Bake, Bath and Bitch
2008-10-29, 1:34 p.m.
*GASP* Guess what, guess what!!! Im on holidaaaaaaaaaaay!Its half-term this week so Ive taken a couple of days away from Twat Inc with the intention of having a bit of R & R with Jooj and Treac. So far Ive been officially away from the office for one hour and 17 minutes and I have already had one courier delivery of paperwork which absolutely HAS to be proofed before Friday and one phone call from the office telling me that the courier stuff is all wrong and I should wait for fresh stuff which will be with me��.on Friday.
*tsk* I wouldn�t mind, but its not like they pay me a �very important and vital to the smooth running of the company� type salary.
Anyway. Onwards and upwards. A few photos of last weeks exploits.
First off, remember me saying L had brought his dad round to look at the studio? Well, here he/it is. Both are pretty splendid�..but only one of them hasn�t got any socks on.
Treac had a sleepover at her friend�s house on Saturday so Joj and I had a day mooching about and cooking stuff. Here�s how we did stuffed peppers or, Jesus H Christ! Even a 12 year old can stuff a few bloody peppers!!!
Mix up some grated strong cheddar some cream cheese, some cooked bacon (or ham) and some chopped spring onion (or scallions if you are a foreigner). Cut the ends off the peppers and scoop out any seeds with the handle of a teaspoon. Squish the cheesy stuff into the pepper. No photos of that bit as its too easy.
Then, get a piece of filo pastry
Brush it with melted butter
Put a cheesy pepper in one corner and start rolling
When you get to the centre of the pastry, fold the corners in and keep rolling. We find it helps to look really cack-handed at this point, ideally with your tongue sticking half out.
When they�re all rolled up, paint them with a bit more melted butter and bake in the oven for about 20 mins at 200�C/400�F/Gas Mk6. YUM!!!
If there is any filo pastry left over, you could always use it to line a little pudding bowl, then chop up an apple, add a few raisins and some dark brown sugar and add that to the pastry bowl shell. Scrunch the pastry over the top of the apple mixture and put it in the bottom of the oven while the peppers are cooking. By the time you have eaten all the peppers, you will have TOFFEE APPLE FILO PIE!!!! Look smug, Jooj, look smug!
Next day, she got all clever with herself. Digestive biscuits were squished and mixed with butter, apples were mixed with blackberries and egg whites got whisked up with sugar
Once the crumb case had been made and the fruit had been spread in the dish, then it was time to spread the meringue mixture on the pie
Bake in a hot oven for five minutes or so and say �I made that!� to adoring step-father.
Meanwhile, Treacle came back from her sleepover and demonstrated to us what happens if you stay up all night eating Haribo after a full day of singing Supergrass covers on the Singstar. Apparently it makes you pass out on the sofa and only wake up to have a bit of blackberry and apple meringue pie.
Right, on to the serious stuff. My lovely friend Jonathan got me all intrigued about what kind of toxins might be drained from my own raddled corpse if I tried the Epsom Salts bath. As I explained to him, whilst I don�t have necessarily quite the same scary level of noxious substances hanging about in my system as he does/did, it IS the 21st century, I HAVE had 42 years to build up my �toxic waste retention� abilities and I have to concede that I CAN have a somewhat laissez faire attitude to ingestion.
Needless to say, curiosity had me in its tickly little fingers and was making me go all squirmy and giggly � especially once I�d talked it over with Slaveboy in the office next day and he�d decided he wanted to have a go, too. We did spend an inordinate amount of time wondering what might happen to the bathwater once our respective toxin desiccation had been achieved. I assumed mine would mostly be whisky, mint Aeros and spunk. Slaveboy only looked slightly affronted when I suggested his would mostly be amyl nitrate�.and spunk. I thought it was churlish of him to poo-poo my suggestion that we both bring in a sample of our bath water after the event in a compare-and-contrast kind of way. He�s no fun.
The chemists only had Epsom salts in teeny tiny little pots so we had to shop online.
These guys sell it in huge great tubs AND its delivered the very next day! Yay!! Unfortunately, they do also have a minimum order value which meant I went browsing the site and bought astonishing amounts of soap-making equipment. Hmmmm, I feel a craft afternoon coming on!
I have to say I was a little bit disappointed that the water didn�t immediately turn into a seething green ooze as soon as I stepped into the bath but, no matter. After the recommended soaking time (which WAS relaxing, but that may just have been as a result of it being the first time in the day when I had been forced to be relatively motionless) my skin did feel a bit�ummm�sludgy. I don�t know if that was the effects of the Epsom salts or just because I needed a bath but, either way, I had to find something to give myself a jolly good scrub with.
We have those strange nylony �bath puff� things in our house. They didn�t exist when I was a kid, which means that someone must have invented them relatively recently. I like to think it was somebody who had a surfeit of those funny net bags that onions come in, cos we all know it�s the very same stuff and that tying a bunch of onion bags into a puffy shape with a hank of decorative rope and flogging them off at �2 a pop is an idea we all wish we�d thought of.
No soap within arms reach so I had a rummage in the window sill basket (where pony-bands, blunt razors, hairclips and pairs of bend nail scissors go to die) and found a strawberry shaped glass bottle of bubble bath which Treac had bought me for some Mothers Day long since past. It was strangely �un-liquidish� for something which purported to be pourable and had more the consistency of a continental jam. I think it was supposed to be strawberry scented (it wasn�t) and it was of a most disturbing colour. Not bright red, as you were doubtless thinking, but more�.ummm�.more��well, let�s just say the last time anything that colour and viscosity was found in a bathtub there was also a knitting needle and a bottle of gin lying close by. *shudder*
As I scrubbed the sludge of a thousand years my stressful life off, the water became unpleasantly murky and I was a bit surprised to see, when I got out, that even tho my skin did feel nice and soft, I hadn�t actually become 26 again. Nor do I appear to have got any better looking.
L is going to try it next time he has a bath (don�t hold your breath). I suspect that will be the one and only occasion when bathwater has had a head on it.
Googling for something for Treac, I just found the lyrics for the Cocteau Twins �Pearly Dewdrops Drop�. Why would anyone want that?
I could feel my clothes mutating into shapeless brown sacks even at the very thought, bless their angsty little 80�s heads. Actually, it�s a shitty bit of youtubery, the song was better than that, Im sure. Or it might just be my angsty 80�s memory, making me think so.
Im missing my sister dreadfully at the moment. She�s still/back in Bruges and likely to be for several more weeks. In a spirit of making me feel less abandoned, you are welcome to fill my comments box with unreasonable requests, well observed yet cruel observations on my dress sense, sympathy for my precarious financial position and/or pithy and amusing comments on my inability to choose a husband who is not a bit of a twat.
Off ice skating tomorrow so will try to get some pics.