Cement Face, clip fan and new numbers

Continuing on from yesterday’s post, we’re entering the world of Chat again.

Before we embark on any of the actual stories, I’d just like to list some of the names mentioned in this week’s magazine. People love sending stories or pictures of their children and I fear something has happened to the new mothers of today, something called Crazy Naming. It’s like they’ve randomly picked out some letters from the dictionary and stuck them together to make a word and written it on the birth certificate. And even when fairly regular names are used, there’s a real thing for double barrelling. We must double barrel! These are just a few….

Kaly-raine
Modlen (female, by the way)
Dayton Rae
Ella-May
Amy Rose
Roman
Olivia Grace
Harley
Darcie
Willow
Sharonesme
Kimbalee
Leigh-Catherine

And with the scene set, in we go. First up, we have Concrete Face Lady.

Yep. Actual concrete. In her actual face. In fact, it was a mixture of cement, tyre sealant, mineral oil and glue. In her face. She was born a boy but lived as a transexual and wanted the plastic surgery to have womanly cheek bones and a more feminine shape to her body. The cement nonsense mixture has also been injected in her boobs, hips and bum, where they have now gone lumpy but the doctors can’t remove them because it has solidified around the  nerves, tissue and blood vessels so can’t be removed. Yeh. Being a boy doesn’t seem so bad now, does it?

Next up, everyone’s favourite page – the ‘Blimey! That’s clever’ page. And what have we here?

O, it’s just some settings on an oven, you’re probably thinking. Well! Let me tell you! It is not just some settings on an oven!…

Actually, yeh, it is. They had faded away so she got some more sticky numbers and stuck them on. That’s it. That’s the tip. When the numbers on your oven settings fade, put some more on.

That wasn’t really even a tip, was it? That was nonsense.

Let’s try another one.

Store your hair clips on a fan. Firstly, who has this many hair clips?! Secondly she says this clipping technique ‘stores them in one place and looks pretty.’ And looks pretty?! Really? You decide.

Lastly, this.

Keep toilet roll tubes and put wires in them with a label on. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with this, as such. But it’s not really the ground breaking life changing rocket science I’m always expecting when I look at these pages. We’ve cut down trees to produce this magazine! I need to feel there was a decent reason why we did that.

I guess the whole of Chat magazine overrides that idea.

P is for…

POPULAR!

Ok, anyone who loves feeding people knows that, illogically, you feel that when people praise your food they are, by default, also praising you. I think that might be why I like feeding people so much.

Last Sunday, when I had my first day at Ham House, another volunteer who’s been there for 15 years was talking about his oven being broken. He said he would normally bring a cake in every Sunday to put in the tea room for when the volunteers have their breaks.

A ha! thought I. I see an opening for a new cake-baker and, potentially, a new most-popular volunteer.

With my sights set on one day inheriting Ham House (who wouldn’t want this as their holiday home?)…

…and becoming the 3rd Countess of Ham (I’m sure that’s a thing), I thought I’d become temporary cake-provider.

Now, the night before, having made my fabulous plan, I went to my kitchen to bake a cake…. And found I was out of sugar. What a loser. Who lets themself run out of sugar?! So I made a loaf of bread with loads of different spices and seeds and took along one of the chutneys I made at the farm.

When I got to Ham House, I dropped the goodies in the tea room with a note before going to bake for the visitors.

I headed to the kitchen with the volunteer baker for that day, who I would be shadowing. We baked two different types of biscuits, using 17th century recipes that we didn’t change at all (apart from baking them in an electric oven, of course).

One was a carraway and coriander biscuit. And could I stop calling it carrot and coriander when speaking to visitors? No, of course not! And they’d go, “O, carrot and coriander biscuits? Interesting!” And then I’d be like, “O no, sorry. Carraway and coriander.” And feel silly.

The other was called a knot biscuit, because of how the dough was rolled into strips and twisted or knotted together. They had carraway, ground mace and fennel seeds in them.

Here’s a close up of my prettiest knotting attempt.

The baking smells brought visitors and other volunteers down to the room, following their noses. Although it was a much quieter day than the previous Sunday I had worked, we still had a decent amount of people come and linger, chatting about the history of the kitchen.

Every so often, I brushed a stray bit of flour off the beautiful elm wood table which, they think, has been there since the early 1600s and I’d think of the people who had worked at this table before me and think how interesting it would be if the table could talk.

Once we’d finished baking, we stayed to the end to talk to people about the recipes and what 17th century food was like. It was good fun because food is a thing most people can connect with because most people cook so I ended up having some quite in-depth discussions, speculating on the occasions when the biscuits might have been eaten and what with and were they dipped into a hot drink or eaten after dinner as a digestive, etc etc.

When I popped to the tea room at the end of the day to check on the bread and chutney situation, the loaf was now a few crumbs on some napkins and the chutney was half empty. One of the gardeners was in there and she asked if I was the one who baked the bread and said the gardeners had loved it! They snaffled half of it in about ten minutes and loved the chutney! Even the lady I was shadowing on the baking said she had tasted it and enjoyed it!

So I think that means they love me too, surely? Isn’t that what that means? What to bake for next time though? Suggestions please.

Signing off, Laura Maisey, (future) 3rd Countess of Ham and Lady of the Manor at Ham House.

A day at Waltham Place (or: I want to live on a farm too!)

Yesterday, I had the most fabulous day out. Someone had got me an early birthday present, which was a place on a course about preserving fruit. The course was on a farm called Waltham Place just outside Maidenhead.

The journey there was quite eventful, after coming out of the station, seeing a bus already at the bus stop, leaping on and being what I can only describe as ‘adopted’ by two ladies on the bus. After I had asked if the bus went in the direction I needed, the ladies said it didn’t but I could get off near an airfield and take a short walk to get to the farm. I got out my purse to pay and the driver reminded me I needed the exact money. After scraping around among my change, the ladies almost got into a fight offering me the 20p that I was short of!

The journey to the farm then was smooth, after another man getting off at the same stop, pointed me down the right road. As I approached the main entrance, there didn’t seem to be any signs of where I should be…

I was once again thrust on the mercy of the locals as I helplessly ran after a man I saw in the distance and asked where the course was being held. He pointed me up the road to the Ormandy Centre which, of course, I now remembered reading about in my notes before coming.

I found the centre eventually and was greeted by Adrian, the chef, and Nicki, his ‘gopher’ (her own words) and three of the other women on the course, for of course it was all women! The other women arrived and we started the day with chitchat, tea and biscuits.

Everything they gave us was made (and often grown too) on the farm. Adrian does all the cooking there. And that means everything. Absolutely everything. No help. He’s surprisingly calm and good-natured for a man who’s responsible for the feeding of a family and entire staff of such a big estate.

So our teas and coffees contained milk from the cows in the next door fields and the only non-farm ingredient in our macaroons and Viennese whirls was the sugar. The flour is milled on the farm, the milk from the cows is turned into cream, butter and cheese, and the eggs are harvested daily from the chickens who live in the next field to the cows. It was like taking a trip into the past, all the things we were offered to eat were homemade with produce from the surrounding fields. I started planning what my own small garden might be capable of and, so long as I don’t mind living on tomatoes, chillis and herbs, I could totally do this self-sufficient thing too. Maybe.

After tea and biscuits, we got stuck into a bit of teaching. Adrian gave us notes and talked us through the process of jam-making, the essential components and what does and doesn’t work. It wasn’t quite as ordered as that though. There were regular delightful tangents off into the obscure – long discussions about what goes into commercially produced jam, whether to keep one’s jam in the fridge, what fruits work and how long to keep jam for (a jar of Adrian’s, made in 1996, is still going strong today).

We were then given aprons and invited into the kitchen. We approached cautiously and told that this morning, the jam tasks were: raspberry jam, three fruit marmalade, lemon curd and blackcurrant jam.

The other women piped up, excited about one of the other of the jams. They were paired up and given lemon curd, marmalade and raspberry jam. Finally there was just me and the blackcurrant, which Adrian said he’d help me with.

I was presented with a pot of blackcurrants which I went off to a corner with and put on a hob to heat.

I heated my blackcurrants for quite a long time as they needed to reduce down by quite a lot before I could add the sugar. While the others were lemon zesting, butter melting or draining their fruit out….

… I stood next to my blackcurrant pan and watched. I started to feel like the slow kid at the back of the class, still trying to work out times tables while the others progressed onto long division….

It boiled for quite a while before Adrian gave me the ok to add the sugar and mash the blackcurrants a little bit. By the time I was pouring out my jam, even the slower lemon curd lot were long finished and on their second round of tea and biscuits. They do say, though, that good things come to those who wait, and my pot of blackcurrants yielded the most jars. Check out my harvest!

We then stopped and had lunch, made by Adrian, of course. It was leek and potato soup and bread, fresh from the oven, spread with tasty yellow butter from the farm.

After a long chat about recycling with the other ladies and me digging in to the bread, again and again, Nicki finally cleared away lunch, thank goodness, and Adrian talked us through different ways to preserve fruit.

So the afternoon tasks were ketchup, tomato chutney and bottled fruit. I ended up on the bottled fruit but had someone with me this time. We chopped and peeled the fruit and packed it into the jars to wait for our syrup, which was just a basic mixture of sugar and water. This we poured over the plums and rhubarbs. For the pears, though, we did white wine, sugar and cinnamon. Once all the fruit and syrups were in the jars, we put the lids on loosely and baked them on a very low heat for an hour.

In this hour, we all donned wellies and coats for a walk around the farm. We saw the chickens who provide the eggs…

…the cows who’s milk was in our tea….

…and the gardens which are beautiful and colourful in summer…

By the time we got back to the kitchen, our fruit was ready, the chutney was thick enough to go in jars and our day’s work was put on the table for admiring.

By this time, there was nothing else to do but to have another round of tea, accompanied by two gorgeous homemade cakes (a tea brack and a Victoria sponge)….

….and to chatter about what a brilliant day it had been and what other courses were they running and could we come on all of them please and how I wish I could become a lady of leisure and just spend all day homemaking everything I wanted to eat and not have any processed food in the house and o, if only! If only! Get thee behind me, Heinz, for I shall consume only homemade ketchup from this day forth!… Maybe… If I get the time to make some tomorrow after work… If I’m not busy practising piano and trying to become a world famous concert pianist.

A lovely Irish lady who was rushing off a little early to pick up her son from school had heard the story of my arrival and offered me a lift to the station. So all of sudden, in a bit of a rush, I was accepting her kind offer, grabbing my bag and running off. The journey home was fuss free and Danda looked very pleased when I arrived home with my crop from the day….

We then spend an evening, nibbling some of each, especially the beautiful beautiful lemon curd, which is thick and spreadable and divine on bread.

I honestly can’t think of anything about this day that I didn’t enjoy. If you are anywhere near Waltham Place Farm, I can fully recommend their day courses, for the experience itself, even if you’re not actually going to become the best jam maker the world has ever seen!

Advertising nonsense

The other day I was flipping through one of the many catalogues we get sent at work. They are full of new products on the market and cool discounted deals and all the usual advertising jargon you see in the world of products of this sort. Occasionally, though, I come across something which is utter crap.

The most offensive one I saw recently was this nonsense tag line for a coffee company…

What can this possibly mean? Hand-roasted coffee? Hand picked, maybe. Even handmade. But hand roasted? How is that even possible? The workers at Union have limbs which can reach temperatures of over 100 degrees so they simply hold the coffee in their hands for a while? Or they have huge walk-in ovens so they each take a handful of coffee and walk in the oven to caress the coffee beans gently whilst they roast, in the process roasting themselves alive and getting third degree burns, but they don’t mind. They sacrifice their bodies for the sake of bringing us ‘hand-roasted’ coffee. How lovely.

What?! What can it mean? Hand-roasted? Any suggestions?

Next up, a tea company.

Design led. Is that supposed to be a good thing? I’m not sure why that would seem good. Do I want a tea company which is taste led? So I know I’m getting a nice tasty cup of tea? Or even innovation led? So I know that maybe I’m getting something new and interesting. Perhaps a fantastic new tea experience which could change my life.

No! This tea company doesn’t give two hoots about the taste, the innovation, the potential for new experiences. It couldn’t give a cuppa for my morning being made or ruined on the strength of my tea-drinking experience. No. What they care about is the design.

The design. That’s right. They’ll throw any old PG Tips in the box without a care in the world. So long as the design is good, this company is happy. They are design led. Good to know.

The next nonsense is geography-specific.

Stonewall Kitchen, advertising their product in a UK magazine, which is being sent out to small delis and shops around the country, are enticing me to buy their product and stock it in my shop by telling me that I will recognise their product from ‘artisan shops in the US.’

O, thanks for pointing that out. I couldn’t think where I recognised it from. I just knew I’d seen it somewhere!

Because I’m always hanging out in artisan shops in the US.

Always.

I’m never out of them.

I practically live in them.

Ridiculous.

The worst landlord ever

When I was in my second year at uni, my friend and I decided to move off campus into our own place. We looked at a few places but settled on a flat on a council estate, mainly because it was over the road from university.

When we looked at it, however, it was a little rough around the edges, to say the least. There were chips in the paintwork in most of the bedrooms. There was a huge hole with piping exposed in the bathroom wall. There were odds and ends of crockery in the cupboards. Nothing had been cleaned. There were no curtains or even a curtain pole in my room.

The estate agent confidently assured us that everything would be sorted by the time we moved in. There would be professional cleaners and builders etc who would get the place ready before we arrived.

We found two flatmates to fill the other rooms and, a week later, my friend picked up the keys and headed there with all her belongings, ready for the exciting new adventure. I was working until early afternoon so it would be a few hours before I got there.

I got a phonecall shortly after she had walked through the door, which I thought would be full of excitement and anticipation. Instead it went something like this:

“It looks exactly the same as when we viewed it the other week. There’s still a big hole in the wall and it’s a mess.”

She called the landlord and said there was still a hole in the bathroom wall and that it wasn’t safe. His response?

“What’s the problem? Are you going to climb into the hole?!” followed by a little chuckle at his own wittiness.

When I got there after work, we donned house clothes and yellow gloves and got to cleaning. We packed up all the bits in the kitchen which had been left and put our own stuff in the cupboards.

When the landlord eventually came round to sort out the hole in the bathroom wall, he brought a man with him who, I got the distinct impression, it seemed he’d picked up randomly on the street while driving to the flat.

At one point, the man was cleaning the oven which, we had insisted, needed a proper industrial clean out as it was so dirty. The man, who spoke no English, just kind of muddled through and my friend had decided to keep an eye on him. This was how she saved our cutlery from destruction as he reached for a knife to start scraping the dirt off the inside of the oven.

“No!” she said, speaking slowly and clearly, as though talking to a child. “We use these to eat with. You need a sponge or a scourer.”

He also tried using the oven cleaner he’d found, on the inside of the bath, which he’d been asked to clean. Again, Sophie stepped in, speaking slowly and clearly and handing him some bathroom detergent spray.

That was just a hint of things to come. He owned the flat upstairs too and the girls living there had some hilariously bad set up where he would pitch up every month and collect the rent in cash, all £1400 of it. We gave him cheques for a while before insisting he give us his bank details so we could pay him properly, by bank transfer. That honestly took about six months from first asking him before he gave us them.

When there was a water leak upstairs because someone left the tap on and water was flooding out through our light switches and down the walls, he said there was no need to get anyone out to look at the damage or fix anything because it would be fine.

He’d show up at odd moments and start talking nonsense. Like the time he turned up at my birthday party and started rambling on about this idea he had to store memories on a computer chip so as not to forget them.

He was from Sri Lanka and would just disappear off there without any forewarning, leaving no-one in charge of his business dealings. So, for no discernible reason, we wouldn’t be able to contact him for a month. He didn’t see what the problem was.

He once threatened to turn up, pack my bags and put them outside. When I pointed out that he needed to go through a court and have a properly authorised eviction notice to do anything at all, he flipped out, said he didn’t care about my ‘rights’, and said we owed him money. It’s all hilarious now, but honestly, it was quite ridiculous.

The more I think about it, the sillier it seems. After we moved out, he insisted two people’s rent hadn’t been paid and so kept the whole deposit (four people’s rent). When I called to ask for the other two people’s rent back, he said he’d ‘told the police on me’. I said the police don’t get involved with rental disputes as it’s not violent crime. He stopped picking the phone up when I called.

And that was my experience with the worst landlord I have ever had. It was like living in a comedy.

What runs through my head when I’m falling asleep

This is specific to last night –

Gosh I’m tired. I wonder if I remembered to do everything at work today? Bins out? Yes. Lights out? Yes. Yeah, I did everything. O wait, I didn’t leave the air con on! O no. Dammit.

Is my alarm set? What should I make tomorrow? Banana bread probably. Muffins maybe.

Ok, mini self test. Criminal law. Theft. Where’s the definition found? Erm. Erm. Sleepy. Section 1. I think. Section 1 of the Theft Act. 19 something. Brain slowing down. 1968 I think. That’s all it can handle. Self test over.

Just remembered, I did leave the air con on at work. Phew.

I wonder where my trainers are. I haven’t seen them in days.

My phone needs charging. Too lazy to get out of bed and get the charger.

O no. I need a wee. If I go to sleep really quickly, maybe my body will forget then I can just go in the morning. Nope, I still need one. Ignore it.

Did I turn the oven off? I think so. Mmm, dinner was tasty this evening. Salmon. Mmm. I think I’ll do something chickeny tomorrow for dinner.

Should I try and remember something about mortgages? Stack v Dowden. And Tulk v Moxhay. Hmmm. I don’t remember why they’re important though. O well. Sleep time.

You’ll always be a part of me… I’m part of you indefinitelyyyy… Boy don’t you know you can’t escape me… Oo darlin cause you’ll always be me babyyyyy… What on earth? Go away Mariah.

I can’t wait til my exams are finished.

I wonder if it might be sunny tomorrow.

I love cake.

My worst food disasters

I had a recent one and it’s been haunting me and making me think of other kitchen disasters I have had.

I’ve tried making chocolate mousse a few times and can’t quite get it sorted. I don’t know whether I’m not whipping the egg whites enough or something but it seems fine when I make it. It’s the right texture and all that. Then I refrigerate it for a while and when I take it out, it’s just solid. It’s not light and fluffy, it’s heavy and un-airy. And it depresses me. It make ME feel heavy and un-airy. I don’t try to make chocolate mousse anymore.

I made some flapjacks a while ago. They were going to be a present for someone so I made sure I did a good job. When I took them out of the oven, they looked lovely. I left them to cool and went in the front room… Came back ten minutes later… They were black! I’d left them to cool on top of the oven, with the hob on! I NEVER leave the hob on. I’m really strict about turning things off with the oven and hobs. Lovely apricot flapjacks, cooked and finished and ready to eat… and ruined.

When I lived abroad, as opposed to one specific disaster, we just had an ongoing disaster concerning our diet, which was mainly that we were 18 and didn’t really know much about cooking. We mainly ate plates of rice with something added, eg rice with sweetcorn mixed in, rice with chopped onion mixed in, rice with butternut squash, rice with rice. We also made these dumpling-type things which were just flour and water with something added, eg, dumplings with sweetcorn, dumplings with onions…..

My latest one was a marmalade cake. The recipe said to use self raising flour AND baking powder. I thought it seemed wrong but I trusted it anyway. So I made the mixture, put it in the oven and checked on it twenty minutes later. Disaster! The mixture was bubbling like crazy and expanding at an alarming rate. It had overflowed out of the loaf tin and formed a little cake mountain on the bottom of the oven. I didn’t know what to do about it, I turned down the heat and watched it closely. When it eventually stopped exploding, it then sunk into the empty space that had been created from all the bubbles in the middle of the loaf. It looked awful! I felt like a failure. The next morning I woke up and tried it again, plain flour this time. It worked!

I had used the Great British Bake Off cookbook for it and later found out the recipe was one that a guy used then got eliminated! His had sunk too! And then they just put the recipe in the book without changing it! Madness. For anyone else wanting to make a sticky marmalade tea loaf from that cookbook, use plain flour!

P.S. 21 days till first exam. Today’s study topic – Theft. And I can’t find any of my Land Law notes! Oops!