the scent of water

I need some music inspiration.

I'm such a music dunce.  It's shocking really.  But I'd really love to learn so much more about it - so, what kind of music do  you love?  If you had to choose three artists, or bands, or composers, to recommend to somebody, who would you choose? 

I'm all in a muddle.

Nothing new about me and muddles.  We are old friends.  Nothing new about the solution either.

Eat ice-cream.

(Frozen rasberries + cream + unrefined icing sugar + food processor = instant gratification)

I found her in the middle of a dull surburban day.

It's easy to see why some societies make a religion out of nature.  Even at her most mundane she can rip your breath out with her beauty.

Small solitudes.

 

"There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go.”   ~ Tennessee Williams

In a journal he kept of his Greenlandic expeditions, Knud Rasmussen quoted an Inuit shaman as saying that all true wisdom is only to be found far from the dwellings of man, in the great solitudes. The romantic in me fancies this to be true, the pragmatist laughs and thinks that three years roaming around the edges of Greenland isn't going to get anyone's washing done.  And you can find, Mr. Shaman, a surprising amount of wisdom in washing.

Still.  Sometimes my yearning for that kind of silence grows so strong it becomes painful.   I am no more likely to leave my family than Knud was likely to stay home with his, so where are the places, I wonder, for people like me?  

The only kind of answer I have found so far is inside the small solitudes.  The books, the journals, the wanderings of the imagination.  A solo meal.  Time with my camera.  Whether these things will remain enough, I have my doubts, but they are, at the very least, a great point for departure.

I've never been a blog of the day before.

 

It's  rather exciting, and yes, I am being a big fat show-off about it. Unashamedly so, because who wouldn't be excited about being associated in any kind of way with such a fun and funny movie?  (if you haven't seen the trailer for Julie + Julia, please do go and have a look - the scene where Julia is sitting in a restaurant talking to her husband about her talent for eating makes me laugh out loud.  Every time.) 

If you are visiting here expecting an honest-to-goodness food blog and are now wondering what on earth it is you have found, don't worry.  No-one else knows either.   This post probably explains things as best as they can be explained, but really, just make of it what you will.

PS: - Could that apron above be any more perfect?

Some things that are only mildly related to some other things.

  

Art is contagious.  ~ Brenda Ueland

I like the idea of art as a virus, infecting first the DNA of its creator and then rapidly spreading to whoever else is fortunate enough to cross its path.  There are some days when I wonder if there is any kind of point to art, and then there are days when I wonder if there is any kind of point without it?

There was a man who walked into the front garden of the house in my early morning dream and picked a bouquet of blue hydrangeas growing there.  He brought them inside as a present for our table, and to offer a warning of the danger waiting outside our front gate. Then he disappeared. Cheeky sod, I thought when I woke up, and decided that he must have come from my dream book.  His name is Luca and I am not quite sure whether anyone really knows if his heart is good or bad.

I am buying Sara Maitland's A Book of Silence as a birthday present for myself next month, partly because I love that title, and partly because in one of the lives I will almost certainly never live I hang out by myself in an isolated cabin in the Scottish Highlands.  If I can't have that particular dream then surely the next best thing is to be infected by the work of someone who can.

I'll make this as quick and painless as possible, which is to say not very.

Day 7 and we made it.  Pretty much.  Budget almost nearly kept, to within 5% anyway, which I'd call a win. I might even call it a first. 

Judging by the photos I took, it looks like we lived off snack food for the week, but we ate actual meals too.  Breakfast was mostly porridge or homemade muesli, an egg every now and then.  Lunches were sandwiches made from homemade bread, pizza rolls, bacon butties, often accompanied by fruit and popcorn, and I did succumb to cherry and chocolate chip cookie overload on one occasion or three.  You eat one and see if you can blame me.

Dinners: Devilled meatballs, roast chicken, chicken risotto, spinach and ricotta cannelloni, penne bolognaise, creamy tomato chicken, and pot roast beef.  There was even an apple crumble with cream, and a homemade peach icecream with rice pudding thrown in there too. Yes, it was rather a feast.

 

Which was the revelation.  I'm all for the organic thing, sustainability and animal welfare being rather hard to argue against, and there has been an immensely pleasurable lack of packaging hanging around the house too.  I don't much enjoy the sanctimonius whiff that seems to hang over organic stores sometimes, but maybe that is just the incense. The real epiphany came Saturday night when I answered the usual round of "what's for dinner?" with "I don't know.  Chicken something."

Because I didn't know.  None of my usual combination of recipe ingredients were in the cupboards, and the recipe books weren't of much help either.  Going to the supermarket for a top-up would really screw up the whole experiment, so I had no choice. I winged it.  Pulled out some ingredients I thought might like each other, including the stunted but still nutritious rainbow chard that has been sitting in a pot on my patio forever, and made up dinner.

Going into my pantry and finding quality ingredients there, ingredients that were costing me less than my usual chaotic style of medicore shopping, using them in a nutritious (and super yum too, she says modestly) meal that isn't in any recipe book anywhere and could only have come out of my kitchen in this season on that particular night - it was magic.  Pure and simple magic.

So the experiment continues and morphs into a lifestyle.  I am home-cook, hear me roar.

What I lack in organisation, I make up for in colour.

The courier arrived with my new old sewing machine when I was in the middle of vacumming the dining room, supervising homework, preparing dinner, and so forth.  Obviously I dropped everything to see if the machine would actually sew one piece of fabric to another.  And another.  Etc. 

 

Eilidh wants lessons and in the meantime makes do with paper and staples.  Or plastic and sellotape.  I think she had 20 such outfits in her wardrobe at last count.  I am of the firm opinion that she spent her 9 months in the womb planning all the things she would wear once she escaped into the real world. 

Random photo of dried roses.  I keep planning on using them to decorate cupcakes but have not yet been able to bring myself to such a level of sacrifice.

I almost gave up yesterday.

Because I'm good at that.  Why spend another evening cooking when I could be reading a book?  I was tired and sad and just didn't want to pull out another couple of meals from the (still surprisingly well stocked) pantry. 

One sleep and a defrosted portion of bread dough later, and I managed to tick off another day (5 down and 2 to go).  I confess there has been one last minute run to the supermarket for milk, one for my favourite English Breakfast tea (you didn't really expect me to go without did you?) and I bought the children a small treat this afternoon to celebrate the beginning of winter holidays.  It sounds a lot, put like that, but for me it's a minor miracle.

Here comes the rain again.

 

When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other.  ~ Chinese proverb.

No food pictures today but never fear, we are still eating.  Cookies mostly.  Instead, I've been trying to take some semi-attractive photos of a couple of books that make good cold weather reading (This Cold Heaven, and Winter's Bone, if you're interested), but the light has not been co-operating and so I am stealing these few slices of summer from my northern friends instead.  It's been a cold, hard winter.

(I dreamed a few nights ago that I was writing a book called A Strange Row of Trees, which my unconscious self thought was the most genius title ever.  Lord knows what it was about.  I also dreamed I was narrowly escaping burning meteors and aliens in tiny spaceships, so, you know.  Maybe not.)

1. a little cheer, 2. yarrow, 3. Peonies and lilacs, 4. wild things: gratitude 241.365