Shoes

I'm not a hoarder. As soon as an outfit no longer fits either of the Lattes, it's out of the house. You won't find me with a loft full of babygros.

But the shoes. The tiny shoes.

For years I've been stumbling over my children's first shoes, which kicked around the house idly waiting for something to happen.

Anyone who has what is known in the trade as a 'neurologically typical' child may be looking at the above shoes and thinking, "What cute shoes! Like miniature Doc Martens!" And it's true - in retrospect, they are pretty cool. But if you have a special needs child you may well be sighing. Another pair of Piedro boots. Pair after pair, all the same design.

(At least when Eldest was small and the NHS provided Piedros, I didn't have to tramp around the High Street trying vainly to wedge her unyielding, bulky plastic splints into shoe after shoe. Since her initial diagnosis, I have never really shed a tear in a doctor's surgery. I do, however, weep quite openly in a number of shoe shops.)

Below are Littlest's first shoes. Clarks. My mother jumped on her chance to go into town and buy these one day when I was feeling unwell. I could tell that she felt was Littlest was cruelly ignored, running round like an urchin in her socks. Perhaps she thought we were too traumatised by shoe shops to enter if we didn't absolutely have to.

Anyway. Somewhere we have a polaroid of a confused child in leggings and a massive nappy standing in a shoe shop, surrounded by a cutesy cardboard frame entitled "MY FIRST SHOES'.

You know what you do when something has been kicking around the house for too long? You glue it to a board and stick it on the wall. This is a genius idea. On the floor right now I can see a denim jacket, a sock and an empty packet of chocolate buttons. I can see our walls becoming a LOT more interesting.

Let me sleep on it

Last night, at midnight, I staggered in through the front door and threw my luggage on the floor. I had a heavy overnight bag (I always overestimate how much I'll read on a train); a handbag; and two or three bags of swag from sponsors' stalls at the parent blogging conference Cybermummy, all of which I had dragged across London until my shoulders shrieked.

I'd had an exhausting day. A fun day - a day full of speeches and workshops and cupcakes and tight schedules and buzz and friendly faces. A day when I barely got chance to catch my breath. But also a very odd day, when I found myself right at the centre of something as well as right on the edge of it.

At one point all of the blogger delegates - 400 of us - sat in the main auditorium and were told to get our phones out, right now, and tweet about our day. Most already had their phones or iPads out anyway, and were beavering away. I don't have a smartphone. I was very aware that what I did have in my handbag were two battered paperbacks from a second-hand bookshop. The night before I had arrived late to my  hotel because I had stopped off at the BFI to watch a black and white film. It is a quite a strange experience, being told you are one of the driving forces of a cyber revolution when you're actually a bit of a Luddite.

This morning I got up and sat at the big old desktop computer and cranked up Twitter. Posts about Cybermummy were already popping up online, but I was in no way ready to write one. A couple of people said very nice things about me, and the post (I can show you which it is, now) I was chosen to read out during the crowdsourced keynote. On Twitter, people were having coffee, getting on trains, greeting each other. I realised that I could spend all morning there, and still be no further towards a coherent thought.

I turned the computer off. It was time to step back, and get swallowed up in something a bit more low-tech.

I bought this sarong from the Cancer Research shop a few weeks ago with the idea of turning it into something for the Lattes. The pattern was an easy choice - though I love sewing when I get started, my impetus to start usually comes from frugality rather than desire - so I went for the free oliver + s downloadable pattern for a popover sundress.

The fabric itself said 'there's no need to get too stressed about this'. Not only did it have that hippy-chic thing going on, it even got me out of making a hem.

The instructions suggested I dress the yoke with ribbon. I muttered about having no ribbon, and fruitlessly searched some boxes. Littlest turned up, and suggested that I use the ribbon she was wearing - ribbon from a giftbox that she inexplicably had tied around her waist. Well, it was her dress - who was I to decide what shade of ribbon?

This was the easiest dress in the world to make. Due to the casual weirdness of the original item, the bottom edge is a whole range of different lengths, and that makes it all the better. I even have half the sarong left to make a skirt for Eldest - with another obvious choice of pattern lined up.

And Twitter? No idea. I haven't even checked my emails for hours. Some days are better without constant updates - and it's strange that it should take a cyber conference to remind me of that.

With thanks to Kelloggs, for making my trip possible.

Sugar rush - a giveaway

I've told you before about the sponsorship I'm getting from Kelloggs. And I promised to make some Rice Krispie cakes in celebration. Luckily, Kelloggs decided to send Easter cooking kits out to a handful of bloggers, so my job was made even easier - I didn't even have to shop.

(I don't want you drifting off during this, because I've got a Rice Krispie cake kit to give away. It's got marshmallows in it. Stick around.)

So, this was the recipe. (You should be aware that I am very much a follower of recipes. I don't do much winging it. If it says 300g of something, I am not the kind of person who is comfortable using 290g or 310g. I do what I'm told over here.)

We donned our special Rice Krispies aprons and chef's hat, grabbed our Kelloggs wooden spoon, and got to work melting our marshmallows.

The next job was to pop the Rice Krispies into the pan, and 'stir to coat' with the marshmallowy goop. Then the mixture was to be rolled into balls, and turned into little rabbit shapes with sweets for eyes.

Hmm. About that.

I can honestly say I have never been so sticky in my life. Those 1960s films where people had to be pulled out of quicksand? I thought we were going there. I thought I would never be free.

Rolling it into balls? No chance.  We decided to just squash it down into a tray. You can see how well this went below.

The only way that the mixture could be pushed down into a tray was by adding a secondary surface to push down on. We chose a layer of Dolly Mixtures. Because, you know, there wasn't enough sugar in the marshmallows already.

It goes without saying that this Rice Krispie slab is one of the most popular things we have ever made. The Lattes gave it a resounding thumbs up. And, once dried, it is not sticky at all, and can safely be held in bare hands without a can of WD40 being nearby.

So! If you'd like to have a go, I have a kit to give away. It contains an apron, a chef's hat, a wooden spoon, a packet of Rice Krispies, a cookie cutter, marshmallows, Dolly Mixtures, and tubes of decorative gel. And it all comes in a handy bag.

Just leave a comment to enter - the giveaway closes on Sunday May 1 at midnight. And though I'd love to hear from you wherever you are, I am only posting the prize within the UK.

Is that a poached egg, or are you just pleased to see me?

There is a scene in Season 5 of the US television show 24 where everyone has been sacked from the anti-terrorist agency due to an evil conspiracy. It is about 2am, no-one has eaten or slept (as usual), and the computer expert Chloe has to hide out at the home of the piercingly blue-eyed silver fox Bill Buchanan in order to continue their unauthorised world-saving activities.

Bill's home looks cosy and full of books. He has removed his tie and undone the top button of his shirt. In my dreams, I am Chloe, and in these dreams I imagine that when I have finished my complicated satellite tracking I adjourn to Bill's kitchen to find that he has prepared me the perfect poached egg on a slice of toast.

Bill has not made something too over-the-top. His poached egg is a tacit demonstration that he could cook more elaborate things perfectly well, though he does not need to show this now. Not everyone can poach an egg properly. He is playing a subtle game, and it makes him irresistible.

I'm going to leave things there for now, to save us embarrassment. (And also because I have given a good deal more thought in this fantasy to the quality of the imaginary egg than I have to any imaginary sex. If you are looking for cheap thrills, you have come to the wrong blog.)

For me, a poached egg is just about the perfect meal, and it is what I have almost every time I eat alone. There are a variety of different approaches - Jill Dupleix piles hers on a bed of lemony courgettes; Bill Granger has eggs benedict with hollandaise sauce and a slice of ham. So when I was sent a copy of the new book Cookery School to review, the first recipe I tried was the one with the poached egg.

Cookery School is the official tie-in cookbook to Channel 4’s Cookery School daily series, with recipes by Richard Corrigan. (I must admit I haven’t watched it. Far too many series of 24 have been made to give me time to watch cookery programmes.)

Richard Corrigan's egg comes on red onions, red wine and balsamic vinegar, with herb butter on top. Be warned - if you are used to a familiar egg with a few asparagus spears to dip, then Corrigan's version is a little bit like being hit in the jaw by your own egg. (In a good way.) It is a sit-up-and-take-notice egg. It is not the egg that Bill Buchanan would make.

Cookery School separates recipes into different ability levels - basic, intermediate and advanced. The poached egg is in 'Basic', but don't let that fool you - the recipe still takes four different pans. Working your way through the recipes, the ultimate aim of the book is to make you cook like a Michelin-starred chef.

The book includes step-by-step photographs which demystify quite a few cooking processes -  including preparing scallops, boning a fish, preparing ravioli and making a proper custard. What I do like very much about this book is that it is neither too patronising nor too showy - whilst assuming you have the confidence to cook oysters, it does not assume you can cook a poached egg, and provides some rather fine instructions.

Poached eggs aren't rocket science, but not everyone knows how. Just look at the success of poach pods. (Bill Buchanan certainly would not use poach pods.) Most of us have gaps in our cookery skills - I can happily joint a chicken, but I'd never been told before that you should fry a pork chop propped up on the fat for a minute or two. Turns out it really makes a difference.

Later in the week I treated myself and Mr Coffee to pork chops with an apple and grain mustard sauce with colcannon. This was a beautiful, subtle and delicious meal, which we followed up with the fine apple tart with maple and pecan.

The tart was from the Advanced section, but was actually very easy to make, with a few simple ingredients, and was utterly gorgeous. It had that "I made my own apple tart - what of it?" insouciance that you are looking for when you want to show off without trying to look as if you are showing off.

Just the kind of dessert, in fact, that Bill Buchanan might make for me.

 Clockwise from top - fine apple tart with maple and pecan, 

pork chops with an apple and grain mustard sauce with colcannon, 

sticky red onions with a poached egg and herb butter.

Images from the book.

Cookery School is published by Michael Joseph Hardback.

Love in tissue paper

My darling Valentine

It had been my intention to buy you flowers. But when I picked the Littlest Latte up from school and told her we were going to the florist, her face crumpled. She began to cry. She had had a hard day - so much writing, so many phonics. She was just too tired to make the trip. Couldn't we go home and do craft?

And so my only option was to get the tissue paper out.

It was only later - too late, in fact - that the mistake was discovered. Littlest had heard the word forest - not florist - and pictured an exhausting afternoon looking for wildflowers.

I don't think, on a windy, rainy February day, that even my love was strong enough for that.

(Tissue paper flower tutorial from here.)

Better late than never

Can you hear the screeching of tyres? That would be me, rushing to get here in time for Silverpebble's Splash of Colour week.

Right. A blossom tree, made by a Latte at local workshops to celebrate Chinese New Year.

(Here you must imagine a photograph of vibrant red and gold Chinese lanterns, taken in the Chinese supermarket on my phone, which didn't come out very well at all. I'm sure it will be better in your imagination.)

A parcel of cupcakes and honey arrived from Rowse Honey, who were hoping it would sway me towards telling you about their new advertising campaign and how you can go to their Facebook page and get free honey yourself. What were they thinking? That I'm the kind of woman who can simply be bribed with cake?

It seems that's exactly who I am.

Hama beads. (Well, the Ikea version.) I bought two tubs of these about four years ago and we have barely made a dent in them despite many desperate attempts. I am convinced that they breed in the dark, creating new little tubes of joy for the vacuum cleaner to savour. Most of them go on the floor anyway.

In our future, I see many more bead princesses. But not bead horses, because I managed to over-iron this one and melted most of the pattern board.

Fresh mint tea, in a favourite mug - an idea I stole from a restaurant I visited with a friend. At home, it was not as good as I hoped it would be - not enough mint left on the plant, probably, or the wrong kind of mint, maybe. It looked gorgeous, however. And I hear you can also put honey in it...

Those crazy Magi. Don't you just adore them?

Tell you what, this week, I wish I lived in Spain. Not that our own Epiphany celebrations haven't rocked, by the way.

Alice advised me that the done thing was to put a hard bean in a cake. But why stop at a bean when you already have a surplus of plastic babies?

Then we Fimoed some presents in the oven for the Magi to bring the infant Jesus. Accidentally, four were made. The Lattes decided that the additional gift would definitely contain chocolate.

Crowns were created from the Coffee House's seemingly endless supply of sequins (I don't even know where they come from). I offer these gifts of second-rate photographs to the Queen of Colour herself, Miss Silverpebble.

Then, with a heavy heart and large quantities of sherry, I took down the Christmas tree and packed the ornaments away. With them I placed the first Christmas present of 2011: new decorations, which I buy each year in the January sales.

See you on the other side, my shiny little men.

An epiphany

There will come a Christmas when my carefully arranged wooden Father Christmas set will not be jostled out of place by an array of characters including a pony in a plastic car, a cardboard cat, a flowered sea serpent and a Christmas card written to a stuffed bear which was found at a second hand toy sale.

And when that day comes, I may find myself less pleased than I might have imagined.

I have no resolutions about a tidier house. Instead, I need to remember that this house isn't a space that I own. It's a space that I presently share, and all the more wonderful for that.

Zac Efron is our science teacher

Littlest wanted to know why her screaming was giving us a headache. Through his pounding skull, Mr Coffee tried to explain about sound waves.

It was Eldest who picked up the Kiddie Science baton.  All you need is some rice, some speakers, and a High School Musical CD. (Okay, you can choose your own CD. You're grown-ups.)

Other optional items include a disembodied Barbie leg with which to spread the rice around, and some Ibuprofen.

Here comes the science bit...


HSM rice from Coffee Lady on Vimeo.

Remember, remember

One last blast this week for Silverpebble's Splash of Colour. We made lanterns.

And then we joined a parade through town shouting about how we were going to burn the traitor Guy Fawkes.

Thing is, I've become rather fond of him.

All ye of little faith

I was feeling very good about my cake until Silverpebble sent me this link.

 

If anyone is ever seized at midnight by the desire to make a cake in the shape of a horse's head, the instructions are here.

Can't see comments? Try clicking on the post title. 

If you still have trouble commenting, click HERE.

Lino cuts

Are you ready for this? This is proper craft. I know you're not used to this, here. I know you come to mock my crafts.

But Mr Coffee bought some easy-cut lino, and things moved up a gear.

He started by cutting little slabs of MDF to fit pieces of the lino. It is always pleasurable for a man to choose a hobby which includes sawing up bits of wood.

We created simple designs for our blocks, though it took a while for the Lattes to grasp the concept of 'simple designs'. Enthusiasm and complexity apparently go hand in hand. Eldest finally settled on a flower.

My original plan was a line of wine glasses, but as we know, I'm not the most talented artist. I abandoned the wine glass idea when Littlest squealed: "That's lovely Mummy! Is it a spade?"

Somehow I managed to produce a passable Little Dancing Man, in a John Travolta pose aimed at disguising the uneven length and width of his arms and legs.

The designs were copied onto the lino, and then the grown-up did the cutting. (I am not the grown-up. I do things with knives when chopping vegetables which make onlookers wince.)

The man was set free from his two dimensions, before being glued onto his MDF block.

Ink was rolled onto him, and he came alive.

Altogether now.

Can't see comments? Try clicking on the post title. 

If you still have trouble commenting, click HERE.

Here comes the science bit

Anyone who was brought up in Birstall knows a thing or two about oxygen. Or at least about its discovery.

Joseph Priestley, the man credited with discovering the stuff, stands over the market place, brow furrowed, forever sticking his bronze candle where the sun don't shine. (In his bronze jar, that is.)

Image from Wiki Commons

Our children, not having been brought up there, didn't even know who he was. The thought of it! So, with apologies to Dottycookie, here's my one and only contribution to Kiddie Science.

You need a glass or glass jar, and a candle, and two children who have never heard of Joseph Priestley. The candle is lit. The glass goes over the candle: the flame quickly uses the oxygen inside and goes out. (The top of the glass also goes black. Sorry about that.)

Here's the best photo I could manage. Sorry about that, too.

Can't see comments? Try clicking on the post title. 

If you still have trouble commenting, click HERE.

Crafts for children - a talentless update

One of the ironies of my blogging life is the fact that most people who find me by accident do so by innocently googling 'crafts for children'. They then find themselves reading this post, where I blether on about how useless I am at doing crafts with children.

Poor souls.

So just to cheer them up, I thought I'd offer an update on my craft attempts.

(from left to right(well, roughly): haunted castle from the Charlie and Lola magazine, princesses from Klutz, various Christmas crafts, hearts garland from Kids Craft Weekly,sea monsters from Mr Maker, bits of Fimo, ladybirds and hearts card from Kids Craft Weekly)

Another wonderful discovery has been the Galt Silk Painting Kit. It's a challenge to find age-appropriate projects that an older child can complete beautifully if they have fine motor difficulties. With this kit, you make small dots of paint, which spread automatically and stop at the gutter. It's practically impossible to produce something which isn't very lovely.


And a further small tip for the truly talentless. I have found that even if you are completely useless, a cheat's way to be the kind of parent that you want to be is to pretend to be the kind of parent that you want to be. It fools a 4 year old. It fools an 8 year old. If you don't keep your wits about you, you may even fool yourself.

More bad memories unearthed by knitting

The Grandmother was so delighted to be going to a wool shop with her daughter and the Littlest Latte that she went a bit insane.

"Oooh look at that! And that! And that!" exclaimed The Grandmother happily, buying me patterns for items I had never thought of knitting.

"I could knit you one of these," I said wickedly. This is exactly the type of hat my mother likes - warming for the ears, colourful, and embarrassing.



(See how the little girl is staring into space, trying to find a mental place where she can ignore what she is wearing on her head?)

"Yes! Yes please!" replied The Grandmother.

So this would be the right time to tell you my First Date story, where I went into Dewsbury with a bloke named Simon to have a coffee and look at the shops.

(Anyone who has ever been to Dewsbury will be able to confirm that it is Not Paris.)

As we strode awkwardly along the bookshelves in Smiths (the romance!), I saw a telltale woolly sight on the other side of the shelves.

It was a snood.

It was cerise.

It stopped, dead, and moved a little from side to side in panic. Then it plunged out of sight.

If it had been attached to a person, for example, say, my mother, you might have imagined that it had realised it was not meant to be so close to The Date of the Century and had hidden behind the bookshelves, with its owner moving quickly away with her knees bent so as not to be detected.

The date did not go well. But the snood story has lived on as one of those family stories that you have to be a blood relation to ever understand.

Let's knit my mother a hat. And then maybe put the pattern away for another day, maybe eight, maybe ten years in the future, when I can put the hat to use on any dates the Little Lattes might plan.

Built for comfort, not built for speed

Lynn was blogging about her Grandma today, which was odd, because I was thinking about mine.

It was knitting that did it. I learned to knit when I was a teenager, and my main time to do it was in the car on long journeys. However this meant being seated next to my Grandma: trapped, like a caged animal in a zoo, unable to escape her critical gaze.

She would watch for a while. I would know she was watching. I would knit defensively, trying to wedge myself into the car door. I knew what was coming, and it always did.

"You don't knit t'gain way." (This is Yorkshire dialect for "Your knitting style is a very slow and laborious one". 'Gain' is from the Old Norse, 'gegn', apparently, and it's not something she made up at all. Though Mr Coffee and I were convinced that she did make dialect words up, and as she was older and more Yorkshire than any of us we couldn't contradict her. One day I'll tell you all about Dick's hatband, and how queer it was, and no-one will understand what I'm going on about.)

Knitting again after a 20 year break means that, God rest her soul, I don't have to listen to her complaining about how slow I am. And I think I do okay.

Certainly the Littlest Latte was happy cuddling up to her new hot water bottle cover, knitted with the yarn that Mr Coffee brought back from the market but forbade me to make into anything that would be on show because it was such a bright red.

 

I may not be super-speedy - but I'm a whole project down. And yes, for you aficionados, that IS moss stitch, and I am officially a genius.

Crafts With Children - Tips for the Talentless

I was never any good at art. At school my mother and I would take turns to do my art homework and then snigger at the fact that we always got three out of ten.

One week I got one out of ten for a picture of my dead rabbit. ONE! I didn't draw it lying dead, obviously, though to be fair with my talents it would have been difficult for the teacher to tell. I drew it from memory, and then wrote the poignant message "I can't remember anymore. Silky died last week" on the bottom of the page.

After that outpouring of grief, what kind of teacher would give a child one out of ten? The heartlessness! What about my emotional distress?

Anyway, now I have children I am not allowed to pass on my ineptitude and cynicism about the artistic process, so I must do crafts with them. It stands to reason that I am no good at this. I moaned about it to a friend, who agreed that her children were terrible too, and to illustrate her point brought out a blue/grey wooden triptych that her eldest daughter had made, explaining how she was unhappy with the colour palette.

As a rule of thumb, if your kids are painting triptychs you don't actually have anything to complain about.

I regularly receive emails from this wonderful lady at Kids Craft Weekly, (sign up! sign up!) and I read them and I think wow, and then I archive them to come back to later and then I never do. I buy the Charlie and Lola magazine and do about a tenth of the stuff. And I feel bad about both of those things.

So I think I am the perfect person to offer the following Guide to Craft with Kids for People Who are Crap at Art.

1) Get everything ready beforehand. Do not get them started and then go into the basement to look for the Sellotape otherwise you will come back to find that one of your children has cut all of the other child's toes off with the scissors.

2) Do not put all the cardboard boxes and toilet roll tubes into the recycling box, which is standing outside in the rain, before you begin.

3) This next tip is very important. Bring your children up to be relaxed and not at all predisposed to stress. This is practically impossible but would, I am sure, prevent tearstained children sitting on the steps taking big jerky breaths because they wanted the red-handled paintbrush.

4) Keep saying: "Isn't that lovely!" even when it isn't.

5) Chill out a bit. A few years ago the Eldest Latte discovered that blue and yellow mixed together made green because I answered the phone when she was painting. Had she had my full attention, I would have told her not to make a mess by mixing up the colours.

6) Don't swear.

7) Don't expect to drink a cup of tea.

There. You are all ready now. And what a timely post, I'm sure you'll agree, when everyone is finishing off their fireworks pictures and getting ready for the onslaught of the cotton-wool snowmen.