It's Friday and the sun's shining

Being a flat-wife has given me more time to cook from the many recipe books I have in our kitchen.  When I was working I would race home via the supermarket and cook dinner most nights.  Now the racing is off I've got time to think about what I'm going to cook.

I've never been one for throw in the oven dinners even when I lived on my own, it didn't make sense.  No matter how well packaged and enticing these meals were they never really tasted fresh and I love the fact that I'm putting in my own salt, sugar, pepper etc and I know exactly where my ingredients have come from.  Also we now have so many recipes geared around people cooking for one that it would be silly not to http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/.

But not everyone has a love of cooking like I do but it really does help if you have the most simplest of cooking books.  I remember a friend buying his wife who was a novice in the kitchen, Heston Blumenthal's cookbook, it's food physics (even writing the word physics makes me feel light-headed) and even the more experienced of cooks would be incredibly challenged with his books.

And so last night I was making my favourite thai curry recipe.  It doesn't involve three heads of lemon-grass, a piece of galangal (which is ginger to you and I) and a partridge in a pear-tree; it's an authentic thai recipe but without the fuss.  Prep and cooking time maximum 15 minutes and that includes pouring yourself a glass of something yummy whilst stirring the pot.

And this is definitely in my top books of the year.  As well as my easier than easy thai curry there are soups, stews, kids food, mezze, dips, smoothies, salads, puddings all written out in easy to follow recipes.

Also at the beginning of the book there are pictures telling you what equipment you may need and what it looks like, so very important.  It's also a very light-hearted take on cooking, which is the way I like it.  Life's too short to be taking on a veloute (light stock to you and I).

I find the devil is in the preparation.  Pans to the ready, kettle boiled, utensils to hand and ingredients chopped.  And once the hungry masses are gnawing at your elbow you're ready to go.  And if you're lucky to get a "is there anymore?", you know you're onto a winner.


Happy weekend everyone and see you on the other side.

Starting up

I've been contemplating setting up my own business for a long time.  I've thought of many money making schemes ranging from tools for the internet to simple kitchen appliances.  And sadly none of them have come to fruition.

After doing a little research on setting up a business the most common theme seems to be that you should take on something that you are familiar with or have a great understanding of.  Now I think I've found a business idea that I feel confidently knowledgeable about but oh my god it's still quite daunting.

I've also learnt that it's imperative you do research into the area you are looking to do business in.  So I can see at least 15 companies that we would be in competition with and out of them are a handful of real players and by that I mean would sell their dearly beloved to get a brief and the remainder are established but old hat.

But I am trying to move away from the daunting feeling and instead I'm trying to strip away all of my fears and look at the bare bones of what I'm up against.  So I'm trying to visualise myself promoting my business alongside each of those 15 companies, say at a business fair and we are all out to be the best on the block.  When I think like this I can see (via their websites) the type of offering each of these individuals are selling and so far I can't see any of them doing what I intend to do.

All I need to do is take this vision and put it into practice and hopefully with the partnership of a certain talented partner, I think we can do this.

Country living

We have just come back from a lovely wedding in Tetbury, Gloucestershire.  The town was so quaint and predictably British that I fell in love with the place instantly.  Beautiful Georgian houses, rolling lush hills, not too many inbred locals and a gorgeous early Victorian church with a Vicar looking every inch the Vicar of Dibley.  Oh and its won town of the year, every year for the past 8 years or so... how very Hot Fuzz....

(any excuse to include a clip of this very funny fllm).

Tetbury is so immersed in the good life that I wanted to move there tomorrow.  London has been my home for almost 25 years and as much as this city has treated me well, I think it's time for a change.  We spent the weekend amongst people who live all over the UK and a small few who live in London.  The Londoners look weary and the out of London types seem upbeat and less cynical.  Maybe it was because we were there to celebrate our friends getting married or maybe it's because London does wear you down, eventually.

I realise that in every part of the UK there are pockets of the yob mentality but it seems in our particular postcode this is their preferred habitat.  After a lovely night out at the pictures with Mr C, we jumped into a black taxi outside the cinema.  Still on a high from a very funny film and not really paying attention to a double-decker bus that had pulled up alongside us, the following happened.  The bus-driver decided to leave his bus (full of passengers) and pick a fight with our cab driver.  We're not entirely sure what the fight was about but afterwards we learnt it was to do with a minor driving error 50 yards up the road.  But this minor driving error had so enraged the bus driver that he pulled a knife on our taxi driver.

Post this little incident you'd imagine I'd be quite shaken but I just get angry.  That's all I get now, angry with this city.  Which is a shame because it really is as diverse and exciting as you can imagine London to be.  I don't think Mr C and I will be moving to Tetbury anytime soon, especially as the commute will be the equivalent of half a working day but somewhere in the country that is commutable would be just perfect.  And I know that it will be a big change for a city dweller like myself but I do like a change of scenery and this could be it.

California Dreaming

I lay in bed wide awake around 0430 this morning and for some reason I started thinking about a much wanted pair of skates (pre roller boots) that I was given on around my 8th or 9th birthday.  My birthday is in February and by the time I got home from school and had my tea it was dark and probably freezing outside but I didn't care.  I put my roller skates on and skated to the top of the hill where we lived and skated back down again a hundred times, well until I got called in for bed.

But what I was thinking about this morning was the blonde-haired, faded jeans, converse wearing kids over in California around the time I was skating up and down a hill in a small town in the north west of England.   I was a child of the 70's and every summer was endless.  The sun always shone and rain didn't exist, sadly we didn't have the Pacific Ocean at the end of our street.  Around this time I remember a neighbour coming back from a holiday in the US, we were all so in awe of his haul of American goodies: popping candy, Levi's and more importantly, his skateboard.  It had red polyurethane wheels and even though skateboards weren't my thing it symbolised so much and was the coolest thing I'd ever seen.  

And so all this memory rush is to do with a coffee table book that I came across by a photographer called Hugh Holland, titled "The Locals".  Hugh spent the summer of the late 1970's running around the canyons and beaches of LA photographing these kids.  California at the time was in the midst of a drought and most swimming pools were left dry.  These kids would break into back gardens and skate the empty pools until it was their time to go home for tea.  Great photography and if there were a portal in time, I'd want to be part of this gang.   

At the time these photos were taken we were 7,000 miles apart and I know that I would have slotted quite nicely into this life, riding my Cruiser, hanging at the beach, all day, every day.  

Twittering

I'm not sure how your daily routine starts but mine starts and ends with Twitter.  When I started on Twitter many moons ago, it was a map of the world with little icons, tweeting into bubbles.  As there was only me, a couple of hundred Japanese and a few nerds over in the US, the conversation wasn't exactly riveting.  Oh and the Japanese tweets were in Japanese and I couldn't understand a single character.  However I persisted and it was the thought of people on the other side of the planet commenting on their state of play from downtown Tokyo that got me hooked.

But Twitter today is a force to be reckoned with.  And for the non-twitterers out there, basically you set up an account and as with Facebook you have the option of posting a status, you know the kind: "My day cannot get any worse", "Archie just put my brand new underwear down the toilet, labels and all!" etc.  However you don't necessarily have to tweet,  following people is much more fun.  Following people falls into numerous categories: friends, famous peeps (actors, singers, fashion etc), news channels, government bodies, magazines etc etc.

Not everyone tweets all day, every day.  But there are prolific tweeters out there and you do get a mix of the informative and the hysterically funny.  Your favourite comedian on TV generally ends up being the dullest git on Twitter (Dara O'Briaian being the exeception and Joan Rivers) and when certain celebrities aren't holed up in a Priority Clinic and have access to their phone they can start off a stream of conciousness that makes you understand why limited access to the internet is sometimes required for these people.

Aside from this it's a platform for honest communication.  It's unregulated and so incredibly informative.  We have witnessed some huge moments in history this year and oddly for a few of them I was out of the UK.  However with WIFI on my Iphone and my twitter account, I followed the Arab Spring from my hotel room in Seville, reading the tweets from all these brave men and women trying to overthrow their despotic President and the News International hacking scandal (read from a beach bar in Paxos).  Journalists tweeting their unfettered opinions, celebrities who had been hacked, tweeting their reactions to what was happening there and then.  I love it.

I do like being connected and I wish more of my friends tweeted, I'd use Facebook less, I imagine.  twitter.com/spottedinsoho

The job interview

I decided this year to embark on a new career path.  Having checked out my yearly forecast with Jonathan Cainer (and my husband for financial reasons), I was assured by JC that this was in fact my year for change due to some astro-theatrical manouveres playing out, up above.

Charged with this information and a bonus in my bank account I decided to join a small catering company.  The pay was crap, the offices... well it was a desk in a warehouse surrounded by dusty files but I love food and cooking and cook-books and so I welcomed my new job with both hands.  

I enjoyed the walk through the car mechanic dominated industrial estate every day and tried not to get intimidated by the beep beep of the white van drivers.  Clutching my latte, I arrived every morning to embrace the world of food delivery.  I'd worked as a PA in the media industry alongside some of the big hitters for over a decade and a half, I truly thought that all I had learnt along the way, would itself add value to this struggling company.  The owners, short of cash and energy embraced my ideas but this was short-lived.  The ideas that had been so readily eaten up in my first or second week were left sitting in emails and in-trays.  But ever the optimist I kept believing that all their hopes and dreams for the company would become reality, sadly it never happened. 

And so after many months of utter boredom and situations that I don't think legally I can put down on paper, I left.  A comment from one of the owners, one that previously I would put down to his utter lack of sense, made me realise that there was more to life than this.  I cleared my desk.  Said goodbye to the only person who was still there at 5.30pm, the utterly faithful kitchen porter and texted my boss, "I quit".  I duly asked for my P45 to be posted out when they had a moment.  It was completely liberating and so off I went past the car mechanics, timber merchants, linen launderers and hopped on the first bus home.  I was unemployed again.

And so we come to today.  Looking once again for something new from my previous long-term role, I was approached and asked whether I had considered a recruitment consultant role in the industry I'd spent most of my working life in.  First interview went well, the second interview was awful.  The upshot is that I didn't get the job.  The feedback I was given made me feel totally useless and I am back to, what to do next?

The role of a PA is a dutiful role and one that requires a lot of organisation but little change.  I want a change and want to do something different and I don't think I've left it too late to change my career path.  However what I have found is that now I'm married, and of the age where I Should Be Having Children, it's a given that I will be starting a family and therefore why would I want to do something different?  

Well I do, and I don't want to have children.  What I do want, is the opportunity to learn and do something different.

Tomorrow - dress hunting in Westfield, being a flat-wife (we live in a one bedroomed flat) and if I have time "How to get fit in 30 minutes" (as per Harper's Bazaar September Issue).