late starter

at the age of 43 i have learnt to make a white sauce. this is not hugely important to me, not like learning to do a perfect cutback or hang ten on a wave (surf stuff for those landlubbers) or selling a design to an international fabric house. why do i mention it then? well, when i was at school we had to choose between home economics or latin for standard 7. (grade 9) seeing that i wasn’t heading for law or medical school or needing to understand gregorian chants it was decided that being a housewife was the satisfactory alternative. fortunately that only lasted a year due to a bizarre subject choice that i’m still battling to understand. nevertheless we spent that year making white sauce: welsh rarebit, macaroni and cheese, white sauce and fish, white sauce ad nauseum… i do not remember a single meal we made that did not have white sauce and by the end of it i still couldn’t make white sauce. my cooking partner, however, could. perhaps being thrown out of class didn’t help matters, but being the daughter of a home economics teacher should have.

since then i have avoided making white sauce as much as possible. macaroni cheese is not a big feature in our house and welsh rarebit is dog food really. but now, even a failed housewife, such as I, can make a lumpless white sauce and turn out broccoli au gratin, potato bake, mac cheese and the like. (in an edible form now, mind you)

so if you deposit a reasonable amount of money into my paypal account i may just let you in on the secret…..

 

ok, ok, i’ll divulge. the secret of white sauce is that you melt the butter and add the flour whilst on a low flame and then YOU TAKE IT OFF THE HEAT and add the milk (slowly). none of this rubbish about murdering the lumps whilst slowly adding the milk over a low flame like your mom told you to. so go on now and make a something or other au gratin without feeding it to the dog….

Banana bread

Another addition to ‘they draw and cook‘. if you love cooking, this is such a great site. you can print out beautifully illustrated recipes from around the world.

Banana Bread

sugar and spice and i’m not very nice

i’m just not one of the people who walks into the kitchen and goes “whoopeee! let’s get cooking!” i drag myself in there out of obligation not to let my family starve and first and foremost i do love food. it’s the putting together of ingredients that bores me. the thinking of what to make and usually out of an old mother huboard type fridge.

the cyclops on the other hand is a great cook, but he takes the slow food movement a little too extremes. sunday lunches seem to cover supper and if you are still awake by the time an evening meal appears then i guess you won’t be eating supper for breakfast.

all over the internet there are pages of happy, bubble people blogging about the last meal they threw together. although the photos may make me salivate, i find their enthusiasm slightly pathological. unbelievably all over the western world people continue to produce and buy up cookbooks as if it’s the next best thing to 50 shades of grey, which is sort of more how i would describe some of my meals.

oh, i guess i should give myself a bit of credit: i do like baking and i can whip up some mean falafel balls. i can make tahina paste from scratch and a damned good quiche too, but now that i got all that off my chest, it’s off to stand in front of the goddamed fridge again…