Domesticity

One of my new year's aims is to make this blog more about the cooking, crafting, and general creativity that make my life a bit more fun, give me some non-academic 'down time', help keep the threads of my sanity just about hanging together, that sort of thing. Basically, to make it more like the blogs I love to read and find inspiring, as opposed to the 'random unknown internet person ranting incoherently about life' that probably doesn't have widespread appeal. However, those sort of blogs need loads of good photos, nicely shot with a decent camera...oh, and loads of good crafts and cooking done by a talented person who puts time and care into her work, rather than some crappy, fuzzy point and shoot snaps uploaded a week after the crafting took place, and shoddily done acts of not very original creativity thrown together when the author has a moment where she can justify doing something she loves rather than WRITING HER EFFING DISSERTATION, and done by someone who is clearly distracted by Italian foreign policy during the collapse of Yugoslavia and the thought of writing 12,000 words in 6 weeks plus a bucket load of other academic work and a language that she's not very good at that she needs to become fluent in before May and, ya know, a baby to raise. And, as you may have guessed, I fall quite firmly into the latter category.

However, sometimes (probably too often), I have days where all I can manage is housework and some interesting cooking, and maybe a bit of light crafting too. Especially since all of these are much easier to achieve with a baby on one's back or at one's feet than dissertation writing is. They probably are what is managing to (barely) hold my sanity together, so I won't beat myself up too much about them, and even though my pictures are shoddy, I'm going to blog about them to make them feel even more productive and nice. Yesterday was particularly nice.

I had a real comfort food lunch, thrown together in minutes:

Lettuce and cucumber with niiiice sherry vinegar and olice oil, seedy bread lightly toasted, spiced onion marmalade that we bought at the farmere's market a week ago and is now reduced to a few smears at the bottom of the jar, and best of all, totally unhealthy wrong on so many levels VEGAN BACON. Yes, I am one of 'those' veggies who loves fake meat with a passion. I don't care if it's wrong, I love everything I can remember about the taste of meat, I just don't like the fact that it comes from an animal. So I will continue to occasionally treat myself to trashy indulgences such as this. Hmph.

Much more healthily, I then baked some nut and seed bread. The recipe is from a Boost Your Childs Immune System, one of the many books I bought off Amazon whilst Cara was ill in order to make sure that such a terrible thing as as cold never befell any of us ever again... The book has lots of really good healthy recipes in it for all ages, but has also made me spend ridiculous amounts of money on flaxseed oil and the like, and freak out that Cara isn't eating two portions of homeground millet a day. However, this bread recipe is good so never mind. I thought about posting it here, but I don't know the rules about posting recipes from books... Anyway, here's the dry ingredients-I thought it was rather purdy for uncooked bread:

And here's the finished product: It's quite tasty, although it has an unusual flavour due to the ground coriander seeds in there, and I really didn't cut the onions finely enough (because my knives may as well be butter knives and I can't justify the expense of fancy new ones), so that can be a bit stringy. But it feels like you're eating health when you tuck in, so that's a bonus.

I also made lovely healthy lentil salad from a recipe that Shannon sent me whilst I was pregnant.

However, I left the lentils boiling whilst I was upstairs with a teething baby (second tooth cam through last night I think!) who would not let go of my boob for long enough to go turn the hob off, so it is more of a lentil mush than a lentil salad.

But it is still very tasty, and, together with the bread made a good, healthy feeling lunch at uni today, although I did also drink 3 cups of strong coffee and scoff a Bounty and a big piece of carrot cake and a bag of bombay mix, so all the health was cancelled out and I crashed and burnt by half past three, thanks to the teething last night and the early library-ing this morning. Anyway, good salad. Plenty more to eat tommorow. Jolly good.

Miss Baby ate (smushed) her millet and avocado whilst we ate (non photographed) roast veg and cous cous:

Bless her little pixie ears.

Then we had hot cups of this gorgeous spiced winter cordial which makes it almost worthwhile suffering through evil January:

And that was my kitchen creativity for the day, for once captured by camera and blogged about incoherently. There was also sewing room creativity, after Little Miss the-sewing-machine-makes-the-noises-of-a-baby-eating-monster had gone to bed, but that has not yet been photographed so I will save that excitement for another day. And of course, there's always knitting needle creativity whilst I watch crap telly, but I never do get round to photographing that. I will though! And blog it for all to be underwhelmed by! Off to bed now, more early morning library going is necessary tommorow or else I shall fail miserably. Woohoo!