. Someone showed us into a large room with drinks set out next to the Wendy House. We demisted our glasses. Under the felt-tipped airplane with pictures of children's heads pasted to the seats stood one mother. Over by the window stood another. That made four of us in the room. A nursery assistant brought us our drinks. Grimaced.

"Nice weather, isn't it? The other parents'll be along shortly I expect. Must have got held up by the weather."

Posted 06 June 2007 11:00 | Number of comments: 7 | Comments

Angst Car Dilemmas Domestic chaos Etiquette Husband Mistakes Nursery

PostingHappy campers

The first family holiday is a shock. Ours wasn't a holiday at all, not in the strictest sense. We worked harder than I've done in some paying jobs. It was hard graft. Day and night. Each evening I squirted my milk into a bowl and mixed it up with powdered baby rice for my daughter. I still remember the sound it made hitting the plastic. It was fun. But in an unfamiliar, cow-like way. I felt sad at losing the old freedoms. In private, I cried.

Back in the heady days of coupledom we used to book a cheap flight somewhere, then wing it, smug about being proper "travellers". We only once came to grief, descending from a Cevennol mountain to find a room for the night in the valley. A Festival de Cinema had taken all the accommodation in a 10k radius. No room in the inn. Again, I cried.

The nice monsieur in the local hotel rang round. After many worried looks, he found us somewhere and sent us off with rabbit stew for our supper. After all he'd done for us, I had no heart to confess my husband was vegetarian. The cottage was grim; no windows. The bed too small to accommodate me or husband. I woke several times with nightmares, unsure if awake or asleep. A long night.

We left the next day, both blaming the other, and got a room in the hotel, which all the actors had by then finally left. We stayed for two days, because we had no money and the one cashpoint in the village was in a shop that didn't open until for another two days. The hotel staff asked every time they saw me "Ca va mieux?", which seemed to translate as "You're not going to have a nervous breakdown on our premises, are you?"

Not wishing to risk a repeat of this on a family holiday, we've agreed to plan ahead. I'm not experienced in any of this, but we're ruling out hotels. Either we'd have to leave daughter alone in the room while we got our meal. Or sit there in silence and darkness from 7pm.

The obvious solution would be self-catering. But that would mean booking a place for a week or fortnight, and then we'd be stuck. I've a yen for adventure, and would love some of the old spontaneity.

So we're investigating tents. I discovered on Saturday tent brands are named after birds. Buzzard, Hawk, Shrike. It speaks of freedom. Prairie, Roadrunner, Vista, Oregon, Halo, Aurora. Challenge and adventure. In my imagination, I'm there. But our daughter is already ahead of us. Her Pop-Up Activity Tent arrived home yesterday.

Posted 03 June 2007 20:19 | Number of comments: 6 | Comments

Daughters Dilemmas Fun Husband Kit Mistakes Out and about Toys Work