Hexing House-Keeping

In my wildest dreams, I want to be a Retro-Housewife. It is my ardent desire for my darling husband and two beautiful daughters return from their respective places of work and school to a perfectly coiffured wife/mother, sporting a 1950s frock, nipped in at all the right places and lipstick applied without a single smudge. The house will be gleaming like an advert for Glint, it will NOT smell of my Lambert & Butler smokes (1950s housewives only smoke in the evenings alongside their Martinis, replete with green olives) and the healthy, but sumptuous, dinner will be ready to dish up as I twirl around the kitchen, my dirndl skirt flaring out provocatively, yet efficiently.

God! Reality bites hard, doesn't it?!

For health reasons, I have not been at work for some time and have thus had Mr Muscle, Flash, Zoflora, Cif and Domestos at my disposal on a daily basis. The house has shone but due to aforementioned health reasons (let's call them HR, because we all know a bastard in HR) I have not been quite as diligent as usual. The place is clean, but the lustre is not there. It's tidy, but it's not immaculate. This annoys me immensely, but for the time being, it will just have to do.

However, baking and cooking still must be done.

I am too much of a cheapskate to pay for mass-produced cakes and biscuits and will therefore make my own on a regular basis. It is rare for us not to have at least one flavour of home-made cake in a plastic bag on the kitchen worktop. Indeed, at the moment, we have coffee and walnut, and lemon and coconut, which I smear with raspberry jam. I tend to get free-range eggs via a contact at work, but as I am not in touch with him at the moment, eggs come from Eddie the Grocer, round the back, who leers at me whenever I walk into his shop. He looked a bit glum the other day, so I brought him round samples of my cakes (in the hope that he'd offer to sell them for me). He just looked furtive, slipped them into the stock room, mumbled something about it being a good job he was married and then ducked as his Mrs stomped around the cleaning products aisle.

Despite my best intentions, something ALWAYS goes wrong with my baking. The last two times I have made triple chocolate brownies, they have ended up like breeze blocks and thus landed in the bin. My quiches burst through the ceramic beads which I ladle on to prevent the pasty rising during blind-baking and look like the surface of the moon, and I can regularly undercook the veg. Last time I made fresh bread, instead of using Bread Flour, I reached for the regular Plain. And then one of Mr Parsnip's teeth cracked as he took a bite with his tomato and basil soup (home-made!). That cost quite a lot of money in dentistry a few days later...

Today, as #1 is off to Normandy at 4.30am tomorrow, I decided to make a lovely 'Ta-ta, See You, Hello Peace & Quiet Dinner' to see her off with which involves chicken casserole and something I have been threatening for a while: a baked chocolate and mint cheesecake.

Now, normally, my cheesecakes turn out spectacularly. Even #2, who is averse to anything not wrapped in plastic, enjoys them. I have turned out Baileys, Tia Maria and fresh lemon ones to date. So, off I toddled to the Co-op and spent about £8.00 on the ingredients. Philadelphia Cheese (low-fat); Fair-Trade black chocolate (so I am not exploiting the workers); free-range eggs (so those poor chickens' bums get a break); 'Light' sugar (for obvious reasons); and 50% extra free McVities' Digestive biscuits...cause I am a cheapskate and always look for a bargain. Despite not wearing the 1950s frock, having contemporary music on very loud and being caught boogying dramatically by Mr P wherein he made me jump out of my skin and blush somewhat at the movements I was then making with my hips, I did twirl around, got the dirty dishes done as I whisked the mix, melted the chocolate and made the base...

I had a spring-form tin ready for it all. It was looking fantastic. I even got adventurous and 'marbled' the mix with the melted chocolate, forming a cobweb of patterns. My smile of pride stretched from ear to ear!

Then I picked the tin up to place into the pre-heated oven (160degC) and the f*cking bottom fell out of the tin. I had got the wrong 'bottom'. 

The squawking out of me was both blue and desperate. Thank God #1 walked in at that point and offered to assist as I was covered in raw chocolate/mint cheesecake mix. Mr P, with the doors thus being wide open, heard my expostulations, came in, saw the mess and set to to help me clear up.

#1 told me it was OK to cry. And I almost did. Purely for the former beauty of the thing. 

However, it's OK to cry over spilt milk, but not over spilt cheesecake mix. 

It was salvaged, turned into a gloop and baked. So we now have chocolate/mint 'crunch' for pud tonight.

During the mop-up operation, #2 came in to snitch on her sister who had used some rather nasty profanities on her while my back was turned. And for once, I simply couldn't be fagged intervening. White mess dripped from the worktop, down the cupboard doors and onto the floor which I had scrubbed twice yesterday (twice because the bloody kitten decided to pee on the lino in the evening). I snapped at her to sort it out herself and she stared at the mess.

'Has it gone wrong, then?' she asked.

'No, it's bloody marvellous, isn't it?' I retorted, somewhat obviously sarcastically.

Mr P was on his hands and knees at this point, mopping up the gloop. With reassuring 'shush-shush' noises and an explanation to #2 of how sarcastic angry women can be, she vanished with a bit of a flounce of indignation.

So, the proof of this pudding is certainly going to be in the eating. It looks like a nasty brownish/grey mess and I am still heart-broken at the loss of my cobweb. Mr P is going to have bacon butties at early dawn tomorrow since we have to get up at Stupid O'Clock. I'll probably bloody burn those, too. 

One of these days, I will produce a meal fit for a Queen. I just hope it isn't Queen Anne I.

Christmas with the Mildews...

Have you ever felt as though the weeks pass by without you being able to catch up on yourself? I am sure at least one of our two dear readers does. This year has flown by with much event - my mother has sent me to Coventry at least five times; I have had three jobs; hexed my ex three times and got engaged once. I'm quite a busy bee, wouldn't you say?

I am 100% convinced that it will be Christmas Tree-putting-up-time soon. I always try to hold off until the very last, as I tend to put all the chocolate decorations on the tree and then worry about them melting, so I eat them within 24 hours. But this year, I am resolved to be a bit more stalwart.

The week before last, as I was driving home, listening, as is my wont, to Radio 2, Chris Evans was interviewing a chap from Fortnum and Mason, about their £20,000 hamper. The interview itself was just a load of blah, but I was rather disgusted that Mr Evans proceeded to play a Christmas song and banged on about what a 'marvellous time of the year' it was. No. It was bloody November. Just after Bonfire Night: nothing going on. IT IS NOT A MARVELLOUS TIME OF THE YEAR...

Everywhere I go, I am being bombarded with Christmas. As I am one of the most disorganised people you could ever have the misfortune to meet, I find it rather offensive that I am having reminders of Christmas stuffed down my neck.

Christmas in the Mouldsworth B.M. (Before Marriage) household, was a very sedate affair. I can't remember the tree ever going up (if at all) before 20th December, and there were never any presents or cards left under the tree. This lack of tradition engendered in me an impatience and inability to maintain a surprise which still lives with me today: for example, four weeks ago, I went out with the view to attempting to organise presents - I bought stacks...then I gave them all out the following weekend. Rubbish...

I have to be honest and say that, on the whole, my Christmas Days are a total wash-out. I have this ridiculous notion that they will be romantic, snowy, sparkly and wit-filled, and in reality, they are boring, damp, grey and twit-filled. Last year, I spent Christmas alone, excepting a bottle of Toilet Duck and the bog brush - and I was in my element! I had been to church; made a sarcastic comment to the priest about Church Service +1 (having attended Christmas Eve, too, and discovering a repeat), eaten a bit of smoked cod and brocolli, and girded my loins for the presence of an ex who was most unwanted, but had begged an audience to personally present me with a Christmas card on his own miserable Christmas Day. It was unutterably dull, and had I had the opportunity to work, I would have done.

My first Christmas with the ex was a very excitable affair as he liked real trees, whereas I was used to plastic naff ones. I smoked myself into oblivion, as the trend, in 1992, was for sparkly parcels dangling from the tree, which were exorbitantly priced. Each joyfully smoked packet of 10 or 20 B & H was wrapped in purple or gold spangly paper, tied with a bit of gold string, and suspended from the branches of the tree. I saved us a fortune in decorations, (but not in fags) which appealled greatly to the ex's frugal Yorkshire mentality.

In order to save even more money that Christmas, the ex went out shooting and bagged a couple of hares. I had frozen loads of blackberries from the autumn hedgerows and blanched plenty of organic (read, covered in caterpillars and grubs) vegetables and planned a Christmas lunch fit for a poor, young couple, living in sin.

Having marinaded the hare in left-over lager from the night before, and glazed it with honey and blackberries, the ex and I decided to cycle up to the local pub for a cup of cheer while the hare roasted. The weather was foul: sleeting, bitterly cold, icy wind, and the roaring fire in The Hare and Hounds was most welcoming...so much so, that we got stuck in to a fair number of pints of Old Scrotum before I realised, with a start, that I had a hare to care for.

We precariously cycled back, wobbling more than was quite safe on an extremely fast country lane, and fell into the house...to be met by a wall of black smoke.

The hare had shrunk to the size of a small guinea pig and was totally unsalvageable - apart from giving it to the cat. The ex and I looked at each other in dismay, and, ever one to make light of a situation, I rifled through our tiny freezer compartment and rustled up some chicken nuggets to go with the carrots and broccoli. It wasn't actually a bad meal, all things considered, and the cat thoroughly enjoyed his offerings. It took until New Year for the smell of smoke to vanish from the kitchen, even though I kept the back door open as much as was possible with the bitter cold - then again, the gap under the stable door was so enormous, allowing mice to walk through upright if they so wished, that it didn't make that much difference.

So this year, I vowed that the girls and I would be going out for Christmas Lunch and there would be little, if no, palava. However, all the best laid plans go to waste with me, I have left it way too late to book anywhere, and I now have another mouth to feed in the shape of Charles Parsnip. I am considering how to complain enough to get out of doing it - if it was just the girls and myself, no doubt there would be three different meals to cook: I would be on my fish or seafood, #1 would be on the chicken, and #2 would pick at bread and Nutella. However, Mr P appears to like his traditional meal with all the trimmings as has been evinced by mention of joints, roasts, Yorkshire pudding, sausages wrapped in bacon etc. and I am starting to get frown lines above my nose from thinking too hard.

It's a pity the chippy isn't open...