Friday 31 July
Tonight the harem pants will make their second appearance when I’ll be dancing about in trainers and a muscle vest, which I’ve decided is a good idea although I’m not sure why and suspect it may be a thought planted by the ghost of Jason Orange past. I didn’t fancy doing the stomp of shame through the office again today so I substituted them with jeans for day (I think this is this what fashion people say. ‘For day’ and ‘for evening’) .
I’m wrapping up the week here. No recipe tonight cos I just went out for bruschetta followed by calzone to fill me up for later – you can never have too many elliptical baked dough products in one meal, particularly on a Friday and especially when you’re going out later.
Here’s the photographic evidence – of the outfit, not the food. Note yesterday’s jacket making a proper appearance.
Conclusions:
- I’m getting into the plaited hair and have banned myself from the snooze button so as to improve my hairstyling skills. It’s good to get hairdo ideas from magazines, I think. It seems less sad than copying clothes.
Thursday 30 July
Today was a very special day for outfits. My dear friend Cari had given me some navy silk hareem pants in order to keep up appearances with this ‘being current’ endeavour, and today they were the most matching thing I had in my wardrobe – or the most matching thing I could still fit into, rather – so it was time to look like the office clown.
Cari liked them, and my friends Adam and Thomas liked them when I did a catwalk show for them the previous evening. The girl I sit next to at work graced me with a “You can just about pull them off” while wrinkling up her nose and talking about how much she dislikes people who wear hareem pants, but no matter.
Unfortunately the below photograph would, if it were to be used in court, likely fall into the category of ‘evidence against’, but that’s partly because I’m standing as if I’ve shat myself. Plus the angle is a bit unflattering.
Since I’m being a bit crass today I’ll admit that I’ve always thought hareem pants look like their purpose is to disguise elephantiasis of the labia, and I’m not sure if I’m yet convinced, especially looking at this picture, but I really like wearing these, comfort wise. I almost think they’d be better in the sunshine with a pair of flip flops and a vest, rather than dressed up. But what the Guardian says, I do. Sad when you think about it in the cold light of day.
Trousers
Pants
Looking it it again, I’m retching a bit. They honestly don’t look this bad in real life. Or in mirror life, anyway, which is not real life, which is always a perturbing thought.
The jacket over my shoulder is an amazing garment – another of Evi’s FARHI by Nicole Farhi creations. It’s a shame you can’t see the detail because the shoulders have cool rosette-ish bits on them. Wearing a navy and white outfit with a navy and white jacket, I felt very matchy – far more than I would ever naturally be. I also felt a bit like Andy Pandy but that’s fine with me – we have much in common.
For dinner I made Dan Lepard’s blueberry almond bars. It could be my measuring problems but this was so sweet and sugary it was like eating an enormous boiled sweet out of the glove compartment of a hot car. Or out of Wonka’s river, even. IT stuck to my teeth (I’ll leave that typo in because the idea of getting information technology stuck to my teeth while eating dessert is better than the idea I’m trying to say) and made me feel sick (I did eat about four portions though, so we’ll leave that aside) and it actually hurt my tongue, i think. I put some cherries and blackberries in it too. My baking tin was a bit bigger than the 20cm square one he suggested (20x30cm was the best I could do) so it was a bit thinner than it should’ve been. You know I feel bad blaming the recipe because Dan Lepard has such a nice, smiling face and he’s a cake expert, whereas I’m a girl in a small kitchen who can’t use a measuring jug properly. I got the feeling it would’ve been great had it been less sugary. As I was pouring in more and more of the stuff, rubbing in an enormous chunk of butter and stirring in the nuts I was seeing the calories clock up in front of my eyes like the pennies on a petrol pump. I am not one to worry about calories – I only really found out what they were a couple of years ago and I never count them unless I’m looking for a more urban version of sheep to clock up when I have insomnia. I’m more of a magical thinker when it comes to food. I judge it by size and emotional significance, so a massive plate of salad is often the same as a massive plate of cake, unless I really like the salad ingredients or don’t like the cake, in which case the cake is probably healthier. Well, you know. Anyway despite my nutritional ignorance, this cake did scare me a bit. And trust me when I say it really takes a lot of sugar to scare me. Once I got a dud packet of Tangfastics and they all had wormholes through them where the sour stuff had eaten them away, and as I ate them they started to do the same thing to my mouth, but I polished off the whole packet anyway, and now I charge cavers £4.95 a piece to look for the Witch of Wookey in my tonsils.
I am tough.
Blueberry and almond bar
Cavities and obesity
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Harem pants are better than I suspected but your office folk must be pretty progressive to accept them without sniggers/second glances.
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I spell hareem two ways, because we should exercise freedom of choice or we might lose it.
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Cookery conclusion remains the same as ever: one must measure, measure, measure darling! And when will one ever learn?
Wednesday 29 July
I got another quite nice outfit! And I plaited my hair just like the lady in the picture and felt a bit like Maid Marian, if Maid Marian wore sequinned tops and bad foundation. The plait wasn’t really like the picture actually, because I can’t do a french plait on myself very easily, but especially not one of those herringbone ones where the plait sits along the top of the head like a sausage. Are you with me?
Grey
Greyish
I bought the ingredients for the evening’s meal, ricotta hotcakes, and rushed home in time for the arrival of long-suffering conspirators Adam and Thomas, who had yet to discover that in return for a few bits of fried cheese and two-thirds of a bottle of leftover vermouth, they’d be helping me highlight my hair in order to join the blonette ranks.
First I cooked the food so we could work the Trevor Sorbie magic on a full stomach. I don’t know why I still have a deep-seated mistrust of these recipes but I do, and I assumed these hotcakes were going to be a disaster. I guess that’s because they looked like they involved precision. Pancake ingredients usually need measuring, and then you have to get the pan the right heat and so on. But in fact, even with my gung-ho attitude, they turned out great and Tom gave them “ten – no, nine-and-a-half – no, ten” out of ten. I didn’t separate the eggs as the recipe said, I just bunged them in. I also used sunblush tomatoes instead of cherry tomatoes cos tom and I both have a hatred of the spawn of Satan, as I usually call them. Nasty, malicious, foul-tasting little bombs of crunchy mucous.
I served them with all the things Yotam suggested, including a jar of aubergine stuff from the posh foods section of Sainsbury’s (which had run out of the ‘exotic vegetable’ fresh aubergine) mixed with a massive tub of creme fraiche (just imagine the accents on those words so I don’t have to put them in), some raw garlic and lemon juice.
It was a fine meal and it looked almost as it was supposed to.
Ricotta hotcakes
Ricotta charredcakes
They look like chicken fillets but they were the genuine article.
Next we downed a load of vermouth on the rocks and turned to the task of hair bleaching, for which I changed into the sort of braless old baggy, stained tshirt only your best friends must ever witness.
I wet and combed my hair carefully and by then was already bored, so Adam mixed up the bleach while I sat around making ape noises. Then the lads pointed at sections of hair, on to which I daubed the highlighting paste with the enclosed mascara brush thing. What a rubbish tool that was. It just got tangled in my unkempt hair, so I discarded it and used my fingers instead. This was a task that deserved my full attention but didn’t receive it, and as a result I now have a stripy, red-slashed head of hair, but no matter, we all agreed it looked OK anyway. I don’t much care what happens to my barnet as long as it minds its own business and lets me get on with mine.
However, blonette it is not. There are a few yellow bits around my lugholes – they’ll have to do. Do I look like Gisele? Nah, but I don’t really want to anyway, she must find it hard to make friends and stuff.
Tuesday 28 July
Tuesday marked the beginning of the grey fashion shoot, which I knew was going to be simple enough for me to copy given the many grey clothes I own. I felt like a bit of a raincloud but a couple of people said they liked my outfit. I didn’t really wear the cardie tied around my shoulders as it would have been cumbersome and I’m not sure about the sartorial wisdom of tying a jumper around a jacket. But maybe I’ll change my mind, in the manner of scarf-tucked-into-beltgate. The hairdo came out looking a little Sandra Dee on me, although by the time I got home and had this picture taken I was glowing like a pig and my fringe looked nothing like wot it had at 7.30am.
Groovy
Greasy
I was supposed to buy a Ted Baker jumpsuit after work but I checked it out online first and, luckily for my bank balance, it wasn’t in the shops yet. So after a few quick drinks with designer Jonny during which we saw Meg Ryan walk past (bad highlights, proper trout pout, still a legend though isn’t she), I had time to rush home to cook parcels of food for my friends Liv and Dan.
I made three parcels out of baking parchment and one of foil, and here’s a list of their ingredients based on what i could find of Hugh’s suggestions.
I froze all my apples, which were meant to replace pears in one of the options because I can’t stand those grainy horrors, so i just served greek yoghurt with honey and nutmeg and some chocolate ice cream as slightly unconventional starters. Nice things to share though – three spoons and a coffee table are all you need really.
1) A couple of fillets of sea bass with butter, chunky-sliced fennel, vermouth and big hunks of lemon rind.
Pretty close to Hugh’s suggestion but for the typically lazy chopping, and it tasted delicious. The fish was really tender and all the flavours very subtle. Could probably have done with a bit of seasoning though. Couldn’t find any other more unusual fish in the supermarket and fishmongers are shut by the time I finish work.
2) Ginger, garlic, spring onion and soy, plus two chicken breasts and two duck legs.
Forgot to buy chillies and decided to bung the whole lot in one parcel rather than doing separate ones. I left it to cook for longer than the other parcels and removed the chicken first, then put the open parcel back in for the duck to finish cooking and brown a bit. This was really delicious. It’s a lovely way to cook chicken as it keeps it very tender, and the spring onions, which i don’t usually like that much, went lovely and soft and sweet.
3) A packet of ready-cooked and shelled mussels with white wine, butter, chopped garlic and thyme.
Mussels are another thing I’m not usually dead keen on but these’uns were very, very nice. The butter, garlic and thyme stopped them tasting too fishy. They were easily shared as we all stuck our forks in and ate them like party nibbles. What with the mussels being ready prepared, this is a super-easy idea and very much recommended.
4) Two bananas, a bit of white rum and a big Toblerone (minus a few triangles we ate on the way home from the shop).
Yum. Odd how bananas taste less like themselves and more like banana-flavoured stuff when you cook them. Also odd how difficult I find it to type the word banana. I left this parcel in a bit long cos it was puddingy and i didn’t want to serve it first (despite having already dished up chocolate ice cream and yoghurt for starters. ) The toblerone burned a little bit but this was nice as it made a layer of Dime Bar stuff on the bottom of the foil, which we picked off when it cooled.
Liv and Dan were suitably impressed by this papery feast and we had plenty between three of us.
Conclusions:
- Parcel cooking is the bomb. Easy, quick, low maintenance, versatile. This is a cooking tip I’m genuinely pleased to have picked up and practised enough to do it in future. It appeals to my George’s Marvellous Medicine sensibilities as you can throw in any old ingredient and see what happens.
- I think I might be getting quite good at cooking now, which is great. A very satisfactory result of the project.
Monday 27 July
Today’s outfit was a goodie, I think. I felt grown-up and received some (two) compliments at work, which was nice. Unfortunately this photo in no way reflects the positive elements of the outfit. The best thing was the lovely FARHI by Nicole Farhi silk blouse, which you can’t see properly in the photo. It is pale green with bloomy, button-tab sleeves and a sailory double-breasted popper front. It was designed by Evi. Dead nice. The skirt was out of Oxfam and I even had some green shoes from Dotty P’s years ago, but cos I had to take this photo myself again, I cut off my feet again. I wonder if this has some sort of Freudian implication. I also had a flower ring I bought a while back from Accessorize, but that got hidden too because I put it on the wrong hand. Details, details.
Here’s the visuals:
Ruffles
Kerfuffles
Look at that, my legs aren’t even leaning the right way again! Heheh, I’m so rubbish at this. Where’s my stylist?
The model looks so romantic. I am imagining a guy walking into his sitting room, seeing her reclining on the sofa and thinking ‘God she’s beautiful.’
I look like a chunky-legged Cindy Sherman rip-off after a shot of Rohypnol. I am imagining a guy I met that night walking into his sitting room and going ‘Oh shit, she’s still here. And she looks like she might be trying to seduce me. How am I going to get out of this one?’
Oh, I’m sure it’s just the lighting. Umm… oh yes, dinner! For dinner I cooked apricots with honey & star anise.
Apricots with honey & star anise
Aww, bless
Something about the bottom photo makes me think of a furtive snap of a dog turd, but this dessert tasted delicious. It was really simple and satisfying to make, plus the ingredients were easy to get hold of. But a warning: it didn’t come cheap. The spices were pricey – I used a whole jar of vanilla pod. Why even sell it in a jar? Jars are for plural ingredients. And the recipe called for many apricots, and dessert wine. But I bought cat litter too, which is expensive, so might be skewing my perception of the price of the ingredients. I chucked the receipt away, obviously. On the plus side the recipe made four big portions and I could only manage one, so it has yielded several future puddings or breakfasts.
Conclusions:
- If possible, be mindful of camera angles.
- The business of wrapping food in paper and baking it is a clear winner, and it takes no time and no effort once you get the paper out of the cupboard, which is the sort of task that tends to put me off trying such ideas – totally ridiculous.
- Apricots are way nicer than I’d remembered.
- Vanilla pods cost so much money, and then you just heat them up and ultimately throw them away.
Sunday 26 July
On this day in history I was allowed to wear a relatively normal outfit, but for the enormous flower cuffs, which I tried to emulate by tying white rags around my wrists. However I had to remove them before my shopping trip for fear of looking like a self-harmer among the supermarket community. I also had to put on some tights as it was breezy outside.
Sorry about all this pouting but, as you can see, the project dictates it sometimes.
My next task for the day was to try to look like Christy Turlington. I look absolutely nothing like her (see above) so this wasn’t going to be easy. I studied the Measure’s picture of her for a while and decided the main things I needed to do, other than sign up for major surgery, were to have darker hair with no fringe, whiter teeth, redder lips and dark blue eyes, and to be thinner.
The lipstick was about the only easy bit. I dyed my hair dark brown but the fringe will just have to wait as I can’t afford extensions – and if I could, I’d only be one of those women who has an obvious basin mark around the level at which the new hair has been attached. A proper mullet, in other words, which I’ve already rejected this month. I wanted to get a teeth-whitening kit but my friend Adam told me his friend told him the best thing to use is Beverly Hills Formula toothpaste, so I got some of that and I must say it’s already working a treat. People keep coming up to me going ‘Christy, Christy, can I have your autograph?’ and I have to bat them away with my Swarovski-encrusted yoga mat. I also wanted to get some slimming pills while I was around the healthcare aisle, but Adam told me I was a clever girl so there was no need for such nonsense, and I was led away by the elbow to Argos, to look for some cheap coloured contact lenses. I suspect ‘contact lenses’ and ‘cheap’ shouldn’t really appear in the same sentence but hey, it’s only eyesight, you can always buy some more. I’m telling you Argos used to sell coloured contacts but they don’t anymore, so I crossed that off the list as I wasn’t going to David Clulow or whatever to spend loads of money trying to look like I have dark blue eyes.
I ought to put a picture of CT next to a picture of me to demonstrate my (lack of) success but I don’t want to, and it’s my blog, so I’m not going to. Maybe later in the week, if I’m allowed to also put a picture of Maureen from Driving School to balance things out a little.
The recipe for that evening was sardines in filo.
The supermarket had no filo so I used a packet mix of shortcrust pastry I had in my cupboard. They also had no sardines, so I used smoked mackerel. The result was that I ended up with smoked mackerel pasties. They were really nice, I recommend them. All you have to do with those packet mixes is put some water in. Then you can squish handfuls around whatever you like in the manner of kids with Playdoh and toy cars, and put them in the oven for like 20 minutes. Never mind Hugh, never mind even Delia’s cheats. Follow my recipes instead. Get a packet mix, squash it around something, cook it.
Conclusions:
- I have actually reached a couple of conclusions of late. One is that having tidied my flat up a lot, decided I need to be more organised and filled my freezer with home-cooked meals, I do feel a great sense of wellbeing. I think this project is definitely making me happier. What a result! The lifestyles magazines tell us will make us happier might actually make us happier. But is that just by virtue of matching up to their benchmarks? I dunno, probably, I’m no psychologist. But I know my pa would say it makes you much happier to have food in the cupboard and a neatly made bed. Mind you, do you need the Guardian to tell you that? I do, actually. I always thought making beds was like tying your shoelaces after taking your shoes off, until now. Now I see I was wrong.
- There is also a darker conclusion I’ve drawn lately. I feel like a capitalist monster. I am very careful to waste no food in the making of these recipes as everything uneaten goes straight into the freezer, but still. There’s something really gross about the whole thing. ‘Oh, the Guardian says I have to buy five jumpsuits and a pair of trainers this week. Off I go to the shops then!’ Maybe if I stop shoulder-barging those charity people in the streets I can absolve myself. I’ll think more about this.
Saturday 25 July
The first task of the day, after the paper had been bought and magazine scanned for potential ridiculousness, was to get dressed in a nasty approximation of a very feminine look. I don’t own much pastel stuff because I ain’t much of a pastel kind of a girl, plus I’m beginning to realise that a lot of the things in my wardobe are horrible clothes I bought at least nine years ago. I am only realising this now because I have to find the most similar garment to the one in the picture each day. Which leads to me sitting on my bed with a long face thinking ‘well i suppose the closest thing I have to that shirt really is the cream bell-sleeved top I bought for Beltain camp 2001 back when I was a druid,’ etc. Witness saturday’s heinous combination, which left me looking like a frightened sixth former in 1997, suddenly liberated from the dictates of school uniform and clueless as to how to use this new-found power. Also I have no furniture in my flat that’s the right height to balance my camera on, so i had to cut my legs off at the ankles (in the photo, that is).
Frills and spills
Ills and spills
Gawd, I can’t look at that any more. Scroll down, scroll down I beseech you! Noweth!
As if the pastel clothes weren’t enough, I also had to put pink eyeshadow on my face. I wasn’t impressed. The lack of eyeliner combined with my blunt fringe meant my eyes looked like currants stuck on the front of a gingerbread man.
I also had to wear lipgloss, which is very rare for me as I think it’s too Vicky Beckham c. Spice Girls era. Luckily I used to work on a duty-free trade magazine, during which time I got basically as many free cosmetics as I wanted (I know! I miss it so much…) so I have a drawer full of all kinds of unlikely make-up items, all of which are about three years old and smell of paraffin, but ne’ermind. Make do and mend.
The trick of brushing lips with a toothbrush is one I know well thanks to Just Seventeen in 1994 and it does work momentarily, but I’d still rather a good slick of red lipstick.
Anyway here’s the result of my efforts this week:
Summer pink
Summer hink
Thanks go out to Jonny, the latest graphic desinger chum to offer his skills in photo-fouring (but also the man who commented on my huge shoulders [please see previous post as I can’t be bothered to link to it – must dash to Carphone Warehouse {see any previous post}], so it all evens out in the end).
For dinner I was supposed to cook newspaper-wrapped bream. However I spent all day trying to get my tiny flat to look like a Guardian interiors shoot, which was no small feat as you will soon see, so I missed the shops and ended up shovelling down a tuna and pasta salad and taking a bottle of wine to a mate’s house instead. I tried to get a bottle of Australian riesling but whatever, I couldn’t see any, it was only Tesco Metro, I wanted to actually see my friends at some point, so I just got some cheap Pinot Grigio and headed off to dance to early ’90s club classics with my chums instead. So much more fun than baking fish in newspapers . Maybe Hugh could do a playlist one week.
So perhaps the most amusing thing I did on saturday was trying to make my flat look like a chic, utilitarin Antwerp loft apartment. My flat doesn’t even have an official front door, so I have to let my friends in through a locked iron gate leading to a rat-infested concrete alleyway. It has no heating. It is decorated in mint-green woodchip and the carpets are royal red with a rank gold print. The electrics are so dodgy you have to choose between cooking dinner and being able to see while you cook dinner, or else there is a burning smell and the trip switch goes. My post is collected for me by a Turkish men’s club. The laminate-covered corridor is full of cockroaches and resembles something out of a David Lynch film if David Lynch set his films in Hackney and had no sense of mystery, only desolation. So whenever I look at the aspirational interior design pieces in Weekend magazine I feel a sense of wry amusement mixed with a strong pang of wanting, wanting, wanting that life. Please see below my tragic attempt at achieving that life. At least I have a home, and it’s dry, and it has a lock, and I have my own washing machine. And it only costs me seven-eighths of my salary each month to live there.
I’ll just post the pictures next to one another and you can see what I mean. I think no droll commentary is required.
Conclusion:
- There are too many tears cascading down my cheeks for me to see the keyboard, let alone draw conclusions.
First impressions
My first thought this week was that I was going to try a new blogging format and catalogue my attempts by day, rather than by item.
My second was that I was going to format my bullet points in a different way, with full stops at the end of each one.
My third thought was that I’d better open the magazine and see what I had to do this week.
Frills and spills fashion
A bit girly – scary colours and bare legs – but I just got some more beautiful FARHI by Nicole Farhi (yay Evi!) clothes that I hope to incorporate, which is exciting.
Groovy in grey fashion
Good. I have lots of grey clothes and I quite like the hairstyles.
- The Hero blouse – what is this? The name of a Balmain blouse? I already know I can’t afford it.
- Christy T – erm, well it’ll be a doddle to look like her. I guess I’m dying my hair again then.
- Frilly brollies – useful and achievable, for once.
- Ted’s biker playsuit – looks kind of like it might be alright on, but a bit scary, possibly too pricey and probably not in the shops yet.
- Blonette hair – great but how do I incorporate that with looking as much like Christy Turlington as possible? Tsk, the writers of The Measure could’ve thought this through a bit better couldn’t they?
- The Cameron/Brown holiday wardrobe circus – irrelevant to me. I don’t even care what celebrities are wearing, let alone politicians. It’s enough effort to work out what they’re saying.
- “This is it” tour merch – fine. I hadn’t planned to buy any MJ socks.
- “Cinch your waist” to be replaced with “square your shoulders” – since my waist is quite a lot less waisty than it once was I’m happy enough about this – but it could leave me looking like an American football player. In fact once I was sitting in the pub with a mate and he suddenly went: ‘Christ! You’ve got big shoulders, haven’t you,’ so either I’m well suited to this look or I’m in big trouble.
- The Cheryl v Dannii debate – fine by me. I have no telly and vitually no idea about any of this stuff anyway.
- Ditto Michelle Heaton – looks awful, send her down, keep her away from me.
Lauren Luke’s summer pink
Hmm, not sure. Pink eyeshadow can go either way, I already know this. At least I own some though.
Great headline, the sub in me notices. The belly in me notices that the recipes look pretty good and tasty. The brain in me notices that they also look simple enough to do and the worried woman in me can’t see a great deal of cream involved. Good all round.
This headline removes all the goodness created by the previous one (they’ve changed it online. Oh I know, it’s to so with search engine optimisation isn’t it. Good for them. Shame, for my purposes). The recipe is secondary. But delicious looking.
Yummmm, can’t wait to cook it.
Relationship matters and Aspects of love
Another new relationship piece! Gosh, the pressure is really on now for me to find somebody to share my life with. Poor sod had better be prepared for a lot of dinners at home. However, loved-up or not, I can see the sentence ‘get eight hours sleep a night’ or words to that effect. Certainly something for me to aim for this week.
A flat filled with empty rice sacks – finally something a little more achievable for a girl of my means?
The dregs of last week
Last week was an altogether tricky seven days for following this godforsaken plan. I was tired, unprepared, trying to track down an iPhone in every spare moment (a feat that has still yielded no success thanks to the momumental mess-ups of first Natwest – which did everything wrong, and then Carphone Warehouse – which gave away my reserved phone after promising not to while I sorted things out with the bank.) Here are the final dregs of things I managed to vaguely achieve despite the difficulty of cooking recipes, photographing complicated outfits and buying copies of foreign magazines to look at vampire photoshoots while also mantaining one’s daily life. You know the saying that punctuality is the virtue of the bored, or something? Well following the advice of lifestyle magazines follows a similar pattern. I’m certainly having to sacrifice a fair portion of my social life in order to do this project, as I keep having to rush home of an evening so I can make pastry.
Here’s one of the outfits I copied last week but have been hesitating to publish because I hate the photo so much. As is plain to see, this blog is not about my aesthetic vanity, so I must forge ahead with the endeavour. God forbid, I keep thinking, they publish a swimsuit fashion shoot. I really don’t know what I’ll do. Still, this one involves jumpers, so how bad can it be?
Belt up
Belt down
The hat and the cardie (another FARHI by Nicole Farhi delight) are great but it’s not a look that I can pull off easily and the main event, the belt, I hadn’t brought with me to the festival.
Last week I also cooked another of Rosie Sykes’ recipes, which was supposed to be sea trout with samphire. However she had thoughtfully provided alternatives to both main ingredients for those who don’t have time to visit the fishmonger/seashore, so I was able to make an equally delicious salmon with fennel dish. In fact now I get to thinking about it, it really was very nice, and the portion I couldn’t eat is waiting in the freezer for my later delectation.
Sea trout with samphire
Salmon with fennel
Mine’s a bit shady in the photographic sense but it tasted good enough even to serve to someone else, which is sadly not always the case with my cooking.
On Friday night I was supposed to dash home after work and make the next recipe in the magazine, which was an apricot puree, but my dear friend Michelle, whose design skills have enabled me to copy Lauren Luke’s tutorials in terms of layout finesse if not photographic content, has left my workplace to fly to her home country, the US. It was a sad day for everyone so instead of leaving on time to stew apricots, I went to the pub instead. I was supposed to cook the puree later but, as anyone might have predicted, I stayed in the pub until closing time instead, feasting on several kingsize twixes and baguettes fetched for me from the nearest supermarket by concerned friends who found it distracting when my eyes rolled back in my head as they attempted to discuss the merits of Indesign versus QuarkXpress with me. I then ate a kingsize (can you spot the theme?) packet of crisps, several flapjacks and a muffin on the way to the bus stop, topping up that little snack with a cream cheese and salt beef bagel as a treat to myself after walking home from Seven Sisters cos I feel asleep on the bus. I think the day I can fit back into my old jeans may be some way off yet, but this is not a subject to be worried about within a five-mile radius of a bagel shop. Anyway, the simple conclusion here is that no matter how dedicated you are to the cause of becoming the perfect liberal-minded domestic goddess, you have to push all this aside to wave bye bye to a good friend, and eat junk instead.
There were further failures to report last week.
I was supposed to have a picnic, which was meant to involve fizz and apparently annoying frisbee players, but there was no time for such daytime frivolity. The closest I got was consoling myself – after a Natwest battle – with a bag of healthy (for once) lunch stuff from Tesco, which I ate at my desk. Some sad picnic, huh.
I also meant to find time to restyle my bathroom in the manner of the Guardian‘s home feature, but that fell off the bottom of the to-do list by virtue of its being so utterly unlikely to produce any success that there was little point even glancing at those pages.
There were also a couple more outfits from the week that I actually captured pretty faithfully, especially one on friday involving – gasp – a scarf tucked into a belt! And I liked it! Sadly, though, there is an added level of effort involved in my copying of the lifestyle in question, and that is the photographing of it. I just forgot to ask anyone to do my picture for me and was a little too tired and inebriated to take it myself when I got home. So a couple of days’ outfits got lost in the ether last week, which is disproportionately upsetting to me as in some ways I do like to be thorough. In some ways.
In terms of heart and mind, I read Oliver Burkeman and Aspects of love with interest and bore their musings in mind. I noticed that I hadn’t experienced a visit from the Imp of the Perverse for quite some time, but thinking this seemed to be like knocking on his front door (probably in the trunk of a tree in some enchanted forest) and calling out ‘coo-ee, little imp, come out and encourage me to drive into oncoming traffic.’
Luckily I had no driving to do last week but I did read an article about some posh gardens in which one plant had been growing in the same spot for 135 years, and upon reading this I experienced such an overwhelming desire to go and cut the plant down in the middle of the night that I began to feel nauseous. Good job I don’t live in the Lee Valley or that fern would’ve been dead meat. Vegetable. Whatever.
Aspects of love suggested that low self-esteem doesn’t in fact make you less lovable, which certainly made me prick up my ears. Every time I found myself walking around the supermarket (where I spend most of my time these days thanks to a certain magazine), thinking how I hadn’t put any make-up on for at least ten hours and how was I ever possibly going to meet my Mr Right next to the polenta, and more to the point how was Mr Right ever going to be convinced I was Miss Right when I was clearly standing in such a hunched and self-conscious manner while comparing prices of the aforementioned Italian dietary mainstay, I thought to myself : ‘No no, he might not like your face much, but at least he won’t mind that you don’t like your face much today. In fact, he will love that you don’t like your face much today.’
Overall conclusion in preparation for the next issue:
- Must (and will) try harder.
Fried halloumi with runner bean salad
Last night had to be the most successful evening of cooking so far. First of all the fried halloumi with runner bean salad turned out absolutely lovely. The ingredients were easy to find and not too expensive. I was able to follow each step faithfully rather than leaping up them two at a time, coat tails flying in the wind. There were no feelings of frustration or inadequacy. I love Rosie Sykes for this. I also defrosted and heated through my previous beetroot salad and raspberry tarts with great success, making a full-on Guardian meal of loveliness for my bezzer mate and I.
Fried halloumi with runner bean salad
Fried halloumi with runner bean salad! Nailed it!
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I feel a bit like a school kid saying goodbye to a really lovely supply teacher. ‘Miss Sykes, why can’t you write recipes for the Guardian every week?’ (I know she used to. Maybe they could get her back if they offered her a payrise?)
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The ingredients for this one managed to be tasty and unusual enough to warrant writing about, but not hard to find and not too pricey. Even though there was a fair amount of preparation involved, none of it was too fiddly or complicated
I've always found it funny when people write letters to the Guardian's Weekend magazine complaining that the recipe ingredients are too middle class and the fashion only looks good on thin people. After all, it's just a magazine. Or is it? I decided to follow its recipes, fashion and lifestyle advice as closely as possible, to see if the aspirations promoted therein can really be achieved by the average reader who is not especially wealthy, not necessarily model thin and is obliged to work regular office hours. This blog has no affiliation whatsoever with the Guardian but I link to the Weekend magazine website for the purposes of illustration. 
Guardian Girl 
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