Bad Blogger & Barcelona Bear

I can't believe it was February when I last wrote something on this here blog. I should get 3 points on my blogging licence and a £60 fine.

During the five years previous to the last blog I was working in a school kitchen as assistant chef, I still don't know to this day who I was assistant to because as far as I could tell I was doing ALL the work, but to be fair the 'Head Chef' did take ALL the credit, so I suppose the job was split evenly!!

Being in that kitchen (nervous shudder) reminded me off 'Barcelona Bear" - when I was about 27 I took my daughter to Barcelona to stay with a friend, one of our days out took us to Barcelona zoo, not a lush green expanse of man made savanna with herds of happy, well behaved wild animals doing wild animal stuff. No. Barcelona zoo was a more a vast concreted landscape that, if photographed from space, would look like the surface of the moon and confuse astrologers - it was cratered with lots of small pits into which was dropped and chained a single animal, mainly bears, monkeys and wolves. The pit, the worst place on earth any creature should be kept in, had driven each creature mad and had thus become the safest place on earth to house them. I remember the bear.

Poor old brown bear, chained deep in his concrete pit. We looked down on him and watched as he rocked back and forth, driven mad by by the same view of grey concrete which surrounded him, driven mad by the same routine of nothingness, no other bear friends to talk to, not even a bare branch to look at. His chains limited his movement so in the end he just stayed in the same spot. He was tatty and thin. He just rocked back and forth, back and forth.

Well that was me, Barcelona Dinner Lady, driven mad by the same stainless steel surroundings, my limited movement confined to the perimeters of the kitchen, the same daily routine and listening to the constant, incessant moaning and whingeing of the 'Head Chef'. All HC did was repeatedly moan "I'm so thirsty" "ooh, I've got a really dry mouth" "I'm sooooo thirsty" " I need a drink" etc etc....these procrastinations would continue for a couple of hours until someone finally made a drink,  HC would forget to drink and spend the following two hours whingeing about how HC had forgotten to drink the tea and how thirsty HC still was. HC would also moan daily and weekly abut toothache or hip ache but never make a point of visiting a doctor or dentist. HC would moan about being too hot, too hungry, too busy (?? too busy doing what ??? Moaning?? there was nothing else going on in HC's direction) It slowly drove me mad. In my head I was screaming SHUT UP!!!

In March I escaped and started my new career within a company, a much larger pit to roam around in, lots of interesting things to look at and plenty of other friendly bears to talk to. A much happier concrete crater. I am still scarred though, I haven't been interested in food or cooking since my lucky escape but am sure and hope it will come back....I just need  a break.


Please note the bears in the photo were not harmed. The photo was taken under strict Animal Welfare Guidelines and after the shoot the bears were then given a huge hug, rub down, fed some honey and returned to their safe and lovingly reconstructed natural environment!

Sausage & Chocolate Cake

It was G's birthday on Tuesday so I made a belated birthday cake. Seeing as he and his brother only eat food from 'Shades of Brown' food groups (chocolate, chips, chicken nuggets, sausages and burgers) I decided to play it safe and make a Sausage & Chocolate Cake.

It looks disgusting but the boys still ate it quite happily, even in the uncertainty of whether the sausages were real or not!!

Simply make a chocolate cake, cover with chocolate butter cream and scatter with cheapest sausages you can buy.....delicious!

Or do what I did and make sausages out of sugar fondant, twisting the ends in plastic and then paint them a sallow fleshy pink colour!

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! I should be 'celebrating' a whole year of blogging, but as I have been such a lazy blogger I have to deny myself the honour.

I don't have any new year's resolutions as such, just the determination to leave my awful job. I am even toying with the idea of going in on Tuesday with a letter of resignation . . . leaving me a month to find a new job. If I hadn't just spent the last two years trying to find that elusive new job then I might just take a leap of faith and quit. But it's too much of risk with a debt hanging over me. But I can feel myself already breaking out in a nervous rash from the thought of that kitchen, that school, those rude teachers and pupils, the dire menus, the repetitiveness, the moaning, the lack of ingredients, the whole sham of it. Please snow so they will close the school!!!!

I have got to find a new job . . . . .

Butterfly Cakes

I haven't been doing much interesting cooking recently, mainly due to lack of funds. We have spent the summer eating salad, jacket spuds and pasta, old favorites which I have already blogged about! I have been a very lazy blogger, no excuse, just need to get myself motivated!

I made these butterfly cakes for little F's 5th birthday party back in August. They were just decorated with thinly rolled marzipan shaped with a butterfly cutter, painted with diluted colour paste and edible glitter (which stayed with me for days!)

J told me that one of her friends, who was just about to eat her cake, had a real butterfly landed on her shoulder and there it sat for quite a while!

Le Tour de France

G's step-father has an apartment in Avoriaz, right in the heart of the French Alps. Stage eight of this year's Tour de France just happened to be finishing there so it seemed fairly stupid not to make the most of a perfect opportunity. So last Friday we made the ten hour drive, arriving at two in the morning, creased, tired and very excited.

It was the most fantastic day, I have never experienced anything like it, the people, the colour, the atmosphere, the noise, the carnival and those amazing cyclists. And it was all there for free! It must be the only major sporting event with so many world class athletes that you can go and watch without spending a fortune on tickets.

Vile Morsels No.1

I have been such a bad girl and haven't blogged for over a month! I have no reasonable excuse for this and I certainly can't blame my hectic social life or highly stressful career!

Due to a very small budget and the fact that we go out cycling as soon as G gets back from work at seven, we tend to eat quite lightly when we get home, shattered. There wouldn't be anything less boring than a daily photo and ode to the jacket potato?

I was recently remembering the most disgusting sausage roll I ever had to eat and this started me thinking about all the food I have eaten under duress, and how the hell I managed to swallow some of the vilest pap ever.

And so to that horrible sausage roll . . . . there was a girl with whom I became 'friends' on the basis that she lived over the road from me and we were both starting at the same secondary school. In my teenage naivety I looked up to her and thought she was the last word on every subject a teenage girl would need to know about - fashion, music, politics, boys etc.... in fact she was a complete and utter B*t*h and she ruined my life at secondary school. It seems fitting then that her mother is in fact the first recipient of my Worse Cook Ever Award and should be jailed for heinous crimes against sausage rolls.

It was the said girl's thirteenth birthday and she had invited four of us to join her for a picnic in the grim field next to her house. Her mother gave us some really grubby, greyed Tupperware boxes full of picnic 'treats' to carry the full fifty yards across to the grim field where we could sit on the barren ground, in January, and eat. Maybe it was a blessing that the first box contained the sausage rolls, this effectively killed my appetite and spared me the horrors that lurked in the other boxes. The cold, half raw sausage roll had the clammy texture of a fat finger that had been floating, bloated, in the sea for weeks; as I bit into it my teeth pushed through the thick pastry, that could easily have just been a layer of neat lard, and then came the nerve-piercing squeak as my tooth enamel scratched down against the gritty texture of the 'sausage' centre. I felt all the blood drain from my head as I tried to control the gag reaction that was desperate to launch the contents of my mouth into the grim field. I held it in for seconds whilst I grabbed a paper napkin into which, at the first unnoticed opportunity, I 'transferred' the yuk. Even now the thought of it makes me shudder. I have never in my entire life, so far, found a sausage roll that comes close to the sheer nastiness of that one . Congratulations Mrs. K!

Elizabeth David

There were two moments in my life that I can still vividly remember, two moments which made me think about food differently. The first was my tenth birthday, my parents took us out for dinner to an Italian restaurant in Whitstable called Giovanni's, I think it might have even been the very first time I had been to a 'proper' restaurant? I had lamb chops. I will never forget how they tasted and my amazement at the flavour of the dried rosemary they had been sprinkled with, I had never tasted anything like it before and it was wonderful.

The second moment was just after my daughter R was born, we were staying with R's paternal grandparents for a few months. I spent a lot of time with R's Great Aunt N who lived next door. R's father would be away working on a film somewhere and her grandfather,C, would be down in the hop garden helping with the harvest. N and I would spend the mornings making soups or stews, at lunch time C and a small group of polish hop pickers would arrive for lunch. They were the simplest, most humble of lunches and the happiest of meals. Most of the ingredients were from my little vegetable garden or soups made from the biggest and most perfect Puffballs which kept appearing in The Valley that year, to this day I have never seen the like again.

During this time of discovery N gave me one of her copies of Elizabeth David's French Provincial Cooking, I read every page of it and was seduced by the modesty, the simplicity and the respectful understanding of food. I treasure this book, it is one of the tiny number of core books from which a million celebrity cook books have been spawned. Everyone should own a copy!