Project “Being Domesticated”

February 20, 2015February 20, 2015 / Christina B / 2 Comments

A friend of mine complimented me the other day on being quite domesticated and I had to be truthful in that yes, I do enjoy being in my own space and being domesticated but only up to a point and that I sometimes find myself a project (such as creating a new flower bed where previously there was just paving or making our own biltong) rather than clean the house. These projects are always for the benefit of the family – it’s not like I go on a read-as-many-books-as-I can-in-a-day project or something like that – but it usually takes up more time than the task I was putting off doing would have taken, which I eventually have to do anyway, I’ve just delayed the inevitable and created more work for myself so I end up running around like a road runner bird. Hygiene is paramount to me though, and the essential areas such as kitchen and bathrooms are cleaned regularly, the house gets vacuumed and so on and I do love it when the house is clean and tidy, sometimes I just struggle with some motivational issues in this area.

Take doing the laundry for instance. This is actually one department that I don’t have a problem staying on top of and with a family of five there is always washing to be done. Add some exercise clothes to that and at least one daily load is required to stay ahead. Which brings me to another point – our laundry hamper is labelled “65l Laundry Hamper” – how do you measure your laundry or washing in litres? It’s either empty, full, or somewhere in between and hopefully not overflowing but what would be the point in the kids ever saying to me that “The laundry hamper has 20l capacity left” if they need me to wash their school sport uniform for instance? I admit to over-thinking and over-analysing things sometimes but that’s just me and while I’m at it, the part that really gets me is folding and putting away the clean, dry washing. Up to that point I feel like I’ve added value to the process (got it clean, got it dry) but from there on it just feels like I’m moving it from one place to another which feels like such a waste of valuable time.

Sewing is another department that I’m seriously lacking in. One of my grandmothers used to be a seamstress, my mum is good at sewing, knitting, crotchet and all things related, my sister is good at it and so are her daughters but I’ve never had any interest whatsoever. I’ve never had the patience or perseverance required to work on something for hours on end and only have my imagination (or even a pattern) of the promised finished product to motivate me to keep going. I’d much rather do a jigsaw puzzle where my progress is more visual and my chances of success are better. Or plant something in the garden. In year 8 I had to knit a toilet roll holder as part of the compulsory home economics course and I procrastinated until the day before it was due to be handed in because I couldn’t face doing it but then I had to stay up most of the night to finish it. And the wool was yellow. A yellow amateur looking toilet roll holder knitted with a bad attitude. It was torture and enough to put me off knitting for life. When I saw some funky, colourful crotched cushions in a magazine a few years ago I decided that I’d love to be able to do that, they looked so gorgeous. But when I tried to crotchet it felt like I had five thumbs on each hand. This was not going to work. I would still like to be able to do it but I’ll need a Mount Everest load of patience and by that time the house will need cleaning again.

Baking cakes is something else I’ve never been confident doing, but when we bought a bread machine about 10 years ago and I discovered that our local bread mix shop sells the most amazing range of pre-mixes that are fool proof and even I could do it, I branched out and started baking all sorts of interesting breads. My family loves home baked Turkish bread and fresh, warm Lebanese flat breads go so well with Lamb Souvlaki or other dishes that you eat in a wrap and the kids will come home today to freshly baked hot cross buns. I enjoy cooking as well, given that I have the time not to just put a quick rushed meal on the table.

My garden is my haven and I spend hours keeping it trimmed, watered, fed, fertilised and weeded. With my husband usually training for an endurance event of some sorts he quite often doesn’t have time to mow the lawn and I’ll happily do it rather than scrub the shower. I planted some Kalamata olive trees a few years ago and the crop has been such in the past that we had enough bottled olives to last us more than a year, and I love being able to pick fresh herbs from my garden. I’ve recently launched project “Expand And Plant More Edible Crops” and added some berry bushes and it’s great going outside, picking a fresh gooseberry and eating it right there.

Some olives from our crop a few years ago

Part of my herb/berry garden

I’ve taken on some other “projects” as well, such as making our own Dukkah (to eat with the Turkish bread) and biltong, both of which aren’t hard to do but take up a bit of time and as it is I’m already planning to make the next batch of biltong on my next day off work. Our house will never look like it’s from a photo in a home décor magazine, it looks too well lived in and it’s impossible to keep it perfectly tidy all the time unless I keep moving around and picking things up and putting them away when they’d been left by others as some in the family aren’t very good at putting things away. I would love it to always be tidy but time is limited and one has to make choices about where best to spend it and then I usually remember that our Dukkah is nearly finished and I need to make some more or a swim with the kids sounds like a better idea. As I sit here I know the filing needs to be done but I’ve just remembered I noticed yesterday that some of the new season’s olives looked ripe. I’d better go check on them before the birds get to them. They might need to be picked, and then the preparation process starts soaking them in water for a couple of weeks, rinsing them daily and then bottling them…

What’s for Dinner?

June 20, 2014February 2, 2015 / Christina B / Leave a comment

A loaded question, and one that I get asked on a daily basis, and most days I’ll get asked it a few times. It conveys expectations that the reply will be something the questioner will be excited about and the reply can elicit a variety of responses, from “Yay!” to “Ugh”. Also the question that seems to throw me into a tailspin of stress if I haven’t got dinner planned yet. It’s interesting how especially dinner forms such an important part of the rest of my family’s life and seems to be something exciting they look forward to every day. A highlight in their day whereas in my non-chef world where it’s just one of many other things to take care of, it’s often a source of pressure and bewilderment as I scratch around in my mind as to what to cook.

I don’t mind the cooking part itself and actually quite enjoy it and like to try out new things when I have the time, but I’m not talented or creative in the cooking department in the sense that I could just throw together some ingredients and whip up a gourmet dish without pausing to think or look at a recipe. I’m good at following recipes and I’ll add to them or change them as I see fit but that’s the extent of my culinary artistic licence. I can’t just wing it if I have to have dinner ready by a time that’s appropriate for hungry and growing children on a daily basis.

It so happens that sometimes I haven’t planned dinner and when I then get asked what’s for dinner I’m in turmoil because I just can’t think of what to cook, because quite often those will be the days when I’ve had a million other things to do and probably don’t have much time to spend on a lovingly prepared thoughtful dinner, and the last thing I have is the headspace to think of a dish that will be a pleaser for the whole family’s varied tastes as well as easy and quick to prepare and nutritious, plus something that I’ll have the ingredients for at home so I wouldn’t have to go out to buy it, but the thing that throws me the most is that question and all the expectations that go along with it, not the actual cooking part.

I’ve taken to planning meals a week ahead so I can do the shopping in one go and not have to worry about planning meals on a daily basis, and then when I get asked what’s for dinner it’s a quick, confident, decisive reply to which I sometimes get a pleased and excited response and sometimes a disappointed one (if the menu is not someone’s favourite), but then the pressure has been taken out of the equation.

Some days I don’t feel very domesticated at all, but other days I’ll be spending the entire day cooking up a storm. I am domesticated enough though, to find it very gratifying when I’ve put a lot of effort into a meal and it’s a crowd pleaser. When my husband and I were newly-wed and I cooked a meal that I’d put a great deal of thought and effort into, I asked him if he liked it and his response was: “Hmm, it’s edible”. My spirits plummeted. I was incredulous. What would it take to impress him? When my face showed exactly what I thought he was quick to add: “That means it’s delicious!”

“It’s edible” has since become his standard great-dinner-compliment although I have to admit that it took me a while to recover my sense of humour about this one, but it’s still not quite the description I was looking for, and the other day when he cooked a steak on the barbecue for dinner, I said that it was “edible”, and his reply was: “that’s the ultimate compliment”. Seeing that, in his view, cooking the meat on the barbeque constitutes taking care of the entire meal it’s great that he’s able to cook us some edible meat. I love how the barbequed meat gets carried back into the house like a trophy and discussed afterwards like it was the only thing on the menu and didn’t require any planning, it magically appeared in our fridge and there was no other preparation involved in dinner at all, including salads and other sides. When the man of our house has barbequed the meat it means he’s taken care of everything involved with the meal.

I’ve gone through phases of getting the kids to take turns to cook a meal once a week so they can learn to take care of planning a meal and cook it, with the added bonus of me getting a night off cooking duty, but after a while something always seems to get in the way and it gets too hard to follow through. They’ll either have exams and then I take over the cooking duty again so they can concentrate on their studying, or they can’t make up their minds about what to cook until it’s nearly dinner time – never mind having time to go and buy the ingredients – which is an expert tactic of child No 1 (and about as subtle as a sledgehammer)! All three of them are actually quite capable of producing a filling meal but child No 2 is probably the one that loves it the most, having sometimes in the past prepared us 3-course sit-down candle-lit dinners with printed menus and a beautifully laid table. Child No 1 can make a mean stir-fry and child No 3 is an expert at making nachos and oat haystacks, but when it comes to producing a meal once a week between the three of them somewhere along the line it just seems to have become hard work. It’s a pity, that. Somehow I don’t get away with it.

Entrée, as prepared by No 2 for one of her dinners when she was 12

Dessert by No 2 for the same dinner

The only remaining family member, Ironman, has never really enjoyed the cooking department and made that quite clear when we were still sharing the cooking duties many years ago and he’d cook us some “gourmet” baked beans on toast, which would have been great if we had it once in a while, but he made it night after night. I kept quiet because if I dared complain I’d have to take over that cooking turn, but after a while the cooking somehow reverted back to my department. It stayed in my department for many years (except for when he does a barbeque, of course) until recently when he decided to help out by taking care of two meals per week: one which consists of buying a roast chicken and pre-prepared salads and the other of cooking frozen chicken or fish fillets in the oven accompanied by some cooked (from frozen) vegies, of which he’s very proud and wanted acknowledgement of his great skills in the kitchen to which child No 3 replied: “You’re very good at heating things up.” I don’t mind either way, it’s quite palatable and I’m just very happy that there are two meals per week I don’t have to worry about!

Thinking back to one of my most relaxing holidays ever, so not taking away from all the other great places we’ve visited and spectacular scenery we’ve seen or amazing experiences we’ve had as a family, it has to be our trip to Bali, staying in a beautiful 5-star resort and not having to think about meals, planning it, buying the ingredients, preparing anything or cleaning up afterwards at all for a week. I felt so spoilt to be able to sit down at a table, order a meal, enjoy it and get up afterwards without doing any of the work. It was fabulous!

Cooking is an inevitable and unavoidable part of life though, and we all try to manage it as best we can. I thought I was on top of it now with my weekly planning, until I was asked the other day, after I was asked what was for dinner that particular night, “What’s for dinner tomorrow night?”