MAKE and BAKE Manifesto

In order to encourage my creative ways and heave myself out of this utterly tedious rut I am declaring the Patchwork Pinny Chronicles Make and Bake Manifesto...I shall henceforth endeavour to Make something every week - big or small, complicated or simple, whimsical or eminently practical - I shall produce something new every week. At the same time and in the very same 7-day period I shall also bake (or roast/steam/grill/fry/boil) a new recipe. These will then be immortalised here for me to admire and to spur me on to greater things. HURRAH!

The making will stretch my time management as well as my creative skills and will (I hope) be really enjoyable) the baking is a nifty way to introduce myself to new things. I am a pretty good cook, hardly anyone ever complains, and everyone seems to be adequately nourished. However, it is so easy to fall into a total food rut and churn out the same things over and over again...boooooring.

I shall add a piccy of this week's make - I had a bunting breakthrough - but this week's bake has already been devoured and must live on only in my memory...

Sneaky Moules

I love love love moules marinieres and always gorge on them when we visit my husbands family in the south of france...but in all honesty I hate celery and having to pick the meat out of the shells takes up valuable scoffing time - plus I'm always having to seek a second opinion over the open-ness or not of various shells and thus their level of toxicity...I digress, this is my home-bodged version of moules with not much of the work...but, to my uneducated palate, most of the taste...

Ingredients
2 packs of mussel meat (these were £1 each from Tesco)
double cream
2 small onions (only because I had no big ones...)
large glass of white wine
a big squirt of garlic puree
knob of butter
olive oil
Crusty bread of your choice...

Fry up your diced ( I diced some small and some slightly larger to make it a bit more interesting)onions in butter with a splurt of olive oil and a big squirt of garlic puree until translucent and soft
Pour in most of the wine and let it bubble and reduce a bit, then pour in the double cream until you have enough to make sauce for two. Stir it around and let it reduce a bit again then toss your mussels in, stir then cover and turn down the heat. The mussels are cooked but this heats them up and allows them to add flavour to the creamy sauce. Give it a few more minutes, stirring occasionally. Then when it looks good and tastes good pour your mussels and sauce into two bowls, add a big pile of sliced up crispy bread and some butter and dig in...Lusherooo.

Don't even think about the calories...it's worth it, honest.

The Joy of Lists...(no self-flagellation here!)

I am not going to batter myself for my 'failure' to post here for months - otherwise this will end up being something else that I feel bad about instead of being something to enjoy and somewhere to explore my erstwhile creativity-type stuff.

Not so long ago I would begin everyday with a list - writing down everything that I 'had' to do that day. It would always end up with more things to do than time in the day and I would pretty much always finish the day having failed...so positive and life-affirming...!

Since I stopped with the infernal list-making I have found that more gets done with less stress and considerably less hassle - strange but true.

I still write some lists, but generally only of the more 'official' things - like making appointments (and attending them), chasing up queries, bank stuff, school stuff - things so boring that I would forget them out of sheer apathy. No longer lists like:

1. Do laundry

2. Dry clothes

3. Put clothes away

*please note the 3-way breakdown of what could have been a one word task-I'm not daft it means I can get three ticks on my list and a lot more crossing off...*

4. Clean kitchen

5. Clean Bathroom

6.Clean Sitting-room

etc, etc, ad-boring-bloody-inifinitum...

hence the 'just bloody get on with it' component of this blog.

Having decried lists however, I am about to make one..

A List Of Things I Might Quite Like To If I Get Around To It - No Pressure Or Anything

1. Bake something I haven't baked before every week (there's nothing quite so convenient as a family to experiement on...)

2. Reclaim my weekends - not spend them catching up on housework just because there are people around to keep an eye on the smallest bear. Instead I shall follow my policy of benign neglect and keep letting him scribble on the wall (one bit of wall, hidden behind long curtains- which is why it took me so bloody long to find it. My son the vandal, so proud..so very proud) while I sort out the domestic disasters in the rest of the house.

Long list isn't it.

..harder than I thought it would be...

I was a fool. Naive. Innocent. Verging on the dim...I was under the impression that I would just casually knock off a post every day, post a picture or two, breezily, effortlessly..

Er, no.

Perhaps at some point in the future I will manage this, but at the moment, no. In the spirit of joy and happiness and not giving myself something else to stress about and, more importantly, to fail at, I shall instead be a guerilla poster... expect a post when you least expect one...then there will be no disappointment only a glorious sense of expectation! Or something...

Running on the spot...

How is it possible to get up so early, sit down for one cup of tea, be on the go for 14 hours and yet still not actually accomplish enough to merit a red line on a list?

My littlest treasure woke me up at 6.30am and from that point on I was preparing meals, getting the littlest dressed and fed, putting loads into the washing machine, then the tumble dryer, washing up and wiping down, sweeping and vacuuming. Surveying the teetering pile of ironing then averting my gaze and doing a Scarlett. Just the usual that we all have to do. So much and yet so little. Running on the spot

My current JGOWIT is that door. So ugly and so sad that I could leave it no longer and started on it today. So far all I have managed to do is sand it down and remove the door furniture and there was me blithely assuming that I could just give it a quick wash down with some sugar soap and get busy with the paint brush and it would be dry and shiny bright by the time Mr H got back from work. Feel free to mock, it is taking forever, both from sheer ineptitude on my part and interruptions from the youngest member of the family. Perhaps DIY and babies really don't mix...if it hadn't been for CBeebies I don't know what I would have done...

As a basically lazy person I am having to give myself constant peptalks along the lines of 'if a job is worth doing, it's worth doing well' and stuff about having pride in the smallest of tasks, I find it so much easier when I am saying it to MrH! Ah well, onward and upward, if I set my completion date to the end of January, I might just make it...

Know your enemy

I have spent a fair bit of time over the last few days thinking about what to write about in this blog. One of the things I realised was that in order to make the changes I want to make I have to Know My Enemy. This would seem to involve really looking at my surroundings to identify the changes I need to make and perhaps more importantly peering nervously into my motivations or lack thereof and giving them a prod towards the positive.

I will henceforth be identifying my issues as JGOWIT a.k.a. just get on with its - I will save the acronym JFGOWIT for those really irritating issues. You may make your own decisions about what the F stands for. I have decided that I will save all my favourite swear words for really important occasions. I use them entirely too much in my everday life and with a toddler who is just starting to talk a little less effing and blinding would not go amiss.

So, today's JGOWIT was to clean the smeary remnants of that vile fake christmas snow from the windows. Hoorah, I managed it! Then, while I had cloth and spray in hand I migrated into the hall to tackle the glass panels of the inner front door. The only drawback is that I got to really examine how ugly this door is. And this is what confronts guests to my house when I invite them in! It's a wonder more don't leg it...I shall try to post a picture just to share the beauty of it all...

The plot thickens...

A little bit about me... I am 38, a stay-at-home mum with a 12 year old son from my first marriage and a 16 month old son with husband number 2. I live on the outskirts of a quaintly historic town on the south-east coast of England in a much abused 1930's chalet bungalow. I have started this blog to document my journey towards a life where I truly embrace my time and really savour each day.

Perhaps it is that the big 40 is just around the corner but I don't want to wake up in 30 years time and regret the things that I did not do and the time I wasted on negativity and procrastination.

Here is a picture of me looking disgustingly chirpy...enjoy.

Starting what needs to be done..

I have never got the hang of housework, no natural talent for it. Unlike some, I lack the ability to just clean up as I go, straighten that cushion, sweep up the dust lurking in that corner, wash up without even thinking about it etc. Unfortunately my mind tends to chime in with a litany of reasons why this is such a massive imposition on my life, what a drag, a bore, a millstone around my neck. After a great deal of analysis I have come to the conclusion that it is the ongoing repetition aspect of the whole thing that confounds me. Grinding on and on, same thing every day, blah blah bleuuggh!

So now I am trying a different approach, I am just going to do it ... and not just the basic necessities like housework and cooking for my family, but the things that I have always distanced myself from with 'I could do that...' or 'I really should do that...' or 'when I get the time I will...'. I do believe that the time is now and that it really is time for me to just get on with it!

Wish me luck...