mutteringhousewife

April 9, 2013

Hazelnut Meringue Biscuits, Brutti Ma Buoni

I first came across these biscuits around the corner from where I live. They were in the diabetes inducing three level four metre counter of the Italian pasticceria that is famous throughout Sydney for its ricotta cakes. I pointed at a brown knobbly looking biscuit and asked the girl behind the counter what it was called. With typical Italian courtesy and willingness to please she said “I dunno. I think it’s got hazelnuts in it”. I have since discovered that it is often called Brutti Ma Buoni because it looks like something that might be produced by a bilious owl but it tastes so good I’ve wanted to make it ever since I had my first five.

It’s the kind of biscuit that needs machinery to make, so as I’m still slightly surprised to be operating in a kitchen that actually has machinery it has taken me until now to get around to it. I found a recipe in the Guardian concatenated with the recipe for panettone I had a few weeks ago and it looked plausible. I needed to accumulate some egg whites.

I didn’t have anything much to do this morning except convert the choir accounts into a new format, so I thought I’d do that after lunch. The cupboard is bare yet again due to the Muffet corralling all the baked goods to share with her friends at school to celebrate her birthday. Knowing I wanted to have egg whites left over I made lemon cornmeal biscuits and had a crack at kourabiedes for the first time which left me with two egg whites. Enough for twelve biscuits. I really could make them half the size, but they do end up being very light.

I put the egg whites in the clean dry KitchenAid bowl, having learned my lesson about that more than once, you think it would stick. Put on the whisk attachment and got it whipping. The whites had to get to firm peaks and you really can’t get there without collapsing from boredom if you do it by hand. I know how foremothers had to, but I really can’t be bothered. It takes ages, even in the KitchenAid. Perhaps I should have had it on a faster setting.

Meanwhile I placed a half a teaspoon of cocoa powder, fifty grams of hazelnuts, a hundred grams of blanched almonds and a hundred grams of caster sugar in the Thermomix. The recipe suggests a coarse grind, so I resist the urge to zap it into oblivion.

I check the egg whites, they’re getting there. I check my mail and a Facebook argument I seem to be in about gay marriage and by the time I hop back into the kitchen they look like this:

Which is just right. I carefully fold in the nut mix plus fifty grams of hazelnuts I’ve meticulously cut in half – I think whole ones are a bit too robust for this light biscuit. I always feel a little sad hearing those tiny bubbles pop as the nuts get folded in, but there’s no help for it.

Plop tablespoonsful of the mix onto a baking paper line baking sheet, you should get about twelve out of this amount. I would have made more, but I don’t like having bits of egg left over, it upsets my sense of symmetry. I’d have had to have made a custard or something, and then I’d just have to eat it. Bake at 180 degrees for about ten minutes, or until they’re just starting to colour around the edges. You need to let them cool completely before getting stuck in. See what I mean about how they look?

Perhaps more a duck than an owl, but definitely avian. Gosh they’re delicious though,

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April 8, 2013

Love food, hate waste.

Do you love food, but hate waste! Well, you won’t have learned anything at the One Million Women gabfest held this morning at the Parramatta Town Hall.

It was all nice enough. They had some great guests. I’ve always been a fan of Bernie Hobbs and she was a very entertaining MC. They brought in the venerable Margaret Fulton and her daughter and granddaughter, who had some extremely unhelpful things to say about fussy eaters. My son was a fussy eater because he had issues with textures, it doesn’t matter how many curries I ate while breastfeeding, nothing is going to help with that but years of experience trying tiny bits of new things. Also it doesn’t matter how many tomatoes we grow in our garden, the children will periodically bite one under parental pressure then spit it out. They just don’t like them. It was a delight to listen to the grande dame of Australian cookery, Margaret Fulton at eighty eight is still full of passion for making everything tasty. So that was a treat.

The mastermind behind the one million women thing had a bit of a chat, but I was a bit surprised that deciding to compost your vegetable scraps, plan your meals before you shop and check the fridge and pantry before you shop was an epiphany. I lost a bit of what she was saying because she had the most amazing hair that kept creeping over her shoulders and gave the impression of trying to strangle her before she’d thwart it and push it back where it would sulk for a bit then start tiptoeing forward for another go. She was clearly very passionate, as were all the presenters.

I don’t mind a bit of Julie Goodwin, but I don’t think any of us were taking notes on how to make an omelette out of some eggs and stuff we found at the bottom of the vegetable crisper. Who can’t do that?

I’m not sure whose idea it was to stick a young lady with a guitar up on stage to sing a song about sustainability that she’d written her very own self, but I kind of wish they hadn’t. Her voice was fine, but she had that extremely whiny sound that’s so regrettably popular among young Australian singers at the moment and the sound system wasn’t coping with her excellent use of loud and soft. Also she sounded as if she was singing with her teeth clenched together, so the only word I heard in the song was “enough” and that was near the end of the song and summed up my feelings about it exactly.

She was followed by a very enthusiastic woman called Lish who made right before our very eyes and to the slightly repressed horror of Bernie Hobbs a worm farm out of two styrofoam boxes and a herb garden out of a third styrofoam box. A worm farm sounds like a lot more effort than my compost bin, which is basically a bin with no bottom that we chuck vegetable scraps in. Periodically the dog decides that there is a rat in there and scrapes a large amount of gorgeous rich soil out of the bottom of it, making more room at the top as the lot subsides. A herb garden sounds doable, but I don’t understand why they just can’t get green grocers to sell herbs in smaller quantities. Surely that would be a simpler solution to the horrendous herb waste this country is groaning under.

The lady from Macquarie University didn’t have a gimmick but some actual facts. She didn’t slip over on the mud left by the worm farmer, but it was a close thing. The main problem food wasters were the eighteen to twenty four age demographic and rich people, neither of which group was even slightly represented in the audience. And this was the problem with the whole shebang. For a start, they were preaching to the converted. There was a bit too much woo hooing and aren’t you all terrificking, which always irritates me. Also practical solutions were lacking.

I would have liked to have seen, after telling us that an enormous amount of fresh food is rejected by the supermarkets because it isn’t pretty enough, an exhortation not to buy fresh food from them. Big corporations understand a boycott. I only buy toilet paper, pet food and giant boxes of cereal from them regularly. I almost never buy fresh food from them. Tell us to buy our fresh food from the local green grocer and local butcher. How about some composting suggestions for people who live in apartments? What are we supposed to do with the kilos of mandarin peel produced at this time of the year? Give us a few different stock recipes so we don’t throw out our chicken and meat bones or fish heads. Show us how easy it is to chop herbs and freeze them in a ziplock bag. You could have got Glad to be a sponsor, I store a lot of things in their baggies. Tupperware, too. And how about some tips for gently hinting to our more wasteful friends that perhaps they could change their ways? Because the people who really need to hear this message weren’t present and don’t listen.

I shall end with something that fascinated me for the fifteen minutes between seating myself and the show kicking off. We were in the Parramatta Town Hall which is delightfully decorated in a style I’d like to call rococo, but I’m not sure if that’s right. Painted stencil work on the walls, a painting of an Aboriginal man holding a spear with palm trees behind him above the stage, lots of plasterwork moulding. At the foot of the buttresses holding up the ceiling was a sculpted man’s face, the same face under each buttress.

It looked like your standard classical face, possibly copied from the Greek, until you look a bit closer and realise it’s wearing a slight moustache. Do you reckon it could be Errol Flynn?

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April 6, 2013

Thermomix Vegetable Patties

I think I overdid it this time. Note to self, just because you have Thermomix doesn’t mean you have to pulverise everything. Here’s how it happened.

I was having coffee with a neighbour and some friends and we were solving all of the admittedly very first world problems of the high school our sons attend. Talk turned to the oversupply of the school cookbook, and my Thermophile friend made the excellent suggestion that she and I should start converting the really excellent and diverse recipes in it to The Thermomix Way. By the time we’d wrapped up I was starving, so after I’d dragged myself across the road home I was looking for a quick and hearty lunch. No bread. No leftovers. Not even frozen leftovers. So I opened the school cookbook and came across a recipe that was a cinch for the Thermomix and I even had all the ingredients, vegetable patties.

I put a medium sized onion into the machine and it made a rather startled sound when I tried to zap it, another note to self – cut them in half first. Added in a slice of butter and sautéed the onion at 100 degrees for three minutes on speed two. I then added in a chopped large carrot, a zucchini and a half and an extremely dried up bread roll I had left over from last weekend’

And zapped them too. Then I added a tin of rinsed chickpeas, a teaspoon of Moroccan spice mix and an egg and gave it a gentle mix on speed two for a couple of seconds. Then I cooked it at 100 degrees for five minutes on speed three, and that’s where I went wrong. I should have had it on speed two or one and put in in reverse (the blunt sides of blades then do the stirring) meaning the chickpeas wouldn’t have been mashed in too. It could do with some texture.

The idea then is that you refrigerate it and it solidifies quite a bit, then you form them into balls and pan fry them in butter. I was really hungry, so I just ate the stuff with a spoon. It was delicious and satisfying. I’ve just had some more for lunch today and it even improves with age. I am eating a lot of vegetables this way, but I’m worried I’m losing the ability to chew. This stuff is also not terribly visually appealing in this form, but would be better as patties.

I won’t tell you what the Moose said it looked like, but I’m sure you can guess. The photo in the school cookbook was worse because the patties had bits of corn through them which for those of us who have had offspring leads to a very unappetising train of thought. Maybe presentation is something to which I should give more consideration.

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April 3, 2013

A Bag of Holding

I had to get out the sewing machine to patch up the giant hole my fibreglass cast has torn in our bed sheets, so I thought while I was at it, I may as well whip myself up a handbag. You see, the one I’m using is perfectly adequate, but its size and composition mean that now that I’m able to hoist myself about on crutches at a fairly reasonable clip it does tend to drag up my clothing as I move along in a kind of ratcheting manner. Not desirable. All I want is a handbag whose handle will fit over my neck and shoulder and that will fit my wallet and phone in it. And some car keys. And some butter menthols.

I actually have a bag that fits this purpose, bought on holidays at Crescent Head.

There are two problems with it. One is that it’s too deep, as at most handbags in this style. I don’t want to stick my whole arm in the thing. The other is that it is my receptacle for the bits of my dream handbag:

And I can’t bring myself to repurpose it. I also need to make a few prototypes before assembling the dream bag, so here is prototype one.

It really only took me about an hour to make. There were a few breaks for arguing with a woman about what the Town Hall will be charging us for the Verdi Requiem and it certainly won’t be nearly twice what they quoted us. I also had to ring up the doctor to apologise for forgetting to come in for an appointment, that was embarrassing. That very rarely happens, I had it in the diary and everything. Perhaps I was subconsciously annoyed that my regular doctor had the temerity to be off having a baby. The strap is leftover material from the Great Soldier Costume Adventure which you’ll find in the archives from last year. I just took a piece of fake black panne whatever that somewhat reminiscent of velvet stuff is called and cut out a piece three times as big as I wanted the bag. I cut a third off and hemmed it, also hemmed the remaining piece. Then I sewed each piece onto the strap. I did have to pick it apart a few times because I have trouble envisioning things in 3D, but we got there in the end.

I did plan for it to be in use just for my remaining three weeks and two days of captivity, but I think with a fair bit of trimming and neatening up it will make a fairly nifty handbag to be put into regular rotation. I just won’t work on it around the time of my rescheduled doctor’s appointment.

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April 2, 2013

Naturally Curly Hair

It took me most of my adult life to come to terms with having naturally curly hair. It’s one of those silly female things, isn’t it? Oh, I’d rather have your hair, yours is beautiful, so easy to manage, oh but YOURS is so lovely! Blah blah blah. Curly hair is a nuisance, it’s never the same two days in a row and it takes a lot of effort to make it look anything other than a fuzzy mess. I thought I’d share with you what I’ve learned.

The most important thing is you need a good hairdresser. Curly hair is difficult to cut, you need to understand that if you snip a little bit off that piece in front it will spring up into a lopsided pompom and sit ridiculously on the right corner of your forehead. You need to realise that it will behave differently at different lengths and in different climates. I was introduced to my hairdresser by a friend with an immaculate blond bob who’d had a longer relationship with her hairdresser than she’d had with her husband. This hairdresser not only understood curly hair, his partner had it herself and even let him experiment on her. Sometimes. I have occasionally strayed from his ministrations, tempted by a voucher or a special, but have always needed to call him in for repair work afterwards, and have learned my lesson.

The next thing is that you need to listen to your hairdresser. I would very much like to have long curly hair, but Gary tells me my hair just isn’t interested. It gets to a certain length, then snaps off in a spray of split ends. Doesn’t matter what nourishing serums I put in it, a bit longer than shoulder length is all I’m going to get out of it. It also looks neater when dyed all the same colour. Because of the dry ends business the natural colour of my hair goes from quite dark brown at the roots to a sandy ginger in the middle and blond on the ends, with some grey sprinkled around the front. A uniform coppery tint makes it look a lot less like something found atop an art teacher.

You will need product. Sometimes more, sometimes less. You will probably also need to blow dry if you don’t want it to sit flat on top and radiate out in a triangle shape like that woman in the Dilbert cartoon. A gentle heat and speed, a little bit of upside down and some scrunching with the fingers is what works best. I use Sebastian Potion Number 9 if I just want no frizz and a weightless product. Revlon Vinyl Twist gives more defined curls, but a slightly sticky finish. It’s good for if I want to go out with curly hair, rather than exasperatedly twisting it up with a clip. Schwarzkopf Silhouette is very good at smoothing down fuzzy ends, but does have an unfortunate tendency to make you smell like your grandma. You only need a tiny bit. I also really like tec texture shine, but they were taken over by L’Oreal some time ago and I’m going to have to make the smudge I have left last.

Of course, I rarely bother with all that. If I was someone a bit more interested in how I look I probably would have had a crack at straightening it at some point. But just to know that it can look like this:

if I wanted it to makes me a lot less likely to risk my marriage by cutting it all off.

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April 1, 2013

Mayonnaise and Coleslaw in the Thermomix

I grew up in a fairly condiment free household, so I never felt a burning urge to make my own mayonnaise. Despite this, I have had two attempts at it, mainly to prove that I could, and it turned out that I couldn’t. Once with a whisk and once with a blender. Both times it was looking very promising, then irretrievably split into a watery, curdy mess. Of course, it’s really easy in a Thermomix. Having a had a good hard look at myself, you could even say it was foolproof.

What you do is put in the Thermomix the yolk of an egg and a tablespoon of vinegar. You can also add flavourings, I put in two teaspoons of hot English mustard and, because the only mayonnaise I’ve regularly encountered is Praise which is really sweet, a teaspoon of honey. You could also add a clove of garlic. It says salt and pepper to taste, but as if you’re going to have a taste of that mess, so I just put in a twist of the grinder of each. I also weighed out 250 grams of olive oil into a jug for pouring purposes. It suggests a neutral tasting oil, and despite using a light flavoured olive oil, you could definitely taste it, but I like it, so there.

You put the butterfly fitting over the blades. My demonstrator told me there was some secret wrist action that would secure it onto the blades, but I haven’t been able to reproduce it, and everything I’ve read suggest you can just perch it on the blades and she’ll be right. So that’s what I did. And it was. Mix it for one minute on speed 4.

Then comes the bit I’ve always failed at. You pour the oil in a thin steady stream onto the lid, with the little plastic lid on, because the lid slopes down to the middle and there’s a small gap under the lid. You do this on speed 4. It is suggested that you take about five minutes to do this. Or you could pour a steady stream for one minute, then realise the biscotti are about to burn, rescue those, blop in some more oil, decide to take a photo because it looks pretty in the sunlight, and I’ll tell you it’s really hard to take a photo of yourself pouring oil into a Thermomix with an iPad while standing on one leg. But I did it, because I wanted to share:

Anyway, my even with interruptions my very unsteady stream took about three and a half minutes, but look!

I made mayonnaise! It’s the colour and consistency of soft butter, which is probably a bit thick for mayonnaise, but eminently spreadable. It’s rich and delicious.

Then you don’t even have to wash out the bowl to make coleslaw. There are an infinite number of coleslaw recipes, but let’s go with a basic one first. Put in the bowl two tablespoons of your terrific home made mayonnaise, a cored and quartered green apple (I can’t help but notice that a lot of the salad recipes in the Thermomix book contain a green apple), a hundred grams of carrot (which is one large one, very roughly chopped) and about two hundred grams of cabbage. I also put in two green onion stems which were a bit harsh the first day, but had mellowed in by the second day. I may replace them with celery the next time. Then zap for about ten seconds. I like to start off at a low speed, increase over a couple of seconds to a medium speed, then check. The machine does shudder quite a bit at first, but apparently that’s normal. This treatment got the coleslaw to what I think of as Kentucky Fried consistency.

It was an excellent, slightly dry coleslaw, but better the next day. It made two breakfast bowls full, and I ate one bowl for dinner last night. I think you could add whatever hard vegetables you had to hand, I’ll have to let you know how that goes. It could possibly stand a little more mayonnaise too.

So all of a sudden I can make salads. It changes my whole perception of myself. I’m going to have to make some sweets to restore my equinamity.

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March 27, 2013

Chilli Garlic Prawns – Kind of in the Thermomix

The joy of having a good friend and neighbour take you shopping because you’re on crutches is that you see products you’ve never considered before. I knew that the prawns you see at the fishmongers are all defrosted because the little so and sos are frozen as soon as they’re caught. I’m not sure if they’re also peeled at that point, but I’ll try not to think about it too hard. So it makes sense to buy a kilo bag of frozen prawns and have them on hand whenever you feel like making chilli prawns.

I don’t know about you, but I often burn the garlic. Not any more! With a Thermomix you put your flavours in the jug, so

In this case four cloves of garlic, three chillies from the garden, a couple of bunches of tired coriander and a slice of butter. I’m still experimenting with chop first, cook later or contrariwise. I tried cook first, chop later and I don’t think it’s quite right. I cooked it for two minutes at 100 degrees on speed three, then chopped it and got a lovely decoration of the jug walls.

The kit comes with a very well designed spatula, so I scraped down the walls and chopped a couple more times, and it all seemed OK. I added six of Frank’s locally grown tomatoes and cooked at 100 degrees on speed two for ten minutes, then added a pinch of salt and chopped to make a very fragrant sauce.

What you can then do is tip the sauce out, half fill the jug with water and cook the rice in the steam basket while cooking the prawns and bok choy on the Varona above the rice, then assemble at the end. I’m not going to do this. I have my prawns defrosting in the wok and have tipped the sauce over them.

The hungry husband isn’t due home from the Jedi’s soccer training until about ten minutes after seven thirty. So at about seven twenty five I will half fill the still saucy jug with water and cook the rice in the steamer basket for fourteen minutes. Meanwhile I will be stir frying the prawns in the sauce with chopped bok choy just for a couple of minutes and the sauce will reduce down a bit and flavour the prawns. Sometimes I stir the rice in so it absorbs the sauce, but it looks better served on top of the rice, so that’s what I’ll do tonight.

I might add another chilli. Of course, that will require it to be served with a cheeky Chardonnay, but it can’t be helped.

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March 25, 2013

Thermomix – the Preliminary Review

There’s a lot of Thermocurious people out there. Wanting to know how I’m using my Thermomix. Is it any good? What does it actually do? And what they’re really asking is, if I bought one, would I use it?

It’s a tough question, and there are no right answers. I will let you know what my experience over a bit over a week of using the thing.

Firstly there’s a bit of a learning curve. You have to be prepared to have a go at things and be surprised at the results. You have to look at some of the pedestrian recipes in the accompanying cookbook and try out bits of them. Fairly soon you’ll get to know how long to cook things for, what speed to chop things on and what things you’d really rather do in the frying pan. Everybody will use it differently, but here’s what I’ve been up to with it.

It is a much better blender than the one that is currently brushing the sand off its towel and returning to me under warranty from Kitchenware Direct. That blender will be relegated to the job of milk shakes and slushies and I’m sure it will last a lot longer than two months this time. The Thermomix jug has a flat bottom and a wide and vicious looking blade that sweeps the bottom of the jug. It will pulverise a single clove of garlic (don’t do it on the highest speed or it will just fling it out the hole in the lid if you’ve neglected to put the little cover on). It will also deal with being filled up to the lid even with hard (chopped) vegetables or frozen fruit. It will create a very fine nut meal. You can make flour with it out of whatever grain you like. It does a great job of chopping Parmesan cheese into sprinklable particles. I have continued making frozen fruit iceblocks for the kids as I was in my holidaying blender and the kids report a much finer texture, not that they were complaining in the first place. In its blender capacity I have made almond meal, icing sugar, hazelnut meal, rice flour, salmon patties, tomato salsa, bread crumbs. It doesn’t automatically reduce everything to dust, there are a range of speeds. I’ve also kneaded a spelt bread dough with it, it has an interval setting. You can just set it for two minutes and every couple of seconds the dough will get a beating. I’m going to have to play with making bread in it quite a bit more, I feel. I’m also planning to make mayonnaise in it for a coleslaw, two things I’ve never made before.

The heating bit takes a bit more getting used to. I’ve got the sautéing onion and garlic in it down pretty well, you only have to cut the onion in half which is a bonus. It’s ideal for something like refried beans which I’ve just made for dinner tonight. You chop and cook the onion for two minutes. Add garlic and spices for another minute. Add the beans and a third of a cup of juice you drained off the tomato salsa you prepared earlier and cook for another fifteen minutes. Turn up the blender speed and it’s done. All in the one jug, just by pressing a few buttons. I’ve tried cooking rice in it, and that’s a keeper, as is steaming fish, but I’ll be doing mashed potatoes and pasta the conventional way.

One of the big things for a lot of people, including me, is how easy is it to clean? Very easy indeed. Most of the time I just wash it quickly in the sink with a squirt of detergent, hot water and the scrubbing brush that came with it. Or the squirt of detergent, the hot water, and set it on the machine (with lid on) and give a few bursts of the blender. It’s stainless steel, so doesn’t retain smells. It disassembles very easily indeed and goes in the dishwasher too, just make sure the electrical bit at the bottom is dry before putting it back on the machine.

There seems to be a big market for the Thermomix in the allergy and food intolerance communities because it does make it very easy to make things from scratch. If you are someone who makes things from scratch a lot, and I am, you will use it every day, which I think would make it worth while. You do need to make sure you use it for everything you possibly can for the first couple of weeks to get over your learning curve, I’m only just starting to think “that’d be easy to make in the Thermomix” rather than “am I going to be able to do that in the Thermomix, or am I just going to make a big mess?”.

The best thing to do is to go to a party, better still to go to more than one, by different demonstrators. There isn’t hard sell at the parties, they realise it’s an expensive piece of kit and you’re unlikely to impulse buy one. From the amount of interest I’ve had, I’m thinking of having two parties next term. You get lunch and everything. Enough blathering from me for the moment. I will keep blogging about stuff I’ve made in the Thermomix a couple of times a week, then gradually the novelty will wear off as it gets fully incorporated into my cooking. I do love a gadget, so how could you go wrong with a thoughtfully built multipurpose one like this?

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March 22, 2013

A spot of Knitting

The Muffet has a school requirement that at the end of Lent she hand in to her school two knitted squares. These are known as Dorcas squares for some biblical reason and apparently will be sewn into a larger blanket that will be sent to a hot country with no need for extra heating and possibly set fire to. I have taken a short and non representative survey of girls in year seven, and apparently all squares submitted have been actually knitted by an older female relative, rather than the year seven girl. Of course I knitted the Muffet’s contribution, on condition that she actually attempt one herself. She did, but her ability to drop tens of stitches at a time made her effort a little bit too well ventilated for practical purposes. I should start her on her squares for next year now.

To encourage her to knit I went to one of the few remaining haberdashery shops in Sydney, in Turramurra actually, to buy some beautiful wool for her. I normally buy my wool at craft shows, at which this shop exhibits, but there wasn’t a lot of choice at the last show I went to. So now I have a stash or rather lovely wool, a merino/silk mix and an alpaca, and I wanted to knit something with it. I have enough scarves, it was time to try something a bit more adventurous.

The advantages of knitting a headband are numerous. It’s just a strip of knitting, so is fairly quick. You can try something a bit fancy without having to commit to a full garment. And one always needs headbands to keep one’s curly hair off one’s glasses.

I’m still too scared to try cable knitting, but I liked the look of Trinity Stitch. I knocked one up with purple wool and look, you can see where Jane rang me up to ask advice on pony camps.

There, up near the top of the needle. Yes, that is a nut at the top of the needle, the dog chewed off the end when he was going through that stage last year.

It was too narrow and looked like a trial piece. Now that I have the hang of it I’m doing a wider one. The way to do it is this. You cast on twenty four stitches. Do a row of purl. Then you knit then purl then knit all into the one stitch, wrapping the wool to the correct side each time. When you’ve got three stitches on the right from the one on the left, you pull off the left one. Then you gather the next three on the left onto your right needle and purl stitch. Repeat to the end of the row. Do another row of purl. The next row you start with the triple purl, then the knit purl knit into one stitch. The problem I had was numerous interruptions, meaning I could never remember if I was up to a row starting with knit or with purl. I’ve solved it by putting the knitting down either in the middle of a fancy row or at the end of one. Then I could see which one I had just done. When you get to the end of the fancy row you say out loud the last stitch in the row, then do your purl row, then start with the stitch you’ve said out loud, ignoring the derisive comments of your family members.

Anyway, there’s good instructions on the web, and you just sew the ends together when the headband is long enough to sit tightly around your fat head. Maybe when I be done a few I’ll be brave enough to try a pattern that has one of those codexes that look like the Rosetta Stone. Those grannies that can knit anything must have started somewhere.

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March 21, 2013

Crutches for beginners

You need a day off hearing about the Thermomix and I have learned a lot about getting about on crutches in the last seven days and I feel I should share. When you’re given crutches, you get a lesson on how to hold them and how to get up and down a step and you’re on your way. Some people don’t even get that. There’s so much more to it than that.

Garb. You’re going to find yourself a little restricted in what you can wear. For me the ideal outfit is a long tunic with pockets. Fortunately I do have one of these and am wearing it a lot. Dresses in general are good, but not too short. A fibreglass cast has a lot of the characteristics of Velcro, so avoid the delicate fabrics and you may want to rethink the lacy undies. Tshirts are no good, they ride up a lot, and even though your abs are in better shape than they have been for years, no one really wants to see them. Tight singlets seem to stay put if you can find pants that will go over your cast. You will need a handbag that goes over your neck and one shoulder because you can’t carry anything at all in your hands and there’s only so much you can stuff into your bra and the waistband of your undies.

Stairs. Avoid them. I do have a step in our house and here’s the thing. If you’re on crutches, going down is hard, especially if there’s more than one, and up is easy. If you have to go down a set of stairs I would seriously consider throwing your crutches down them and going down on your bottom. Going up, you just need to do it slowly. If you’ve built up your left buttock and calf sufficiently to do a bit of hopping you should concentrate very hard when going up. You don’t want a broken wrist as well. Going down is much easier on the hop.

Doors. The best way to open a door while on crutches is to stand beside it and put on your sad face until someone comes along and opens it for you. This doesn’t work when you’re alone at home and trying to get out two doors at the front of the house while blocking egress to two small dogs. I’ve developed a technique that involves holding the crutches in one hand to fend off the dogs and doing the twist on my left foot with a backward hop. It takes a while.

Shopping. You can’t do it. I’ve tried, and I’ve failed. I had to be rescued by a kind lady called Janet who is a retired education lecturer and is now considering joining the Grad Choir. If you really must, you have to go somewhere they’ll pick and pack for you and only buy what you can fit in your handbag. You could try holding a shopping bag by your little finger while using your crutches but be warned, it will throw your balance right off. Get a shopping buddy, that way you don’t have to explain what version of Metamucil you get and where it is and you can choose your own alternatives to the cat’s kangaroo meat when they don’t have it in stock yet again. Anybody free to go shopping on Wednesdays?

Standing. You need to do it in the kitchen, and you need to do it while ironing. Yes, I know the kids should be doing it, but they’re already looking after the washing, garbage and dishwasher, so I’ll iron for them. You want something to rest your knee on so your body can pretend it’s standing properly to give your weight bearing leg a rest. While ironing I use the decaying corpse of a defunct computer, it’s just the right height. I’ve put a coffee table in the kitchen to kneel on which allows me a lot more upright time than I’d otherwise be able to manage. It also annoys everyone else, so they keep out.

Miscellaneous. These newfangled fibreglass casts are terrific and waterproof and everything, but after you’ve showered they take a little while to drain. These means that if you’re in a hurry and have decided to go with leggings today, they’ll get rather wet while you drag them on. Speaking of showering, you can shave your remaining leg in the shower, but you have to have excellent balance. Or not mind getting a bump on your head. Get yourself industrial strength deodorant because it’s really hard work getting about on crutches, you’ll sweat way more than normal. Don’t be afraid to use your crutches to sweep small boys out of your path or to poke children who are ignoring you. You have to get some fun out of this.

Also, you may want to give your muscles a bit of time to get used to your new mode of transport. If you go hard the first few days you will ache like you’ve been beaten about the shoulders and ribs for days. And try to work up to the hopping, it’s a good way to get around the kitchen while holding trays or boxes of ingredients, but it initially takes a toll. On the plus side I’m hardly snacking at all because it’s such an effort to move anywhere. Heigh ho, heigh ho, only five weeks to go.

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