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Crafts on Sea

/ Cooking

Dear Delia,

I don’t know how to say this, but me and you? Its just not working out is it?

We used to be so great together. Back in the day when I first started cooking we were inseparable. I was an ex-veggie, couldn’t even cook a sausage. You came into my life in the form of many cookery books, given to me by my dad, over-whelmed with happiness as he was that I was finally ready to move on from cheese filled Findus Crispy Pancakes and for the those early, heady days together it was great. I learnt loads from you and yeah, your picture on the cover now looks pretty filthy these days, but who wants a clean book?

If I’m honest though Delia, I started seeing someone else. Mary Berry. I just didn’t have the cake tin sizes that you wanted for Jacobs birthday cake and she came to my rescue. Yeah, ok my first try with her was rubbish, but sometimes the first time you go with someone new it isn’t all that. The second attempt was fantastic though. View Post

/ Cooking

Hello,

My mummy writes the big sensible blogs here normally where she pretends to be good at craft and stuff. But have you ever had any of her cakes? Ahem. Lets just say the victora sponge she made for my birthday took her two attempts, a whole heap of words I’m not supposed to hear and apparently forced her to drink a whole lot of mummy juice afterwards. I don’t know what’s in mummy juice, but my mum seems rather keen on it and she won’t let me have any, even though it looks nice and she claims that its kinda fruit based so it would probably count towards my five a day.

Anyway, she looked a bit knackered after out most recent 4am chat  so I thought I would do a blog for her and share the yummy cakes I made yesterday at the childminders. Check these bad boys out.

Chocolate. Cornflakes. General yummyness. The cornflakes have (probably) got some vitamins added to them, the chocolate looks good when I dribble it down my white tshirt or wipe my chocolatey hands on the new tele. (Go ahead and judge people, but I made it very clear to mummy and daddy that when the tele and fridge both broke last week the one that needed replacing first was the one with Makka Pacca)

Mummy will probably do a proper sensible blog here next week, but in the meantime, feel free to nominate me for any of big blogging awards, or at least comment. No one wants a toddler checking their wordpress to find no comments in there. That’s almost as annoying as when mummy failed to make the helicopters come back the other day. I’m probably gonna need therapy for that.

Love and chocolate dribbles,

jacob x

 

/ Parenting

So, a couple of weeks ago a man contacted me and asked if I would like to do a product review on some clothes and I thought….hmm…. because the day he happened to contact me was super-dooper-spam-on-twitter day and anyone who contacted me that I hadn’t known since birth was treated with the level of suspicion that I normally reserve for Russian ex-military types with a teapot full of Polonium.
Which is strange, because in ye olden days I used to write a fanzine (yes, really that long ago, it was on ceefax and everything) and I used to get stuff to review all the time and never thought twice about it. Funny how one gets more suspicious in old age.
Anyway. Having worried for at least 15 minutes that this was a state sponsored attempt by The Man to Shut Me Down I then realised that a) this was unlikely and I should stop drinking so much caffeine and b) I could actually do with some new clothes for Jacob so I said yes and lo and behold a week later some goodies from Vertbaudet arrived in the post.
I did think that as a ‘proper’ product tester I should just let him wear their gear. However the Husband reliably informed me that if I dressed him all in pale colours he would look like Martin Bell.
Nice trousers Jacob!
Oh! And a nice top too! Apologies for the baby reins here, which rather spoil my modelling on the beach session, but he’d just walked down the steps onto the beach from the main road behind where, like a proper Essex Boy, he’d been trying to chase after 4×4’s and sports cars.
So yes, nice things, cheers! In terms of sensible testing, they do both require a bit of ironing which isn’t generally my biggest forte, so I do my best to leave that to John. One strange thing though is that the children’s clothes in Vertbaudet are 0-36 months or 2-14? And as Jacob is 18 months he looks a bit weird in baby clothes now so I struggled a bit to find something that looked like the ‘right’ age for him, I just can’t see him rocking much in the way of pastels these days, although maybe that’s just me.
If anyone else would like me to product test huge diamonds, 4×4’s filled to the brim with petrol or holidays in the Caribbean with baby sitting thrown in, I’m your girl. Just don’t send me the dodgy teapot, ok?
/ Crafts for grown ups

As much as I love sewing, I have the attention span of a small child. I generally put this down to bing dyslexic, but if I’m honest a large part of it is just wanting to get something done. I work, I have a small child, dinner to cook, flat to clean, washing up to do, husband to hold polite conversations with. I long to do a huge patchwork throw for our bed, but in all honesty I don’t know where I’d find that time. Or the patience.

So, a pin cushion it is. A pin cushion that can be made between putting the child to bed and putting the dinner on which to me is the perfect length for a craft project.

Designed myself too! Not that its a biggie, but I know how some other people copy things off pinterest and I have gone utterly old school and ghetto here and copied the design from something I’d seen in Real Life and not on a computer screen. No good will come of this, obviously.

So, to make this, all you need is to draw and cut out two big circles on some nice material, preferably something that contrasts nicely, then use a sewing machine to go round the outside leaving a big gap to turn it inside out. Turn inside out, stuff with loads of toy filler and then sew the hole closed.

To make it look a bit funkier I added buttons on the top and the underside, this also meant that by sewing between the two of them I could make the cushion into more of a defined pin cushion shape as opposed to just a little cushiony lump. This was an utter faff. I mean it, large scale faffyness was involved here and some low level swearing too (large level swearing generally being reserved for baking). Obviously, the one I’d looked at had been done by a big machine, probably somewhere in China where as my poor clutzy hands in less exotic Essex were not so well designed for this task. Still, it does make it look a bit funkier, and I had it all finished in time for tea. After my last blog about drunken rock and roll antics, I can feel now like I’m back on the road to domestic goddessness, all be it with the normal vats of wine thrown in on route.

/ Cooking

And so we start with a confession. I was laughed at at work last week because I don’t think I’ve ever cooked a Sunday Roast. I thought they were something only people’s grandparents made, and apparently this, ahem, isn’t the case.

In my defence I was a vegetarian for eight years. Mumma Crafts on Sea  is a veggie. My brother is a veggie. Roast dinners were never going to be a big part of my childhood. Even when I started eating meat again The Husband had to teach me how to cook bacon. Roast dinners always look like such a pain to cook, and yet there is that desire that occasionally builds up to eat a ‘proper meal’. The kind of meals mums are supposed to make and not just the total carb-junkie pastathon that I live on.

Thankfully my mild case of paternal guilt was thwarted this week by my friend Aimee Fox-Godden who asked me to blog a couple of slow cooker recipes. Being a parent to Vaguely Fussy Child, I obviously could not be faffed to cook him something separate to what I’m eating. Predictably, this being the latest in a long line of Teething Hell weeks (sponsored by calpol and cbeebies) the Small Thing would not eat a ruddy mouthful of this (I appreciate that I should probably lie and say that he loved it or I’ll never get my advance on How To Feed Your Fuss-Pot Child) However he has wolfed it down before, I promise! Either way, I had it on at lunchtime which meant once he was in bed I could concentrate on more important things, like drinking.

For two adults with proper appetites, and one toddler who may or may not eat it.

Ingredients:

1 pack skinless chicken thighs, chopped into bite size pieces

A few potatoes, peeled and chopped

Half a low salt stock cube

Whatever vegetables you have knocking around that want eating. In my case this was peas, sweetcorn, green beans and a leek. Sweet potato is also nice but that would have involved going to the shops.

Pop everything in your slow cooker with about 1 cup of water. With slow cookers the thing to remember is that the water needs to be there to cook everything, but it will not disappear, so unless you want a soup don’t add loads, you can always put more in later.

Turn slow cooker on. Feel smug. (A re-occuring theme in this blog, you may wish to note)

Feed child. Cross fingers if appropriate.

Because the husband is also not generally  a fan of sensible foods, we tend to chuck loads of dried chili flakes on ours when we serve it so that voila! Not too sensible, but still tasty, healthy and no effort at all.