quelle erqsome...

Happy New Year!

Matthew and I are off to party a little. Hilarious tales and pictures of me in my party frock to follow. Have a good night now! xx

just as the programme got interesting

Half an hour ago I learnt that Friday is getting married. How fab is that?!

Adam and Joe make Spot the Cultural Reference via the filmed manipulation of cuddly toys even more fun than it is normally. Unfortunately they're now off the telly. (For real, the show is no longer on the telly.)

Matthew loves them.

Matthew borrowed a Best Of DVD from his bassist Paddy last night. He's watching it now, which makes concentrating on anything that requires an iota of articulateness incredibly difficult. Though the fact I only had four hours sleep last night may also be contributing to this. It was a long night south of the river drinking and debating the Lesbian Taboo, for which I was given honorary lesbian status to join, and chasing a small cat with a piece of red twine.

This is what I've done today:

This is also what I've done pretty much every day in Crouch End since my holidays began. But today it was down in Brockley at one of my favourite cafes in London. Silly name aside, you haven't relaxed until you've spent an entire afternoon slowly reading newspapers and debating Slavoj Zizek's latest contribution to the Guardian. (Seriously disappointing, rather seemed like the beer/frog tangent was included to boost his word count.)

I can't ignore it any longer. Adam and Joe is calling.

london in fog

Between 18 December and 22 December London was covered in a thick veil of fog. My nan, who is rather reminicent of a short, bald Ewok (but sweeter and with a laugh that can stop traffic), said that she hadn't seen fog like it since she was a child before the war. Back then fog was fog and children knew not to run into the road without looking.

Road conditions, cot deaths and airplane delays were all blamed on the fog by the less salubrious newspapers who strove to shock the public with their headlines:

KILLER FOG! FOG LINKED TO TERROR PLOT! MI6 TO INVESTIGATE FOG WHEREABOUTS 23 DEC!

But I loved it. 'If we can't have snow, at least we have fog' I was oft heard to say. Unfortunately I spoke too soon. The fog -- killer or benign -- left us on the evening of 22 Dec, and left me with a sinking feeling that the weather on Christmas Day would be just like any other.

plush toys roasting on an open fire

I've been extraordinarily lax about posting these past couple of weeks. I didn't mean to be. However, it turns out, that those shackles, the ones that tie me to my desk, the ones that make me panic if I'm more than five feet from a computer, THEY'RE NOT REAL.

Everything in London smells like wet dog -- happy Christmas from the... the city of... Is London the city of anything? I was going to call it the Big Smoke, but that's got to be somewhere in the States. Not Chicago (they're Windy), maybe Detroit? Maybe it is the Big Smoke. Who cares, today and yesterday it's been Home of the Wet Dog.

I've only got a half day today and already Author McBlurry has demanded a larger font and allowed my computer to wipe his manuscript the second I pressed Save. (Stop arguing, it was clearly his fault.) So with three hours to go and a steadfast determination to do no work at all I present you with:

The best picture of yarn ever. It's pretty much 100% plastic, but I don't have to feel it, I just have to look at it. Pretty, no? The Yarnographers Forum has been making me drool in a manner quite inconducive to pretending to be doing anything productive. Perhaps it's the tadpole-esque cordiness, or maybe that sheen sparking in the flash light, I don't know, but there's something about the aesthetic of this picture that makes me quiver.

  Sadly the sheer gorgeosity of this yarn doesn't work in the larger photo quite as I had hoped. But the lack of sharpness just makes this Yarntini sock yarn all the softer, don't it? It's the colours that matter anyway -- and Jessie at Yarntini is like the Colourway Fairy. Leah has pictures of her new Madder Rib socks which illustrate how awesomely delicious this yarn really is.

Actually, I spent most of last night dreaming about how to dye the perfect colourway, Yarntini style. How many times must she have had to swatch up half a leg to make sure the proportions were right? It's the sort of skill I could only dream of.

Yesterday I discovered One Planet Yarn and Fibre, and I have very quickly fallen in love with every aspect of it. Fair trade! For knitters! Hurrah! It's (surprisingly?) hard to find fairly traded handspun/dyed yarns which do not subsequently necessitate selling your kidney to pay for it, and yet at One Planet they've managed to bring together some incredible-looking yarns and needles. And a sock knitting kit from Sereknitty. Now. I know I don't need it. I know I have the needles and the stitch markers and the sock yarn. But it's so pretty! It's very tempting to pull out my credit card now, but I am at work. So restraint must be shown.

I thought I was led here by AdamKnits, but in fact he showed the way to Yarn Pirate and she was the one to link up One Planet.

And that's three hours. Granted it's not taken me three hours to write this, but internet noodling a-plenty. I did actually get a little work done, but it was so around my trawling for yarn sales and giggling as I caught up with blogs I've not read for ages. Lovely, no? It was all I could do not to sit at my desk finishing up the last few rounds to Matthew's socks, which are veryverynearlyclose to be complete it is actually killing me dead not being able to knit.

So next up: Emmms' resolutions, Year in Review and (at last!) pictures. (Promise.)

pictures? i didn't say anything about pictures...

Matthew and I are thinking about making our own pickled onions. The fog has lifted and this is what we've decided. Here are some websites that may help us on our way:

Douglas Adams would have be proud of this one.

The Foody recommends this way.

Historically speaking, pickled onions make a great Ploughman's.

I suppose we're just determined to become self-sufficientish.

I've got a Mushroom and Tofu Pie, topped with a flaky crust, in the oven that needs attending.

Happy Christmas!!

bitter is better with a dash of honey

'It's day.'

These were the first, very confused words to come out of my mouth this morning.

'I know, sweetie.'

There was a Matthew lying across me, grinning, and that strange bright blankness that's been covering London for the past three days seeping in through the window. It wasn't our window. It was Matthew's bassist's girlfriend's window. And I was in her bed, hair like Medusa (mythical not editorial) and a mulled wine mouth.

I perhaps ought to mention now that she was not in the bed with me and that I've not begun to embrace a life of sending Matthew to sleep off his drunkenness while I shag other people's girlfriends. This girlfriend is currently in Germany and the bed was going free. I perhaps ought to mention now that last night I temporarily forgot that the age old anti-hangover ritual I was dutifully applying to Matthew -- Drink water! Eat! Ibuprofen! Go to bed! Good boy! -- would probably have benefited me as well. Instead, I cobbled together a very late supper of tortellini and asparagus for Matthew and sent him to bed. So that I could remain downstairs shrieking in earnest about class struggles and Nietzsche and white tea. No one in can be in Paddy's presence and not be reduced to shrieking. He is an endless stream of information and anecdotes and to make yourself heard requires torn vocal chords. We sloshed our way through two bottles of white wine and when those were emptied carried out a panicked search party for more booze in the kitchen. I perhaps ought to mention now that downing a vat of steaming mulled wine at four in the morning is not conducive to a living and productive following day.

Or waking up without a purple tongue. At about half five I flumped into bed next to Matthew, covered in the stench of up-to-late. I proceeded (apparently, and the only witness to this is Matthew, but I don't know if I can trust him) to breathe all over him and snore like an angry thunder god. Nice.

The cause of being undignified boozehound can be directly traced back to the best fucking gig I've ever seen Matthew (and his band) perform. I know I just end up sounding like the dutifully gushing girlfriend, but seriously. Something clicked on stage and it was electrifying. People danced and giddied; I managed not to groupie myself; the boys came off stage with grins so wide it pushed back their ears. It was marvellous.

In the aftermath that is today, I've done a whole whack of nothing much. Luke the illegal cat and I snoozed for a few hours this afternoon. I indulged in a chai latte and a cranberry and raspberry Innocent juice and read a bit of Frederick Forsyth's Day of the Jackal. I thought about the toxicology of the platypus. I danced a bit to the Exit to Wave rocking the juke box in my mind. I did not think of work. At. All. In fact, I think today, though tired and mercifully only mildly hungover, I have felt more relaxed than I have been in ages. I feel like I will awake tomorrow and DO THINGS. Like finish Matthew's socks in time to be stuffed inside a Christmas stocking. And maybe -- just maybe -- find time to upload some overdue pictures.

horrible horrible horror

Terrifying dream last night: Barbara Windsor and David Jason chasing each other around and flying into pouts as though it were a horrible Carry On Geriatrics.

and i ended up at a cloud machine

I came across Sylvia Matas this afternoon via Craft, which I learned about while listening to an interview with one of the founders on CraftyPod, which I went to because Anna Torborg was giving an interview about the Crafter's Companion.

 

Undoubtedly Puddle and Coral Reef are more visually impressive, but there's something about Cloud Machine that takes my breath away.

Mince Pies

The only thing I really, personally contributed to this recipe is the pastry, so that's all I'm really going to post about. Sure I took the time and effort to go out and purchase the mincemeat, trawling through endless aisles of jars, peering thoughtfully, discerningly at the ratio of mixed peel to vegetable suet, gauging the number of sliced almonds in each. But it's not quite the same as making it yourself, is it. I would dearly love to learn how to make the mincemeat from scratch, in fact as I've got so much time off next week (three days, whoo!) I might just make that my mission, if I can find time between all the knitting and reading and wandering aimlessly.

In any case, the pastry. Pastry is notoriously fiddly; too much water and you're sunk, too little and you waste away. Pastry can make or break a desert, for no matter how wonderful the filling, how decadent the topping, a poor pastry will let the whole thing down. My favourite pastry is my mum's. I have never witnessed a bad pie come out of her kitchen. Her quiches are to die for, the one time she tried strudel exquisite (the build up to which was weeks of panic; the result of it four happy bellies); but it's her mincemeat ring and mince pies, which appear but once a year, that made the run-up to Christmas that much more exciting. Though the thought of eating one was akin to allowing someone to shoot my toes off the smell of them could not fail to announce that the holidays were upon us. When I was fourteen I actually agreed to put one of them in my mouth and from that day forth I have been a committed convert. Though Mum always used store bought mincemeat filling (flown in from Sainsbury's especially), her pastry is, was and will always be made from scratch. Her pastry is, was and will always be the best pastry ever. And yet it was only last year that she discovered the power of vinegar. The following recipe is my mum's with one small deviation: where she uses white vinegar, I substitute apple cider vinegar. The result is almost imperceptibly sweeter; however, don't let that put you off using it for savouries. Substituting salt for the sugar will turn the sweetness into tartness.

ingredients:

8 oz flour
5 oz butter/vegan marg
2 tsp caster sugar (fair trade always recommended -- it's a but coarser as it's been less refined and thus more caramelly than non-fair trade sugar)
3-4 tbsp ice-cold water, plus 1 tbsp cider vinegar

method:

Sift the flour and sugar into a large bowl. Slice the butter into chunks over top, about an inch thick. Using the pads of your fingers, rub the butter into the flour. It should take a good five minutes before the mixture starts to looks vaguely like bread crumbs, but you don't want to over do it otherwise the resulting pastry won't be as velvety.

In a separate bowl mix together the water and vinegar, then, tablespoon by tablespoon add to the flour-butter mixture. Start off with two tablespoons and fold the water in, then gently compress together. Add two more, folding and gently compressing. By this point you should be able to pat the mixture into a ball. If the batter is still very crumbly add a smidge more water, but be careful not to swamp it. If the batter is too sticky, add a bit more flour until the texture is round and smooth.

Once you have a ball to be proud of, place it in a bowl and pop it in the fridge for at least half an hour. If you're running out of time you can always stick it in the freezer for ten. It should come out the same. The pastry is much easier to handle if you take it out of the fridge ten to fifteen minutes before you need to use it.

I have pictures of how my mince pies turned out, but my guests are starting to arrive and I will never win at the Hostess Sumpremo awards if I don't go to greet them.

my heart leaps at the sound of his key

I found Purl Bee via the queen of polka dots this afternoon and have had the most inspiring time poking about the site. There are some amazing photographs on there and there are links to all sorts of wonderful crafty sites, but the tutorials in particular are fantastic. Mind you, Juju's got some pretty awesome tutorials going at the moment as well. I think my new year's resolution might be to bite the needle and learn how to sew -- properly! I've been stuck in that midway point of knowing almost how to and having loads of ideas for what I'd do with it if I could do for years. Sloppy sock baubles aside, I've not done any real sewing since Matthew's Christmas stocking and that was two years ago.

The owl of Crouch End is hooting outside my window. Somehow the sound makes it feel more like winter, and closer to Christmas. Actually, that could be because I just pulled the most glorious coup and won Matthew's main gift on eBay! I'm so excited I'm practically high. All we need is a little snowfall and I'll be nigh on mindless with glee.

After the promotion debacle of last week, I've decided to make up for it by creating a category designed specifically to advertise such events in the future. To your right you will now find Things to Do. Next week's Thing to Do is go see Exit to Wave weave their magic on stage at the Live Bar in New Cross (well, Deptford really, but they're next door to each other). Hurrah!

I remember when I was wee my parent's friends would have 'open house' afternoons before Christmas and serve up oodles of delicious foods and punches. Though I think we only really went so my parents could hang out with real adults and soak up some intelligent conversation before the new year, they were always awesome fun for my sister and I. Not only were there chocolate truffles and little cakes and heavily iced cookies, but a house to explore and other kids who'd been dragged there too to run around with. Other people's houses are always more interesting than your own, right? In any case, we're having a very civilised mince pie and tea party tomorrow evening. I think everyone ought to attend, don't you? Mince pies and tea? Double hurrah!