No Gym Required

Workout Tip

To tone flabby buttocks and thighs: transport your children, one at a time, the 40ft distance between sofa and the bathroom basin to clean teeth, each child standing on your feet and holding on round your waist. If they obligingly weigh in at the end of the trip, you will find that you have moved 136.4lbs, quite some distance, mostly using your bottom muscles.

The request to further move them on the short distance to their bedroom in the same manner was peremptorily denied, due to workout being already at maximum level - I said my bottom was too achy.

I then heard youngest questioning my six year old, " Why is Mummy's bottom too flaky?"

You can extend the workout to include biceps and stomach muscles (it is important to engage these in order to protect your back), by having your 35lb three year old decide to be a baby, unable to walk (though still able to talk in commanding tones) and need to be carried between the bathroom and the bedroom several times to complete the various pre-bedtime rituals.

You will now be able to dispense completely with any gym or other fitness routines and have earned a sit-down in front of computer to visit blog-land.

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Cut to the Car Chase

My children’s current obsession with law and order, (cops and robbers being the favourite game of the moment) has recently extended to encompass the school run. To my recipe for a South African country school run post of a few months ago, I can now add a new ingredient. Every white car (and in South Africa 50% of cars are white) is a police car and every other car is a robber. Our car is silver grey,(encrusted with red clay mud from our road), so we are robbers escaping from the police. This calls for much screeching and ducking down in the back, whenever a white car pursues us... sighs of relief, when we escape undetected and they pass us by. I am Robber Mum, they are Robber Children going to Robber School. Their teacher has a white car...but that’s OK cos she stole it from the police and she is really Robber Teacher!

Interestingly enough, a real police car causes far less excitement than a plain white car – maybe the reality doesn’t quite fit with the fantasy life of inverted justice, the robbers being the good guys – bad is good, good is bad. Reminds me of another favourite game, (luckily now losing ground to terrible Knock Knock jokes), where Yes means No and No means Yes, You can get horribly tied up in knots with that one. I hope this tendency to turn the world on its head and look at it through the wrong end of the binoculars is a normal part of moral development and experimentation for young children and not a sign indicating an urgent need for a child psychologist!

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Frolicking in the Daisies

We had a perfect spring day yesterday and the daisies agreed. They're not at their thickest yet, next week our farm will be carpeted in white, but enough to start trying to capture this year's 'children in the daisies' pictures. Every year I have a bash at getting the elusive perfect shot and am frequently foiled by the bright contrasty sunlight (which is what makes the daisies unfurl their petals) and the glare from all these white flowers. The kids are usually squinting in the brightness, with dark shadows thrown by their hats on their faces. I'm aiming for an album with a page for each year, full of our children frolicking in the flowers, growing up in the daisies.

This year we had an ulterior motive too. We're setting up a photo library on our A Flower Gallery site, where you can download photos for a small fee, hence the letters on this pic. I've been learning, more than I ever thought I would, about Photoshop - resizing, retouching, adding letters to the sample photos so that they can't be used so easily without permission, and staring at my computer screen, instead of the enticing view through the window, to the daisies and mountains.

The kids were cooperative models for a short time, but as it got closer to lunch time patience wore thin, and the appropriate captions for the resulting pictures were more likely to be 'Stomping off in a grump through the daisies'.

We had decided on a policy of using only the generic pictures of them for the library, not portraits where they are easily recognizable. So trying to get pictures of them walking away through the flowers hand-in-hand was the aim...and we did get some...but how eloquent backs can be! Some of the shots clearly say, 'my Mum made me do this and I actually want to go and pick up pine cones over there and now I think about it I'm hungry'. Still there's always next week.

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Domestic Goddess Pancakes

"When can we have pancakes for breakfast again, Mum?"
Once long ago, when I had just got Nigella's "Feast", I tried out her recipe for banana and buttermilk pancakes, one Saturday morning, deviating from our usual cereal and toast routine. Ever since the cry periodically goes out "Pancakes, pancakes, pancakes".

So I've promised them for tomorrow. We have a mid-week public holiday. South Africa celebrates its public holidays on the actual date, rather than moving them to Friday or Monday as in Britain to make a convenient long weekend. This results in the charming custom, if the holiday falls on a Thursday or Tuesday, of taking the intervening single day off as well and declaring it a school holiday, so lucking out in a four day long weekend! We've had two of those this year so far,, but tomorrow - Women's Day, falls on its own in the middle of the week. I'm not sure why we get a holiday for ourselves, there isn't a Men's Day but I'm not complaining, the men get to have a holiday tomorrow too, fair shares.

Anyway these promised pancakes: I went back to "Feast" to look up the recipe and was reminded again why Nigella Lawson is my favourite food writer. She writes:

"Whenever I'm trying to be Nice Mummy, rather than normal Bad-tempered Impatient Mummy, I make pancakes. Unfortunately, it can often be counter-productive, but the sad truth about parenting is that it's virtually impossible to learn from your mistakes. The whole thing is a Dantesque punishment: you're trapped in the cycle, knowing what you're doing, but seemingly unable to stop."

So here I am, about to prove the truth of that by getting up bleary eyed tomorrow morning to cook pancakes, instead of having a lie-in, and hopefully not getting cranky with the children, as youngest decides I have to take her to the loo, just as I've put a perfect blob of batter in the pan and everyone is eating faster than I can cook and hang on a minute, I want one too!

Here is her recipe:

Banana Buttermilk Pancakes

1 very ripe banana
150g/5oz plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1 egg
250 ml/1 cup buttermilk
1 teaspoon caster sugar
30g/1oz butter melted

Put all the ingredients except for the melted butter in to a blender and liquidise to a smooth batter. It can now wait till you're ready to cook. Stir in the melted butter just before you start cooking. On a heated smooth griddle or thick-based frying pan, dollop tablespoons of batter to form 7-8cm/2-3inch pancakes, flipping them over once the underside is set, a minute if that, by which time it will have turned a deep golden brown. Half a minute or so on the other side should do it, then transfer on to warm plates while you continue to cook the rest.

My kids like them with cinnamon and sugar, but inspired by the picure in the book, my middle daughter disappeared off this afternoon and came back with a bowlful of early strawberries, gleaned from our established plants, which don't call a south African winter 'winter' and insist on flowering through it, so we'll have one or two each alongside our pancakes tomorrow, hopefully not too early in the morning!

This limerick from my Easter post seems appropriate here to finish off.

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Chopsticks

We have often jokingly said that my son must have been Chinese in a previous life. He will happily eat plain rice every day of the week, his favourite meal is rice and baked beans and he never tires of rice, rice, rice.

My sister-in-law brought the children back chopsticks from her visit to the States (as well as assorted, astoundingly cheap toys from Walmart). Now we are sure of it. Yesterday evening they decided to try out eating their supper with chopsticks, never having used or seen chopsticks being used in their life before. My son picked them up, exactly right and just started eating his rice and chicken, as if to the manner born. We were mildly gob-smacked! My six year old picked it up quite quickly with a bit of trial and error, and an extremely protracted supper ensued, with every grain of rice painstakingly cleared from plates, then a bowl of cut up apple embarked upon, then more grated apple - all with chopsticks. It was an hour later that they were at last persuaded to finish eating and go to bed, taking their chopsticks with them...who needs toys, you get more mileage out of a cheap pair of chopsticks!

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Signs of Spring

The first blossoms are out on our tiny almond tree, sparkling with rain drops.

There is a whisper of spring in the air, with sprinklings of our snowy white daisies appearing in the sand and grass. Later they will become carpets, too thick to avoid treading on them.

Arum lilies are blooming (they grow in the ditches at the side of the roads here - I couldn't believe it when I first came from London and saw a hundred quid's worth of choice blooms just there at the side of the tarmac, mine for the picking!).

I have completely missed the boat with pruning our ornamental vine. I’ve been waiting for the last scarlet leaves to drop, before setting to and reducing its volume by half. Today I looked at it and saw the first buds breaking into leaf already. A mad frenzy of gentle trimming of loose ends ensued, like untangling knitting - a patient puzzle process. Any time I cut too close to a burgeoning bud a drop of watery sap welled out of the cut like a tear, making me feel guilty for spilling such vibrant life force.

For now though, warm sun is followed by squally showers, floods and cold nights to remind us that August is actually still winter and hot water bottles are required for a while longer.

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Wheat-Free Chocolate Cookie Recipe and Ramblings

We have finally finished the leftovers from Sunday's feast. The last chicken carcass is being reduced to stock, as I write, the gentle aroma of chicken soup pervading the house and driving the dogs crazy with its tantalising nearness! I haven't had to cook a meal from scratch for the last few days as we had a whole roast chicken left, as well as scrummy bits of ham and stuffing to pick at, not to mention the choccie pudding.

Today though I had to roll up my sleeves and start baking again. Bread gets devoured at a rate of a loaf or two a day here. My son brought back three friends from school today and the lunchtime loaf was practically inhaled in seconds. The slow eaters had to make do with Ryvita for a second slice. Eight seems to be the age where a child makes the transition from picky eater living on air and crumbs, to voracious appetite never satisfied...with four eight year olds in the house, I thought I'd better do a batch of biscuits - chocolate oat cookies, in self defence or at least in defence of the rest of the supplies in the larder. Even with those the apple bowl was emptied.

They did use up enough energy to justify the depredations on the larder though. Hurtling through the restios in elaborate games of chase, outfitted in my son's camouflage trousers (he being the smallest, they looked like army fashion victims in 3/4 length baggies), then cricket, then bicycling down the farm road, with a short rest inside playing with lego. My six year old daughter valiantly trying to keep up and be included with the big boys, youngest wisely staying well out of it and playing her own complicated game inside, talking away to herself.

So now I have to decide whether to publish my recipe for wheat-free chocolate oat cookies, for those of you who also have ravening eight year olds to feed. I adapted this recipe so much that it is now my own personal recipe, that has nothing to do with the one it first evolved from, a new species altogether and as such I am quite protective of it, but now I think it is grown-up enough to go out into the world under its own steam and evolve some more.


Wheat-Free Chocolate Oat Cookie Recipe

115g/4oz margarine or soft butter
1/2 cup soft dark brown sugar or treacle sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
1 egg
1/2 cup oat flour
1/2 cup rye flour
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
2 dessertspoons cocoa powder
1 cup porridge oats

Cream together the marg or butter and sugars. Beat in the egg. Sift in the flours, bicarb, baking powder, salt, cinnamon and cocoa and stir to combine well. Stir in the oats. Grease two baking trays and put generous teaspoons of the mixture in dollops, well-spaced. Bake at 160C/320F for 15-20 minutes until firm and slightly coloured. Cool on a rack, they firm up as they cool.

This recipe started out as a way to keep my son off wheat and still happy, when we were trying to help his asthma/bronchitis tendency, but now we all like the cookies anyway and the wheat-free aspect is just a bonus. Now you know they are healthier than your average cookie you can eat more....!.

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