Souper Trooper

We're well into the 'season of mists and mellow fruitfulness' (thank you, A-Level English Lit curriculum for lodging Keats in my brain forever) and I can no longer pretend it's still summer. On the whole I am not a fan of  autumn and winter because the garden is dormant, it gets dark too soon and it's soggy much of the time.

 However, there are some positives about the cold and dark even a solar-powered soul like myself can appreciate. One is that it's time to get the beautiful Welsh woollen blanket on the bed once again. The other is that it's soup season. 

It's a very good blanket 

I love soup. I really, really love it. Not just 'quite like' but actually think about and look forward to it. It's a wonderful, comforting thing. It can be healthy or indulgent, quick or take ages, smooth to soothe a sore throat or hearty and veering towards stew. I don't care, I love all of them.

One of my favourites has been sustaining me since I was breastfeeding my second baby (who is now 24) and never had time to get a proper meal. I actually fed him with a tea towel over his head while I ate this soup because there was nothing more likely to wake him for a feed than the presence of a warm dinner for me. The soup is nourishing because of the lovely Puy lentils, and helps cut through a bunged up nose or general winter blues with the kick of sour lemon juice and heat of chilli flakes. 

Hot and Sour Soup with Lentils 

1 diced onion
1tbs olive oil
200g mushrooms
300g Puy lentils
1.5l vegetable stock
3 crushed garlic cloves
lemon juice
chilli flakes

I fry the onions in the oil until they're lightly golden, then add the mushrooms and cook for another 5-7 minutes. I add the garlic for the last minute then pour the lentils and stock in, cover and simmer for about 30-40 minutes until the lentils are fully cooked but still hold their shape. Then it's adding enough lemon juice and chilli to fit your palate - in my case about 4 tablespoons of lemon juice and a heaped teaspoon of flakes, but I like things on the punchy side.

Other days it's nice to have something creamy and comforting. Leek and Potato is obviously a winner. Cream Of Tomato soup reminds me of snowy lunchtimes in Canada when I was a kid, dunking my grilled cheese into the soup bowl at the kitchen table in our house on Ann Street.  However, most often I make soup with a single type of vegetable, roasted until sweet.

A change to these old favourites I've adopted recently is to add white beans to all my smooth soups. When they are pureed it just adds a bit of velvety smooth texture while boosting the protein, iron, minerals and fibre of the soup. Beans are ridiculously good for you and cheap, so it seems a no-brainer.

Roast 'Something' Soup

An oven tray of roughly chopped vegetable (eg butternut squash, carrots, parsnips or cauliflower)
2 tbs olive oil
vegetable stock
1 tin or jar of chickpeas or butter beans or cannellini beans
spices and salt and pepper
cream (optional)

I toss the squash slices (or carrots etc) in the oil and tip them into an oven tray which goes into a medium hot oven until the vegetable is tender. How long depends on big or small you've cut your veg, but typically it's in there for 30-50 minutes. Then I tip it in the blender with the beans and add stock slowly until it's a soup and not a puree. With squash and pumpkin soup I like to add cumin; carrot likes coriander; parsnips benefit from a dash of horseradish.  Then it gets portioned up with anything not getting immediately eaten being labelled (obviously) and put in the freezer.

I took a tub of this type of soups - butternut squash with chickpeas - to have lunch with a friend the other day, and we were agreeing how brilliant this sort of food is when you just don't have the energy to stand in the kitchen. Sometimes, whether through illness, the general peri menopausal hellscape or just a case of I cannot be arsed, a container of soup in the fridge is like a hug from your past self to your current knackered self. "There, there. Don't worry, I've got you covered."

Broccoli soup is a special one - it needs almost nothing doing to it at all. Gordon Ramsay demonstrated it on telly once and it was a revelation! Literally a 5 minute soup. Just steamed broccoli put in a blender with stock and seasoning. It's a vibrant green, and is absolutely delicious with a slice of goats cheese sitting on top, gently melting. If you've ever got a slightly sad looking broccoli in the veg drawer, I can highly recommend using it up this way. 

I've written in the past about the absolute queen of soup, Pasta E Fagioli  which is especially pleasing made with home grown borlotti beans. In fact, some of last year's borlottis are in this week's sausage casserole, reminding me that the veg patch is a gift that keeps giving even when the garden is asleep.

My favourite ready made soup is the Smoked Haddock and Salmon Chowder made by Cully and Sully. It usually costs between £2.20-£3 and is a hearty meal all of its own. It's not quite up there with the marvellous Fiskesuppe we had in Norway, but it's the best soup I've had from a supermarket. 

To be honest, for me there are very few vegetable soups worth buying in the supermarket since manufacturers started adding coconut solids to soups (rather than butter) to make them vegan. It's not nearly as nice. I stick to fish soups now  if I'm buying ready made. My freezer is packed with reused Cully and Sully tubs; I buy it most weeks through winter.

The best restaurant for marvellous soup, in my opinion, is The Jolly Fisherman in Craster. They have a magnificent Crab Soup that they serve with a generous helping of homemade bread, and the House Chowder is also superb. 

I am alone in my Soup Devotion in this house. Mark enjoys the odd bowl, but he'd usually opt for a sandwich instead. (Mark and I have VERY different ideas about what qualifies as acceptable bread. I am very much Not A Fan of the damned Chorleywood process that ruined bread quality in the UK, whereas he doesn't mind) Zach never quite forgave soup for being the only thing he could eat for weeks when he first got braces, and Miss B thinks soup is boring. 

One thing we can all agree on is that Andy Warhol preserved for posterity the most truly repellent flavour of Campbell's Soups in his second Soup Cans collection of  paintings. It's currently on display at the rather wonderful Cartwright Hall in Shipley, on the edge of Bradford. What on earth were Campbell thinking?

Hot Dog Bean Soup? No ta.

 

 

Seasonal Food - Asparagus Quiche

 It's the last weekend in May and we're deep into asparagus season. We've passed the first few harvests of a handful of spears and are into the gut. The first cutting I ate while standing next to the saucepan in the kitchen; the next three or four actually made it to the plate. By mid May I had enough tall stalks to make asparagus soup, which is far and away Zach's favourite soup in the world. (I like ALL the soups)

Last weekend, following the mini heat wave, the spears had put on another burst of growth, leaving me with nearly 300g of fresh trimmed asparagus to be used that day. I decided to make a quiche. 

Sublime to ridiculous - the big one was over a metre

It must be said, I never make quiche. Ever. Mostly because it involves pastry and I hate dealing with pastry. It's awful stuff - too cold and it doesn't roll out, too warm and it stretches and sticks to everything. Dreadful. With the exception of making mince pies, I only ever use the ready made pastry, and even then unwillingly.

However, asparagus quiche does look awfully pretty, and heaven knows I've got plenty of eggs from the hens at this time of year. I decided to give it a go.

• 1 pack of ready rolled shortcrust pastry
• 4 eggs
•  140ml milk
• 80g finely grated hard cheese (cheddar, pecorino, parmesan, whatever you like)
• as many chopped asparagus spears as you can fit in your dish (about 275g in my case)
• salt and pepper 
• grating of nutmeg (optional)

I put the pastry into a lined pie tin and popped it in the freezer while the oven heated to 160 fan. Then I blind baked the pastry for 15 minutes, removed the baking beans and put it back for another 10 minutes.

I whisked the eggs, milk, seasoning and most of the cheese together in a jug. The raw spears were cut into 3cm lengths and the tips set aside. I crammed as much asparagus into the pie tin as possible and poured the egg mix over it until full. I arranged the tips in a circle in the centre of the quiche and sprinkled the remaining cheese on top before sliding it c-a-r-e-f-u-l-l-y into the oven.

It baked in the oven until set which took about 35 minutes, give or take. The time in the oven was just enough to lightly cook the asparagus, still leaving some bite to it, which is my preference. If you prefer asparagus soft, by all means blanch them for a minute or two before baking the quiche.

I'm not going to lie, it was superb. Really, utterly delicious in the way perfectly fresh ingredients just outclass anything you can buy in a shop. The eggs and the asparagus were food metres, not miles, and the asparagus was cut from the veg bed while the pastry was blind baking.

It was far too much for the three of us - obviously Luke wouldn't eat it and Bonnie's still at uni - so I shared some with my Very Excellent Mate Penny. She was also a fan. Asparagus one of those crops, like peas and sweetcorn, which really benefit from being home grown and eaten as soon as you pick them. The sugars start to turn to starch the moment after they're picked so freshness is crucial to the best flavour.

So I guess the real first instructions for this quiche  are:

1.  Plant your asparagus crowns in February or March. Mulch well
2. Wait three years 

 

 

We have it, I just don't know how to pronounce it.

A little over a week ago Mark bought ingredients for pesto and focaccia, intending to recreate the food we had on holiday. Then he didn't actually get around to it while I was obsessing about promised Italian food, so I ended up making them. (Never, ever proimise me cheese, Italian food or trips to New York and fail to deliver - I will obsess about them at the slightest opportunity).

Focaccia needs baking at a very high temperature. This is how I discovered our 23 year old Samsung oven no longer heated up past 140 degrees, and produced very, very bad focaccia.

The oven had been limping along for years; the door wouldn't shut entirely so it's lost heat for at least 6 years, probably more. Last month I discovered only half of the grill worked, but as we have an air fryer, that seemed manageable. 

After some very scientific research and testing (I read Good Housekeeping's recommendations, then I went to John Lewis to open and shut doors and twiddle dials) we decided on our oven. Wanting one that would last pretty much forever, we bought a Miele.

The difficulty in ordering one in person is that no one seems to know how to pronounce it. There was MEE-leh, my-EL-eh,  my-EL, MEE-lay, MEEL, MEE-luh. Each person I spoke to said it differently. In the end I was basically just pointing. "I want that one with the actual buttons, please."

It arrived promptly enough, but there were complications. We'd gone down from a double oven to a single, so Mark needed to build a shelf for it part way up the larger cavity left by the old one. This does mean we have space for an extra drawer, though, which is great.  Also, it needed wiring it. These felt a bit of a faff, so to be perfectly honest Mark procrastinated a few days before doing it just before Bonnie and her friends arrived for the Easter weekend.

There was a hitch - no power. Mark uninstalled it, connected the oven to a plug and turned it on, which showed the oven itself was fine. So it seemed to be the wiring. 

I'll be honest, mid afternoon before a 4 day weekend when you're feeding 7 people is a sub-optimal time to discover you need an electrician.  

I hit all my local WhatsApp chats is an urgent plea for a good electrician but the recommended tradesmen were either busy or on holiday. Mark finally found a bloke at 3:30 on the condition that Mark went to fetch him as his son had taken the car keys. 

 David the Sparky was very lovely. He explained the wiring was just fine but had been over-tightened, leading to a dodgy connection. He fixed that, tested it and put it back in place and was driven home clutching half a dozen fresh eggs as well as his fee, with about an hour to go before the young people arrived.

This morning I thought I should get to know the oven - technology has moved on a lot in 23 years! So first I made a dozen carrot and pecan cupcakes using the Hummingbird Bakery recipe at 2/3 proportions, then a batch of dark chocolate and orange cookies from BBC Good Food. Seeing as it is Good Friday, I've got dough for hot cross buns proving as type. You know me - go big or go home.

HAPPY EASTER - but Zach ate the A cupcake from Happy so I improvised

The new oven is amazing - it gets to temperature extremely quickly,  has a myriad of setting I don't yet understand and probably will never use, has a self cleaning function and can be operated remotely by my phone. What a marvellous modern world we live in, as Captain Jack Aubry says.

 I did the cupcakes on Conventional and the cookies on Fan Plus, and think I'll try Intensive Bake for hot cross buns, and see if I can find a difference in them at all.

 As for the name - I think I'm going with one online suggestion -  Miele rhymes with Sheila. 

 

NB - Mark more than redeemed himself for procrastinating three days with the oven by mowing the lawn today while I baked. First mow of the year! It all looks lovely.

Sort your (life?) fridge out

I absolutely love Sort Your Life Out on the BBC. Dilly, the organiser, is my hero and I go around labelling things like a fiend - my chest freezer is awe-inspiring, I promise you. However, I'm not exactly living up to the decluttering queen's standards day to day. Quite frankly, I'm very messy and fairly lazy. 

With my knee pain worsening over the past two months, the kitchen has descended into chaos lately (along with the rest of the house, god help me!) I though I'd best  have a bit of a sort out. In doing so, I found an awfully nice lunch.

Zach says that to have an ADHD diagnosis, your quality of life has to be suffering because of your struggle to concentrate or remember things. We decided that means I have Mark's ADHD.  He's vague and drifts off to something else partway through, but I'm the one whose life is affected. The number of unlocked doors, cupboard doors left ajar, half-done tasks is substantial and I have permanently bruised shins from walking into whatever drawer he's left open.

So while it's great that he thinks "I'll put that leftover lemon juice from the cocktails in a little tub in the fridge to be used up later," the system falls down because he doesn't label it and he forgets about it entirely the second he closes the door. (See also tins of baked beans, sliced tomatoes, mashed potato, gravy, ready sliced cheese for burgers). 

Mark had put a third lemon juice in the fridge while the previous two were going manky, so I figured a proper sort out of the fridge was overdue.

I chucked a bunch of mystery items (seriously, LABELS, dude!) and checked the many (so, so many) pickles and condiments (entirely my fault)for Best Before dates and emptied out the meat and vegetable drawers to check  the state of things.

I noticed the spring onions were looking a bit pathetic and the lettuce had seen perkier days so needed using up. There were three tubs of mashed potato, and in the meat and fish drawer was a tupperware with some salmon I poached a couple of days ago and didn't need all of.

Hurray, free lunch! I mixed the salmon flakes with some of the mash, finely chopped spring onions and a tablespoon of capers - I like putting capers in, it's like including tartar sauce.  I separated an egg, adding the yolk to the bowl and whisking the white. 

Giving the contents of the bowl good mix, I formed four patties. These were dipped in the beaten egg white then into a bowl of the sourdough breadcrumbs I keep in the freezer. (Every time I get to the nub end of the loaf it's usually going a bit stale, so I put it in the blender to make breadcrumbs and add it to the bag. It's very handy)

Spring onions at 1 o'clock, capers at 7

 I put the fishcakes in a hot frying pan with a bit of vegetable oil and fried them for about 3 minutes on both sides, flattening them a bit to be sure they'd warm through.

I shredded the lettuce, and using the most recent lemon juice, did a quick vinaigrette. It was really tasty - a 10 minute lunch for two using up odds and ends. It was very satisfying.

OK, not elegant but very tasty

 

I needed a nice and filling lunch because I was going to have some rather unpleasant dentistry that afternoon and who knows how long until I'm on solid food again! It was the nicest part of my Monday, other than Mark very kindly buying me flowers to cheer me up after the wisdom tooth came out.

 It was nice to feel I'd made at least one small area of my chaotic house tolerable - especially as Miss B is coming home for the Easter weekend bringing two friends to stay, and we are going to need to fit a LOT of food in that fridge. 

CBT-ing the shit out of this

Material reality is a right pain the the arse, isn't it? I might feel very much the same inside as when I had the kids 26 (and 24 and 20) years ago, but my actual physical body tells a different story.

I have always had fairly useless joints. I was forever twisting an ankle and falling off boots with only a very modest heel even in my teens.  I could still put my foot behind my head in my mid 30s but I couldn't walk in anything higher than about 2 inches without risking breaking my neck (yay, hypermobility). I'm a klutz, but I'm ok about it.

My hips and knees went all to hell during my pregnancies, each worse than the last.  That resulted in being on crutches and a lot of pain for most of Bonnie's pregnancy, and things never quite went back to place. I also have osteoarthritis and have struggled with (often acute) knee pain since my 30s. 

A lot of that was my own damned fault - I hated exercise, I love food and drink, and the only healthy lifestyle choice I've ever made is never smoking. I treated my body more as an amusement arcade than a temple, and I took pretty lousy care of myself for a variety of uninteresting reasons. I also worked standing up for 10 or more hours a day for the 8 years I had the baking business in my 30s and 40s, and the knees got worse and worse.

Over the past 10 years I've been trying to tackle this in a number of ways. I found pool-based exercise classes for people with similar problems and I approached them with zeal. I was going to three a week at one point and my basic mobility was really improving. I can stand up without leaning on the arms of chairs and my balance is far better. I lost a significant amount of weight which has helped with joint inflammation - my knees aren't burning hot by mid afternoon anymore. 
This is very good.

But. There's always a But.

More and more often I was missing Aqua classes because of pain and injury. Falling awkwardly when a rug slipped on a polished floor put me completely out of action for a couple of months and noticeably affected me for over a year. A too-vigorous class leaves me sofa-bound for two days. My knees give way numerous times a day. I try not make a fuss but the pain is sharp and debilitating. Days here are punctuated by yips and short shrieks like I have a particularly piecing form of Tourettes.

Anyway, here I am at 56 years old. I have done what I can to fix the pain from my knees - and, increasingly, hips - but each year I'm getting worse and worse. I can no longer get to the end of the road without a crutch and am desperate for a sit down at least 4 times if I try walk to the coffee shop 200m away.

My life has become small. I can't stand it.

Being a total hypocrite who pushed her Dad into getting a mobility scooter and an elevator in his house so he can go upstairs, I have flatly refused to get a walking stick. I have a crutch, because a crutch is something people use when they are recovering from an injury. Like a broken ankle or or ACL tear, say. A crutch feels like it might well be temporary. A walking stick? That's permanent. We don't need that.

Having walked across the very compact city centre of Leeds twice in the last few months and been couch bound for several days after, I really can't pretend this is going to go away. I can't pop to the shops, or post a letter, or pick up a prescription, or just live my life like a normal person. 

This is stupid. I love being out and about, I love being around people. I can't self-identify as a physically mobile person, I can't wish myself better and I can't alter the material reality that my joints are shot. And it's only going to get worse as I age. Exercise is great for maintaining the best mobility I can have, but it can't fix the degradation of the joints that's already there, nor make me younger and less broken.

What I can do, and what CBT has always been wonderful at helping me do, is reassess.

This is where I am now. I can't change the past, I can't change the state I am in. I can, however, accept this less than ideal reality and decide to problem-solve my way out of it. This will not be pleasant, but it will be effective. 

Okay. So I can't walk much at all. In old school terms, crippled. (We laugh when Dad calls his Blue Badge his Cripple Sticker... it's funny because it's true.) I can ride my beloved Vespa but I struggle to put it on its stand when I get where I'm going. I am a permanently disabled person who won't be striding up  the big hill at Fairburn Ings to watch the starling murmurations nor walk along the Giant's Causeway. 

NB - Those example do rather break my heart as I love murmurations and it's been my longtime ambition to see the basalt columns of the Causeway. And Petra. A woman can dream.

But I can do something about some of that. I can accept where I'm at. And that really, really hurts.

It's hard to give up the belief I can get better, that there's a life without joint pain and lousy mobility. One day (actually, in about 5 years or so I expect) I may qualify for NHS knee surgery and that might change things, but right here and now, it doesn't. And it's hard to accept limitations are real, and not wish them away.

So what would allow me to do what I want to do? There's an easy answer to that - a scooter or electric wheelchair. It's not the same as being about to self-propel, but it's a damned sight better than self-excluding from everything.  

I don't claim disability benefits or anything like that, so I don't have hoops to jump through to access mobility schemes. This is actually an advantage. I can work out what best suits my ambitions for my life and buy it. No having to prove to strangers just how broken I am, like when I got the Blue Badge. Gods, that's a depressing procedure. I'm glad I won't have to do that.

I also have been in vociferous denial that this is a permanent state of affairs. Every year I start mapping out our trip to the Giant's Causeway and every year I have to push it back because I've had a setback and I can't walk enough yet. 

YET.

For heaven's sake, Jay! It won't get better, so have a cry then book a wheelchair-accessible trip and go see the wonders of geology from relatively close by. It's not clambering on the rocks, but it's still pretty damned cool. As the Rolling Stones told us, we can't always get what we want. Close will do.

I have a choice. I can remain in denial that this is my life and I can miss out of loads of experiences and a better quality of life. Or I can jettison a stubborn mindset that a) being disabled is a 'lesser' thing (it isn't, it's just more difficult) and b) that ignoring it will make it all go away at some point.

I was pretty ruthless when pushing Dad to install that elevator between the dining room and his bedroom. I even used the  - frankly unethical, although true - argument that Mum would have insisted on his getting one, so if he wanted to respect what she would have wanted, he'd better stop messing around being stranded downstairs all damned day and get the lift installed.

I was right, obviously, and it vastly improved his life and his ability live in his own home. Now I need to apply the same standard to myself.  

I have been to try a few mobility scooters and chairs. And today I've referred myself to a mobility organisation for an assessment to discuss which  chair or scooter would be most appropriate for what I want to be able to do. 

It's a small start, but I hope it's a productive one.

 

 

My Year In Books

Books. Aren't they just so damned addictive? Every year I promise myself I'll get rid of some of my books to free up a bit of space. Every year I buy more than I give away. I'd be absolutely sorted if I didn't hate e-reading so much. 

2025 has been a great year of reading for me. I got some good books for Christmas last year and spent my birthday money on even more, so I've read a good 20 to 30 new-to-me titles.

The absolute stand out pleasure has been the Ithaca trilogy by Clare North. I love Clare's science fiction novels so I was confident her writing would be good, but even so this series blew me away. It's set on the island of Ithaca, home of Odysseus, and chronicles the life of his wife Queen Penelope who has to use every ounce of her wit and guile to rule over a place missing a generation of men, subjected to piracy and political machinations of neighbouring kingdoms, and that will not accept a woman in charge.

Each one (Ithaca, The House of Odysseus and The Last Song Of Penelope) is narrated from the perspective of one of the three Goddesses involved in the fight for the golden apple that started all the trouble. Hera, Aphrodite and Athena have strong and distinct voices, and very different biases. It was a marvellous conceit through which to tell the story and I'd buy Clare North a box of chocolates for it if I could. The women of the island were well drawn characters that I desperately cared about, and I had to ration myself to only reading one then having something else on the go to eke out the story as long as I could.

 Sticking to Ancient Greece, I recommend both Natalie Hayne's Stone Blind and No Friend To This House. I enjoy Haynes on the radio as well as through her novels. She's smart, funny and tells a good story.

Another big win was The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim. My lovely friend and neighbour Penny bought it for me when I got home from our week in Rapallo because von Arnim had been living there when she wrote it, and the book is set on that headland. It was a gorgeous literary extension of the holiday, with the sea and sky so blue and the buildings glowing in the sun. Penny is a skilled hand at choosing just the right book for a person or an occasion; she puts a great deal of thought into her gifts. I'm lucky to have her as a friend.

Setting for The Enchanted April
 

She also gave me Remarkably Bright Creatures, knowing how I feel about octopuses. (I think they are at least as bright as we are, and possibly more. They are certainly the closest to an alien mind we have ever encountered.) The narrator is an octopus in an aquarium, and it was a good fun.

However, it did tip into the trend for Bloody Ridiculous Narrators To Choose. In the past two years I've had an octopus, a tree, a book, a pigeon, some water, a dog, and probably a couple others I can't remember. I don't mean when an animal narrates a story about animals, or when it's a non-human person like a cyborg or AI or super intelligent spiders (hurray for Adrian Tchaikovsky!) or ghosts of people who have died in the story. I mean stories about people 'whimsically' told by an unexpected being. I'm all for a bit of whimsy here and there, but not whole torrents of it. It's a seasoning, not a main course.

For holiday reading I thoroughly enjoyed two by Tracy Chevalier: Remarkable Creatures about my heroine Mary Anning and The Glassmakers about the Venetian island of Murano through the centuries. Daisy Jones and the Six as an audio book was an ideal choice to keep me entertained through airports and flights and trains - the voice cast is excellent. There was also Small Bomb at Dimperley from Lissa Evans, which I enjoyed but it was slightly spoilt by my sky-high expectations given how much I loved the more ascerbic Old Baggage and Crooked Heart. This was an enjoyable romcom and I wish I'd read it first, not last. 

I did have two clunkers while in Italy. The first as Think Again by Jacqueline Wilson, whom I'd only previously read as a children's author. I forced myself to finish it because I was running low on holiday books and still had 3 days to go, but thought it was leaden and dull. 

Casting about in desperation, I found Sally Rooney's Intermezzo on the swap shelf in the hotel. I've never read any of hers and figured it was worth a punt. Nope. It's boring, has too much sex and not enough personality. One of the main character reminded me of the really irritating drippy John Irving protagonists he went through a phase of - the type of bloke you'd like to give a slap to and tell them to buck their ideas up. I can't be arsed with navel-gazing ineffectual men.

Another I read that seemed to be everywhere was James by Percival Everitt.  It's Huckleberry Finn as told by escaped slave Jim, but it's essentially one 'joke' (that black people are well spoken but put on a dumb patios in the presence of white folk) stretched far past breaking point. It would have worked for me as a short story but across 303 pages it wore mighty thin.

I've been reading quite a lot of non-fiction (for me) lately but as usual I rarely finish them. I start all enthusiastically, galumph through the early chapters but then fade out like a a toddler with a Sesame Street attention span. However, I do like to pick them up from second had shops to dip into when the subject looks interesting. The low cost helps to offset the didn't-finish-it guilt.

The memoir Crying in H-Mart by Michelle Zauner was interesting as a snapshot into a culture I don't know much about - tourism from the armchair is much cheaper than the real kind! I didn't get terribly far with Normal Woman by Philippa Gregory because it covered quite a lot of the same ground as Femina by Janina Ramirez, which I read a couple of years back. 

In contrast, I positively devoured Unfortunately She Was A Nymphomaniac by Joan Smith, which defends the reputation of the Julio-Claudian women of Ancient Rome. Having reread Robert Graves last year, I am embarrassed that I took his wild and misogynistic characterisations in I, Claudius and sequel as true. Poor Livia, the slandered villain of the piece, and poor starved Julia. The Caesars were brutal to the women they disliked or discarded.

I bought Unfortunately when I went to the Women's Right's Network's book festival in November. At the same time I bought yet more histories of women and essays about women's rights, but those are the kind I can dip into for one essay at a time.  Much as I once needed to read Satanic Verses to see what all the protests were about, I'm enjoying The Women Who Wouldn't Wheesht, which caused the National Library of Scotland to nearly self-combust this autumn. It was introduced at the festival by its co-editor Susan Dalgety, who has so many tales to tell and dirt to dish I wish I could be on a night out with her. She also has a downright filthy laugh. Her book certainly sparked a long and interesting conversation with Luke.

I've read a couple of books about buying less (borrowed from the library, naturally) and about being more connected to the natural world, but I kind of do that stuff anyway. The books about birds by Tim Birkhead  - The Most Perfect Thing and What It's Like To Be A Bird - have been very interesting while my pitiful attention span holds, but ultimately I read because I want to be told a story.

Between this year and last I read the first three Brandon Sanderson Mistborn novels. I love a bit of fantasy and interesting world-building, so Luke thought this would be something I could get my teeth into. He was right, as he so often is, and I will happily read more Sanderson in future. After all, poor old Robin Hobb can't be responsible for every mighty fantasy tome, can she? I did read the three Wild Ships novels this year, rounding out her already remarkable world. She takes up about 6 feet of bookshelves alone.

 R.F Kuang's been very busy over the last few years. After a brief foray into her satirical fiction  Yellowface, I returned to her fantasy with Babel, which was fascinating to anyone with a love of just the right word and correct nuance for a situation.  It has racism, colonialism, isolation, magic and conspiracies while romping through an alternate Oxford weirder even than Lyra's. Her latest, Katabasis, is on my wish list for next year.

For science fiction, I've only read a few this year and only one new one. The Ministry Of Time (which barely counts) kind of fluffed its execution while landing the ending pretty well.  I revisited my old pal Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. 

Uncharacteristically, I only read 6 Georgette Heyers instead of my usual 15-20. I chose Terry Pratchett for most of my comforting re-reads instead - first all the Guards novels, then dipping my toe in a variety of them as they appealed to me including Granny Weatherwax and Tiffany Aching novels.. I think I needed the humour. And it does me good to have a gap from Heyer now and again because I know my favourites almost by heart.

 Zach loaned me Batman: Year One by Frank Miller in a sincere attempt to overcome my long-held impression that Batman is basically an asshole. I like Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, Superman, the X-men (Bryan Singer movie versions, at least) and Ms Marvel, but the Caped Crusader always seemed more of a sociopath than a hero.  I was impressed! Year One was a very engaging story.  That was a super introduction for me, although Jim Gordon almost broke my heart. He's queued up another couple for me to carry on with. I like the lads' determination to share their cultural capital with me the way I share mine with them.

Queen B doesn't recommend books to me often but we share a few authors. We both enjoy Emily Henry's romance novels.  I wasn't as taken by Funny Story, which I read in the summer, so I re-read Book Lovers and Holiday Read to get me back in the mood. 

Oh! I forgot one of the big hits of the year - The Voyage Home by the sublime Pat Barker.  It was the final in the trilogy started by The Silence Of The Girls (my book of the year at the time). Barker's prose is so gorgeous I always feel I'm in the room with the characters, hearing the insects chirp and smelling the blood and the dirt. I love a book that sweeps me in so utterly that I forget my surroundings. 

I expect in January I'll tell myself I need to make more space and give away another 30 or 40 books again, before instantly filling the space with a new batch of exciting stuff to read.

It's still a shame I hated my Kindle so much. It felt the ideal solution to my slightly out of control book habit. My mum-in-law Marion very kindly bought me one for Christmas some years ago. But somehow it's just not the same without a cover and pages. At least the kids use it. 

I'm sticking to paperbacks. 

Anyone got a runcible spoon?

As anyone with an allotment or fruit trees in the U.K. will know, this has been a Mast Year for trees producing nuts and fruit - meaning an absolute glut of produce. The weather conditions conspired to make everything go into overdrive and as a result boughs are bent under the weight of apples, plums, pears, everything. I had to take off half the unripe plums to stop the victoria plum's branches snapping under their weight. People literally cannot give away their apples for free because everyone has far more than they can use.

There is one exception in our garden - my beautiful little quince tree in a pot. We had a wind storm just after the blossom opened and they blew off without a chance to be pollinated, so it's another year without fruit for me. But not, it seems, for others.

Somewhat overripe but scented quinces

I was lucky enough to get a bag of quince from a guy with heavily cropping tree in our old neighbourhood. They are like large yellow pears with an amazing smell and a dense texture. I kept sticking my head in the bag to sniff them because it was just so delightful. It's a hard scent to describe, but it's fruity and perfumed at the same time, and nothing else is quite like it.

 I had made quince jam before but I wasn't happy with the slightly gritty texture. You know that underripe pear sensation, where it's a bit granular? It's like that writ large. I had clearly not done something right, but all the blogs and articles I read about quince said either that you needed to push it through a mouli, that it just was slightly grainy, or that if it's grainy you're doing it wrong but without any further information of how to do it right. So I decided to make quince jelly instead - like the membrillo you can buy in Spain to have with manchego and other hard cheeses, but not quite as tart. Let's be honest, any excuse to eat cheese is a win.

 I roughly chopped the fruit - which took some doing, those things are rock hard! Between the pesto making and the quince my arms are going to be bulging with muscles at this rate. (One can dream). I put it in a large pan with some water and simmered it until mushy - it took about 2 hours. One of the nice things about making a jelly rather than a jam is you don't have to peel and core anything, just whack it into chunks and let it cook down slowly, so it's a nice easy way to make a preserve.

Rather enthusiastically bubbling quince

Once it had cooled, I set up my straining bag and its holder. Or rather, I didn't. I couldn't find the damned straining bag anywhere. I looked in all the sensible places and several not so sensible places, to no avail. Mark suggested the mighty Cliff's Hardware, which is a tiny shop that sells everything you can possibly think of. Although they assured me they usually had jelly bags they were out of stock at the minute.

As an aside, I hope everyone has a Cliff's in their life.  The sort of place where you can hold up the broken bit of dishwasher or esoteric connecting pipe and they'll reach behind their counter and say "like one of these?" and you will be able to fix whatever it is, even if you do have to go back twice more for further advice. It's a bit like a halfway house between Mr Hooper's store and Luis's fix it shop on Sesame Street - they don't do the repair but they sell you the stuff so you can, and explain what you need to do if you're unsure. The staff are unbelievably patient, friendly and knowledgeable. Timber, plumbing, tea cosies, bird seed, bedding plants, hay for your guinea pigs - Cliff's Hardware has you covered.

With this rare lapse by Cliff's, I still had not straining bag. Mark offered a trip to Harrogate to buy one from Lakeland, which would have included a bonus trip to Betty's for a fondant fancy (my personal favourite) but as he was in the midst of painting the kitchen I declined. Better to get that done than my domestic experimenting. I had found a metre of muslin in my search, though, so I ran up a spectacularly bad but still functional drawstring bag on the sewing machine. I really should remember the bit about measuring twice before I cut once. Oops.

We're in the middle of decorating,
 of course it's a mess

With the mush of 2kgs of quince shoved into the bag suspended above a large bowl, I left it to drip through the fabric overnight. It didn't do much, so I wrapped a couple of tins of tomatoes in clingfilm and used them as weights to get more liquid through.

The result as a scant pint of juice, give or take. I added 400g of sugar to the liquid and simmered it to reduce until it reached 104.5 degrees Celsius. That left me with a single jam jar of crystal clear pink jelly - not much to show for 2 kg, 2 hours cooking, 18 hours draining and then half an hour simmering with sugar, is it?

But throughout that time the house smelled amazing. And to be honest I wasn't making quince jelly because we needed a decent supply of it, I was doing it because it seemed like fun. 

I should have stopped a little before 104.5 as the quince jelly is very firm. Then again, the Owl and the Pussycat dined on slices of quince, so it's probably meant to be like that. At least, that's what I'm now claiming.

So there we have it - one glowing jar of scented beauty, to be put aside until the Christmas cheeseboard brings cheeses worth such an effort.

The owl and the pussycat went to sea 
In a beautiful pea-geen boat...
...They dined on mince, and slices of quince, 
Which they ate with a runcible spoon