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.
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?
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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