Writing Prompt

Write a story or poem set in a supermarket.

RECIPE: Easy Meat and Potato pie

Easy Meat and Potato Pie



Ingredients:

one pack of chopped up stewing steak
one large carrot, peeled and diced
one large onion, peeled and sliced
one small stick of lettuce, washed and finely diced
one large potato, peeled and diced (larger chunks than other veg)
one knorr rich beef stock pot (or equivalent stock cube)
a glass of red wine (plus another to keep you company while you cook)
a generous spoonful of redcurrant jelly (optional)
a pinch of herb salt
pepper
a few shakes of smoked paprika if you fancy it
squirt of brown sauce
olive oil
cornflour
bay leaf
ready-made frozen shortcrust pastry, defrosted
egg yolk for painting on top of pastry

Method:

1. Brown the meat in a casserole dish suitable for using on hob. Set meat aside.
2. Fry veg in olive oil in casserole dish until beginning to soften.  Return meat to casserole dish and stir to mix stuff together.
3. Add stock pot, herb salt, jelly, paprika, brown sauce, a generous dessertspoon of cornflour, and stir well. Add wine. Stir well.
4. Barely cover with hot water from kettle. Add a bayleaf. Cover and cook in oven on a low heat (160 on a fan oven) for about an hour, until meat is tender. The gravy should have thickened. If not, mix some more cornflour with cold water and add a little to the stew after it has cooled slightly, stirring well.
5. Set aside until cold. Then tip into a pie dish.
6. Roll out pastry.  Cover top of pie, paint with egg yolk and cut two or three inch-long air vents in top.  Cook in oven at 180 (fan oven) until pastry is cooked.

Alternatives:

• use different vegetables.
• use different flavourings - different spices, herbs, chilli, garlic, tomato puree
• use rough puff pastry

What I've learned recently: We can't all be natural blondes...

But I could be a natural grey...

My father is a natural blonde, and my mother is a natural brunette.  My maternal grandmother and most of her children (except my mum who took after her father) were natural redheads.  In a properly organised universe, I’d’ve inherited one of these distinctive hair colours, wouldn’t I? But, no –  after a few years of baby blonde hair, I eased into my teenage years with hair that, at best, during hot summers, was honey-blonde, and at worst (ie, most of the time) was what could diplomatically be termed ‘mousey’.

But I did get the sort of skin that so often accompanies ginger hair: vampire-pale, mole-speckled, bursts into flame at the first hint of sunshine.  So that’s ok. Thank you, Universe.

Anyway, at seventeen, I decided that dying my hair tart-blonde would be a good move.  My dad always said blondes have more fun (and he should know, as he ran off with our teenage babysitter when I was seven), so I figured I was ready to embrace the high life.  I chose the palest permanent blonde colour available, and remained that colour for years, not counting the periods when I added orange and back combed it into a monstrous frizz. [I was always drawn to punk rock].

                                           

Having blonde hair really did change my life. I got a lot more attention from men, for one thing, which was a surprise to me as nothing else about my appearance had changed.  Except that I maybe used an excessive amount of slap – looking back, it was possibly my resemblance to a 1950s streetwalker that got me all the masculine attention. What is it about blonde hair that taps into so many men’s libidos?  Beats me. It did cause me a problem when I first fell properly in love, however, aged 23 (I’ve always been a bit slow), as I allowed the object of my affection to believe my blonde hair was natural.  I actually couldn’t believe he truly thought it was real. I mean, my eyebrows are brown (if you know what I mean). And I’m not from Sweden, or one of the Midwich cuckoos.  But he believed I was a natural blonde and I let him continue to do so because I couldn’t bear the thought of disabusing him of this idea which had clearly become part of what he loved about me. When he did work it out, we were more or less finished anyway, but it didn’t help.

Anyway, in my thirties, I started going for darker, more natural-looking blondes, and then I spent many years with my hair coloured in various shades of ginger, which actually suited me better than any other colour.  The problem with ginger hair colours is that they fade more quickly than other colours, the lovely vibrant orange shades turning…well, mousey.  So I eventually moved onto shades of what were called ‘light brown’ but always look quite dark to me. I try to use reddish browns, and sometimes I just go for the full-on ginger look despite the inevitable disappointment that a fortnight of hair-washing will bring.

                                         

So, why am I going on about hair colours?  Well, the thing is, I haven’t coloured my hair for about two months now, and the natural colour is beginning to show through. And, shock horror, quite a lot of it seems to be grey! It’s still dark at the roots, but there are definite silvery streaks at the front and sides.  Now, I have no problem with being grey.  My partner’s hair went grey-white in his thirties and he later grew a beard so he looks like Captain Birdseye these days.  We never have a problem choosing someone to be Father Christmas. I have a friend who is my age and naturally grey, and she is gorgeous and looks younger than me.  But most of my friends dye their hair.  My mum dyes her hair. My colleagues dye their hair.  It’s a class and geographical thing, I think.  I am from northern working-class stock – council house, comprehensive, FE college – and women like me, in my generation, dye their hair.  They just do.  I rarely wear make-up these days and I have been the recipient of disapproval from my peers and elders because of it.  Anyone would think I’d started wearing sackcloth and jesus sandals! I have several much more middle-class friends from an older generation in London and they have all grown old gracefully and sport lovely grey and white hair. But no one has seen my natural hair colour, including myself, since I was seventeen.

I mean, it's not as if showing my true colour would transform me into a prune-faced, squinting granny with no teeth, complaining about how much better things were in the old days, is it?  Not immediately, anyway. I'd have to put some work in.

                                           

So, I’m thinking – Lockdown has already made me cut my hair into the worst bob the world has ever seen, so why not take the opportunity to grow the colour out altogether?  I could at least see how grey I actually am (before I quickly get the Clairol out, sobbing hysterically). 

But now, just to spite me, The Clown Prince has decided to send us all back to work in a few weeks, hasn’t he? 

Listen up, Boris, two months isn’t enough time to grow out several inches of hair, and I can’t go back to work piebald, can I? Have some compassion for your citizens, man…

Writing Prompt:

Write a story or poem inspired by a famous painting.

What I've learned this week: The Importance Of Keeping Fit...

The Importance Of Keeping Fit! 

As we have all been told, it is important to exercise while on lockdown in order to keep yourself fit and healthy.  The problem is that I didn’t do much exercise before lockdown.  In fact, my life wasn’t really all that different before lockdown to now, except that I went to coffee shops and ate less.

In the first week of lockdown, I started doing online yoga again for the first time in months. I also did the ‘soothing stretching exercises’ recommended by a video I found on Amazon Prime, aimed at ‘those with chronic pain caused by conditions such as fibromyalgia’.  These exercises appeared very gentle but the instructor was secretly an evil witch – I woke up the following morning feeling like I’d been wrung out by a beefy Victorian washerwoman. That instructor clearly had a short, fat poppet with badly cut hair and glasses in her back pocket.  Twenty minutes of these so-called ‘soothing stretches’ managed to inflame my entire body (and not in a good way). I spent the following three or four days hobbling round like a professional hypochondriac, convinced I’d got Covid-19 as every part of my body hurt.

However, a fortnight later, I started going for walks.  Counter-intuitive as it might seem, spending all my daylight hours, and quite a few night-time ones too, typing at a laptop tends to make me a tad stiff. Who knew?  Mother Nature was also being either exceptionally kind to the poor creatures confined to their houses and gardens, or exceptionally cruel, depending on your perspective. The weather was gorgeous.  My husband had been taking daily walks down to the local park and reservoir since lockdown began, adopting sensible social distancing measures of course.  So I decided to accompany him.

About ten minutes into every walk, my back started hurting.  I was sure I’d seen one of those van Tulleken twin doctors proving that exercise could cure chronic pain better than pills, and that was on TV so it must be true.  Therefore, I knew I only had to persevere and the pain would ease up.  

It didn’t. It got worse. So I came up with a genius idea: I would take the painkillers an hour before I went on the walk, giving them time to start working, and that would keep the worst of the pains at bay during the walk. If I did this for a week or so, I figured that my body’s natural alignment and muscle strength would return and I could stop taking the pills. 

After one week, I went for a walk without a paracetamol or ibuprofen crutch, and guess what?  My back ache returned with a vengeance!  Traipsing downhill through the wood near our house, I felt as if a goblin was walking behind me and hammering on the muscles below my waist with a lump hammer.

                                             

Well, it just hasn’t had enough time to work yet, I thought.  

A week later, I was mentally refreshed – the bluebells and wild garlic in the woods really are stunning, and the reservoir is a thing of true beauty under a bright blue spring sky, and the people who were keeping a safe distance away from us were all friendly and cheerful.  Who’d’ve thought a pandemic could be so pleasant?  So I stopped taking the painkillers again.

Rumpel-lumphammer was back, this time adding extra resonance by gently plucking my sciatic nerve with a pair of pliers.  As I lumbered down the hill, tripping over tree roots and cursing the van Tulleken twins ('Damn the van Tullekjen twins, however east-on-the-eye they might be! Call themselves doctors? They're nothing but bloody charlatans! And I bet this tree trunk is covered with coronavirus!), my knees made a sound like an old grandfather clock winding down.

So, here's what I achieved by two weeks of exercise:  

• hay fever due to the bluebells and wild garlic 
• a limp worthy of the hero of a 1940s romance 
• I’d ingested more painkillers than I would normally take in six months.  

So now I’m back to a ten minute limp down the canal path when no one is about, and fifteen minutes a day of ‘Yoga For extremely-unfit-middle-aged-beginners-with-fibromyalgia-and-the-kind-of -bodies-that-just-won’t-do-what-they’re-told  With Adriene’. Adriene is a woman whose video-ed yogic-contortions have impressed me in the past, though I am a long, long way from emulating them. She’s an American and talks too much which often makes me very tense with irritation (which is the opposite of what yoga should achieve), but I’ve learned to distract myself by counting the number of clichés she can pack into one yogic position (I counted twenty-eight this morning).

                                                      

Don’t get the wrong idea. I do sometimes move away from the laptop.  I have a frequent compulsion to bake cakes and talk to my little nephew by Google Hangouts, and I am teaching a couple of private tutees by Skype (yes, I am now able to use ‘multiple’ online video calling apps), and there is housework (which P is doing most of at present because I am in such pain – when I iron, I have to prop myself up against the table and take a ten minute breather between each item). 

And there is of course the ten hours of procrastination I have to fit in each day.

Well, someone has to do it!

Self-Isolation Recipes: Lime and Coconut drizzle cake

Lime and coconut drizzle cake

        

Ingredients
4oz/100g self raising flour, sieved
4oz/100g caster sugar
4oz/100g softened butter or spread (I used Flora)
2 eggs
zest of one lime stirred into flour
a handful of dessicated coconut 
For drizzle:
two limes (but one would do), juice squeezed into a cup
roughly same volume of caster sugar (or icing sugar) as lime juice
a few dessertspoons of canned coconut milk


Method
1. Grease a loaf tin and line base with baking parchment
2. Beat sugar and butter together until light and pale
3. Add eggs and beat into sugar mix
4. Fold in flour and lime zest
5. If you are using an electric mixer, you could probably just throw all ingredients into bowl and 'whazz it up', as Jamie Oliver would say.
6. Stir in the dessicated coconut, if using. I planned to use this, but discovered that my dessicated coconut was more than a year past it's use-by date, so I decided against it!
7. Bake in a moderate oven (mine is a fan oven and I put it on 180 degrees) for around twenty minutes, or until a skewer stuck in its middle comes out clean.
8. While it is baking, heat up the lime juice and around the same volume of sugar in a pan until sugar melts. Add the coconut milk. Stir well. Make sure it is hot before drizzling. If you want to test the syrup to see whether it is sweet enough, take a small teaspoon of it and let it cool on the spoon before tasting, to avoid burning your mouth.
9. While cake is still warm, tip it out of loaf tin, prick top all over with a fork, and spoon the lime and coconut syrup over the cake, letting it soak in.  Use up all the syrup.
10. Once cool, sprinkle with icing sugar if you want to.

What I've been reading this week: Haven Wakes by Fi Phillips

Haven Wakes by Fi Phillips


I first became aware of this novel, which is aimed at the 11+ audience and published by Burning Chair Publishing, when Fiona mentioned it on the Open University's Write Club Facebook page. I downloaded it onto my kindle partly out of a sense of writerly solidarity - I like to support new authors - but also because I too am writing a fantasy novel aimed at the same age-group.  I didn't even find time to read it until recently but I wish I'd started sooner as it turns out to be a lively, entertaining, imaginative read.


                                                   



The novel is set in a future version of our world, and begins excitingly with a mysterious shadow creature being chased and almost caught by two thugs and their mean, magical master, Kendra, who is searching for something.  As the narrative progresses, we discover that the magician is being employed by an even scarier magician, Winters, who is involved in the murder of the CEO of Haven Industries.  The murdered man's nephew, Steve Haven, is left at an unpleasant boarding school while his mother goes off to search for his missing father.  While his parents are gone, Steve is caught up in an increasingly mysterious and exciting adventure involving a magical place, Darkacre, attached to his own world but unseen by most 'workadays'.  He meets numerous fascinating and often frightening characters and learns things about his parents and his world.

The novel is the first in a proposed series, and it certainly caught my attention and sucked me into the narrative quickly.  Fi's style is fast-paced, compelling and readable - there are very occasional minor 'glitches' (too many characters are described as 'bone-thin', for instance), but only the sorts of things that people like myself, currently studying creative writing and engaged in a great deal of beta-reading, would notice.  The plot is original and there are some brilliant moments - I loved the fire imp, and Hartley was a wonderful character. There is genuine suspense and the action sequences are well-paced and well-controlled. Dialogue is plausible and helps to develop characters and move the plot along.  I haven't read the whole novel yet, but so far it has gripped me completely and I want to read on. I would have loved it when I was twelve or thirteen, and I am definitely enjoying it even now at my advanced age.

I hope Fi does write the sequels and I think this is a series that ought to find a loyal readership as I think it would appeal to any young reader who likes adventure, fantasy and intrigue, well-drawn characters and imaginative ideas.


You can find Fi at http://fiphillipswriter.com/

RATING:
Haven Wakes

**** 

Key:
*****      highly recommended - a 'must-read'
****         good - well worth taking the time to read
***           ok - will help to pass the time in a boring situation
**            not very good -  just about readable but flawed
*             not recommended - boring, offensive, badly-written or deeply flawed in some other way