Bye bye basin
I boiled the last in the suet pudding series last night, and savoured every bite. Served as suggested with double cream, it was a) sublime and b) a step towards morbid obesity that I would prefer not to have taken. Tonight it’s roast veg (and more lemon pud out of the fridge), tomorrow a rye loaf, and then I get a couple of days off to eat spinach leaves and contemplate my retreating navel.
It’s so boring going on about stodge and calories all the time – I’m yawning as I type – but it’d be a pointless experiment if I didn’t honestly share my concerns. And I think most people would be vaguely concerned about their health on their fourth consecutive day of suet eating. I am sorry though. I’d love to be able to transcend such drossful subject matter and, once I’m back in my trainers next week (when the broken foot is officially allowed to get some proper exercise again), I hope to set aside my Supersize Me cholesterol fears and chill the hell out.
There’s no photo of the lemon pudding but it is etched forever into the window frames of my mind, for it was truly one of the best desserts I’ve ever made.
Moving on, here’s a photo of me hunched in a loo.
Life's a peach
You can guess this one
Conclusions:
- American football player in drag
- Tara Palmer-Tomkinson three weeks after being fished out of a canal
- Office girl on opium
- All of the above
Also, you probably didn’t even (care to) notice but instead of wearing a small, white watch I don’t have, I wrapped my headphones around my wrist instead, creating an attractive yet functional accessory for the modern woman. And also, I quite like the way my terrible magazine photography makes the model look like a Victorian ancestor (although certainly not one of mine).
Now, enough with the parentheses: I’m off to Sainsbury’s.
Game on, game off
Oh GOD, when will nude shades go out of fashion? They’ve been on trend for long enough now – it must be at least a month or two since I first had to clothe myself in unsightly pastels. It’s high time we went back to black, please.
I’m determined to pull myself out of my fit of ill humour today but it’s not easy. Last night’s pudding was far less successful than saturday’s leek and bacon delight because I underseasoned it, undercooked it and overwashed the saucepan with this horrid ‘pink petals’ washing up liquid that makes all my food taste of a scene out of Bambi. Yeuch. I think it’s actually got under the skin of the pan.
After a late dinner of suet with a dripping garnish and a side dish of cream, I went to bed early and lay awake until 4am worrying about beige clothes.
Today I feel tired, grouchy and corpulent, so backcombing my hair into a sort of sub-Sarah Ferguson up-do, covering my eyelids in purple shadow and pulling on a crumpled sack of a skirt from the bottom of my wardrobe wasn’t quite the morning routine I’d hoped for. Mind you just putting ‘morning’ and ‘routine’ into the same sentence is something of an achievement for me so I’ll cheer up a bit at this juncture. There.
I’ve got it pretty close with the t-shirt, which is an old favourite my ex screen-printed for his former band, but funnily enough I don’t wear it that often these days and I noticed on the train to work – sadly too late to change – that it smells of the Jorvik Viking Centre. I haven’t been to the Jorvik Viking Centre but I spent much of my childhood in the Oxford Story, and everyone is always banging on about how they smell the same. ‘Blah blah, Jorvik bloody blah blah Oxford Story’ every bloody day. So boring. We get the point!
Hue beauty
Warren Beatty (?)
Conclusions:
- Not feeling it AT ALL this issue. Request black shift dresses and salads.
- Measure: hoop earrings are deemed quite wonderful this week, which is fine by me as I have many pairs of right big’uns and wear them all the time. At least I used to, before I started doing this Guardian Girl jape. Have you noticed they rarely put earrings on the models in the Guardian? In fact there’s often no jewellery at all, aside from a few gold cuffs lately.
- More pudding tonight. It’s painful the amount of suet I’ve ingested over a three-day period. Psychically painful. However that leek pudding was probably the tastiest thing I’ve cooked for the project so far, and it was pretty easy.
- I really am going to stop complaining now.
Weekend
Sad to say a slightly morose wash has tinted this weekend, for no very good reason but that these things happen occasionally. Nothing has gone wrong, but I did feel a little lurch of the soul upon seeing the suet pudding recipes. It’s just the way it goes. On one page, a willowy blonde draped with finely woven pastel sports attire. On the next, 1001 great things to do with lard. It hardly seems fair.
Appropriately enough this week’s model’s expression happens to translate seamlessly into a sulk when I attempt it.
Last night Elin of the Crazy Mouse, her man Ed and Best Liv came over for roast beef with leek pudding. My gosh it were good. I forgave Hugh for the high stodge factor the moment that suet melted upon my petulant lips. A finer taste and texture I have rarely revelled in. NB have been reading Herodotus so excuse the narrative tone – it is Sunday, the day of self-indulgence. Also, don’t hate me – next to Herodotus on my shelves are the autobiographies of Jason Donovan and Kerry Katona.
I am at this very moment preparing beef pudding, although with a disappointing lack of kidneys due to a monumental Sainsburys oversight. I’m also drinking the red wine that hasn’t gone into the pudding filling, and listening to old Love records, so signing off quick before the wistful anecdotes come out to play. Please find below the photographic depiction of two outfits and a pudding, with no captions until I return to full desktop computer functionality tomorrow.
Have a grey day
Have a black mood
Leek pudding
Bleak pudding
In the pink
On the blink
Conclusions:
• This isn’t a conclusion but a footnote. I make the rules on this blog so pipe down. On Friday, instead of cooking Yotam’s fine recipes, I went to the first Department S gig in 20 years. It was well good. I beseech you to find a Youtube clip of them performing Is Vic There? on TOTP and marvel at their coolness. Byesie bye x
• Actually one more thing: The Measure. My hair needs growing, not cutting, in order to incorporate a Brett Anderson fringe. Also Natwest continues its ploy to make my life miserable and difficult by blocking my card without prior warning this week. For this reason I’m surviving off a stash of cash and find the idea of buying a sequined jacket from Whistles to be not very sensible. Over and out.
Sunday: a nice cake, a grotesque photo
Sunday involved making a large apple and prune cake. As I spooned a worryingly scant amount of cake mixture into a greased tin I thought I was about to create the first genuine culinary disaster of the project. It looked like a thin layer of gruel with a load of apple slices and prunes dumped indelicately on top. But 40 minutes later I opened the oven door to the most delicious smell of warm, cosy baking and a golden cake looking like a princess’s pillow (what on earth am I writing?). It tasted delicious. Even my actual genius friend Jesse who can’t have lactose ate a few slices and reassured me that she could understand why I’d scarfed down most of the damn thing before she even arrived.
Apple (and prune) pudding cake
Grapple (and swoon) for pudding cake
Dumbass caption alert.
Jesse also accompanied me trough the rat-infested alley on to my elegant street to have my photo taken against a wired-up window.
This is pretty much the worst photo I’ve ever seen of myself, and that’s really saying something given that I’m famous for producing rank portraits. My friends and I often used to go on the Crazy Mouse ride on Brighton pier, just to blow the cobwebs away and kill some time being spontaneous near the seafront, which is what you do when you live in Brighton. This one time we had particularly great fun and got off the ride whooping and high-fiving before running over to the booth to have a look at the automatic photo they take of you. There was Liv, laughing away next to Elin, who was clinging on for dear life with a big smile on her face. And then, next to them, was what can only be described as a large, brown monster that appeared to be covered in thick fur and had its mouth open in a hideous, deformed roar. That monster was me. I honestly didn’t even look like a human. I just can’t explain it. To this day the three of us rue the fact that we didn’t buy that photo on a weekly basis, but it was £7 and when you’re young you imagine this sort of opportunity will arise every day.
Turns out we weren’t far wrong: if anyone wants to buy a print of the below photo of an inflated grub, send a postal order for £7 to PO Box 101, blah blah blah.
Go, figurehead
Go, quickly, you are scaring my young family
Conclusions:
- In life, there are good times and there are bad times.
- I think this post perfectly illustrates that point.
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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