Recipe Rifle goes shopping: Spring fashion

A thing my dad has taught me is that you have to modernise - or die.

It's probably the only thing he has taught me by example - everything else i.e. the importance of a neat filing system, up-to-date insurance, legible handwriting, the causes and course of the First World War, he taught via a series of 40-minute lectures using white boards, diagrams, bright lights, water-boarding etc.

But modernising, that's just what he did. He never said "You have to modernise OR DIE!"

He did it instinctively. He had a computer before anyone else, he mastered email before anyone else, he wore with flair and enthusiasm a pair of Converse trainers I bought for him about five years ago (I get him a new pair every year for his birthday). He listens to podcasts and has an iPod. Every few years he will change the style of his spectacles and he is sometimes seen with a new tie. His texting is not perfect, but it's getting there. He keeps up to date on pretty much everything except the most absolutely current popular music, though he will definitely know who (or what) One Direction are (or is. Or, shortly, were.)

My father is 79, ladies and gents. Seventy Nine. Not some Disco Dad who accidentally became a parent at 18. SEVENTY NINE. I was born when he was 44. He remembers the war! But he could also pick Harry Styles out of a crowd. Maybe. I don't think he likes modernising much, I think he finds it as painful as everyone else does, but he knows that you have to move on.

Whenever I catch myself about to say something awful and Tunbridge Wells about Instagram or SnapChat or, indeed, One Direction, I think of my dad. What would he say? He would know about it all. He would not pooh-pooh a modern thing for pooh-poohing's sake. Because he knows that has the stench of death about it. And my father is not afraid of the tax man, or drunks and lunatics or answering the door after 9pm or changing lanes in heavy traffic: but he is afraid of death.

I always think of my very nearly Octogenarian father when I consider, with some horror, that I must Update My Wardrobe. It's the thing I like doing least, because it means buying a pair of jeans that I will consider hideous for six months, of feeling self-conscious when out of the house, having to spend money on things that I'm not sure I like.

But I must Update My Wardrobe because if you don't, you just look dreadful. If you don't make incremental changes then you will still, come Spring/Summer 2014, be wearing a pair of grey skinny jeans (I bought mine in 2005) with a Breton top and a leaky pair of Converse. This is fine if you really, really properly don't care, or really, really properly can't afford it but for the rest of us, looking out of date suggests a deeper resistance to change, to modernisation. It speaks of a deeper stubbornness, an arrogance, a closed mind.

I once went to a lecture given by the agony aunt Irma Kurtz in which she claimed to stave off old age by trying to "change her opinion about things". Sticking to your trusty old shapes and colours is as bad as declaring the same old boring allegiances to the thoughts and opinions you had when you were 25.

Not that I like to over-think these things.

So I have been utilising my new paycheques to Update My Wardrobe and it hasn't gone too badly. Apart from the Boyfriend Jeans, which I am in love with and totally and completely horrified by in equal measure, it has been reasonably painless.

Here are the things I have bought, which I plan to wear when the weather cheers up. It's not much, because it is all expensive as I have finally paid heed to my own advice of buying a few expensive things, not a lot of old shit from the High Street. Though I must point out here that I never, ever wear any of this gear while attempting childcare.

For childcare I buy a job lot of H&M sweatshirts and black 3/4 length leggings from TopShop, which get totally trashed, sent to charity for rags and then replaced. There's nothing quite so nice as a lovely fresh pair of leggings.

I bought ALL of this stash with my very own pennies, that's how much I love it all.

1 McQ Cross-printed sweatshirt, £165 available only online at matchesfashion.com. This is navy, although it looks black here. Goes with everything, excellent for anything smart/casual on the weekend.

2 Green crepe swing top, Michael Kors, £140, from Net A Porter. I love this. Hides the mid-section, great colour.

 3 Acne Boyfriend jeans, £190 Matchesfashion.com. I am scared of these but they are, also, SO FACKIN COOL.

4 Longline layering shirt grey/chambray, £98 from ME +EM.

I used to love wearing shirts, but the way I used to wear them, just cotton, with the top few buttons undone over jeans or whatever, looks horrible and wrong these days for some reason. I wear this buttoned to the top and it feels sleek and nice because of the jersey top-half and the cotton bottom half doesn't cling to my last remaining stubborn baby weight. Also, if you want to wear this under a sweater, there's no cotton top-bit to bunch up and make you look like a man. I am a size 12 and got this in an M.

5 Navy v-neck "swing" jumper, Me+Em £98 in an S to fit a size 12. 

Another favourite thing of mine, the v-neck navy sweater. I will probably be buried in one, but can't find one that doesn't cling horribly to my mid-section. It's a common thing, I find, with anyone who was even last pregnant 15 years ago and is now a size 6 - wearing anything tight around your middle makes you feel like you're being strangled. But this ME+EM sweater is terrific - a lot of their clothes have a lovely, very forgiving and super-comfortable "swing" to them. 

6 Hold fast signet ring, £140, LauraLee. I rang the shop and a nice girl had this made for me in a special weeny size to go on the little finger in a kind of witty mock posh/butch way but with the unassailable message printed thereon: HOLD FAST. It's a nautical term, as Captain Jack Sparrow would say, which roughly translates as "hang on to something and shut your eyes until it's all over".

7 Silver Birkenstocks, £39, Natural Footwear Company - or cheaper on Amazon probably but I couldn't work out the shoe sizes and happened to be passing this shoe shop while on my way to the London Transport Museum with Kitty anyway.

The "ugly" shoe is IN this spring/summer (I may be making this up) and I am absolutely thrilled about it. I plan to wear these with my terrifying boyfriend jeans, a neon sweatshirt and a pedicure

(ENDS)

More food soon

Goat bucco

Goat! Tastes a lot like beef

I've done a thing that I feel bad about. Not bad, but I feel like a quitter. I've done a thing that makes me feel like I've betrayed the sister-motherhood a bit.

I've hired a nanny 5 mornings a week.

A lot of people probably assume that I have a full time nanny and a housekeeper and a driver because my husband once made a telly programme, but it's not that case. I have help, but like most people who can afford and want to have help, but who do not work full-time, it's patchy and makeshift.

I don't want too much because there are many tedious domestic and familial things that you ought to do yourself and there are many tedious domestic and familial things that I want to do myself. But I don't want too little help because the house would fall to bits and it would destroy my marriage.

So I used to have the odd bit of help in the mornings but I now have a chance to opt out of mornings altogether and, ladies, I'm grabbing it with both hands. I'm getting enough paid work to justify it, you see, and I'm gone -  NEEEYOWM! My chair is still going round and round. Kitty goes to nursery, Sam goes out to tear up Kentish Town High Street with the delightful and fragrant Mihaela and I answer to no-one but myself from 0930 to 1300.

And I am mostly okay about this decision, and push thoughts of failure from my mind, because I have done a lot of mornings of childcare and I've just bloody had enough. I could never make it work for me. My best mum friends don't live within wheeling distance and I never managed to get myself a cosy circle of mates to hang out with.

Mihaela, of course, has great teeming masses of nanny friends with their own delightful little charges and they skitter about from playground to playgroup like little buggy fairies and natter away and watch each other's kids, like it ought to be. It was never meant to just be me and the kid, staring at each other, both thinking "Well, this is dull."And if Sam picks up Mihaela's sing-song Romanian accent I will find it charming.

I'm still in sole charge from 1pm-bedtime, which is still hard work but getting easier now Sam is bigger. Kitty zips about knocking things over, squashing PlayDoh into the carpet and throwing potty-related fits and Sam sits on the floor, staring at Kitty with his mouth hanging open, going "Ger", and sometimes "Ah ba ba ba ba ba ba". (And sometimes he just whinges and whimpers and growls from 3pm-bedtime but let's not dwell on that.)

But I feel like a traitor. I feel like a cheat and a weakling - and also slightly neglectful - because I never thought I would get 5 mornings of childcare until Sam was at nursery, when he turned two and a half. I just thought I would mostly do it all myself until then, and only then kick back and deservedly relish my free mornings.

I know how hard all-day childcare is, especially with the under-2s. I know how demoralising and humiliating and boring it is. I've seen it with my own eyes and I don't want to do it any more. A half day, yes yes fine - but not all day. Please not all day!

It used to piss me off, those pieces in the paper quoting any parent saying "I have so much respect for stay at home mothers. I couldn't do it, I would go mad!" It struck me (because I am so angry and defensive about everything) as somehow deeply patronising, like stay at home mothers are aliens from the Planet Patient And Kind.

"What," I would think, "you don't think it sends me mad? You think I somehow have some intellectual thing about me missing that means I can deal with this better than you can?"

Why not, I thought, just be honest about it. You could do full-time childcare if you wanted to. You just don't want to. Don't dress up the fact that you don't want to look after kids full-time as some kind of delightful, chic little personal failing. Just say it. Just say "Full-time childcare is just too awful. I'd much rather look at spreadsheet for 8 hours a day."It's okay to say that! We're all friends here. (Up to a point.)

Some people, I would fume, cannot afford to go back to work because their salary minus childcare is a negative figure. It's not a choice! Some people, of course, cannot afford not to not go back to work (are you still with me?) because their salary minus childcare equals the mortgage. And there are a lot of people whose salary minus childcare equals the mortgage, sunny holidays, private school fees, snazzy shoes… And some people have to go back to work because if they took a few years out to look after kids their job would swiftly be given to someone else, the world would move on and when they did want to go back to work, they couldn't.

Anyway, Christ, I don't kid myself that the money I earn makes any difference to this house, but it justifies the extra childcare. If I'm not working, then it's only right that I take on most of the childcare. And I just can't take it anymore. There's nothing special or precious about me that means I am less good at childcare or that I ought to be exempt from it. I am reasonably good at it these days in fact - you learn to be good at looking after the under-5s like you learn everything else.  But I know what a full day of childcare means and the simple truth is: I really, really don't want to do it anymore.

Anyway so don't have a bloody go at me for chucking in the mornings because it works out well for you, too - I mean, those of you who actually like reading this blog rather than those people who read it and are then mean about it on Mumsnet (why are you reading?!) because it means that I will have a bit more breathing space to blog rather than spending every second having my photo taken looking fat for the paper. Sorry I mean doing my mega important work like writing about haircuts and what I had for lunch. I've gone crazy with the power of it all.

Are you still there?

Now come here, stop backing out of the door, take my hand and let's leap into the world of Cooking With Goat. Yes! I said it: goat. Not mutton, not kid. GOAT.

Cooking with goat appeals to me (as much as any meat appeals to me these days, I am *this* close to becoming vegetarian) because it is not lamb. And goats are annoying.

This is not a thing to go out especially looking for, this is just a nudge from me to have a go at goat if you have access to it: you may live in an area where they sell it and have wondered what the hell to do with it. You can curry it if you like, but you can also treat it less fearfully and use it in this Osso Bucco-type stew, which goes like this:

1 large thing of goat, about 1kg, from the leg somewhere
1 large white onion
2 small carrots or one big one
About 300 ml chicken stock
3 sticks of celery
2 big cloves of garlic
some assorted herbs, whatever you can get your hands on: bay, thyme, MARJORAM?!
definitely a bunch of parsley
some lemon zest
1 glass shitty white wine

Preheat your oven to 140C


1 Chop up your veg and garlic really small into a mirepoix (if you don't know what this is, Google "Recipe Rifle + Mirepoix because the Search function on this piece-of-shit blog isn't working).

2 Brown your goat all over in a casserole dish (which has a lid) in some plain oil then remove to a plate.

3 Without cleaning the pan, sweat your veg gently in the same casserole for about 10 minutes. Then throw in your glass of shitty wine and bubble down until there is only a small pool of liquid.

4 Put the goat back in, along with any juices that have run off onto the plate it was sitting on and the chicken stock. Put a lid on then put it in the oven for 5 hours. YES YOU HEARD ME FIVE HOURS.

5 It shouldn't dry out because at that temperature it sort of can't - water from the veg and from the meat as well as the stock will create a self-sauce.

6 To serve chop a lot of parsley and lemon zest together and sprinkle over.

Eat while thumbing your iPhone because you're so fackin busy with werk, yah?

Gwyneth Paltrow's lamb tagine

Here I am! Yoo hoo! Sorry, I know I'm late. There was this thing with a thing and then my phone battery died and then I locked myself out and it all just fell on my head.

Good New Year? No of course it wasn't. Ha! New Year is dreadful. What a stupid question. Well don't worry it's nearly February, the year has begun in earnest and we can all get back to whatever it is that we normally do.

I've got a peace offering for you to make up for my tardiness - a lamb tagine that I did out of Gwyneth Paltrow's book, It's All Good.

Everyone's got such a problem with Gwyneth!! I don't understand it. So she wants to live a semi-vegan diet and work out for 6 hrs a day so she doesn't look fat when she has to put on a size 0 dress and stand on a red carpet having her photo taken by 4 million people? That's her life and her choice, people. Speaking as someone who often has to put on a dress and be photographed for the paper looking fat, I understand where she's coming from.

And GOOP is just hilarious. Fact. Her nonchalance in recommending a $400 grey cashmere sweater to her readers because "it goes with everything" is simply a laugh out loud moment. No?

Okay whatever. I wasn't that crazy, in all, about It's All Good. I found the fact that they didn't bring out a British edition (so that all the measurements are in cups, spring onions are scallions etc) annoying. And everything requires about a million ingredients. And the pictures are just frightful, the food looks flat and boring - but the full-length photos of Gwyneth wrapped in a $550 goat hair Mexican blanket looking soulfully into the distance are a giggle.

I do absolutely love tagine and this is a really terrific one. I honestly ate my half of the pot in about 5 minutes. I am a fast eater, but even then. So do this! I don't know in what way this is supposed to be healthful and restorative (it certainly isn't vegan) but it is very easy and generally delightful.

Just don't go crazy and make the vegan brownies from the same book because they are just diabolically disgusting.

So here we go

Serves 4-6 if you are having rice with it. If only a salad then this serves 2.

1 handful chopped coriander
6 cloves garlic, peeled
2-inch nub of ginger, peeled
1 small red onion, peeled and chopped
1/2 tsp cumin
1/2tsp ground black pepper
3 tbsp good olive oil
some sea salt
500g of whatever stewing lamb you can get your hands on
about 300ml chicken stock
a pinch of saffron if you have it
1 can chickpeas, drained and rinsed
about 200g butternut squash, peeled and chopped

the recipe also specified 1 small preserved lemon, chopped up but I cannot STAND preserved lemon so I left it out.

1 Put the coriander, garlic, ginger, onion, cumin, pepper and olive oil in a blender along with a large pinch of salt. Blend this together and then thoroughly cover the lamb in it. Marinade for six hours, overnight, or as long as you possibly can. Even 30 mins will make a difference.

2 Preheat the oven to 160C and put the lamb and all the marinade into a casserole dish. Put it over a medium flame and brown all over. Sprinkle over the saffron if using and then add the chicken stock. Bring all this to the boil and stir to release any browned bits stuck to the bottom.

3 Cut a piece of greaseproof paper big enough to sit over the top of the pot, then scrunch it, wet it and set it over the lamb. Put the lid on and cook for 1.5hrs. Check occasionally that it hasn't dried out. After 45 min stir in the butternut squash and the chickpeas and keep cooking.

4 add more salt and pepper if you think you need it and then serve with more coriander sprinkled over the top.

Eat wrapped in a blanket, looking soulfully into the distance, thinking about the day when BOTH your kids will be at nursery all morning.

Pear and cardamom cake for Petra

Excuse my absence. I don't know what I've been doing. Oh yes I do! Potty training Kitty. I won't go into it, but there's been a lot of washing, scrubbing, mopping etc. I'm like Hercules trying to clean the Aegean stables!! Only I am better at accessorising. I like to team skinny black jeans and my new Adelphe diamond-slice ring with eau de toddlerpiss.

But look it's nearly Christmas and though I loathe Christmas recipe pull-outs at this time of year - so confusing, so distracting - I thought I would recycle this cake that I made for my Grazia column (she said casually) and show it to you here, in case you don't read Grazia and you're looking for a mildly spiced cake to serve at some party or other.

And say Merry Christmas to you all! But, especially, to a girl called Petra I once knew a long time ago. A friend of a friend. I bumped into her husband the other day at a party, who I never recognise because he keeps changing his spectacles. At the moment he is wearing some intimidating horn-rimmed pair. "Petra reads your blog," he said. "I'm sorry I don't, I…" he floundered. It's alright, I said. You're not my demographic.

Anyway Petra is absolutely terrific, but she wasn't at the party because she was working! At Christmas!! But I think she is a lawyer and so just works and occasionally, blinking at the daylight, leaves her office to eat a sandwich and breathe some non-recycled air.

(My favourite story about lawyers, by the way, was when I emailed my friend Jamie, who is a commercial barrister, on a sunny Bank Holiday Sunday about something - I wanted to email while I remembered what it was - and I joked "As it's a sunny Bank Holiday Sunday Jamie, I expected a swift response as you will, obviously, be at work." And he fucking was!)

The thing I remember most about Petra was at a dinner party I said I liked her necklace, some really beautiful magnificent choker-y thing with all manner of swizzles and sparkles on it. "It was my grandmother's," she said. "There's an extra bit you can fit on it," she said, describing a hook and eye in the air with her hands, "that makes it even bigger."I just stared at her, boggling at the poshness of it all - I thought she was going to say she got it at Accessorize.

Thinking about Petra made me a bit sad. There are all these people, I think, old friends, who read this blog but I don't see them or speak to them. Then it turns out they've been there all the time. It's possibly best this way, when I think about it. If we were together they would just have to sit there while I rattled on and on just talking about myself and telling boring stories that start off about one thing and then turn into something else and then I suddenly stare out of the window and shout "Oh look there's that fucking massive parakeet on the bird feeder again!!!" At least if you read this blog you can get up and go and make yourself a cup of tea or something. Get a bit of chocolate to sustain yourself until the pay-off.

And while you're at it make this cake why don't you.

This is a very classy cake because of the addition of cardamom, that most people are too scared to use in sweet baking because they don't want a cake that tastes like curry. But it doesn't taste like curry, it's very nice. It's like something they would make on Bake Off.

But it is absolutely huge, so only make this if you have a lot of people coming round.

Pear and Cardamom cake from The Ethicurean cookbook
Serves about 20, genuinely

315g salted butter at room temperature

315g caster sugar, plus extra for dusting

5 eggs (!!!) lightly beaten

315g ground almonds

50g plain flour

1tbsp ground cardamom

1ripe pear (I used tinned pears, which worked very well)

70g dark chocolate

Heat the oven to 170C. Line the base and sides of a 23cm springform cake tin with baking parchment

1 Beat the butter and sugar together for about five minutes, or until pale and sort of fluffy. Then add the eggs. Don't fret too much if it curdles, just beat the shit out of it with an electric whisk or whatever until it doesn't look so awful. 

2 Add all the dry ingredients and mix until just combined. Fold the mixture a few times with a spatula.

3 Turn it into the tin, level the top then place in the centre of the oven and bake for 20  minutes.

4 Slice your pear thinly and break the chocolate into pieces. 

5 Remove the cake from the oven. It will still be liquid. Press the chocolate pieces into the mix across the entire cake. Lay the pear slices on top of the cake and then sprinkle the cake with some sugar, for caramelisation and a bit of crunch. 

6 Put back in the oven. The recipe said for another 40 mins but mine took another 60 mins for a skewer to come out clean. All ovens are different, alas, which is why baking is such a fucking bore. 

Eat with creme fraiche, I'd say. While wearing a really amazing necklace. 

Dirty curry

About six months after I started teaching myself how to cook I realised something: in order to be a good cook you have to be organised. And you have to be tidy. The best cooks are always incredibly neat and tidy. Even Jamie Oliver, I bet - open his wardrobe and there will be 40 identical pairs of distressed jeans, hoodies and trainers all lined up neatly.

(Incidentally, I saw Jamie Oliver at a party the other week. Saw, not met, you understand. Later in the evening, when I was feeling less shy, I put a hand out and very lightly stroked the back of his jacket as he passed me in the throng - so lightly that he wouldn't be able to feel it. He's incredibly tall, by the way - he must be six feet two at least. And broad. Huge! He's like a bear. You'd never think it.)

Anyway I have never been especially tidy. Not some awful great fucking slob, but not tidy. So I was going to have to smarten up my act. You know the sort of thing I mean, get things out of the cupboard and weigh them out before you start. Read the recipe ALL the way through. And clear as you go so that your kitchen isn't such a fucking scum hole by the time dinner is ready that it puts you off cooking anything more complicated than toast ever again.

My heart sank at this. Did I really HAVE to be tidy? They don't seem to do anything as prosaic as clearing up on telly. Ah, telly. I see, that's why I thought that cooking requires no effort beyond dumping things in a pot and stirring - because TV cooks don't tend to wash up on telly because it doesn't make good telly. Telly, you see, is not real. 

But cooking is mostly about getting things out, weighing them, finding a clean bowl for them to sit in for a minute and then when it's all done, washing every damned thing up and wiping down all your flipping surfaces. Did I have to? Have to, have to? Maybe I could just leave it and someone else… my mum… would come along and do it. No wait a second I was not living at home anymore. And although my husband will happily clear up after me, the payback is that I have to then hear about it for the next week. 

However: that was nothing, NOTHING to how bloody organised you have to be when you have kids, especially when taking them anywhere. When I had only one baby I would complain long and hard to anyone who would listen about how going away for the weekend was like putting up and taking down a fucking circus. Now I have two, the monumental amount of shite we need when we go away beggars belief. We arrive, set everything up, have a cup of tea, then it's time to pack everything away and go home again. But, listen to me: I do not overpack. If anything, I under pack. I never used to take any toys, for example. Other people turn up for the weekend with great laundry bags full of toys, which Kitty has to then steal like a latter-day Artful Dodger. 

My husband looks at the bags and bags of stuff in the hall waiting to be stuffed into the boot of the car and always says "God what a lot of stuff". He doesn't question it, because he values his life, but he boggles at it all the same. I know he is thinking: "If I had married someone more relaxed she would pack less stuff and then we could go on the train." 

And sometimes I think that, too. But I look at our things and I know that there is nothing in any of these meticulously sourced and packed bags that we can do without. Without the Dream Tubes Kitty will fall out of the single bed that she will be sleeping in. Without the packet of soup pasta, Sam will not be able to have tea on Sunday night. Without his Lamaze Elephant that plays tunes when you squeeze the hand, Sam will be sad. Without his bath chair, Sam will not have a nice bath, which is a vitally fun twenty minutes in his day. Without Kitty's new travel dollshouse she will be bored and demand to watch TV and show me up in front of our hosts. And so on. It's enough to drive you to drink, let alone anything stronger.

People look at the amount of crap you have in your car when you go away with two small kids and they laugh and sneer and say "In my day we didn't take that much stuff" or "where's the kitchen sink ha ha" or whatever and they mostly say it because they have forgotten or never experienced what it is like to travel with small children. Or they never had to do the packing in the first place. Or they have never had to deal with the consequences of having not packed enough formula, or the correct stuffed toy or the DVD wallet or the iPad charger. And no-one else can do it for you, only you know what you need and where it is. And if you did happen to have someone else in your life who could do that kind of stuff for you, well, you can't put a price on that kind of service. 

I know how my husband would do it if he was packing for everyone: he would take nothing. A handful of nappies, maybe, and Kitty's toothbrush. He does this when he takes Kitty to the park - just hoofs it only taking things he can fit into his pockets. Everything, he reckons, can be begged or borrowed off other people or bought from a shop. If he runs into trouble he just clutches the upper arm of the nearest woman and hopes she will sort it out (she will, because that's what we're like). 

This attitude makes me feel perfectly sick to my stomach. What, just rely on borrowing shit off other people? Rely on there being a shop that has the thing that you need? What an almighty stress. I have, in fact, a few times been caught short when I have been out with my children - mostly lacking suncream, but once also nappies. It is true that other people fall over themselves to help. And whenever I am approached by someone and asked for a spare nappy or suncream or anything, I hand over fistfuls, shrieking lies like "Oh my God that happens to me ALL THE TIME" so that the borrower won't feel inadequate.  

But the fact is that I cannot really imagine anything worse than flimsying about having to constantly beg things off other people for my kids. I forgot spare pyjamas for Kitty at my sister's house the other weekend and she donated an old pair of her youngest's and, although she's my sister and everything and I'm sure I've helped her out of a tight spot in the past, still - it made me feel like a gypsy. No wait, that's not fair to gypsies. It made me feel like some stupid fucking hippy idiot who naffs about forgetting everything and saying pathetic things like "Oh it'll be fine", meaning "I will just take advantage of more organised people who spent 3 days packing while I wafted about my house vaguely, gossiping on the phone."

Anyway *wipes rabid foam off chin* so what I mean by all this is that don't sit about wondering if cooking is less of a hassle for other people - or if other people are doing quite so much fucking washing up. It isn't and they are.

Washing up is a major contributing factor, often, to my not eating dinner when my husband is out. I don't need to worry about him so I can just drink a huge glass of Chardonnay, eat a handful of pistachios and then spoon Nutella directly into my gob from the jar until I feel sick & then take whatever non-prescription, (or prescription, if I am lucky), sedatives I can find lurking in my bathroom cabinet in order to pass out.

But last night, despite being tired and overwrought, (because who the fuck isn't), I actually made myself a small curry for dinner, using up an alarming collection of ancient things in the fridge and it was terrific, thanks to a clutch of store cupboard essentials.

Because sometimes just surviving gets boring. It isn't enough. You have to try to drive yourself on and make the best of things, using whatever dodgy bits and bobs you can lay your hands on.

Dirty curry, for Nigella Lawson

3/4 pack chicken thigh fillets, 3 days past sell by date (don't tell my husband)
10 day old purple sprouting broccoli, chopped up
1 tsp dried chilli flakes
2tbsp light soy sauce
leftover peas from toddler's dinner
200ml chicken stock, open for 1 week
1 small can bamboo shoots, 3 months past sell by date
1 70m can organic coconut cream
1/2 tsp chinese five spice
1 small, quite rubbery garlic clove, grated
1 nest of vermicelli noodles, if you feel like it


1 Wash chicken thoroughly, ignoring any funny smell, chop or snip into bite-sized pieces and fry off for a good 10 minutes in some groundnut oil. Google the symptoms of salmonella

2 Add broccoli, peas, chilli flakes, chinese five spice and grated garlic and fry on a low-medium flame for 5 minutes

3 Add chicken stock, coconut cream and soy, allow this to simmer together for 10-15 minutes

4 Steep the noodles in boiling water for 3 minutes and then drain and add to the curry for 5 minutes.

Chocolate ganache

Esther Walker is unwell. It doesn't have the same ring to it, I know - but it's true. I've had bronchitis. Okay not actually confirmed bronchitis, but that's what I've been saying. In fact it was just a non-specific chest infection but when I say that it sounds like there's something wrong with my bosoms. I reckon it was pneumonia, just between you and me. I don't know how much worse you'd have to feel than I felt for it to be pneumonia. I've had a pain, you see, a pain in my lungs.

Anyway it's taken ages to get better. Usually you get the antibiotics and 24 hours later you're springing about going shopping. But I went to bed on Sunday night and only really got out of bed again on Thursday morning. It was enjoyable in a way - an uncomplicated, straightforward illness: chills, fever, head-to-toe aches, sweats, pain in the chest, dizziness, delirium, all of that. Not just tired, fed-up, run-down, burnt-out. Actually like fucking dying.

I lay in bed inert and unresponsive as other people looked after my children. Occasionally I would try to focus my hot, blurred eyes on my phone and would wonder why no-one was asking me any questions, how life in the house was carrying on quite so merrily without me. But I didn't get too upset about it, just slipped back into a semi-coma gratefully.

And what I've got for you now I'm back from the dead is a thing that's going to annoy you because I know you don't want me to write about cakes and sweeties anymore. But the thing is that those are the NEW things that I am cooking.

I am indeed cooking savoury things like a motherfucker at the moment, but it's all for Sam who has in the last three weeks started raging through food like a starving wolf.

I always used to find people who talked about how much their children (usually their sons) ate quite annoying, as I sat in front of Kitty coaxing her for hours to eat one more tiny weeny thingy of lamb stew. "Oh was Kitty fussy? We're lucky," they would say. "He just ate everything from the start." And they say "lucky" but what they meant was "it's because we're such fantastic parents". I mean, that's probably what they meant. THEY SAID IT WITH THEIR EYES.

But now we all stand about and marvel at the food disappearing into Sam's gob. It's like a sideshow at a circus. Watch the enormous monster baby eat! Down goes a massive spoonful, and another, and another, and another! Like a waste disposal unit. I have decided that in order to fit it all in, the first bit of food must start to be digested and be making its was out of his tummy before he's finished the bowl of whatever.

But it's nothing I've done, you understand? Just like it was nothing I did that made Kitty able to exist for weeks at a time on nothing but air, sunlight and three bottles of milk a day. And it's not because he's a boy, because I know plenty of baby boys who hardly eat anything - because they don't need to right now. Because they'll do more growing later, thanks.

It's just because Sam is massive and getting massiver by the day - he's six months old and wearing Kitty's old blue dungarees that she wore when she was over a year - and he will probably go on to be massiver. (Or maybe he will halt at five feet nine inches when he is twelve years old.)

People always act like it's such a bloody marvellous thing to have a big baby who will eat the world and that having some strapping six footer son is just the gold standard. Whatever Sam ends up being is fine by me, but I don't mind men under six foot. My husband is five feet nine inches tall and I think he is the perfect height. I can look him in the eye. When we embrace I don't end up with my head under his armpit. At parties when I want to say something mean about someone I don't have to climb a ladder to whisper it in his ear. He doesn't constantly bump his head on things and complain about legroom on airplanes.

My point is that a consequence of Sam eating so much right now is that getting together enough food for him is an issue. (Don't get me started on clothes!) If Kitty's hungry I can make her a make her a sandwich. If Sam is hungry he needs something to be cooked and blended. HE WON'T EAT THOSE STUPID ELLA'S POUCHES. Every time I turn around it's time to make another enormous stew, or enough cheese sauce for 8 pots of macaroni cheese. I think of life with Sam when he is a teenager (Insha'Allah) and really hungry and see entire loaves of bread and pints of milk disappearing in minutes before my eyes.

But I can't think that you are interested in my recipe for lentil puree. And the new thing I made recently, as I slowly crept out of my bronchial hell, was a chocolate ganache.

I made one of these before and it wasn't very good. But I have subsequently realised that the recipe was a bummer. So I made it again on the instruction of Paul Hollywood himself (I texted a question into a radio show! I KNOW!!) and it came out just absolutely perfect.

So this is what you do. To cover 12 fairy cakes you need:

100g best chocolate (for kids, milk chocolate probably best - Waitrose do one called Menier, very nice)
100ml double cream
1 knob of butter

(NB - chocolate ganache is always just equal quantities of chocolate and cream - mls to grams.)

1 Chop the chocolate into reasonably small bits and put in a bowl.

2 Put the cream in a small saucepan and heat until it is nearly boiling. Pour over the chocolate and stir until the chocolate has melted. This takes a while, you need to stir all the time. You can bung it in the microwave for a few seconds towards the end if the chocolate has really stopped melting in. Don't whisk it!! Because you will get unattractive bubbles, as I did.

3 When it has all melted in, add a knob of butter, for sheen.

4 Pour over your fairy cakes and decorate. This doesn't actually set firm, like an icing, it's always a bit gooey and sticky. And hurrah for that.

Have a great weekend.

Love
Esther x

Lamb meatballs stuffed with cheese

I am not the sort of mother who feels sorry for people who don't have children. Not even in my most smug moments (literally, only fleeting moments) do I think "People without kids are missing out!" or "People without kids must be so sad".

I think, quite honestly, if I hadn't had kids I would have been alright. I would have done something else, been someone else. I would have bred Shar-Peis or collected guns or become a foreign correspondent or something else equally child-unfriendly. But it would have been alright. I wouldn't have been sad. I would have Christmassed in Barbados and spent Sunday mornings browsing in foreign antiques markets. I would cook more elaborately. I would read a lot of books.

But there is one area in which my heart does go out to the childless and it is this: they have to pretend, especially women, to like children they are not related to. They either have to pretend to like them, or self-defensively announce loudly that they are not "crazy" about kids or they are "bad" with kids or turn it around and claim that kids don't like THEM. (It's not me, it's you.)

The plain fact is that it is hard to immediately take to strange children. Your own are fine. Your nieces and nephews are delightful. But other kids? Well, they're just... whatever, really. Not repulsive or anything. (Although sometimes yes, totally repulsive) But mostly you just feel... nothing.

Unless you get to know them of course. Any child, once you get to know it, becomes the world's most precious thing. But unless you see each other reasonably often, it's hard to go wild about them.

This is a perfectly okay attitude to have if you already have children. The other day a friend whom I was supposed to be seeing for coffee asked at the last minute if she could bring both her kids. Both of mine would be occupied elsewhere. "No," I said, guiltlessly. "Let's do it another time."And her children are perfectly nice. Any other time, when I also had my kids, they would be welcome at my house to smash the place up - we would all put funny hats on and sing songs and have a wicked time - but spend time with her kids, on one of my kid-free mornings? No. Unthinkable. Never.

But you can't say that if you haven't got kids because people go hmmmmm and think Oh, she doesn't like children. Like one of the Witches in Roald Dahl. And it's not that, s/he just doesn't really like children she doesn't know. She doesn't hate them!! Just doesn't really want to socialise with them. They operate at such an odd tempo, do little kids, and unless you are tuned to it, it can seem bizarre.

It's all the interrupting that the childless can't cope with. They probably think you shouldn't let your children interrupt you, that Kiddo ought to just sit in a corner eating PVA glue while you gossip on for 3 hours about someone's hideous new kitchen extension. They think you, the mother, ought to turn and say NOT NOW I AM TALKING.

Or, worse, they do that thing where they reach over to stop the hand of an eight month old who is banging a spoon on a table, because they believe that you are not stopping the child from making this awful noise because you are blinded by love or helplessly out of control.

(The fact is that there is so little joy and light in an 8 month-old's life - can't speak, can't move, probably teething - that why shouldn't the poor little bugger have a bit of fun banging a spoon about?)

Before I had children, all those utterly bizarre things kids do used to do my head in and I thought I didn't like kids, but now I know that 1) you don't really like kids you don't know and 2) I didn't understand them.

Now I don't even notice when I am interrupted. In fact these days I am quite grateful for it - I talk so much and so fast that I can really wear myself out if left to rattle on unchecked.

And anyway I am usually just sitting in my kitchen with Becky B - in the middle of saying something scandalous - and I will be dragged hither to clear up a spill and she will be dragged thither to look at a Peppa Pig rocket and when this strange little ballet brings us back to within shouting distance of each other, we pick up where we left off. That's just how it is. We don't care. We usually manage to cover quite a lot of ground that way.

But when you don't have kids you don't GET to not want to be with them. People act like it's "good" for the childless to spend time with their own ratbag kids to "get practice". Me? I never expect anyone to want to spend time with my kids if they haven't got their own. Why would they? Moreover, why would I? If I am going to see a friend who hasn't got children I want to sit about in clean, fashionable (?!?!?!) clothes drinking alcohol and talking, uninterrupted, about that hideous kitchen extension.

Which brings me rather abruptly to lamb meatballs. Things have been a bit hair-raising round here the last few weeks. One of those times in life when eating, let alone cooking, sort of goes out of the window. We've been getting a lot of takeaway or having things that I can cook from memory, which only require 1 stale cabbage, some nutmeg and pre-grated Cheddar (strength 2).

But the other night, despite feeling pretty sorry for myself, I did have the chutzpah to conjure up a BRAND NEW THING, which are these cheese-stuffed meatballs. Not as hard as they sound and actually really unusual and delicious, sort of half-Greek, half-Indian - like a really beautiful supermodel.

So here we go, this would serve 4 people with sides.

500g best lamb mince
1 small onion, roughly chopped
1 clove garlic, peeled
1 small bunch coriander
1/4 tsp fennel seeds
1/4 tsp coriander seeds
1/4 tsp ground cumin
1/4 tsp fenugreek seeds (leave these out if you don't have them)
1/2 small pack of Feta cheese
salt & pepper
1 tin chopped tomatoes
1 pint chicken stock
1 large handful medium Matzoh meal
1 egg
groundnut oil for frying

1 Put the onion, garlic, 1/2 the bunch of coriander and all the spices into a whizzer and whizz. Don't clean the blender out.

2 Add these to your lamb mince and smoosh around with your hands for a bit. Then throw over the matzoh and the egg and a large pinch of salt and smoosh about more to combine. Try not to think about how cute lambs are.

3 Put a non-stick pan on over a medium heat with some oil in it and while this is heating up start shaping your meatballs in the usual way but put in a pinch of feta cheese - about the size of a small marble, and pack the mince around it. You will discover the best way of doing this by trial and error - by the third meatball you'll have nailed it. It is easiest to work with mince if you have wet or damp hands.

4 Fry off the meatballs for about 15 minutes, turning so they are nice and crunchy on the outside. Keep the heat at a medium, at no point out blue smoke to be anywhere in your kitchen.

5 While these are browning, whizz your tin of tomatoes in your dirty whizzer, then scrape it all out into a casserole dish or any pan with deep-ish sides. Add your stock and a large pinch of salt and about ten turns of the pepper grinder, stir and bring this to a simmer.

6 Add in your meatballs as they seem browned on all sides (some may open up to reveal the cheese within, don't worry about this) and cook the whole lot on a simmer for about 45 minutes until the tomatoey sauce seems to have reduced and thickened. Tinned tomatoes are vile and it's only by cooking them and reducing them that you can turn them into anything edible.

7 Sprinkle over with fresh coriander and eat at dinnertime after the little weasels have gone to bed and you finally get to finish a bloody sentence.