Misadventures in food packaging

The cure. 

Nothing beats the blues like Texas chile.

It's so easy to cook that you don't even have to be sober or awake to make it. Nor do you have to be Texan, even if you are both asleep and drunk. Texas chile is a comfort food that spans borders.

Here's how to make it:

• saute an onion and several cloves of garlic
• add a packet of mince 
• throw in oregano, a tin of kidney beans, two tins of tomatoes, salt and cumin. 
• chuck in the scalding chili additive of your choosing. 
• drown the lot in cheap read wine. 
• simmer a couple hours till nearly burnt, then wash it down with what remains of the cheap red wine. 

The trouble with Texas chile a la Chaos HQ, is that it has to go over corn bread and under sour cream. Sour cream is easy enough to come by in London, but cornbread ain't. 

Just say no. 

In the homeland a box of Jiffy cornbread will set you back about forty cents. Sadly Britain remains a Jiffy-less island, even though you can buy a $14 box Lucky Charms in Primrose Hill, which is proof that every expat has a super-gross junk food craving (I admit with shame that mine is Aunt Jemima fake maple syrup).

Last week  I reckoned I was in luck when I stumbled upon a box of Aunt Jemima corn bread in my local shop. I didn't think much about the phrase 'no mess baking' on the box until it actually came to cooking it. Regular readers such as my mother will recall that I have a visceral hatred of fake-lazy cooking products. 

Really?

Texas chili on the burner, I cracked open the cornbread and was nearly knocked down by a horrible fake cardboard baking tray. But then came the real horror: a pouch of cornbread mix and a note instructing me to dump an egg into the bag, squish it around into a slime concoction, and not puke while so doing. 

Make no mistake - no mess baking has its consequences. I can now confirm that chasing an egg yolk round a plastic bag with your fingertips is substantially grosser than just getting a mixing bowl dirty. 

And yet, all it took to wipe the memory of egg squishery from my fingertips was an overly gluttonous helping of Texas chile, and some cheap red wine. So I forgive Aunt Jemima. After all, she is the champion of fake maple syrup, which shines above and beyond your run of the mill fake food products. 

Mama FAQ

Happy day, British mamas! I should confess here that the word 'mothering' sounds to my American ear like 'smothering'. 

I might have forgotten Smothering Sunday had it not been for an intervention by the eternally wise Bibsey Mama. Having now remembered it in the nick of time (whew), here follows a motherhood faq a la Chaos HQ. 

For banana showers. 

Describe Motherhood in three words

Poo. Puke. Bananas. The universal uniform of motherhood. Some say this triplicate is good for the complexion, others say it builds character. Most agree it poses significant challenges to mental health. 

Does your experience differ from your mother's? How?

My mama raised three kids and several dozen chickens with only an occasional 'darn it'. I manage two kids and one toaster by speaking a sailor dialect. 

What's the hardest thing about being a mum?

Kids go bananas at the slightest provocation. 

What's the best thing?

Kids go bananas at the slightest provocation. 

How has it changed you?

I don't even remember what used to get me out of bed in the morning. I mean, no one was kicking me or demanding bananas in those days. 

What do you hope for your kids?

That they will never lose their joy and nonsense. 

What do you fear for them?

That they will lose their joy and nonsense. 

What makes it all worthwhile? 

The reasons are more numerous than stars in the sky. Like days spent jumping puddles and hunting invisible dragons, covered in finger paint, glitter, and bananas. 

Novelty

I read something last week that really captured my imagination: 

The narratives of the traditional "life-story" are breaking down into unrelated pieces. We work 40 jobs over a lifetime...we move location and we start again and again in the deregulated, privatised world of self-selling. We inhabit virtual places as much as we do real ones. Facts become blurred and we live out fictions. For works of writing to reflect this world, they also have to enter into the language and forms of our time, otherwise we end up with confused, over-stuffed, compromised books that use an old form to try to talk about a new time.

For better or for worse, I reckon this is what now feels like.

This paragraph comes from a piece about fiction's future in the Guardian. The writer, Ewen Morrison, is about to publish a new sort of novel: 'a mixture of facts and fictions, images and videos'.

As a former inhabitant of a 'department of factual verification', I agree that facts are pretty nauseatingly dull on their own. Mixing fact and fiction is where the good stuff comes from.  

Always with us. 

Morrison argues that novels should be novel. Unsurprisingly, he doesn't think Jonathan Franzen is God's gift to fiction.

Like some, I still love the smell and feel of old books. A dream of mine is to reanimate old, forgotten literature in novel ways. 

I know a local librarian who is very wise. He can, for instance, produce batmobile sketches on short notice, and he generally gives the impression of one who could have joined the space program but just couldn't be bothered with anti-gravity. 

This afternoon I got into a long conversation with my wise librarian over a common interest of ours: 'London Labour and the London Poor'. This book was written as a series of newspaper articles by Henry Mayhew in the 1840's. It is a journey into Victorian ethnography, economics, and grimmer than Dickens stuff. Have you ever considered the pay and working conditions of rat catchers, for instance? 

Mayhew's work is woven together from oral life histories. As with America's Federal Writers' Project, this makes the line between fact and fiction a blurry, complicated one. When telling your life history, what would you leave in? Take out? Change? 

Mayhew's work still resonates - perhaps in part because his subjects lived in a broken, deregulated world of self-selling. My wise librarian has photocopies of Mayhew illustrations up in the library billboard. 

I will follow the progress of Ewen Morrison's book with interest. And I will read Mayhew's 'Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of London Life' as suggested by my wise librarian. My interest lies not only the ghost of literature future, but also the ghost of literature past.  

Leaplings

Emily Carlisle has written a wonderful piece on leap year babies for the Guardian.

The cult of cake. 

She highlights some interesting facts related to leaplings - for instance, did you know leapophilia is a thing? Neither did I!

The piece serves as a cautionary tale to future parents, by pointing out the feckless cake inefficiency of leapless parents.

You see, my two were both born shortly before Thanksgiving. Each year by Christmas I am knackered, having sacrificed an entire season to the pillar of cake.

By contrast, Emily's twins were born on February 29th four years ago. Today they mark their first proper birthday in four years. That's right: four years, two kids, one cake.

So to all you full-term women out there: I suggest you aim for today should you ever want to have a cake-free moment again in your life.

And to everyone else: beware the leapophile!

Quotidian

Doomed.

We are coming out of the dark.

A gazillion snowdrops are bursting forth from ancient soil, and promptly getting mashed to bits by trainers. The ducks and the humans are looking friskier.

Still cold afternoons remind me of that Tennyson verse:

          Twilight and evening bell,
          And after that the dark!
          And may there be no sadness or farewell,
          When I embark.

February is a pretty useless month, except for eating pancakes and catching up on movies missed in the parenting line of duty. 

I recently turned on 'Life in a Day', the world's first crowd-sourced movie, which is freely available on YouTube. I approached this movie gingerly, because I feared it would be 90 long minutes of people looking really smug while skydiving.

Back in 2010 when there was a call for footage, I considered sending something in. But I didn't on the assumption that Ridley Scott and Kevin Macdonald wouldn't appreciate clips of kids being whimsical and failing to blow out candles in spite of repeated instruction. In hindsight, I couldn't have been more wrong on this point. 

It turns out that 'Life in a Day' is awesome and totally unpretentious - one of the most uplifting films I've seen. And regular readers (hello Mom!) will know that my tendencies towards cynicism and cake enthusiasm prevent me from getting uplifted easily.

Like it says on the tin, the film is about all the quotidian wonder and pedestrian joy contained in one earthling day. 

One of my favourite clips in the film involves a guy who is travelling around the world by bicycle. He weathers many disasters, like being repeatedly knocked over by truckers. But he always gets back in the saddle, sometimes after a few days in hospital.

The path less truckered by. 

How I would love to embark on a similarly crazy journey. Occasional trucker maulage seems such a small price to pay for pure freedom, unfettered by stuff.

So should dispatches from the land of mañana ever stop, you will know that I have given up silly material trappings like a coffee press and clean socks, and donned my bicycle wings. 

Wave to me from the open road, unless you are a trucker, in which case keep those hands at ten and two.  

May there be no sadness or farewell when I embark.

Lurve

Happy Valentimes Day, as they say in New Mexico.

Breakfast of happy champions.

My mom writes great letters. A good thing, as her children tend to wander, putting her in the position of homefront correspondent.

Here's what she sent me today:

Have a lovely day, and remember this true fact -- chocolate makes you happy!! 

So as I sit here eating a metric truckload of chocolate, I'd just like to point out that I am merely following my mama's orders. Plus, I already ate my vegetables.

So there.

Nomnomnom. 

Snow babies

The snow came.

There were those who said it never would.

December flew by in a rainy blur. January was a brown landscape of wilted Christmas trees on curbsides.

Down the primrose path. 

Then last weekend the sky finally went to pieces.

Now by 'snow' I am referring to an an old Saxon word that means: a modest dusting. Any more would be showing off, and a dusting is all it takes to shut down Heathrow.

We did the only sensible thing given the situation. We took a sled to Primrose Hill.

Four runs down the hill with no broken bones seemed like enough in the luck-pushing department.

So Ali and I scoured the neighbourhood for mama and papa snowmen. I was instructed to assemble approximately ten baby snowmen for each parental unit.

New fallen snow.

Like giraffes, snow parents can be a bit blasé and sometimes need reminding that the moment of reunion with their snow spawn is cause for celebration.

Now comes the part where snow turns to sludge. The sleepy Heathrow dragon grumbles back to life, and naysayers seasonally progress to maligning the Easter Bunny.

Sledges return to closets, where they dream quietly of gleaming white landscapes, never losing faith.

Return to the mothership

Ali has discovered the plot of every story ever told.

Beam me up, mama. 

Here it is: baby misses mama, baby goes searching for mama, baby finds mama, baby is filled with joy and screaming adulation.

A twist on the plot is that sometimes baby is looking for papa. Sometimes even - gasp - mama and her papa.

Ali likes to loudly recount this plot structure during movies. TV shows. Book reading time. Etc.

Lately her parental search algorithm has bleached into the physical world. Toys must be nested with their parents.

Which is why we spent last weekend at the zoo: a baby giraffe had to be reunited with her mama.

Plastiraffe. 

There is a London restaurant called Giraffe that tolerates kids more than most London restaurants. And they give away little plastic giraffes with the smoothies.

One problem with little plastic giraffes is that they are pretty cool and thus worth fighting over with your sister. This means that little plastic giraffes are usually missing at least one leg and look a bit twitchy.

Another problem with little plastic giraffes is that they miss their mamas so very much.

And so our twitchy, three-legged plastic giraffe had to be returned to her mother unit. As an added bonus her papa was there too.

You there Mom?

The giraffe parents looked uncertain when confronted with their blue plastic offspring, even though she was offered up to them with much joy and screaming adulation.

At moments like these I am reminded that my kids see me very differently than I see myself. They seem to think I am a super-human who holds up the dome of the world.

I remember having this concept of my parents too. I know it will be replaced  with criticism, then understanding.

Which is a relief: dome-holder is an awfully hard title to live up to. And it can lead to backache.

Once upon a time in west London

You are not the kind of gal who would be at a place like this at this time of morning.

But the fridge is barren and it's nearly high noon.

Online supermarkets are lawless territories. They remind you of the wild west, or at least the spaghetti west, where knackered homesteaders are forever waiting around for stagecoaches.

The man with the van finally arrives. You try not to panic. You know something weird will ambush you from the grocery bags.

He tells you to have a good day. You are not fooled. You unpack gingerly.

Rocket Science.

You watch like a hawk the food item gremlin: that one item of shopping that looked delicious in the picture, but is actually crap in real life.

You are no turnip. You know it will jump out and sneer at you like Jack Palance.

This time it's the rice.

You ordered rice. In a bag.

The man with a van has brought you vacuum-packed, half-cooked, microwavable rice. Not in a bag.

Though you are an old hand at Molvanian marketing, the label really takes the cake:

We understand that cooking rice can be a chore. That's why we have done all the hard work for you. Rice so good you will never need to cook it from scratch again. Microwavable in two minutes. Suitable for vegetarians. 

You mumble "suitable for idiots". Then you feel like an idiot. Luckily no one is watching, except maybe Jack Palance.

Kryptonite

You chuck the inferior bag-less rice into the microwave in a huff.

You lean against the counter and recall other hateful food impostors of note: low-fat yogurt, non-alcoholic beer, margarine, decaf anything.

You wonder: when did cooking bog standard rice become challenging? How do these rice-baffled people manage to spoon breakfast cereal into the correct location? How do they muster the energy to chew cake?

That beloved word triggers a vivid memory of every beautiful piece of cake you've ever met in every gin joint in this town. Chocolate cake. Coffee cake. Banana cake. Lemon cake. Carrot cake.

Then you realize with a start that you've let the microwave run far longer than two minutes. Now you have scorched crap rice all over your microwave.

You are a turnip. The food item gremlins - perhaps even the terrorists - have won.

Somewhere, Jack Palance is smiling.

Cookie monster

A word of advice to hostage negotiators: biscuits.

I spent last week studying for exams, literally locked in my bedroom. 

One evening I forgot to remove the key from the bedroom door and hide it from the kids. This same evening our postman delivered a dehumidifier, which Papa unwrapped using a paring knife that he forgot to put back in the kitchen.

Some regions have a wet season and a dry season. England has a wet season and a moldy season, thus the dehumidifier. 

Next morning at 9am, or 'late-o-clock' as it is known in pre-school parlance, Ali ran down the hallway and slammed the bedroom door. Then 'click'...she locked it. 

My heart plummeted to my toes. I called Papa in a flapping panic. I summoned some helpful neighbours by flapping about some more.

We gathered nervously outside the door and planned. Our first strategy was to try talking the self-holding hostage into releasing herself.

"Send one million unmarked biscuits."

"Ali, please unlock the door?"

Nothing.

"Please?"

Nada. Zip. 

We began to worry that the hostage had bound and gagged herself.

The guys talked about shouldering the door.

I dialed a locksmith. 

Then suddenly - hallelujah - she spoke!

 "Needa biscuit."

I stopped flapping long enough to slide a biscuit under the door.

"How about a biscuit in exchange for the keys?" 

Crunch, crunch, crunch. 

"Ali?"

"Outa biscuit."

More flapping. Some swearing. Much gnashing of teeth. 

The guys tried a screwdriver to no avail. 

"No biscuit," commented Ali helpfully from the other side.   

Papa had a thought: "Can somebody get me a knife from the kitchen?"

Swoosh - the tip of a paring knife slid under the door. 

"Honey," squeaked Papa in falsetto, "why does our child have a knife?"

We remembered the dehumidifier. This memory triggered some swearing on the topic of remembering to return knives to the kitchen. And some swearing on the topic of remembering to remove keys from locks within child-reach.

Then we stopped swearing and wondered aloud if the paring knife was an olive branch. Was Ali now cooperating with verbal commands? Such a thing would be an exciting and unprecedented new milestone. 

Lifelines. 

"Ali, can you pull the keys out of the door?" 

"Biscuit."

"Please?"

"Nee. Da. Bis. Cuit."

The guys had the handle off the door now. But they found the key in a half-turned state, which made it difficult to push out. Papa dashed to the kitchen. Faced with a distinct lack of paring knives, he returned with the European substitute: a fondue fork. 

Two fondue fork jiggles later and pop - out came the keys.

Realizing that we had run out of biscuits, Ali changed tactics.

"Here you go," she said sweetly, pushing the keys under the door.  

Click: the door flew open.  Papa swooped in to scour the landscape for any sharp objects in a fifty mile radius. 

"Mama!" said my sweet, smiling cherub. 

"Ali!" said her gullable mama. 

"...Biscuit?"