What is making me happy this week: family lunches

Miners and Their Families Gather to Talk and Enjoy the Outing at the Tennessee Consolidated Coal Company First Annual Picnic at a Tennessee Valley Authority Lake near Jasper and Chattanooga, Tennessee. They Ate a Barbecue Lunch, Participated in Sports, Watched a Greased Pig Contest and Heard the Company Officials Explain Health and Retirement Benefits 08/1974 via Flickr Commons

I like to listen to an NBC podcast called Pop Culture Happy Hour, and my favourite bit is at the end of each podcast when the presenters talk about what has made them happy that week. It's like, Things I Love Thursday without an entire list of twee or including compulsory pictures of beautifully iced cupcakes.

This week, what is making me happy is: family lunches.

I had my mum and my three brothers around for lunch on Mother's Day, which involved me cleaning my butt off on Saturday and then cooking what remained of the aforementioned butt on Sunday.

I made a huge pot of French Onion soup with requisite gruyere croutons, and then a lemon and sour cream cake for dessert - I imagined that it would be the sort of lunch that a character in a PD James novel might serve. (I cannot tell a lie: I went to the trouble of actually imagining a PD James type menu and then carrying it out. Could become a hobby (proposed next lunch: a Harry Potter menu of treacle tart and steak and kidney pudding)).

At any rate: my family is loud and talkative and loud and somewhat exhausting. They are also MINE, and funny. I struggle sometimes with getting family balance right (which I can't explain without saying - too much) but when it works, it works so well. I want more fabulous family lunches in my future.

And quickly, my pop-culture consumption for the week:

READING: The Confusion, Neal Stephenson and Liar's Lullaby, Meg Gardiner. The first: epic, fabulous, funny. The second appears to be basically quite trashy and I'm looking forward to rotting my brain cells with it (I have only read about ten pages so far).

RECENTLY WATCHED: I'm working my way through the 2003 series of Time Team, after watching the 2012 series in one sitting.

FAVOURITE PODCAST EPISODE: The Radio 4 Nature doco series on the poetry of Edward Thomas, The Pursuit of Spring. Much inspiration for my proposed toddle in the UK.

LISTENING: I've been scrounging singles from the new Vampire Weekend album on Grooveshark - planning to listen to the whole thing next pay day.

Cooking from blogs: Smitten Kitchen's lentil soup with sausage, chard and garlic

During our summer months, I like to read all about the heavy soups, casseroles and puddings that people in the northern hemisphere are eating. While existing mostly on barbeque food and salad and summer fruit, I have no issue with reading about rib-sticking, heart-warming meals. I like to print them off or book mark them, save them up for a colder time where I will have the need of such dishes.*

Smitten Kitchen's lentil soup with sausage, chard and garlic has been on my mind since Deb Perelman posted the recipe back in January this year. While I've made lentil and sausage soup before (I mean, really, haven't we all) I'm always game to ruin a good thing, change things up and try something different. A change is as good as a rest and all that.

The recipe was, as they always are, easy to follow. The dish itself had many parts but was simple to put together. I thought the finishing furbelow of olive oil and sizzled garlic probably wasn't entirely necessary despite reassurances to the contrary, but perhaps I have a totally pleb palate.

I kept any changes, additions or substitutions to what I thought was a fair minimum. I never know what "Italian sausage" is when I read it in an American recipe - I did use an Italian sausage but it was a pork and fennel one (from the Park Ave butcher in Lower Hutt which is well worth the trip). I have a heap of great home made chicken stock that I used instead of plain water because why wouldn't you if you had it?, and I had some tomato paste so I added a little of that. Sadly, I didn't have any chard or silverbeet (is chard not just a fancy way of saying silverbeet?) but I did have a bag of baby spinach that needed using up and I thought that given they were green and leafy it was all much of a muchness.

After simmering, tasting and then scoffing in record time, I concluded that:

• The dish makes a good hearty weeknight meal if you can wait about an hour (I had a cracker-snack before I began cooking to keep the worms at bay).
• I think the soup will transfer well to smug lunches and I fully intend on wafting the smell around in the kitchen at work. 
• The ingredients are easy to find in NZ if you aren't precious about the exact kind of sausage you're using - although of course a good quality one is a must (and why would you eat a crappy sausage anyway I don't know). 

And finally:

• It would be very worthwhile using silverbeet (or chard tra la la)** rather than baby spinach because the poor bubbas just didn't stand up well flavour-wise. They were like sad wilted wisps of green in a sea of delicious and hearty. Even regular spinach would have been better because the soup does just needs the final leaf to have some kind of body, y'know?

The eaters appreciated it. I will probably make it again. You can make it too! And it's easy enough to be vegged or veganed - there are a couple of options in the recipe.

And now, a photo of my food:



*The reverse, however, makes me so sad - when people start writing about asparagus season and cherries I am sad and in the midst of cold-stored apples and the fourth month of pumpkin.

**I mean, but - they are the same thing, right?

What I have learnt from Sookie Stackhouse

Hey so, while I was sick with glandular fever and I wasn't sleeping or staring slack-jawed at the TV, I did a fair amount of reading.

I absolutely could not concentrate on any kind of substantial book. Instead, I ready the entire series to date of Charlaine Harris' Southern Vampire mysteries, aka those Sookie Stackhouse books, aka the books that True Blood is based on.

I can't tell you what happened in which book because I basically inhaled them all one after the other like some kind of omnibus of ridiculousness. Now, I am shamefully excited because the final book in the series has been released on 7 May and I can finally find out whether Sookie ends up with Bill the Vampire Sap, Eric the Sexy Vampire, the dude that turns into a tiger, or her boss who is also sometimes a dog. I am totally rooting (lulz) for Eric the Sexy Vampire because he's all sexy and dangerous and not sometimes an animal. Just the kind of vampire a girl likes to fantasize about while running a 39C degree temperature.

If I have learnt anything from Sookie Stackhouse, (and it is certainly less than anything I learnt from Anne of Green Gables), it's is: 

✚ Stuff that makes me (even more) fascinated by Southern American culture. Like Southern hospitality: whenever someone comes into Sookie's house, she offers them a drink - but not like "would you like some tea, I've just put the kettle on". She gives a list of four possible beverage options to each visitor. Not one of them was tap water! And it made me think is my hospitality really terrible? Should I be more insecure about this? I am determined to make more of an effort to have beverages to offer to my planned visitors.

The beverage thing fascinated me, and stirred so many questions, like: how does Sookie always have four options? Is that expensive? Would she keep beverages in her house that she didn't even like that much just in case a visitor would like them (that is - more than just a synthetic blood substitute for the occasional vampire visitor)?  Did she keep MORE than the four beverage options, and then cap the amount that she offered so as to not overwhelm her guest? It's possible that I could write an entire fanfic story about Sookie shopping for beverages if I didn't find the idea of fanfic completely tragic. 

✚ When you get the opportunity to spend the day or the night at home (instead of, say, solving mysteries by reading minds, involving oneself in fairy, vampire or shifter wars, or working), you should probably - wash your hair, wear an oversized sleep-tee (of which I have none), shave your legs thoroughly and tan for a few hours. (TANNING. Charlaine Harris you should be ashamed).

✚ Nothing says "thanks for clearing my grandson from accusations of murder" than a well-made chocolate cake.

Silliest series of books ever, but they soothed my feverish brow. And I just counted that there's twelve of them already released so that's twelve ridiculous books read. Good lord.

Going to read something edifying and canon-tastic now. (Right after I finish this chapter.)

In which I begin to fill in another novelty-shaped money-thermometer

Hey so, I think I mentioned that I'd written a bunch of draft stuff that I hadn't got around to publishing.

On my 31st birthday I began writing a totes navel-gazing post:

Today is my 31st birthday (I wrote)

A year ago I decided that 30 was going to be the most amazing year ever - which hasn't necessarily been true. It's been deeply challenging and difficult, and I've had to make some decisions that were very hard for me. On the other hand, it's also been a year where I've paid off my debts, set up a gorgeous house with my partner, participated in kapa haka for the first time, and improved my sewing markedly.

This year I have a couple of goals:

✚ Travel to Paris, Berlin, London

 ... and then I stopped writing. Possibly my train arrived.

But it gives me the opportunity to introduce the Savings Tower! Now that I have paid of my debt, I am indeed most excited that I am saving money for myself instead of paying off debts.

The first thing I am saving for is a trip to Europe. Finally, after spending forever reading about Paris and Berlin and the UK and vaguely planning to *one day* (wistful dreaming face) travel there - I am DOING it. I am, of course, disappointed that hanging out at Shakespeare & Co won't be as exciting as it would have been, say, seventy years ago, or that I won't have the opportunity to run into Anais Nin and Henry Miller.* Or indeed visit a Weimar-era cabaret darlink.

In celebration of my new-found saving abilities I have created another novelty-shaped thermometer. Let us watch it grow together! As you can see I'm already trucking along quite nicely towards the cost of my airfare.

 

 

It's super nice to be saving for something lovely instead of throwing money at debt. Nobody ever told me how nice it would be to have assets... sometimes I just login to my bank account to look at my positive balance. Does that make me sound like Scrooge McDuck in his money pit?

 

*That would, of course, be truly ghastly and dreadful. That was 21 year old Sarah speaking, apols.

Currently playing: Howard by Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele

In which my blog post is in a room

I've signed up to the 2013 leg of Me Made May - I think one of my first forays into the projecty world of sewing bloggers.

The idea of Me Made May in it's most basic form is that I make a pledge to wear a certain amount of hand-made or refashioned clothing over the month and make an attempt to record it. My personal pledge is pretty basic really, and I've already managed to wear something that fits the above description every day if we count outer-wear like coats and hats. My pledge:

I will endeavour to wear a self-made or refashioned garment at least twice a week, as well as to sew two new garments for the during May 2013.

I can't help thinking that this project would be even easier for me if the weather was heating up like it is in the Northern Hemisphere - most of my handmade clothes are sleeveless summer frocks, it seems. At any rate, at least I can make notes of the holes in my handmade wardrobe (as it were). I can't help feeling that my refashions are a bit of a cop-out... despite being very proud of some of my refashioning projects (like the lined 70s trench coat that I just shortened and replaced the buttons on. I think it looks great!).

I am also notoriously bad at taking photographs of my outfits (witness, my month of dressing like Peta Mathias in another of my ill-fated projects). I have one photograph from last week but its of a pretty basic refashion - this is a 70s polyester number on which I shortened the sleeves and skirt, as well as doing some remedial pilling work. Ugh, and the photo is terrible. And you can see my leopard-print snuggie thrown on the floor behind me *shakes head in shame*. And I totes need a haircut.



The elephant-in-the-room of this blog post (the blog post is in a room!) is my recent unexplained absence. Basically - the first two weeks I was just lazy and uninspired whenever I was at home (I have list of possible posts that I made on the train and during a particularly dull presentation - they're still good though so am fully intending to use those).

Then, the week and a half around my birthday in mid-March I felt terrible about myself and it took most of my energy to be a fairly normal functioning person in the day to day, and then I had glandular fever and was bed-bound and energy-less for about three weeks.

I've been back at work the last two weeks but when I get home I am tending towards more bed-reading-watching-Downton-Abbey-repeats-and-knitting-socks than blogging. I'm still unsure how I'm going to blog in the evenings given that I tend to be quite tired, but at present I'll just set myself the task of posting once a week and consider anything else as awesome extra. I'm just pleased that I feel like posting, so I'm just going to roll with that.

If you are a sewing person - are you taking part in Me Made May? Why/why not? If you aren't a sewing person - I am sorry for this blog post was probably mostly dull for you :(.