I am not a happy chicken. The flu is knocking my little family for a six, Finley is a mini monster with a cough, Mark is working till God knows when and I am dying from the kind of period pain you only get when you’ve been really, really wicked.
Today I am not even going to try to be a good housewife. Today I am hibernating in front of a cosy film (Mrs Miniver), with scraggy hair, toys everywhere and laundry coming out my ears. Even saints are sinners sometimes.
This is, I think you will agree, a day that calls for comfort food, and in my world that means:
Brocante Rarebit.
100g Grated Mature Cheddar.
2 tbsp Sweet Onion Relish.
1 tsp Grainy French Mustard.
2 tbsp Skimmed Milk.
1 tsp Butter
2 Slices Thick Granary Bread.
Toast the granary bread on one side only, then mix all other ingredients together to a paste and spread on the untoasted side of the granary.
Toast, serve with sliced tomato, watercress and black pepper et voila! scrummilicious cheese on toast, perfect for miserable mommies.
The other day I was buzzing around the kitchen putting lunch together when snippets of a video Richard was watching in the living room kept finding their way into my rather deaf ears. Though the voice was familiar I could not put a name to it, but when I heard the line below I downed…
Rain. Huge big plops that call for a sunny yellow Sou’wester and a cherry red smile. Vegetable chilli in the slow cooker and candles lit everywhere because this is surely the darkest day in the history of all our Augusts. You fight your way through knee high cottage flowers to feed chickens that squawk in surprise to see…
Yes, drapetomania: the urge to run away. Aren’t words wonderful? For what an absolute pleasure it is to discover a word that encapsulates an emotion so concisely, so absolutely perfectly. Once the word used to describe a pseudo mental illness apparently suffered by slaves, and now a more general description for the overwhelming urge to…
I can’t decide whether I absolutely adore it, or indeed consider it to be the most hideous cushion I’ve ever seen. Either way I want it. I’ve always said a bit of ugliness never goes amiss. Is it a yey or a ney?
I have been buying UK interiors magazines for eighteen years. All of them. Every month. (I could have been rich!!). I’ve seen it all. I’ve seen magazines come and go, and quite frankly, stay when they should have long gone. Some are trashy: the equivalent of Changing Rooms on paper. Some so utterly scrumptious I…
Hello Housekeepers, welcome to a brand new week and the fourth in my occasional series on the depiction of the housewife in art. One of the things I have noticed when I’m trawling the internet for images of domesticity is how very often housewives are portrayed as either grimly determined or quietly contemplative and I…
2 Comments
Look, it's a photo of the way I feel. Except I want to pull the bag down over my head. Happy New Year, Sam
Alison, it's so funny, I was just posting a link to this when I got the comment you were posting about the Paris apartment. http://audefrance.typepad.com/aude_france/ Take care, Sam
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Look, it's a photo of the way I feel. Except I want to pull the bag down over my head.
Happy New Year,
Sam
Alison, it's so funny, I was just posting a link to this when I got the comment you were posting about the Paris apartment. http://audefrance.typepad.com/aude_france/
Take care,
Sam