WTSIM Summer Pudding

It still seems so strange to be spirited into the middle of an English summer, the weirdest thing being the evenings that stay light until ten o’clock. The children are in bed, but still wide awake and chatting away, unconvinced that it really is bedtime, even though it’s way past their normal time.

We’ve had soft summer weather, some sun, some cloud, a threat of drizzle that fades to nothing, warm enough for T-shirts, with a gentle breeze now and then that teases you into a warm top, if you stay still too long. It’s hard to remember that we still need to wear sunscreen even under a cloudy sky.

Out in the garden the children have discovered wild strawberries nestling under their leaves and found that they are only sweet once they are red all round - the one in the photo looks completely plastic but tasted wonderful!

Today was the village street fair and my mother had our roles all organized – our son was to run the marble race that Grandpa used to do every year, with a wooden marble run that takes two marbles hurtling down parallel to see which is the fastest. She ended up manning it herself most of the time, as he wandered around watching all the other attractions.

I helped on the bric a brac stall and took my children’s money from them as they repurchased several of the things that we had donated, including half my old keyring collection! They couldn’t believe the purchasing power of three quid in bric a brac and have now amassed a collection of ceramic birds, soft toys, little boxes, cushions, bags and stuff that will need to be fitted into their cases on the return journey … I was kept so busy inventing prices for pots, ceramic knick-knacks, a playstation and all sorts, that I didn’t take any photos at all, even of my two older children, who had been persuaded into presenting the bouquets, after the fair had been pronounced open.

The hardest part was clearing up at the end, when we had to sort the leftovers into piles for the dump or to take to a charity shop. It was hard for me to send anything to the dump, when it was perfectly good to use still. In South Africa there is always someone who will be able to use something, however well-worn it is. Here we had to send a load of mismatched glasses and unwanted electrical goods to the dump, as nobody could think of anyone who would take them off our hands.

When I saw the theme of this month’s WTSIM event hosted by Jeanne was Berried Treasure, I knew that I’d be making a Summer Pudding at least once after I got here and in fact my mother had already planned one for this weekend, just in time for the deadline.

It has always been one of our favourite family puddings, the epitome of an English summer. Purple berry juices transforming stale bread into a luscious, jeweled slice of flavour to be smothered in cream and savoured. The classic version has redcurrants and raspberries in I think, but ours has always majored on blackberries, with raspberries and loganberries and had apple in to bulk out the berries. Blackberries are really an early autumn berry but my father was always an industrious gleaner from the hedgerows and usually picked enough to freeze for the rest of the year. You can use any sort of berries for this but they need an edge of sharpness, so strawberries and blueberries on their own would be too bland and sweet.

Summer Pudding Recipe

500g / 1 lb mixed berries

500g / 1 lb cooking apples

½ - 1 cup sugar

1 loaf stale white bread

These quantities are approximate, as it depends on the size of the bowl you use and how many berries you have. This does a medium size pudding basin. The sugar needs to be added to taste as the berries vary in sweetness. You are aiming to sweeten them enough to be pleasant but not sickly sweet.

Slice the bread thickly and cut off the crusts. Line a pudding basin with the slices, patch-working them together so that there are no gaps.

Peel, core and chop the apples and put them in a pan with a little water and sugar and stew gently for 5-10 minutes until starting to soften. Add the berries, which can still be frozen, and plenty of sugar.

Warm them over a medium heat, but don’t let them boil. As soon as a simmer is reached they are usually already tender enough, as you want the berries to retain their shape.

Spoon the stewed berry mixture into the bread-lined bowl until they are level with the top of the bread. Any left over juice can be kept to pour over it later. Put a layer of bread slices on top to seal in the berries.

Put a saucer or small plate that just fits into the top of the bowl on top of the bread layer and weight it, so that the berries are compressed and the juice soaks into the bread. Leave it for at least twelve hours and make sure that it stays weighted down.

Serve by turning the pudding onto a plate and pouring over a little of the leftover juice wherever the bread still shows white. Serve with double cream.

Five Habits Meme…

I was tagged by Tanya to do the Five Habits Meme, so here goes…

What was I doing 10 years ago?
Our son has just turned ten, so ten years ago I was living in our London photographic studio, sleeping in the mezzanine over the main studio and looking after our new baby in the office mostly, whenever the studio was hired out, and spending lots of time walking round Battersea Park with him in the pram. The best thing about living in the studio was that there was always another pair of hands around to hold the baby. The worst, the fact that the phone would ring, or else the very loud doorbell, just when he was about to go to sleep, so I always used to take hime out in the park to get him to sleep. He was also good at sleeping in the car, so spent a lot of time asleep in his carseat on the kitchen table of the studio kitchen/office.

Five snacks I enjoy in a perfect, non-weight gaining world:
1. Chocolate.
2. Freshly baked bread still warm from the oven, slathered in butter.
3. Rediscovered in England this trip – McVities chocolate digestives – plain chocolate of course!
4. Cake – of practically any description – if any of you need help finishing up Christmas cake at Easter, I’m the person to invite to tea!
5. Italian pasticceria – but it’s been so long I can now only imagine the flavours...

Five snacks I enjoy in the real world:
Same as Charlotte and Tanya.. all of the above…
AND…
1. Raw carrot sticks as I chop them for supper.
2. Crunchies, rusks or whatever home-made biscuits I have managed to bake that week. I’ll eat the shop- bought ones, but with the exception of the ones mentioned above, which are not available at home that I know of ( or if they are would be ridiculously expensive), I don’t really enjoy them that much, eating them is more a habit that I can’t quite chuck.
3. Raisins
4. Naartjies – especially clementines.
5. Bread and marmalade – both home-made.

Five things I would do if I were a billionaire:
1. Buy homes for all the immediate family that don’t already have their own...
2. Fund our children’s school with all the buildings they need and sponsor all the children that need it now, so that they can all keep their places secure and so that the teachers can be paid as they deserve. Then help it develop a middle and high school, so that the kids can go all the way through.
3. Travel first class, with beds that fold out, so that we can all sleep on the flight over here! A private jet would be attractive, but my eco-principles might hold me back!
4. Eat out in all the wonderful restaurants that I possibly can, at home and abroad.
5. Build a dam on our property, so that my husband can have the water he craves, or else buy a farm with a river or a lake on it.

Five jobs I have had:
1. Advertising production assistant on a computer magazine for about three months.
2. Tour Manager for a travel company in Italy.
3. Photographer’s assistant to a shoe photographer.
4. Running our photographic hire studio, after I met my husband.
5. Freelance writer

Five habits:
1. Clicking on Bloglines, when I get stuck writing something and distract myself with someone’s blog for a minute or two.
2. Grabbing a handful of raisins, whenever I pass the kitchen counter.
3. Twiddling my hair.
4. Bursting into song whenever a phrase reminds me of a song I know – usually from the late Seventies or Eighties – very annoying for my children.
5. Trying to be exactly on time for everything, which usually translates as being several minutes late, as I usually forget something and have to run back for it.

Five places I have lived:
1. Somerset
2. Rome
3. Battersea, London
4. Streatham Common, London
5. A farm outside Cape Town

Five people I’d like to get to know better:
Caffienated Cowgirl
Hen
Mary Alice
Rose & Thorn
AliceBand

consider yourself tagged!

Oh to be in England!

Green… burgeoning, blossoming green, the English countryside in full flood of a generously watered summer. Trees billowing over hillsides, clouds billowing in the sky. Busy roads, speed traps, impatient drivers beeping, as I struggle with the gears of the hire car. Winding country lanes, one car wide, lined with lacy white cow parsley, jagged with stinging nettles, tall hedges blocking the view except at farm gates, which give glimpses of low rolling hills, patchworks of fields, spreading endlessly to the horizon.

We got here safely and survived the first leg to Jo’burg, despite the fact that our son discovered that he suffers from motion sickness in planes and moaned and groaned into a sick bag for the second half of the flight. Luckily our stop-over at Jo’berg enabled us to dash to the pharmacy for pills to quell the nausea and the endless miles to walk between Domestic and International, the maze of confusing signs, specially designed to employ several staff just to stand around and field bewildered travellers, gave plenty of opportunity to re-acquaint our feet with the ground and get our circulation going in preparation for the next ten hour stint.

Their aunt had thoughtfully provided activity bags with colouring books, puzzle books, crayons and pencils, which helped pass the time and the moving pavements kept the kids busy at the boarding gate, as they went round and round, backwards and forwards. Nobody managed more than three hours sleep on the plane, but had the novelty of being allowed to watch unlimited movies on the in-flight system and we discovered The Golden Compass, the movie of the Philip Pullman novel, which was excellent. I even switched over to it, as it was miles better than the lame romantic comedy that I’d started off with!

Arrival at Terminal 5 provided more opportunities for exercise, with the transit train not working, but the kids had survived the flight in good spirits and stepped out gamely. We even made it through passport control, with Youngest on her SA passport, putting on her standard ‘looking at strangers’ frown. Then came a friend meeting us for breakfast, mango smoothie wiping out two of Youngest’s spare outfits, the trek to the hire car place and a struggle with fitting three car seats into the back of the medium estate car we’d booked. Our oldest son was resigned to the indignity of a booster seat, but we just couldn’t fit three seats in a row. The arms of the booster seats interlocked and jabbed into the next child. In the end we took him back into the hire office and lined him up against the measuring chart. His head was close enough to the line that he’d pass muster, with marginally thicker shoe soles, so we handed the one booster seat back, feeling like we were living dangerously, in this newly regulated land of three points off your license for the slightest misdemeanour.

Finally we headed out of Heathrow’s concrete jungle, towards the lush green hills of Somerset. The kids slept most of the way, waking only to see Stonehenge through sleep-blurred eyes.

None of them had any clear memories of Granny’s house, our son only remembering playing on the stairs and that the carpet had been green then, so much exploring had to be done and discovering of Mummy’s old toys that had come down from the attic specially to meet them.

They’ve had a busy two days settling in and we even braved the shops to change the wellie boots that Granny had got them for different sizes (with more symptoms of motion sickness discovered in Youngest, though that was probably due to my less than smooth driving as I struggled to discover the optimum gear ration and grappled with the multiple roundabouts, speed limits and traffic of the metropolis of Yeovil!) – they’re jolly fancy ones too here, with fairies and fashion victim girls and camouflage patterns adorning them, much prettier than the bog standard blue ones from our local farmers coop at home.

Granny had arranged for our son to get some cricket with the local boy’s cricket club yesterday and there’s the village street fair on Saturday, so they’re being plunged into English village life already. Middle Daughter said yesterday that she wouldn’t mind living here. Right now they are having a raucous time with a wooden marble run that is now on its third generation of kids and the sound of cascading marbles is echoing around the house from the upstairs landing. Watch your footing as you reach the top of the stairs as one misplaced marble could have you cascading down them too.

Bright Sparks and Lanterns

Work projects complete. Tick.

Winter Festival over for another year. Tick.

Packing is the allotted task for today.

For tomorrow we fly!

We woke yesterday to the sounds of rain on the roof, children wondering how we could possibly have our winter festival inside.

"It's sure to stop later," I reassured them, "every year we have some rain on the day and then it is always clear enough when it comes to taking the lanterns into the sandpit and lighting the bonfire."

Sure enough the rain did stop, a few rays of sunshine even emerged and it was warm. I optimistically hung out a load of washing and carried on making soup.

Various friends cried off at the last minute, due to children being sick and the thought of damp evenings outdoors not seeming an ideal way to speed their recovery, so we were a select group of about twenty in the end.

Bonfire built, lanterns decorated, wine mulled, soup simmering, we gathered in the damp dusk with lit lanterns and then carried them down the river of light to our circle.

The air was mild and gaps in the cloud let a few stars peek through. Serving up soup and mulled wine,wrapped in layers we were almost too hot and remarked that even at Midwinter it didn't have that foot numbing chill, traditional to Bonfire Night in England.

The kids had a ball with sparklers and a home-made volcano in the sand, the bonfire was eventually coaxed into roaring skywards and the rain generously held off until the sausages were cooked, when its mild drizzle got more enthusiastic and drove us back indoors.

I had made puddings for forty, so after all the soup, bread and sausages we barely made a dent in them. Today looks like a festival of packing and puddings, not to forget of course dipping the dogs whose fleas have been keeping them and us awake and restless at night!

Countdown

In one week's time we will have flown into summer - an English summer … but it will still be summer with light evenings, green gardens in bloom, Wimbledon on the TV and strawberries for tea!

The kids keep asking when we should start packing and can we sort out suitcases now, what is it like going on an aeroplane, and how fast does it go? I tried to give them an idea of the G-forces of take off, by accelerating fiercely down our dirt road, but don't think I really succeeded in giving a genuine flight simulator experience.

This will be the first time they have been to England since we moved here, Youngest's first time ever. I've no idea how it will seem to them. Our son was only three when we left, he has just dim memories of it. To me when I went back in January, it all was instantly familiar, eerily the same, the only thing that had changed noticeably was the number plate protocol on the cars.

England is the background to a lot of the children's stories we read, they've seen pictures and movies and we live in a fairly English culture here at home, but it will be interesting to see whether it seems foreign and exotic to them, or whether they feel quite at home.

I have a last minute rush of work to get done before I even think about packing and we have to have our Mid-winter festival on Saturday - it would be unthinkable to miss having it, just because it seems crazy to have 40 or so people to our house two days before flying half way across the world, so vats of soup, loaves of bread, bonfires and lanterns will miraculously materialise without any advance planning at all.

I also have to put together sponsorship profiles and photos for our school to take with us and for another mother who is going to Germany and is hoping to interest her old school in sponsoring a few of our pupils, the list of kids needing a sponsor is way longer than it should be and I am going to have to dig out their school photos from last year and attach it to the right profile, probably at midnight on Friday, once I've sent off my last article!

All the passports came through except Youngest's British one which is still waiting on the appropriate version of her SA birth certificate - she's going to have to enter Britain on her South African passport, so we have the dilemma: do we hope they will let her through in the British passport queue at Heathrow or should we split up so that my husband takes her through the foreign passport queue, just to be safe? … I mean how many five year old terrorists are there out there, but I'd hate her to get the rough end of the immigration officials at such a tender age.

On a completely different note: I kept Youngest at home today because she had conjunctivitis and had been awake in the night, plus I didn't want her to give it to the rest of the kindergarten. An hour into the morning she came and leant against me at my desk: "I don't know what to do. I wish I was at school" she grumbled … Success! She has finally made the transition from reluctant and recalcitrant schoolgoer to keen kindergartener!

Junk Food Extravaganza

My poor deprived farm kids don't get much fast food in their lives. If we lived in a town there would be plenty of days when I'd be tempted to send out for supper, but out on our farm we just open a tin of baked beans and cook up some rice on days when I've forgotten to de-frost something or have been glued to the computer until 10 minutes before supper-time. It's a lot quicker than going to fetch a pizza from our nearest town half an hour away.

Going out for a pizza is an occasional treat. Making pizza at home is just as occasional and always ends up taking way more time than I think it should, plus dirtying a lot more pans, so fast food it most certainly isn't.

Last Sunday ended up being a total junk food extravaganza … home-made junk food but junk food de luxe! My sister-in-law, having just returned from three weeks away, decided to treat us all to a full cooked Sunday breakfast. Both my sisters-in-law have the English breakfast down to a fine art, including mushrooms, tomatoes and fried potatoes with the bacon and eggs and managing to serve it all hot, bacon crispy. I know I can't compete on this front, so never do. For the kids crispy bacon is the draw card and it's always a question of two packets or three when deciding how much to cook. When they were younger they earned the nickname 'The Bacon Bandits", as they used to run over to their aunt's house on a Saturday morning, when she often cooks breakfast and hopefully join the breakfast table to snaffle a few slices of her bacon, to make up for their super-dull breakfast of cereal.

After we were totally stuffed with our fry-up, that bloated feeling that reminds you why you don't do it too often creeping over us, I asked the kids whether they still really wanted the pizza that I'd promised to make for lunch. Stupid question! What have a few pieces of bacon got to do with lunch, which is at least three hours away?!

The thought of pizza to follow a cooked breakfast was bad enough, but the children had also decreed that their aunt's birthday, which she'd had when she was away, had to be celebrated properly. A chocolate cake with candles was scheduled for tea-time! So if I put back lunch to have pizzas at two, then we had a bare two more hours to make room for chocolate cake…

Abandoning any thoughts of vitamins, nutrition, empty calories and cholesterol we declare it an official junk food extravaganza day and have done with it.

I console myself with the thought that at least they like spinach on pizza, the only form they will eat it in and the tomato sauce is home made, so there will be some vitamins, though that doesn't make any difference to the inevitable bloated feeling that results. There's no question of me making pizza and chocolate cake and not eating it myself, even though I know it's going to have uncomfortable after-effects - and if we're going to do junk food we may as well do it properly.

As well as pizza the lunch table was the scene of an impromptu joke-fest, with us wheeling out all the terrible jokes that we can remember and the children inventing ones that they found hilarious, the punch-lines of which were a triumph of lateral thinking. My husband managed to come up with a line of jokes which all had the same punch line - "Holy Mackerel!" and had the kids groaning Da-aaad, in protest, a pale foreshadowing of a teenager's groan, but definitely Dad was being way too silly!

Some fried aubergine/brinjal/eggplant slices with fresh basil make a wonderfully sophisticated pizza topping for us adults and proved to be my downfall. There was nothing for it but to fall onto the sofa and assume a comatose position until the chocolate cake gets wheeled on to finish us off.

Learning to Read

The other day I was looking at the shelves of first picture books that the kids all loved as toddlers. Some of their favourites were the Little Tiger books: gorgeous, bright illustrations featuring the mischievous little tiger who always said, "I Don't want to have a Bath" and "I don't want to go to Bed". Since they've progressed onto bigger books we haven't looked at them much and I was considering storing them away or passing them onto little cousins, to regain some shelf space.

Middle Daughter, aged 7, has just re-discovered them though, as first readers.

Today we sat on the sofa and she gallantly sounded her way through most of Little Tiger's adventures as he avoids his bath in the jungle. She is on the verge of reading and is really hungry to master it.

The Waldorf system goes through the ground work of learning letters and numbers very slowly and thoroughly. They first learn the capital letters, with stories and rhymes about them, and practise their shapes until they know them in their bones. Then they learn the little letters and then put them all together in writing.

They learn to write sentences and then learn to read from sentences they've written themselves, so they are already familiar. This slow and steady approach makes reading a natural progression and our son learned to read incredibly quickly once he reached this stage, going from zero to full length children's books in the space of a few months.

I think Middle Daughter will too, as she said longingly to me tonight at bedtime, "How long will it be before I can read?" I told her she was reading already and she did fantastically, sounding out long words like 'spluttered' without being too phased by the conglomeration of consonants at the beginning, and recognising 'jungle' the second time she came across it. Interestingly enough she had more trouble with remembering and recognising 'his', than with the longer words.

I'm betting that she'll be racing through Harry Potter by the end of the year, or at least some Enid Blytons. For now though she's aiming at finishing Little Tiger tomorrow and starting the next one.

Winter Harvest

The beginning of June and we're nearly at mid-winter. Our sorely needed winter rains alternate with warm days filled with sunshine, so kids, snotty with colds, run about in T-shirts and bare feet all day and have to be coaxed into warm tops and slippers as the sun goes down and we light the fire.

Farm is really too grand a word for our small-holding, where our main crop is unlimited space, views and fresh air, but it has been time overdue for my winter harvest of olives. Each time the rain swept in from the North West I kicked myself for not having stripped the one tree that has been nursing a bumper crop, lest the olives be wasted. Luckily they're a hardy fruit.

Olives from one of my five trees. The trees seem to take it in turns to produce a crop - they are all different varieties, only now I've forgotten what they all are.

Last year I had just one jarful of olives, this year a whole colander full. Today I looked up ways to pickle them on the internet and ended up deciding that the way I did them last year sounds the best: soaking them in pure water, changed daily for 10 days, then in a brine, changed weekly for four weeks, then leaving them in a brine solution for several months to improve in flavour. Other ways involve caustic soda, which doesn't sound so great.

Then I just have to decide what herbs to put in with them and we'll have our own wonderful olives. Rosemary and garlic, or shall I try to match the wonderful lime dressing that we buy from our favorite Olive Boutique, except I should have picked the olives green for that one...

My 2 year old lemon tree has four big lemons on it too. This is the first tree that has really thrived here on a little patch of clay. The sandy soil of the rest of the farm is too dry for them. I'm really hoping this one will grow big enough to supply us with lemons all winter.


And the mulberry tree that I mourned, its roots eaten by moles, that had sunk at least a foot into the ground at a drunken angle, has suddenly put out new leaf and thinks it's spring again, with embryo berries on it. The one remaining root was enough for it to make a come back. We'll have to see whether we get midwinter mulberries ripening on it!


Our strawberry plants have reached the end of their lifespan. We need new stock, as last year's harvest was barely enough to feed the family and make a few pots of jam. Three years ago I was drowning in berries. The vegetable garden and new strawberry area is being turned over now. We need to get the new plants in now, for them to have any chance of producing properly in the spring.

If only we could bottle our view with a dash of sunshine, then we really would be on the way to being a proper farm and I wouldn't have to feel apologetic when people ask what we farm and I reply that we really just live here and grow a few strawberries, which we only sell when we can't eat any more ourselves!

Italian Chicken for Saturday Supper

As far as food goes, I've been treading a well-worn path of late. Children of conservative tastes, last minute cooking of supper, rushing to do my weekly shop without having been anywhere near a recipe book, all conspire to put the same old meals on the table. Ones that I know some of my children will eat, at least in part, ones that can be rustled up in half an hour, from standard ingredients that can be found on the shelves of our local supermarket.

On Saturday I finally made time to look at a recipe book, determined to try at least one new recipe this week and find something slightly different to enliven my dulled palate.

Marcella Hazan provided it. Italian food has been on my mind, as my latest job is translating an Italian recipe book into English and converting the amounts from metric to imperial (a challenge when the writer even gives amounts in grams for parsley 5g).

I love Marcella's books, even more than Nigella's when it comes down to it. She has a tried and true purity to her cooking, a distilled essence of Italian food from her regional viewpoint. Most of her dishes have an elegant simplicity - just the right amount of everything to give subtle balanced flavour.

The recipe that thrilled me on Saturday night, was a simple chicken casserole cooked with vinegar and resulted in the tenderest chicken pieces I've ever cooked. The flavour was understated but sprightly and what is more the kids loved it. Youngest eating her second drumstick said "It's not different. It's the same" which I took as the highest of compliments from her. It was different enough to be refreshing for us and not so different as to freak out these connoisseurs of plain un-messed-with food.

Pollo con Aceto
Recipe for Italian chicken with vinegar

1 chicken cut into 8 pieces
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
60g flour
salt
black pepper
1 teaspoon chopped rosemary
1 teaspoon chopped garlic
4 flat anchovy fillets chopped finely
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
6 tablespoons wine vinegar

Heat the vegetable oil in a pan. When it is hot but not smoking, dredge the chicken pieces in the flour and fry over a medium heat till golden on all sides. Remove onto a warm plate and season with salt and pepper.

Combine the rosemary, garlic, and chopped anchovies.

In a casserole with a lid, which will take all the chicken pieces in one layer, put the olive oil over a medium heat. Add the rosemary mixture and cook stirring for a brief minute. Add the chicken to the pan and turn the pieces to coat then add the vinegar. Cook for 1-2 minutes until the vinegar fumes dissipate the turn the heat to low and cover the pan. Cook for about 1 hour, turning the chicken now and again, until the chicken feels tender when pricked with a fork. you can add a few tablespoons of water if there is not enough liquid left in the pan towards the end of cooking. Serve as soon as it is cooked.

We are this with mashed potato and green beans which went perfectly with it. Unglamorous and delicious.

The Mystery of the Missing Geese

A few weeks ago we had a whole gaggle of geese on the farm. The proud Mama Goose had raised a whole family of five goslings successfully, without losing one. They would parade in formation around their enclosure at the bottom of the farm, necks stretched out honking, whenever we drove past.

Over the last two weeks their numbers have been dropping off. We'd drive off early in the morning to school and pass a tell-tale snowdrift of white feathers beside the road. Two disappeared one night, then another a few nights later. We didn't know what was getting them. First of all we blamed the neighbour's dogs who can get over our fence. We didn't ring up and rant because we weren't sure and they had their own geese, so it was unlikely that their dogs would be selective goose killers abroad.

We were down to four geese, one female and three males. Another one went the next night so then there were three. The next morning we set off for school, late and in a hurry and came across my sister-in-law armed with a shovel. She was digging a grave for the last female goose, whose body had been abandoned in the beefwood trees and not even been eaten. The two bereft males stood a little way off honking anxiously, the survival of the species now threatened.

Yesterday I had a house full after school. Middle Daughter had organised a play date with her two friends, Youngest had her sometimes-friend to play (now she is at kindergarten she has been discovering the complicated dynamics of girls' friendships and comes home devastated because this friend said she wouldn't be her friend any more). I had a bread-baking play date going for myself - a friend having asked me to show her how, and her daughter and two friends had come home from school with my son. He, at 10, handled having to come home from school with three girls from his class with great dignity and panache. As soon as he was home though, he detached himself from the proceedings and retired to the sofa with his latest discovery - a book with 101 magic tricks.

Into this hum and bustle of activity came my sister-in-law, big with news. The goose killer had been identified, its corpse lying in the goose pen, caught red-handed. Children and adults poured out of the house to the goose pen.

It was a hefty rooi kat, lynx, caracole - a South African wild cat quite a bit bigger than a domestic cat, reddish fur and black tufts of hair on its long ears. It looked like two of our dogs must have caught and killed it. Two of the border collies have learned to leave the house cats alone, but reckon anything else is fair game. We were all slightly sad to see it pathetically stretched out there in the restios. It was the first time I'd ever seen one - they are nocturnal and it would have been beautiful alive. Now its rather pitiful scraggy remains had flies buzzing round and another grave was awaiting it once we'd all looked at it. But at least the two geese should survive now unless there is a whole family of lynx hiding out somewhere. We just need to go looking for another Mama Goose to ensure that the dynasty continues.

Now our detectives have each got their own magnifying glass, I unwisely told them what we used them for as children. I have memories of melting holes in Wellington boots with ours, and if you weren't too clever you then found you'd holed them below the water line… I advised them against this. Today the sun is shining and they have been burning holes in paper to make ancient maps … luckily we have had plenty of rain this week so the incipient pyromania won't result in any bush fires just yet.

The Mystery of the Missing Treasure

Picture me last Saturday night hunched over the kitchen table, armed with the Dangerous Book for Boys, a squeezed lemon, empty fountain pen and a candle.

I'd had over a month to prepare for our son's detective birthday party, mulled ideas around in my head, but I'm beginning to suspect that I'm an adrenaline junkie. Not for me the thrill of a rollercoaster or bungy jumping, I get my fix by playing chicken with deadlines, at least as far as birthday parties are concerned. Once I was a student leaving essays till the day before they were due, now I'm a Mum with fourteen children all expecting the Mystery of the Missing Treasure the next day and only a vague outline in my head. That stress is necessary to spark the creative juices when it comes to thinking up treasure hunts for my children's birthday parties. There are three a year. Each one needs a new theme, a new slant on the clues, a new story and new edge of desperado cutting it fine, thinking up clues only an hour before the guests arrive.

This bunch of newly ten year olds needed a step up from my tried and tested formula of following a trail of clues. Last year the older ones seemed a trifle jaded. Veterans of the 5 previous years' parties, they already knew all the best places for clues on our farm. This year we needed an added element.

So The Dangerous Book for Boys revealed the secret of invisible writing, the principles of the code wheel, things that all good detectives should know ..and all good thieves of course.

By 10 o'clock that evening I had established that lemon juice worked better than milk, and that a candle flame would make the writing appear if you could avoid setting light to the paper. We'd worked out the story and the outline of the hunt but still hadn't encoded the clues and finalised the wording. But our brains had switched off. It was time to hit the sofa.

The next day dawned and I wished I was one of those prepared in advance types, who would have the whole thing worked out the week before. Lying in bed that morning I finalised the wording of the clues, thought out a clever plan to have an e-mail clue that involved searching on Wikipedia.

I'd rashly planned a big roast lunch so that our friends from Cape Town could be tempted out for the birthday, as they don't usually make it to weekday birthdays, it's a bit far to come just for tea, and after all roast chicken and roast potatoes is our son's favourite meal. I still had some baking to do and Middle Daughter wanted to make the cheese biscuits for the party herself.

Stress levels rose as I realised that the number of potatoes to feed sixteen people filled my stockpot, and even my big oven would be stretched to capacity to roast them, the three chickens and baked butternut. It was pouring with rain too, with a playful wind hurling great torrents of water onto our noisy tin roof.

The birthday boy was happy with his new scooter and an MP3 player to try out. He did look at the rain and wonder whether he should have chosen a Lazerquest party. This idea had been vetoed when I found out the cost of entertaining fifteen kids for less than an hour in a dark echoing concrete jungle, just for them to have the pleasure of shooting at each other. He hadn't seriously thought we would agree, but it was worth a try. Anyway in South Africa it hardly ever rains the whole day long and we had a good chance that if it was raining now it would have stopped in time for the party.

Lunch was successfully accomplished, with just enough roast potatoes for all. I left the guests to wash the dishes while I disappeared to encode the clues.

The first party guests arrived early, so I shut myself into the spare room to get busy with the invisible ink. As they hurtled round the house on scooters pretending to be jewel thieves and police, I sneaked out of the side door to position the letter and a candle in an outhouse, other strategic clues along the route, commissioned my husband and a friend to lay a trail of footprints and climb a tree to hide another clue. The treasure was already hidden in the boot of the thieves' getaway car, the car key in the fridge in the garage.

Once the last guest arrived I was ready and the rain had stopped. Instead of the usual story to set the scene I borrowed a bit of drama from Planet Nomad's detective birthday and erupted from our bedroom, shouting that the treasure for the hunt had been stolen and so had all my jewellery. The children poured into the bedroom and looked around. The wide open window and billowing curtain soon had them hot on the trail of the thieves' footprints and we were away.

The coding wheel proved to be a bit of a tricky concept to grasp, (especially as I'd interpreted its use slightly differently than my son and husband had previously, when they constructed it), but one dedicated bunch, with a little adult help, worked it out patiently, while the others cast about for the trail of footprints, which by now was no longer an accurate reflection of the thieves' movements.

My encryption process proved to be rather full of errors too, as I hadn't been wearing my glasses at the time, but I was on hand to interpret the garbled message and they hared off to the hut.

They managed to reveal the secret writing without singeing any eyebrows and it held their attention even though the writing took a while to come through properly.

After a few more clues they eventually tracked down the treasure in the getaway car and were each issued with a cool detective's magnifying glass - a lucky find in the Crazy Store the day before. And even the cool dudes of nearly eleven had a good time. A huge waft of relief hit me as the adrenaline released its grip.

Youngest wants a unicorn birthday for her next one…. she didn't think much of detective birthdays.

Happy Birthday Ten Years Old!

WTSIM breakfast

Breakfast on a school day is a bleary-eyed assembly of cereal packets, a 2l milk container, with maybe some raisins and banana for embellishments. We've always been a family that collects an extensive assortment of different cereals, each one of us having a different preference and some, like me, combining four of them in a very specific formula. When I'm breakfasting against the clock, with one eye seeing that the children eat something, one hand hurriedly spooning yoghurt into Youngest's bowl after she's spent ten minutes making up her mind what to have, I don't need the burden of any decision making process on my part - I can cope with the exact same breakfast every day, as long as I do have some. Going out to do the school run on an empty stomach would be unthinkable, put the day on emergency adrenaline mode ever after.

So when Johanna announced a WTSIM breakfast theme, it was hard to know what to write about. The full English breakfast fry-ups are my South African sister-in-laws' domain - once in a while we are invited to one or other house on a weekend morning to overindulge in bacon, eggs, mushrooms, tomatoes and fried potatoes.

I have fond memories of breakfast in Italy on days off, when we'd saunter down to a bar in Siena, that was merely functional looking but well known for its pastries, and slowly down a couple of cappuccinos accompanied by pastries from an enticing range of flavours that always had you wanting to try the next one and the next. In the end I settled on a favourite which had a tang of orange zest and sprinkling of raisins.

I could of course depart from my normal breakfast pattern and experiment with a brand new recipe, wowing my family with muffins or a fancy bread, but with us only just crawling out of the flu slump, last weekend went by un-embroidered with culinary adventure.

Sometimes the children beg for pancakes for breakfast and occasionally I give in, in the hope of earning a few brownie points to start the weekend off. So I thought I'd give it another go tomorrow for the May Day holiday.

It usually ends up with me slightly frazzled at the edges with so much pre-breakfast activity, eating one or two pancakes hastily at the stove while the children douse theirs with cinnamon sugar and apricot jam and scoff them as fast as they're cooked. Tomorrow I resolve not to get flustered when the first pancake sticks irrevocably to the pan. I will just ditch it and the rest will turn out perfectly. Of course writing about these before I've made them this time round means that I haven't yet got a photo to illustrate the post with, but if I sneak it in belatedly tomorrow morning I can still make today's deadline for the WTSIM event!

The nicest, easy recipe I've found is of course one of Nigella's from her book Feast, for banana and buttermilk pancakes:

Banana and Buttermilk Pancakes

1 ripe banana
150g/6oz plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1 egg
250ml/ 1 cup buttermilk
1 teaspoon caster sugar
30g/ 1 ½ oz butter melted

Liquidize all the ingredients except the butter to a smooth batter in a food processor.

Stir in the melted butter when you are ready to start frying the pancakes.

Use a heavy bottomed non-stick frying pan or griddle.

Heat it to medium hot and dollop tablespoons of the mixture on to it. I usually fit four at a time on my biggest pan. (They turn out like what we called drop scones in England, not like the sort of pancakes that we had on Shrove Tuesday)

Flip them after about a minute, once the underside has set and allow to cook on the other side - check after half a minute.

Pile them onto a warmed plate until you have cooked the rest or serve straight into the mouths of the hungry hoards. Mine like these with cinnamon sugar.

I mix a teaspoon of cinnamon with a tablespoon of caster sugar and they just sprinkle it over the pancakes. Apricot jam is good or honey too. This recipe makes enough for three hungry kids and two abstemious parents.

Of course if I were breakfasting at the Nelly here in Cape Town my unswerving cereal habit would be abandoned in a flash. The tables piled high with every sort of breakfast food imaginable, cornucopias of fresh fruit, encyclopaedias of pastries and baked goods, as well as a hot counter where the eggs are freshly cooked in front of you however your whim dictates, not to mention the stunning setting of old world grandeur and lush gardens, would rather dim the appeal of corn flakes, oats and rice krispies and lead to scenes of over indulgence too painful to contemplate! Just as well that it's my husband that contrives breakfast meetings there occasionally rather than me!

I have to say that my mouth is drooling at some of the breakfast recipes I've seen on everyone else's blogs so far, almost enough to convert me to cooking weekend breakfasts properly ... !

Edited to add: Well if I thought I got frazzled just making pancakes on an empty stomach, adding a camera into the mix didn't really help to make a serene start to the day! It nearly did go into the mix and get sprinkled with cinnamon sugar! And the pancakes disappeared mid-photo session. Still you get the idea and the sun was slanting in through the window for a true South African autumn morning scene.

Literary Feasts

Yesterday was one of those days when you've run out of steam and wade in slow motion through the hours until you are vaguely surprised to have reached the end of the day without even having washed the dishes from the night before.

I had, in my defense, after a recuperating doze in the sun on the swing bench, reorganised the bookshelf of children's books with the help of Oldest son, so that they are now cunningly arranged in alphabetical order and reassembled from around the house all in the same bookshelf. They are more than just books. They are a treasured nostalgic collection of all my personal childhood favourites, some that have done the rounds of my husband and his siblings, then his nephews and nieces and finally made their way back to us, plus others that we have collected in second hand bookshops when we were in the UK. Really good books don't date, their pages just start falling out.

The flu fortnight has left us all low on energy reserves, but with all that reading aloud on the sofa, I've made the wonderful discovery that all three of the children are now old enough to enjoy some of these jewels of stories. Even though Youngest punctuates the narrative with constant requests for an explanation of a word or a concept, she can happily listen for as long as I will read.

I've now got two books on the go that I'm reading to them. I started off with The Painted Garden by Noel Streatfield. This tells the tale of an ordinary family of three children, the oldest is a talented ballet dancer, the youngest very musical and the middle one nothing in particular. Streatfield is so good at drawing recognizable portraits of children and the dialogue reads well even though the book must be about sixty years old by now. Though the kids often think that grumpy Jane is rather rude, they really enjoy the sympathetic portrait of her, that shows that you can be bad tempered but still lovable!

Then the two children who had recovered from flu went back to school, so I started another book for Middle Daughter, The Chimneys of Green Knowe by Lucy M. Boston. The others came back from school and started listening to it, so now they are all engrossed in that too.

The Green Knowe books are some of my very favourites from when I was a child. They tell the story of a boy called Tolly, who visits his great-grandmother in the ancient family house. She tells him stories of the children who lived there centuries ago, and eventually he has tantalising glimpses of the children, who play hide and seek around the house and garden with him, and he gets to know them as friends. This second book in the series tells the story of Susan, the blind daughter of the family who lived at the turn of the nineteenth century, and is also part treasure hunt as Tolly tries to find the family jewels that were lost or stolen back in that time, to save his great grandmother from selling a treasured painting of the other sixteenth century children. Youngest is loving the story but is frustrated in trying to understand the crossovers of time and how Tolly can sometimes see and talk to Susan in her time….this is seriously challenging my powers of explanation, I can tell you!

My husband has also read The Sheep Pig by Dick King-Smith and The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner to them over the last week and their aunt has been reading Olga da Polga by Michael Bond, so a veritable literary feast has been gorged on, even though they've hardly eaten a bite of real food while they've been sick.

They are all nearly better now, though poor Middle Daughter keeps suffering a blocked Eustachian tube, which sends her into sobs of pain, usually at bed-time, and has our stress levels going through the roof. Luckily it's a public holiday here tomorrow for Freedom Day, so we have another day of rest, before two whole days of school, then the May Day Holiday on Thursday…so Friday has officially been declared a holiday too. Plenty of time to finish our books!

Earth, Eskom and more on Teeth

NEWS FLASH

Youngest has her first ever wobbly tooth! She proudly showed it off to me this afternoon and then was excited to discover that it is in fact not just one wobbly tooth, but both the bottom front ones wobbling in unison. Middle Daughter whispered to me that she suspects that I am the tooth fairy, but I am hoping that she'll keep quiet about that until Youngest has enjoyed the thrill of at least one visit from the tooth fairy.

OTHER HEADLINES

Big Brother Eskom is Watching You!

Yesterday in honour of Earth Day, Charlotte wrote about Emily's Ecojustice environmental challenge for anyone who wants to cut down their environmental impact - read about it here. I blithely commented that I can rely on Eskom to do my bit for me - we're having scheduled two hour electricity outages every Monday, Wednesday and Friday 8am-10am, to help control South Africa's energy crisis at the moment.

But at least it's a regular slot, now we know about it, we can plan ahead and our indispensable computers have back up now. My clever husband has got a truck battery wired up to the UPS, so that we both have at least two hours work time in reserve after the power goes off.

However I have sneaking suspicion that Eskom are tracking mentions of them in blog comments worldwide, as they took me up on my blog comment pledge today: we had our regular 2 hour black out in the morning, then the lights came back on at 10 sharp (or 10.05 anyway which is extremely sharp when you're on Africa time). I went to celebrate by switching on the kettle for a cup of tea. A lethargic whisper emanated instead of the usual roar from my previously enthusiastic work horse of streamlined Italian design.

Ten minutes later it still hadn't boiled. Still it was under guarantee and maybe the power outages had given it a nervous breakdown, so as I was doing my weekly shop anyway this afternoon, I packed it up in its box to take straight in for replacement.

A bit later we also noticed that the water pressure was non-existent. Help - a power surge must have blown the pump too. An SOS to the electrician went out.

As I returned from picking up the kids from school Eskom played its wild card and the power went off AGAIN. This time our computer back up batteries declined the challenge, gave some rapid beeps and blacked out my computer.

So we spent an entire afternoon rediscovering traditional values, without the benefits of modern conveniences: my husband read for two solid hours to Middle Daughter on the sofa, where she is in her third day of flu residency. I would like to say that I harnessed up the pony to a trap, to head off to town to market… but that would be fiction taking over …so I used our petrol guzzling car instead.

I traded in the mal-functioning kettle. They didn't have the same smartly designed model in stock any more, so I lost my cool, rational, tasteful approach and chose a space age, gimmicky one that lights up in different colours when it boils and has a huge window so you can see the water boiling! At least it would entertain the children and it was made by a reputable British manufacturer...

I arrived at our gate at the same time as the electrician, who had come to save us from the trials of a night with no water. I walked in through our door to find power had just been restored and miraculously, wonder of wonders, the pump was now working just fine. The brain cogs ground slowly into gear and at least ten minutes later I started wondering if perhaps the kettle had not actually broken at all.

Maybe I have traded in a perfectly good, well designed kettle, for one that looks like it's about to launch into space at any minute, for no reason at all…aaagh!

We must have been on half power for the second half of the morning - lights working fine, but pumps and kettles and battery chargers not functioning at all well.

So this energy saving day turned out not so green after all. One perfectly good kettle is winging its way back to the manufacturers and the electrician had a wasted journey, but at least I can relax in the glow of my new lava-lamp-lookalike kettle and wonder how to turn off the light in it to save energy at night.