Time on my hands to cook. Exotic cook....

 

This may not seem exotic to you, but it is to me.....

When I was young I was fed well, but along the typical British home cooking fare. Roast lamb and mint sauce, sausages and mash with frozen peas, cheese and egg salad. My Mum even baked walnut cake and iced fairy cakes. I have no complaints.

But I visited France when I was a teenager and stayed with a family 30 km south of Paris. And, Oh. My. Goodness. 

The Papa ground coffee beans fresh every day. I heard the electric whizz of the grinder each morning and it was the signal to get up. By the time I tiptoed down the wooden spiral staircase the strong smell of brewing coffee was drifting up. We drunk it from wide bowls and dunked tartines spread thickly with apricot jam.

And the salad served at the beginning of each evening meal was a revelation. Not just an iceberg or a little gem. It was all sorts of green leaves. The Maman actually went out into the garden and picked dandelion leaves, washed them, spun them dry and added them into the salad bowl. All the leaves were tossed with olive oil and a squeeze of lemon juice. It was good.

Everything we ate seemed to me to be exotic, we spent hours eating, bit by bit we would have salads, then steak with pepper, then crispy bits of fried potato with salt, green beans with butter and garlic, then bread and cheese; fresh batons of bread, chewy crust and springy centre, spread with deep yellow butter and aromatic Red Cow cheese...

I realised there was a world of food out there that I hadn't tapped into, and ever since then I have been dipping my toe in the water of exotic and tasty food. I have made some spectacular failures, mostly when I try to make the food more 'healthy'.

I was introduced to the famous Mexican tortilla with its spicy filling by a friend who had lived in America. She gave me a recipe to actually make the tortillas so I didn't have to use the dry, pappy shop bought ones; home made flour tortillas and just so much better. The one thing I didn't like was the rolling out of all these little discs of dough. It took forever, even when I trained one of my sons up to make and roll the dough too. 

Now practically all of my children have left home I don't have to make the same quantities of food that I used to, but I still don't like rolling all those little discs out - so we have been using store-bought ones mostly even though my husband doesn't like it. I got to thinking if I could make healthier ones, and after several hours of watching YouTube clips of people making tortillas I bought a tortilla cookbook and a press. Et voila!

 

And while idly shopping in TK Maxx I saw a tortilla warmer rediued to £3.00 so that went straight in the trolley....

  

And I have to say that the press is brilliant -no more rolling - and I get thin round tortillas with practically no effort. But the 'healthy' version of quinoa/oat/rice flours was a bit inflexible so I spread a topping on and ate like that [hummus, gherkins and yoghurt]. I have made some more dough with wholemeal spelt, so I will give that a whirl tomorrow and see if is more wrappable.

 

Seven things that tell you you're getting older...

I’d like to add a few more things to the list which usually begins with You go into a room and forget what you went in there for…

1.     Strange things start to bother you

 There’s a whole new world of surprises out there once you get past your 60^th birthday.

For example, I kind of expected my eyebrows to start greying. What I didn’t expect was one of them to go grey and not the other. OK, I exaggerate a bit. What is happening is that the left is going grey a lot faster than the right. I used to lie awake at night imagining what a fright I’m going to look with one white and one almost black eyebrow. A trivial worry, you might think, in the grand scheme of things, and so it is. So thank goodness the next phase of getting older kicked in…

2.     You don’t worry much what people think of you

This is one of the nicest things about being a senior. Such a liberation!

3.     It takes you two hours to get ready to leave the house

 I’ve started to notice this recently, and I’m surprised! Goodness knows why, I should have expected it really. It takes me absolutely ages to get ready to leave the house in the morning.

4.     It’s normal to have some aches and pains most of the time

 Somehow we never quite believe it will happen to us, do we? Maybe some people do get lucky, or have discovered the secret to pain free ageing. I’m working on it myself but so far without much success.

I just didn’t expect it to creep up on me so soon.

BTW, the pic is me with a splint on my hand in an attempt to bring my arthritic thumb into place.

5.     You become convinced the world is going mad

Businesses, utility companies, councils – none of them seem to be able to get their act together. Governments don’t know what they’re doing. Parents don’t know how to bring up their children. In fact sometimes the world seems to be going to hell in a handcart.

Smart phones, iPads, laptops etc. – no problem using them yet. But now a lot of technology IS getting bewildering. Trying to follow instructions online can be like trying to understand a foreign language. Nothing makes sense any more! 
How do ordinary people understand this stuff? And as for a disembodied voice called Alexa telling me it isn’t going to rain today when it quite obviously is doing just that, and heavily – well, the world is going mad.

6.     You fit grab rails in the shower

 Or go the whole hog and install a wet room. This would have been my number one choice had space permitted. But I’ve settled for the grab rails, with an extra one outside the front door, just in case.

7.     Checkout girls start calling you ‘dear’

 Yes, it is now that obvious I’m a granny.

Also, I was having a bit of physio last week and was handed a self help leaflet with an old lady pictured on the front. As if to say, ‘You are experiencing the sort of problems associated with being old, dear’.

Just a few points. There are plenty more.

What has really surprised me is how much I’m enjoying the over-sixty years. Maybe all these constant reminders are a wake-up call not to slide quietly into oblivion. Not just yet anyway…         

A woman with a smart phone is never truly alone….

  ↑ This is me, out for the day, but still keeping in touch with what my kids are doing wherever they are…

I may have posted a couple of less-than-happy posts over the last few weeks about kids leaving home.  And all of what I said is true.

But.

Enter the miracle that is Telegram…

[Other social media systems are also available]. I could have mentioned Facebook and Whatsapp, Instagram and others, but Telegram is where my kids interact and that is where I am gonna be. You see, there is truth in this fact that a woman with a smart phone is never truly alone.

At the click of a button I can talk to a daughter in Finland who is having earache, watch two sons in Eiker as they build a house, dip into a son and daughter with their respective families on holiday by the sea in south Norway, take a tour round the house a son rents in Germany, see another son on holiday with his wife and baby in Florida, and advise my newly-married-youngest-daughter which plants are weeds in her garden in Turkey.

I have followed along when my kids make dinners in a foreign country when they send a video on Telegram, watch grandchildren open presents hundreds of miles away and say, ‘Thank you, Grandma!’ in broken English, and see babies just hours after they are born instead of waiting weeks till I can travel to visit.

And it’s not just kids who live abroad that keep in touch by Telegram. The rest of the family in the UK  create groups to discuss special birthdays, holidays together, who can fix our drains, and who is going where for Christmas. Today on Telegram I arranged to babysit for one, catch up with the health of a poorly grandson down the road, arrange for one to visit on my husband’s birthday, and take my eldest daughter out for coffee when the builders had gone. Our 43^rd wedding anniversary supper was totally arranged by Telegram without me speaking a word to anyone. Well, except my husband. He still lives with me at least…

It doesn’t completely make up for the fact I miss them all here, at home, where they used to be. But they’re all growed up now with lives of their own and I can’t help but be nosey as to what they all get up to. For years I was the centre of everything that went on at home, now I am on the periphery. But that is where I should be, and I say, ‘Good luck to ‘em!’

However, I can’t help but say: Kids, just keep sending me those updates. OK?

Caught with his phone out...

So, you take your Dad out for lunch to celebrate his 89^th birthday and this is what happens…

And they say young people can’t leave their phones alone at the table!

That said, it’s nice to have parents who have smart phones. 
That said, they don’t always know what to do with them...

To be fair though, I think our Ma and Pa do very well indeed with their technology as far as it goes. They aren’t sitting in their armchairs moaning about young people all the time. [Just some of the time - Saggy]

But then, neither Pa nor Ma act like old people anyway. As far back as I can remember they don’t ever seem to have acted like adults either. I can’t believe they are both entering their 90^th years. Apart from a tendency to mention the war years and/or the 1930s in every other sentence, they both have a surprisingly un-elderly attitude to life.

It was lovely to spend time with them just chatting, having lunch… and taking pics of each other on our phones.

Many happy returns Dad!

Saggy eating sticky toffee pudding. Phone on table. 

Moo eating sticky toffee pudding. Phone hidden.