Recipe Wednesday! Houmous

It’s Recipe Wednesday!

Home-made Houmous with wholegrain bread and Cothi Valley goat's milk feta. 

Recipe Wednesday is a lie. It’s very unlikely that there will ever be a recipe Wednesday on this blog. I do enjoy cooking, but it very much depends on how stressed I am, how depressed I am, how much the children are driving me insane, how my back feels.

The 'sampled' cake, beside the second cake.

But today I somehow spent the whole day cooking. I decided to make a coffee cake for my husband’s birthday (typical Victoria sponge recipe of 4oz flour, 4oz butter, 4oz sugar, and two eggs, from my wonderful 1960s Good Housekeeping cookery book.) The same recipe is here on the BBC. You have to add a little instant coffee dissolved in warm water to the mixture before you add the flour, for the coffee flavour.

So I cooked the cake. It seemed rather flat, so I decided to cook another to put on top of it. I had to go out for more eggs, walking down to the local shop holding almost-three-year-old Ben’s hand all the way. (He seemed rather surprised we had to pay for the eggs. He’s used to his grandparents’ eggs coming straight from the chickens.) So I came home with my eggs and cooked another cake. I left it to cool while I did half an hour of exercise.

I came back into the kitchen after my exercise, rather tired and looking forward to a rest. Ben was still sitting innocently in the living room playing on Club Penguin. But I went into the kitchen to find that while I had been diligently exercising in the hall, Ben had been helping himself to half of the first cake.

Sigh.

I baked another cake. By the time that was done it was time to pick up the other children from school. Now we have a three-tier coffee cake with a rather wobbly middle.

Some basic ingredients - chick peas, garlic, and lemon.

In the middle of all this cake baking I was inspired to try making my own houmous by a friend on facebook. I have to believe that hers was more successful than mine because she’s more stylish than me and lives in Milan. I have no style and live in Wales. But it seemed like a refreshingly easy challenge, especially after my three-cake day.

I used this recipe from the BBC, but I stuck to it rather loosely. We didn’t have any tahini or cumin, and I put more garlic in than I should have. My husband, who has such a lack of taste buds that wine gums all taste the same to him, surprisingly found the garlic overpowering. The garlic had a kind of hit-you-in-the-back-of-the-throat quality, which I quite enjoyed, but I found the olive oil overpowering, and I think next time I’d find a blander oil. I hate the taste of olive oil. But spread on a sliver of toasted wholegrain bread with a slice of sublime Cothi Valley garlic, lemon, and parsley feta goat’s cheese, it was rather yummy.

Tomorrow I might blend in some more chick peas to even out the taste and thicken it up a bit – it’s a bit too sloppy. If I did it now I’d wake up Ben, who is sleeping soundly above us, and needs his rest so he can wake up at 5am, as is his wont at the moment. If I made it again I think I’d change the oil, use more salt, and make the effort to get tahini, because I think the bitterness of the sesame seeds would help to even out the flavour. But after all, it's a learning experience. Better luck next time!

[EDIT - so, today I put a whole new tin of chickpeas in and a very little sunflower oil, and it's much better, has more of that creamy houmous texture, and is less overwhelming on the garlic front. The olive oil taste still detracts somewhat for me, but it's much less strong. I have some for lunch with couscous and a little of last night's leftover chilli and black pepper belly pork, and a ratatouille type vegetable mix. At least, I try, while Ben tantrums over his boiled egg not being served in a precisely correct manner, feeds it to the dog, and then comes and aggressively sings Twinkle Twinkle Little Star at me.]

 

That lovely goat's cheese.

A little bite.

Next day's lunch. We have good leftovers when my husband's been cooking (which is pretty much every night.)

The Law of Vomit

Children vomit.

That’s one of the first laws of parenting. If you have a child, at some point it will vomit. When we had our first son, we moved from almost constant possetting (muslin cloths under his head at all times) to the law of If we go away overnight, he will be sick. We went to my cousin’s wedding – he was sick in the car and projectile vomited all over the hotel room. We went to my great uncle’s funeral – he was sick in the car. We went to America – he projectile vomited all over the hotel room we stayed in on our return through Heathrow – so much so that we left money for the cleaning staff, because we were so ashamed of the piles of vomit-covered linen left in the bath. We went on holiday to south Wales, this time with son number two in tow. They both projectile vomited all over the holiday cottage bedroom. This was the occasion of my nephew’s second birthday, and he was where they caught the sick bug from. I still remember my astonishment at my sister’s worry when my nephew was physically sick. But children are sick all the time! I thought. Not so with him. Aside from the usual babyhood possetting (spitting up, if you’re American), this was the first time he’d ever been sick. But you see, even he followed the law. If you have a child, at some point it will vomit.

Easter, then, must be prime vomiting territory. We should have realised, when we decided to take our three children out for a pleasant drive around Snowdonia, hoping to wow them with sights of the snowy and beautiful mountains. We’ve had an unusual Easter that started with snow even down at the coast, so we wanted to make the most of it. It’s all too easy when your backyard is this beautiful to go day by day thinking, Another day we’ll go and see all the beautiful things. And it was beautiful. Snowdon was snowy. The roads were banked up with huge unmelted piles of snow at the sides. The lakes were chill and expansive and wet, as you’d expect.

But as we come out of the mountains and start to turn back towards civilisation, the five-year-old son (let’s call him George – it’s his favourite name since being exposed to the Famous Five) wakes up from an uncharacteristic slumber to say, ‘Daddy, don’t do that. I feel ill.’

‘What kind of ill?’ (My voice gets an edge – that urgent, are we going to need to stop the car? edge.)

‘I’m going to be yick.’

‘Oh dear. Well, hang on, darling. We’ll try to find somewhere to stop.’

This is swiftly followed a kind of flood of what appears to be entirely liquid chocolate and an emergency pull-over into a bus stop. You can only imagine the wailing as we try to strip a chocolate-vomit-covered five-year-old in very chilly conditions, get a new top on him (thank god we brought an extra one), and explain to him why he can’t keep his vomit-covered trousers on. No, not his boots either. Nor the coat. Not anything covered in vomit.

My husband attempts to clean the car and carseat as best he can with terry-towelling nappies and water while I try to calm the child. At one point he’s lying face-down on the pavement screaming, because we won’t let him wear sick-covered clothes. Drivers passing must assume this is a normal occurrence for a five-year-old, since no one stops to ask why we’re abusing our half-naked child by making him lie on the ground in near-freezing temperatures.

Ten minutes later we’re back in the car, deciding whether to go the quick way back home, or back through the mountains. The wailing has stopped. George is warm under a jumper that’s spread over his knees. It seems that the sickness was just a case of too much chocolate. He’s already asking for sweets, ‘if we yop at a petrol yation.’

Back through the mountains we drive, choosing the alternative route so as to take in the majestic sight of Tryfan, a 3,000 ft high pile of cragged stone, and the part-frozen lake at its base. We ooh and aah and crane our necks backwards to take it all in. We travel on into the widening mountain valley. The two-and-a-half-year-old (let’s call him Benjamin) calls out, ‘Water bottle! Water bottle!’

I have a bad feeling about this. And I’m right. Before I can give him any water a chocolate slick explodes over the car, spattering Ben and his seven-year-old brother (Oscar?) in something resembling a terrible bog-snorkling accident.

Suddenly there’s a stream of holiday bikers behind us and not a stopping place in sight. Eventually we manage to pull up in a gateway half-filled with a heap of some kind of tarmac sweepings, and try to sort out the chocolate-covered two-and-a-half-year-old. Luckily (again) we have a spare top, but again there’s great dismay at the fact he can’t wear his vomit-covered trousers or boots. Most of the nappies we brought are so soiled from Incident No. 1 that we can’t use them to wipe up after Incident No. 2. I wrap Ben in my coat to keep him warm while my husband (who, by the way, has something of a vomit-phobia) tries to clean up the lake in the carseat.

The journey home isn’t one we try to take at a leisurely pace. Of course there are the obligatory tourists driving along the B-roads as if they expect avalanches and crocodiles around every corner, but eventually we make it, and the carseat covers get a much needed wash, along with almost every item of fabric that was in the car. My husband cleans out the car itself with dettol and water, then sloshes the waste water into the field, unaware that there’s a nesting goose directly in the line of fire. So it’s a bad day for the goose as well as for us.

But was it a bad day? There’s something rather fun in these kind of emergency situations. I mean, once you factor out the distress caused to the children. Being caught on the hop, having to manage to calm down children and keep them warm and clean up unexpected pools of sticky vomit and get them home safely. It certainly made it a memorable day. We all got home safe and well, the children perked up marvellously once they were clean and dry, and the washing machine got to prove its worth.

Lessons learned? Not much I didn’t already know. Always take a change of clothes when you take children in the car. (We don’t – we were just lucky, this time.) Travel with extra water. (Well, I try to.) Travel with towels. (Do terry-towelling nappies count?) Don’t let the children eat too much chocolate before travelling. (Is it ever possible to regulate a child’s chocolate intake at Easter?) If you ever plan a car trip, always expect vomit. (I try not to expect vomit, to be honest. I like to think positively.)

I hope we’ll get to go on holiday later in the year. If we do, remind me to refer back to this blog post, and plan accordingly.

The Tantrum Monster

The other day I was sitting in Café Nero with my husband, enjoying a cappuccino (skinny, decaff, just to be extra boring.) While we drink and talk it’s fun to people-spot, especially since Café Nero is reassuringly cosmopolitan for a small coffee outlet in North Wales. Opposite me was a person whose t-shirt said, ‘Animal Free Ride’ on a large green circle over her left breast, talking away in Polish, I believe, to the rest of her group. Listening to them gave me a pleasant feeling of being abroad, because all the other conversations were such a babble that I couldn’t make out individual words. It’s nice to go out for coffee with my husband. It’s nice to feel free and sophisticated and relax a little on his days off.

Except for the two and a half year old. The emotionally fragile two and a half year old...

The realities of two and a half year olds is that you are never away from them. Offers of babysitting tend to pale away in proportion to how stroppy he is being at that point in time. The ‘of course you can go out, we’ll look after him,’ quickly turns into, ‘well, maybe when he’s not quite so volatile. Maybe when he’s happier being apart from you.’ So a relaxed coffee with the husband turns into a tag-along blowing raspberries in the back of the car, into a high incidence of very sticky hands, into a silent prayer of today, let him be happy.

So far that day he had had tantrums over being sleepy, waking up, wanting to be carried, wanting to be put down, and a sausage roll. In Café Nero it was time for him to have a tantrum over his straw. The carton comes supplied with a proportionally short straw, but he put a long straw into his carton. (‘Did you get him that straw?’ I ask my husband. ‘I thought you did,’ he answers. Then we realise he’s just acquired a stray straw off the floor, and is sucking away at it.) But the straw is too long for the carton. He tries to shove it further through the hole. Apple juice sprays everywhere. He won’t accept the other straw. He won’t let us trim the long one down. He just wants it to be shorter – to spontaneously shorten itself because he’s furious with it.

Having a two year old is like having your own personal drunk or drug addict. They’re volatile, fall over easily, are irrational, take delight in strange food combinations, concentrate intensely on one unimportant detail, and can’t focus on what is important. Their speech is slurred, their co-ordination is clumsy, and they’re wildly unpredictable and liable to fall asleep at a moment’s notice. They often smell of pee. The only difference is that they don’t smell of alcohol – and that they’re like this all the time.

How is that that a sweet request of, ‘Peanut butter?’ can turn into a freshly made sandwich being torn into pieces and thrown on the floor because it wasn’t folded right, the peanut butter wasn’t spread right, he wasn’t allowed to make it himself because sometimes I just don’t have the patience to oversee these things, or because he changed his mind half way through and wanted honey instead? Actually, this article at slate.com answered a lot of those questions. It explains how hard it is for the toddler to understand why you’re suddenly saying no all the time, how they work to their strengths when negotiating the world (using their new-found motor skills in place of their inadequate language skills, for example), and how their frontal lobe is just not developed enough to enable them to plan and reason logically. All this boils down to the fact that when your two year old is screaming and throwing things (when your seven year old gets a black eye because he’s just had a toy hurled at his face), there’s a reason for that behaviour, and to a certain extent you just have to work through it. It doesn’t always help when he’s just upturned a potty full of urine onto the carpet, but knowing that your two year old is living in a bewildering, changing world is a very useful thing.

So, let’s get back to a world where you give the toddler a carton of apple juice and he decides the straw is too long. It’s almost inevitable that there will either be a spillage, or screaming. You can try to explain to him why he shouldn’t squeeze the carton like a marauding monster rampaging through a city, or why you can’t make the straw longer – but you shouldn’t expect to get anywhere, at least, not until a few more months have passed. Perhaps you will get looks of shock and disapproval from other people in the café (perhaps they never had children, or forgot what it was like.) But you shouldn’t feel that your child is the most terribly behaved child in the world. You shouldn’t feel that you oughtn’t to take him out in public, or that you should be able to stop him screaming. You should just grit your teeth and try to enjoy your coffee. After all, how many chances will you get, until your babysitters decide they can actually handle your bundle of joy again?