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.