Enough about that....

Let us draw a veil over the tedious repetitivity (?!?) of the previous post and talk about my latest new recipe...

I am trying to challenge myself with new recipes and foods I never cook...why? Why not...Anyway, today's attempt was Pork chops with an onion, mustard, cream and cider sauce. Pork and I have an odd history, I am certain that I have never cooked a pork chop before, roast pork is never on my menu and I don't do goulash...It's not that I'm anti pig, oooh no, bacon is an example of gustatory perfection and ham and especially sausages are an essential part of my culinary repetoire.

When I was small I didn't particularly like roast pork, I have a feeling that this was largely due to the questionable textures associated with the ubiquitious school dinner, with it's hard smooth roast potatoes and glutinous 'gravy'. My dear, long-suffering mother even tried to hoodwink me by telling me I was eating lamb...but no,I guessed it and still said I didn't like it. Thereafter I was released from the obligation of eating roast pork and to this day I still get a little frisson of excitement at actually getting one over on the grown-ups.

{As I type this I keep remembering just how much pig I am actually delighted to consume...spare ribs, spit-roast, stir fry....so basically I really enjoy the flavour of every type of porcine product barring the sunday roast style...so much drama over so little...}

On with the recipe...

Pork Loin Chops - as many you think your guests will enjoy
Sliced onion - I am of the opinion that you can never have too many fried onions in a dish so visualise how much onion you'd be happy to pile onto your plate then times it by the number of guests
Cream (single or double)/creme fraiche
Cider or apple juice about 200ml but go with the flow
Wholegrain mustard
Olive oil
Seasoning

Slosh some olive oil into a large pan and heat it up, season your chops on both sides and pop them in the pan, fry the meat until it is nicely browned - this might take longer than you think...

Remove the chops and put on a plate nearby, slide your sliced onion into the pan and keep frying, at this point I sloshed some of the cider into the pan to de-glaze it, worked like a charm and gave the onions some extra depth of flavour. Cook the onions until they are all sexy and softening but still with that sweet, edgy body, slosh in the cider and keep to a gentle simmer until the liquid has reduced a bit.

Now add how ever much cream you fancy, some mustard - anything from a heaped teaspoon to a tablespoon according to your taste - and stir through, place the chops into the sauce and let it gently cook for 5-10 minutes, check the seasoning - a little salt might be good here - and put the chops on warmed plates, cover with the oniony sauce and add your veg.

I served boiled new potatoes, spinach and sweetcorn and peas with the pork - the freshness complemented the richness of the pork very nicely.

Verdict...still not that interested in 'straight' pork, I'm actually not keen on what feels to me like the coarseness of the meat. However, my husband was enraptured by it and proceeded to tell me just how much he had missed eating pork...poor, poor cruelly deprived man. Even my eldest ate it all and he is the type of person who minutely examines his food just in case I've maliciously placed something he thinks he doesn't like into it... looks like I'll be cooking this again.

The Big 4 0

I was 39 in October last year...to save time I thought I'd start stressing about turning 40 early and so set myself a list of things to do and learn and finish.

Foremost on the list was to loose a considerable amount of weight...Unfortunately I have only been even approaching slim a couple of times in my adult life. The most recent was about 6 years ago, after I discovered the rather exotic and very busy double life my then husband was leading and we parted company. My body's response to this was to stop feeling any hunger at all, I lost any and all interest in food and subsisted on hot, sweet tea and roll-ups... mmm healthy. This went on for 3 months and I lost a stone every month without even thinking about it, nothing like a bit of emotional anguish to kick-start your weight-loss plan. Can't say I'd recommend it.

So that was sort of all well and good, every so often I'd get the big bags of clothes that I'd always kept for 'when I lost weight' and I'd be able to fit into some more, good ego boost etc. Unfortunately 2 bouts of what I thought was extreme food poisoning and a trip to the Dr later I found out that I had gallstones...ouch. This continued the weight loss - after all extreme pain after eating anything fatty is quite a good incentive to avoid fat at all costs.

Life then started to look up, I re-met the man who is now my husband, had surgery to remove the stones and got happy...A few years after that and I had my second son so happiness plus pregnancy over-indulgence and all the weight lost returned, bringing reinforcements... Arsington!

Thing is, I really do not want to spend any more time thinking about being fat, I want to be happy in my skin, I want to have a massive party for my birthday and feel that I have succeeded at this one fundamental thing that has over shadowed so much of my life.

I am determined to make my body healthy...27th October 2011 - Bring It On!!!

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...