Herbed rack of lamb with courgette gratin

I don't mind hospitals. I always suspect people who say melodramatically "Oh I HATE hospitals!"are angling to tell you a story about how they broke their leg when they were nine and had to go to hospital and it was just really, laike, super-traumatising.

People who have had a really terrible time in hospital, watched family members die, contracted MRSA, been operated on while still awake etc., tend not to want to re-live the experience by telling you about it.

I'm not saying I love hospitals: I don't want to, like, go on holiday to a hospital, but I don't mind them. So when on Friday morning the GP told me that I had to take Sam to the Royal Free as quickly as I could because his temperature was through the roof, his heart was dancing a disco beat and he was breathing faster than Mo Farah on the home straight, I wasn't too fussed. Fine, I thought. Hospital. Lovely paediatricians to make Sam better feel nice no more crying.

And I still didn't mind throughout that whole day while I sat in the kiddie A&E with poor pathetic, hot Sam as the (really nice) nurses and (really charming) doctor made him repeatedly scream his head off by sticking things in his ears and down his throat and up his nose and taking blood samples and chest X-Rays.

But then after seven or so hours - I didn't even feel them go by, I am very good at waiting - we were sent up to the children's ward and given a room. We couldn't go home, they said, until they had seen Sam smile (ha!) and his temperature had come down to normal.

I looked around the room and out of the window as dusk started to fall over Hampstead. Away from the roar and chaos of A&E, which I had grown to think of as home, it was so quiet. So lonely. I looked at Pond Street, the steep hill I drive up and down at least once a week. I looked around the clean but shabby room, at the green and blue metal-barred cot, at the parent bed, which had a mattress that was like a load of bricks padded with some old carpet, a few slices of wonder loaf scattered about on top then covered with a sheet.

Then I thought about Sam's nursery at home, where I have been spending the last few sleepless, fretful nights with its soft cosy beds, clean bathroom and tasteful wallpaper, everything smelling sweetly of Persil. I thought about the prospect of being denied having dinner, in my own kitchen, with my husband. Worst of all, my iPhone battery was running out and I hadn't brought a charger. And I thought: "Even if I have to grab Sam and make a run for it disguised as an old washerwoman I need to get out of this fucking place."

The absolutely delightful nurse, who had immediately given me a cup of tea, a sandwich and a muffin as I arrived, (they don't do that at the Portland, I tell you), and the consultant came round and said "It's a really bad virus. So, no antibiotics unless the throat swab comes back positive on Monday. Now it's just about waiting for the virus to work its way out, managing his fever in the meantime, which we can do here, or…" they didn't need to finish the sentence. I had shoved my paltry belongings back in my horrible TopShop holdall, stuffed Sam on top, said my fond farewells and was in the parking lot waiting for my husband within about six minutes.

My husband had repeatedly offered to go out and get a curry for dinner but I just didn't feel like having a big stinking pile of food. I needed to wash the Free (God bless it, the people who go to work there are truly sent from Heaven to do His work) out of my hair and eat something pure and holy, like sushi.

But I didn't have any sushi, so we ended up eating a bizarre dinner consisted of an entire Epoisse and two rounds of black pudding with fried apple slices.

Which was delicious, but I'd much rather have had (if not sushi) a thing we had the previous evening, which was the titular herbed rack of lamb with courgette gratin.

A butcher has opened at the top of our road, a really proper one and it has changed my life. My husband is hugely squeamish about where meat and fish come from and so we only eat a very narrow range of things from Waitrose: chicken, certain sorts of salmon, bacon, extremely expensive free-range beef. Even then he complains about it not coming from a proper butcher. There is a butcher on the high street but it's out of my way and he once sold me some bad chicken and I am still annoyed about it.

So now one a good butcher has opened - Meat NW5 is its catchy name - we have been able to have pretty much anything for dinner. I've gone slightly nuts, I go every morning after dropping Kitty off at nursery and I think they're a bit scared that I might be in love with one of them.

But the thing is I can go in and buy 2 chipolatas for Kitty's tea, 120g of best stewing beef for Sam's puree and then some lamb sweetbreads and a small rack of lamb for dinner with my fusspot husband.

No more spare sausages or chicken thighs hanging about in the fridge. Just go, get only what you want, cook it that night. Then buy 400 packs of bog roll and deodorant and Cheerios on Ocado every now and again. Ha ha ha! It's like being handed loads of time and money.

A rack of lamb is a bit 2002 and I don't actually think I've had it since then but it is a lovely thing and I did it like this with a courgette gratin, which was AMAZING.

For the rack of lamb

1 rack of lamb
2 tbsp Dijon mustard
1 large handful fresh breadcrums
assorted soft herbs - thyme, mint, oregano, rosemary - whatever you like, a small handful
some lemon zest?
salt and pepper

Preheat your oven as hot as it will go

1 brown the lamb all over for about 4 minutes in some oil and set aside to cool for a few minutes

2 Whiz up your breadcrumbs with the herbs and lemon zest, a large pinch of salt and a few turns of the pepper grinder

3 spread the lamb with the mustard and then pack on the breadcrumb mixture

4 All the recipes said put the lamb in the oven at 220C for 12 minutes and so I did that and it came out actually fucking cold in the middle. I mean, I know it's fine to eat rare lamb but come the fuck on. Giles and I ended up agreeing that for a rack of 4 chops or more you should put it in at 220C for 25 minutes.

For the courgette gratin

3 courgettes
200 ml double cream
salt and pepper
1 handful of breadcrumbs
1 large handful of parmesan cheese

1 Slice your courgettes to the thickness of a £1 coin (have a look at a coin because it's thinner than you think it is), put them on a baking tray and cover them in olive oil and salt and pepper. Stick them in at the top of the oven at 180C for about 10 minutes.

2 Get yourself a dish that will take all the courgettes. Shake them in, add more salt and pepper - you could also crush in a bit of garlic or other herbs if you like - toss them about, then pour over some double cream. I used I think about 200 ml but basically you just want the courgettes to be lying in a medium-bath of cream. Not a small pool and not absolutely drowning.

3 Pack on top of the courgettes your breadcrumbs and Parmesan cheese. Back for 25 min at 180C

And, look, here is Sam this afternoon. Right as rain - sort of. Still not really smiling, but no need to worry.

Apple Tart Maman Blanc

The other day I wrote a piece for The Daily Mail and as the paper arrived and I saw that I was on the front page (ack!) with some dastardly headline I felt ill and squeezed my eyes shut and clutched at my pyjamas and waited for the whole internet to fall in on my head all day long.

It didn't, thank god. Thank you. I mean, I'm sure there were 4,000 comments underneath the piece, all vile, but I don't read those - (you simply cannot and stay sane) - but I did get one, single, slightly unhappy tweet. "I used to love your blog," it said, "but now you just troll yourself. How much do the Mail pay you to write this stuff?"

And I realised then, that I should probably explain what happens. I lose track of how many readers I have, I forget that I'm not just writing to Becky B and my husband.

(Becky B's just had a baby by the way. No pain relief. None. There was briefly a story going round that she had her stitches with no pain killer either, but that turned out to be apocryphal, like that one about how she once put a mugger in hospital just by giving him a nasty look.)

But for other readers, seeing me in the Mail like that must be strange, like if your boyfriend suddenly turned out to be a contract killer, or a pimp.

So this is how is happens: one morning, some devastatingly charming girl emails from Femail, (they're all charming at the Mail, that's their deadly weapon), wanting to run a piece that you have already written and to give you, in return, enough money so that you don't have to work for the next two weeks if you don't want to, and pay the nanny AND buy a bottle of neon pink nail varnish from Models Own.

And you stop and you think "Oh but my photo will be in there, and some really horrifying headline and there will be pictures of my children…"and then you think "yes but this is my job." And then you think "money...". And then you think how pleased your mother always is when you're in the paper, no matter what you've said. And then your husband comes into the room and reads the email over your shoulder and goes "You're going to ask for more money, aren't you? Great job. Don't forget to invoice!"

Then you file your piece and wait. Presently the "edit" comes back to you, which is where they run your normal words through their computer and it comes out in perfect MailSpeak. And you go "fine - can you change this and this?" and they go "sure".

And then you deal once or twice more with women who, as the deadline gets closer and closer, sound more and more tense, as they sit at their desks, talking to you and eating their lunch at 8.30pm, tapping in tiny tweaks here and there - none of which matter because the headline is going to be MY KIDS ARE SO FACKIN BORING YAH???? so the subtle word changes you are insisting on are like dusting the rotary blades of a helicopter that's just crashed into the side of a mountain.

Then the paper comes out the next day and you feel crushed and sick until your husband goes "GREAT job!" and your mother, who quite often looks at you blankly like "which one are you, again?" actually rings up and says "They're talking about your piece on the radio!!!!!!" And then you remember: "money!". And, eventually, you square it all away and forget about it. Until the next time.

It helps that I am basically a sloppy hack at heart and don't really mind - not really, otherwise I wouldn't do it. If my children find these pieces later in life and want to have a go at me about it I will simply start charging them rent.

Another girl in my life who doesn't judge me for this kind of caper is a French girl called Amelie, once described to me as the "rudest girl in London" but I don't understand why, because she is simply charming, she is just a bit brisk and French. I think she is terrific.

We went to see her and her husband this weekend for lunch and Amelie calmly went out to the shops to buy some ingredients for Raymond Blanc's much-celebrated Apple tart Maman Blanc and made it while guests were arriving. She had never made it before! And, she declared "I 'aven't cooked anysing for years." I cannot imagine how relaxed you have to be to do something like this.

Anyway it was just fantastic. I didn't help in the actual preparation, I just provided moral support and read out the recipe as she was cooking, which she declared was very helpful but I think she may just have been being nice.

This is how it goes: the precise recipe, including instructions for the shortcrust pastry, can be found on p246 of Kitchen Secrets, or online.

Amelie, like all good French girls, just buys her pastry pre-made. I think she used puff (she herself couldn't remember if she had bought puff or shortcrust - such insouciance!!!) but you really ought to buy shortcrust.

So here we go:

Apple tart 'Maman Blanc'

1 packet shortcrust pastry
3 dessert apples (like a Braeburn or whatever, just not a super-sour cooking apple)
15g unsalted butter
15g caster sugar
11/2 tsp lemon juice
7g Calvados (if you like)
icing sugar, to dust
1 medium egg
100 ml whipping cream
50g caster sugar

1 Roll out your pastry to fit your tart case and have it slightly higher than the rim of the tin because pastry shrinks on cooking. Prick the base with a fork and put in the fridge for 20 min.

2 Preheat the oven and a baking sheet (or any old tin big enough to take the tart tin) to 220C

3 Peel and core the apples and cut each into 10. Lay them closely together and overlapping in a circle in the base of the tart case.

4 In a small pan, melt the butter and sugar, then take off the heat and mix in the lemon juice and Calvados if using. Brush this over the apples slices and dust with icing sugar.

5 Slide the tart tin onto your now hot sheet and cook for 10 minutes. Turn the oven down to 200C and bake for another 20 minutes until the tart case is brown and the apples look a bit caramelised.

6 For the custard filling, whisk 1 egg together with 50g caster sugar and 100ml whipping cream and pour into the tart 10 minutes before the end of the cooking time.

Et Voila! As Amelie almost never says.

Kale chips

I am very slightly ashamed of how obsessive I was about weight gain and loss during and after both my pregnancies.

When I say obsessive during my pregnancy, I mean I just fretted in my head a lot about how fat I was - I didn't NOT eat just exactly whatever the hell I fancied. I mean, there was nothing I wouldn't eat. The second time round I made concessions to not putting on three stone by switching to Diet Coke and not having pudding with every meal … but I still put on three stone.

And when I say obsessive about my weight after pregnancy I mean obsessed with regaining some approximation of my pre-pregnancy state. And if possible, beyond that, plummeting to under nine stone in weight (this is an impossible dream). Obsessed, I ought to say, up to the point of actually doing any exercise.

Having said that, it's an easy trap to fall into, once you reckon you are done with babies, to go a bit scrawny. To go Full Thin. So traumatising is it being so fat and ungainly that you almost attempt to scrub out the very memory of the fatness by getting far too thin, only for your husband to leave you for a chubby barmaid just at the point that you look genuinely terrific in a pair of leather trousers. (Which by now you must wear all the time, even in June, because you are stick-like and freezing.)

I say I feel ashamed because it all basically comes off in the end - unless you are really bloody unlucky, or just really not trying at all - but I feel like rather than obsessing about getting back into a - any! - pair of jeans I ought to have been bonding like crazy with  my babies. We did bond, I think. Kitty vaguely knows who I am and Sam says "Mumum" when he sees me. Fine. But still, my impatience is a bit embarrassing. It's just a bit vain.

Anyway I can relax now and spend the next forever getting even thinner being totally focused on my children because I am back within a whisker of my pre-baby weight, although not quite my pre-baby shape.

There is a ghastly thing that happens when you have a baby where your hips widen - literally the bones actually widen - and take a while to settle back to their normal circumference, so you can be back to your old weight but still not fit into your old jeans.

But I have achieved a sudden accelerated weight loss by hitting on the importance of lunch in my day. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I have had to eat in order to lose weight.

I hate lunch. I always have. I find it tedious and boring and I don't like lunch options. So normally I skip it, but then come 3.30pm I am so starving I can't concentrate and then I start snacking heavily on very sugary stuff, which isn't going to make anyone a supermodel, you feel me?

But lunch is a bore. And it makes a bloody great mess, which I always want to avoid as it feels like I cook and clear up about 15 meals a day as it is. I have all this food and this enormous, stacked kitchen, and yet I'm just not eating lunch. It wasn't happening.

So I thought to myself "What would Anna Bateson do?" Anna Bateson is a very successful friend, initially of my husband's but I suppose also of mine, now - how do those things work? - who does something important at YouTube and has two children very close in age and everyone goes round going "OMG Anna Bateson".

When she is in this country, (which isn't often), I openly mine her for information and go "What kind of handbag do you have? Who is your nanny? Where are you going on holiday this year? How did you potty-train D-? Which internet shopping outlet do you favour? Where are those jeans from?" just because I think she has the answers. She quite often does, it's totally apt that she works at an internet company. She's a one-woman search engine.

Anyway so I thought to myself "What would Anna Bateson do?" and the answer was: OUTSOURCE. Anna would outsource lunch. She would go "Yes, buying a healthy, delicious lunch every day is more expensive than making it at home, but if it will persuade you to eat lunch, which in turn will make you thinner, it is cheaper than a gym membership." She would calmly show you a brief PowerPoint presentation about it and then leave to catch a plane.

So now I either go early to fetch Kitty from nursery and stop at a Vietnamese cafe on the way for some grilled chicken and cous cous or I buy myself a salad from Pret in the morning if running errands. Failing that I FORCE myself to eat baked beans on sourdough. Then I have a cup of tea and 1 (one) biscuit and that's it until dinner.

It still being winter-ish and both my husband and I on our eternal, possibly terminal, quest to weigh 3 stone apiece, we are always looking for new things to do with wretched kale and someone suggested kale chips, which turn out to be very easy and very delicious (when covered with a lot of salt and brown sugar). They taste a lot like what we always used to call crispy seaweed in Chinese restaurants and it is basically the only thing approaching "tasty" that you can do with kale.

It's very simple, what you do is pre-heat your oven to 180C and shake out some kale on a large baking sheet. Snip up the bigger pieces with scissors and then sprinkle with brown soft sugar and some sea salt. Bake for about 25 mins checking occasionally to make sure they're not burnt.

Eat as a pre-dinner snack with, err, sherry? Or a Diet Coke if you really mean this.

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.