College Lake with a Back Carry

In which I do my first walk with the Chap on my back, find a different path to take around College Lake and continue to assuage my nursery-guilt with knitting.

Map: None Used (routes are available at College Lake if you're desperate, but it's very much a case of following signs!)
Distance: 4k
Time: 1 hour

Rating: Easy Walk
This walk was a first for me, because it was the first time I did a walk with the Chap on my back. It's been coming on for a while - I got to the end of Willen Lake and thought "oof, my back", so I've been working up to doing extended walks with the Chap on my back, and this was the first 'proper' walk I've done with him there. It takes a bit of practise to get them up there - I have found it easiest to 'Santa Toss' him over my head rather than scooting him round my side, as he's just got too tall to fit comfortably under my arm. However, I can get him up there without incident now, so long as he isn't wearing anything big like a coat that tend s to get rucked in the back and make the back of the Ergo sit a bit low, but I now know what that feels like, so it can be dealt with.

However, I still wanted to build my confidence, so I went for College Lake. It's an easy walk, it's not a long way or difficult terrain, and it has a visitor centre so nappies and so on can be dealt with.

We started as we start most walks these days - with the two of us walking. We use the reins for this a lot as the Chap can accelerate in an impressive manner - fine of you're in a flat park, but not so good if you're in an area filled with rabbit holes or on a train station or similar.

On leaving the Visitor Centre, turn left and follow the path round. It starts on gravel and then quickly becomes a packed earth path, and the Chap seemed quite happy to toddle along that rather than dashing off into the undergrowth, so I let him off his reins to tootle about in that purposeful manner that toddlers have.

Soon enough, however, he stopped and asked to be carried, so I threw him over my shoulder and into the back carry and we continued forward.

The line of trees soon breaks and you start to get views over the lake. The path splits shortly after this - the orange trail continues on the flat path suitable for prams, but we chose the purple trail bearing right and down a slope. This leads down into a tree-lined dell, and then up again to a narrow path. It's a quieter path and easier if you're wanting to see some birds or other wildlife than the main orange trail.

Also a week of firsts, I have finished my first cardigan for the Chap! I am amazed that it not only looks like a cardigan, but it also appears to be wearable! I put it on him this morning (before I had sewed in all the loose threads) and was also delighted to see that, although a bit big at the moment, it will fit him and appear to be in proportion when he gets big enough for it. I am amazed it actually looks like it's supposed to! It took weeks, however, but I'm really pleased with it. And at least it gave me something to work on while we worked our way through the Lord of The Rings extended box set.

I find knitting terribly comforting. When my sister-in-law asked why I had started knitting, the answer was simple - guilt. I hate putting him in nursery, but I find knitting helps me ignore it.

"Ah-ha," she said, in that knowing way that people with psychology degrees have. "So it's a case of 'I'm leaving you, but I've got you this."". I've thought about it, really, and that's not quite right. It's not about leaving him so I got him something. There's a world of plastic dinosaurs and cars that could fulfil that function. It's something about the effort, the activity. It's not really about the fact you get a cardigan at the end of it, although that is in itself satisfying (and surprising!). It's more about the activity; the performance aspect. If I think about it, even though I enjoy being at work (which is something I never thought I'd say, but that's what having a year's maternity leave lead me to conclude), I still feel that by going to work I am doing something unutterably selfish. It doesn't matter that we can't afford for me not to work - I think it's a case of the Terrible Shoulds. I feel I should be at home looking after him, and therefore any other choice is Doing It Wrong.

You will shortly reconnect with the main trail, and we continued along this until we saw the gate leading off to the left through the fence, marked with a 'permissive footpath' white arrow. As this was somewhere I hadn't been before, I decided to go and have a look and see where it took us.

I really enjoyed this part of the route. It feels a lot quieter than the main path, and takes you along the edge of the nature reserve through the trees. It was also completely deserted apart from a photography crew who were taking promotional pictures for the reserve, who grinned as I went past with my load.

  

In wearing the Chap as I go for walks, I manage to do what I want at the same time as feeling like I'm ticking the 'Proper Parenting' box. It was the same when we went and enjoyed the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum the other day - I enjoyed the dinosaurs before I had a child, but now I'm not just indulging myself. I'm Being A Parent. In knitting, I perform the role of being his mummy, even if what I'm doing is just sitting on the sofa drinking beer and shouting "Oi love 'ee, Mr Frodo!" at various opportune moments at the TV. Now, obviously this doesn't mean I'm not his mother when I'm doing this, but it seems to me that again, this is a self-indulgent act when what I should be doing is watching him sleep and composing odes to his restful slumber or similar. Left brain knows this is tosh. My left brain understands that one can still be someone's mother as you cry "You were robbed of that Oscar, Mr Serkis, robbed, I say!". So, knitting is a salve to the incoherent babbling of my right brain - I am performing the act of being a mother, therefore it's fine. It doesn't matter that I am knitting because I enjoy it, or I like the challenge - if that wasn't the case, I wouldn't do it. I enjoy it, but it also helps on the occasions when he comes home from nursery knackered, goes straight to bed and I hardly see him. It's either knitting or watching little videos we've made of him and crying. I know which option is provides a more conducive household environment...

The path then leads you back onto the main route, giving you good views over the lake. We continued forward, and then took the first right hand turn. This area is definitely not suitable for prams - there are steps and gates and narrow pathways and it would all be very awkward. I like this route, however, because there have some interesting things to look at along this way. This way has information about the history of College Lake, starting with old machinery left over from the days when it was a chalk quarry and going all the way back to the dinosaurs.

We then took the path leading up and off to the left back to the main route. I also wanted to have a look around the second hand book shop that lurks about the Visitor's Centre - I am indeed one of those people who can never resist the lure of a bookshop. I have a particular fondness for women's advice manuals from pre-1960s. None exist in this bookshop, but I did pick up a nice children's book about an elephant who is pen-friends with a penguin.

Children's books acquired, we then continued back to the Visitor's Centre, then home.

Things I Learnt

• After I changed to the 'santa toss' method of getting the Chap on my back, all my back-carrying problems have been solved!
• I can knit, it seems. My next plan is for something a bit more proper than a beginner's pattern... something that involves a tension square to start off with...
• You can get a number of quite varied walks out of College Lake. When I first went, I was pretty sure it was a straight march around a circuit job, but I am glad to find that there's a good amount of choice. It's also good for building up confidence if you're not used to baby wearing for walking.

Tasteless Knitwear For A Hot Water Bottle

Apologies if you came by to read this earlier and found a blank post. Blogger and I are having some... issues... I ask it to schedule something, it schedules it and then promptly moves it to drafts rather than publishing it. Or, when I try and get it to post, deletes the whole thing. Grr...

Anyway, some times ago when I was last ill and my husband had been sent out On A Mission for things like tissues and cold & flu tablets, he also returned with An Unfeasibly Large Hot Water Bottle. It's marvellous. The old one had sprung a leak having survived 10 years of duty as well as the noble service of warming my feet while in labour, and it gave up the ghost.

The positive thing about the replacement Unfeasibly Large Hot Water Bottle is that, being Unfeasibly Large, it stays warm for ever. Or a long time, anyway. The negative thing is that no standard sized hot water bottle cover had been built to take the job on.

Armed with my newfound ability to knit, I adjusted an easy pattern I found in a book (thank you, ability to use ratios) and have knitted an Unfeasibly Large Cover to go over it. Did I march in and cry "Bring me the most tasteless wool in the shop?" I hear you wonder. And how will I ever manage to sleep over the noise of the colour scheme? Time will tell...

Sloe Comfortable... Drink In The Garden

"Hold on a minute!" I heard you cry. "Wasn't there - admittedly quite some time ago - a mention of sloe gin?"

Indeed there was - well remembered; very perceptive of you, if I may be so bold.


Sloe gin and muscarii - Merry Springtime!

I am pleased to announce that finally, finally, and quite a long time after Christmas, the sloe gin is ready. After I tasted it in November and reported its delicate notes of cough mixture and school nurses, I whacked in a fair bit more sugar, shut it in a cupboard and forgot about it.

I am very satisfied with the result! For a change I have created a fruit liquer that doesn't taste of raw ethanol with a hint of fruit! Clearly the extra sugar helped. It is very tasty - still tasting alchohol-y, still sloe-y, still gin-y, and not too sweet.

 I recommend putting a measure into a goblet with some cheap fizzy wine and creating what I shall refer to as... a Kir Prunelle? Kir Faiseur? Kir-de-la-hedgerow?  You don't really mind what it's called once you've got halfway down the glass and are working up to making imperious demands for another...

Baby, I want your socks

I have finished the socks!

I will be honest, one is a little bigger than the other, but (I hope) not disastrously so... They are at least one of my rare crafty type projects where they have actually turned out looking like the should do (I am scarred by years of CDT and Art at school in which nothing ever looked like it should), and I am awfully pleased with them.

Next step? To learn how to knit socks in the round so I don't have to do a lot of faffing round with the tapestry needle once I've finished them...

Finger Food For Fussy Babies

I have briefly mentioned this before, but The Chap  is not a good eater. While other people's babies were being fed puree from 4 months, I looked nodded at the WHO guidelines and decided to hold off til 6 months, and that we would then go the Baby Led Weaning route. In some ways this was a good choice, and in some ways, bad. I wish now I had ignored the guidelines and begun spooning puree down his gullet so he would have got used to eating from a spoon. I now watch other people's babies powering through all manner of cooked vegetables from Tupperware tubs, or accepting a forkful of something or the other from their parents meal.

The Chap does not do this. He does not eat well.

Potatoes. Meat. Most cooked vegetables. Pasta. Savoury purees. Fruit that isn't apples or bananas. Fruit that sometimes is apples or bananas. These are the items that we continue to present him with, and continue to occasionally, grudgingly be brought to his lips, only to sail moments later over the side of the high chair. Even the food he does like (sausages, bread, toast and cream cheese, apples, raisins, dates, Ikea meatballs, pork pies, apple pies, yoghurt, cereals like Shreddies) is often rejected and goes the same way.

It is not unknown for breakfast to consist of a Shreddie, or half a rice cake. Yes, I've been to the Health Visitor. The answer is that I must love the baby I have, and to keep offering variety to him in the hope he will expand his repertoire. It appears to be working, albeit slowly. He will now consent to 2-3 bites of broccoli if presented, or the occasional noodle. And, indeed, he does now bring things to his lips, rather than before when he would pick things up, only to drop them in disgust.

This lack of food I find very worrying. I know it's silly to compare your baby to those of others, and I know he is, at this age, pretty self regulating. It is hard, however, when you put him in a high chair with breadsticks, raisins and an apple in front of him, and he waves his hands about declaring he wants something, but whatever it is is not clear. Banana? Yoghurt? Pork pie? Nope, nope, nope. It all goes sailing over the side of the high chair, and he then works himself up into a frenzy, cries to be taken out of the high chair. This would be fine, but he then spends the next half hour crawling up my legs, sucking his finger and complaining that he's hungry. Offer him food, it is refused. I get to enjoy this farrago five times a day. It's hard.

However, this means that when I make something for him, I want it to be calorie and nutrient rich, because I know at best we have 2 - 3 bites of it before it goes over the side of the high chair.

Here are three recipes the work for my Fussy Fiend. If you have one like mine, maybe they will work for you. Anything is worth a try...

Dried Fruit & Nut Raw Food Bars

This is an adaptation from this recipe given to me by my friend Caroline, but with added bells and whistles. I don't really go for the raw food movement, but this gets fruit (vitamins!) and nuts (protein!) into the Chap, and they taste good, so I'm all for it.

The quantities make more than 3 bars, promise.

Ingredients

70g dates
70g prunes
70g plain cashews
1 tsp tahini
handful of oats

• Stone dates. Put the flesh into a food processor and whizz until the contents of the bowl has stuck together into a big ball of mush. Remove and put into another bowl.
• Repeat with prunes. Put the ball of mush in the bowl with the dates.
• Repeat with cashews until they are ground. Put in bowl with dates & prunes.
• Add a hefty teaspoon of tahini and a handful of oats to the bowl.
• Using your hands, mix the mush together until combined.
• This mixture isn't too sticky usually, so I can then turn it out and roll it on a work surface and then chop it into bars.
• If your mixture is a bit sticky, it is easy to just shape them into bars using your hands. If the mixture is a sticky one and you have a stroppy toddler like I do, the Chap tends to reject it, so if you leave them a couple of days the outside dries a bit and he will then accept them.

Carrot & Apple Soda Bread

This is an adaptation of Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall's Parsnip & Thyme Bread, and is good when we reach a 'I will only eat bread or toast, thank you' phase, and is also good for getting cooked vegetables into him. You can easily replace the parsnips with any root veg you fancy, or, in this case, some fruit too. I haven't tried beetroot yet, but I am excited by the possibility of a jaunty pink loaf. You don't have to use gram flour, and can just use 175g normal self-raising, but gram flour, being from chickpeas, is high in protein, and with a baby that is awkward about meat, the more protein I can shoehorn into him the better.

Ingredients

175g carrot and apple (I used 3 carrots and one small Gala apple)
1 onion
150g self raising flour
25g gram flour
1 egg
1-3 tbsp milk
50g cheddar (or other hard cheese)

• Chop onion and fry in a little oil for 10 mins or so until soft.
• Grate carrot, apple and cheese. Add flour and salt.
• Add softened onion.
• Beat egg, and add most of it to the flour and mix to a soft dough (save the rest of the egg to glaze the loaf). If the dough appears dry, add 1 - 3 tbsps of milk.
• Shape dough to a loaf and brush with egg (or an egg and milk mix)
• Bake at 180 degrees for 40 - 45 mins, or until the bottom of the loaf sounds hollow when tapped.

Peanut noodles

A new addition to the Chap's repertoire, this is a) calorific, b) tasty and c) cheap, and is good for us to share for lunch. It's not good for under ones as it contains honey, and if you worry about your child eating salt or peanuts it's not for you. It works for us, however.

Ingredients

1 tbsp peanut butter
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp groundnut oil
1 tbsp honey
A squidge of garlic puree
1 portion noodles

• Mix peanut butter, soy sauce, oil, honey and garlic puree to form the sauce
• Cook noodles according to packet instructions.
• Drain noodles and return to pan. Pour on sauce and heat through, stirring continuously.

Optional Step

The Chap is a bit suspicious about floppy noodles, so I then transfer the noodles to a frying pan and cook until they are firm on one side, then flip over and cook the other side so you end up with a loose noodle 'cake'.

Tea for the ChapDad

The ChapDad was very pleased last week to find himself a featured Example of Instructable Best Practise (or whatever it's called) with his recipe for Fridge Brewed Tea. If you want an invigorating brew that doesn't make you go all twitchy with caffeine, may I direct you to his method here.

Good results have been had with Christmas Tea teabags (normal English Breakfast tea with added spices) and lemons this week. The jasmine is still my favourite, however.

Birthday Cake - Friday Post Part 2

This is the second of two posts for this Friday, and if you like cake more than walking, then this is the part for you...

I have spoken before of my love of baking and celebratory cakes in general. I find the whole concept of this edible chemistry very pleasing. I'm not one of those people who produces immaculate cookery every day of the week, but for an Occasion, I love to prat around in the kitchen. So with great joy I realised I was now Someone's Mummy, and therefore in position to have to Bake a Birthday Cake. To some people this would fill them with horror, and to you I wish you all the best in your trip to Marks & Spencers. This, however, is My Kind Of Fun. Or at least, I always think it's my kind of fun, until I get halfway through it, find things are more difficult than expected and then swear lavishly at the whole cake-production process. It's an important stage, I find. I do really enjoy it though.

So here, for your delight and delectation, is how to make a pair of baby building blocks cakes for a first birthday, with the Great Birthday Cake Construction began with a day of baking 2 days before the family celebration of the Chap's first birthday...

Building Blocks Cakes - A Halfway Passble First Birthday Cake in 30 Easy Steps

1) Ever keen to make my life more difficult than it needs to be offer guests variety, decide to make 2 sorts of cake. The two on the left of the picture are Nigella Lawson ginger cakes, and the one on the right is a banana bread using my mummy's recipe.

2)Leave to cool and stowed in Tupperware overnight before The Great Day Of Cake Decoration. Feel gratuitiously smug. Aren't you organised?

3)Get up the next morning. Cut the first ginger cake in half and see - to your horror - that the damn thing is still raw in the middle.

4) apply a certain quantity of swearing, followed by cries of 'fetch Nigella!' (The plain sponge cake recipe from Domestic Goddess was employed, and while that was cooking I set about the other cake.).

5) Take one banana bread loaf, cut in two and sandwich together with buttercream to form as close to a cube as you can manage, like this:

6) Measure the sides of your cube, and then cut a cardboard template out to the right size.

7)Roll out marzipan (because a birthday cake without marzipan can be a sad thing indeed), and use your template to measure out enough to cover the four sides. brush cake with apricot jam and then apply the marzipan. A little light cake massage may be required to achieve the correct shape.


8)Cut out a square of marzipan and apply to the top. Mine looked like this:

9)Repeat using fondant icing.

10)Remove cake from oven. Test. Decide it isn't cooked yet. Return to oven.

11)Break out the food colouring and an inexpensive paintbrush. Make imperious demands on your husband to tell you things that start with the letter D. Declare that you haven't got the artistic skills to successfully render a dog in a recognisable form. Settle on ducks and dinosaurs.

12) Use a spare bit of fondant to practise your technique.

13) Furkle through the baby books in search of a satisfactory duck picture to copy.

14) Paint on ducks, dinosaurs, daisies and drums.

15) Remove cake from oven. Test. Decide it appears cooked, but you don't trust it after the ginger cake episode. Return to oven.

16) Faff around.

17) Remove cake from oven. Decide it's probably ok, but give it another 15 minutes.

18) Waste time reading Twitter feeds.

19) Remove cake from oven. Leave to cool.

20) Do other stuff for the afternoon.



21) Once your child is being bathed and put to bed by his father, cut plain sponge cake in half, to find - to your horror - that this cake has had the opposite problem to the ginger cake, and has been overcooked.

22) Have at your sponge cake with a bread knife and whittle out enough edible sponge to form something that may resemble a cube. Or not.


23) Lavishly pad cake to the same height (ish) as the first one using buttercream and jam. Apply apricot jam and add rolled marzipan. Declare that this cake looks nothing like the first - it really isn't a cube shape.

24 a) Use the phrase 'bleedin' nightmare' and 'bloody well going
to Marks & Spencers'

24) Construct false corners for two sides of your cube using marzipan, and press cake into shape using two glass placemats.

25) Add fondant icing. Massage cake again using placemats.

26) Break out the food colouring again. Have a moment of childish giggling with your husband regarding things beginning with the letter C that you really shouldn't paint on the side of your child's birthday cake. Decide cats, cherries, caterpillars and clocks are more appropropriate.

27) Realise you have given your caterpillar far too many legs to be an insect. Declare you intended it to be a centipede all along.

28) Finally finish decorating your cake, some 9 hours later than when you first set out to do it. Sit down for a cuppa and an episode of Being Human.

29) Once dry, cover with cling film and leave overnight.

30) Wake up, observe cake, have a general sense of smugness when the rest of your family see your cake and go 'oo'. Don't mention steps 1 - 29...

The finished cake - a lesson in marzipanning over the cracks....

Lovely Rich Fruit Cake

It's that time of year - the time of year that is as a red rag to a bull to fans of baking. I'm not particularly good at baking (I can't really make things look beautiful, even though they taste nice), but I do love the traditional celebratory fruit cake, laced with brandy and clothed in marzipan and Royal Icing.

The naked Christmas cake, 2011.
It will be iced sometime between the 20th and the 24th, I imagine.

As a child, decorating the Christmas cake was one of my favourite activities of the festive season. There was a set manner in which the cake was decorated - the Royal Icing formed into low peaks (easier than trying to make it completely flat),and then piped with those funny little coloured flowery splodges around the base (I think they're called  drop flowers?). Every year I encouraged my mother to more and more violent colours. I definitely convinced her to do the whole thing mint green one year (it'll be very big in fashion next season), and I think we may even have done a black one. Well, we used black icing; I think it came out a sort of sludgey grey in the end.

Now I am a grown-up, and I get to do my own Christmas cake. It's definitely a thing to be done sparingly - who really has the time to bake something in the oven for four and a half hours more than once a year?

The Cake, 2010.

But I like the time it takes. I like the preparation up to the point where you declare it Time To Do The Cake. I like the way I find myself announcing how I Must Feed The Cake, as if it is some ancient demonic presence in Tupperware that will wreak havoc if I do not mollify it with weekly supplications and brandy.

Getting married is another occasion when you get to eat The Cake. It's also one of those odd times when you are suddenly required to have opinions about things you don't care about. Providing swatches of bridesmaid's dresses so the flowers can match exactly, for example. Cake, however, we found we had Opinions on. My husband insisted that the cake should be round, and that no other shapes were acceptable.

"How about doing a sponge layer for the people who don't like fruit cake?" our cake bakey lady said.

"No!" I intoned, with all the tolerance of Jeremy Clarkson at a Greenpeace meeting. "If they don't like fruit cake then they don't have to have any."

The Cake, 2008

So yes. I love the foolish artistic endeavour of the Christmas cake. It is a lovely thing, and I look forward to icing it, accompanied by festive swearing at a) Delia Smith and b) the electric mixer when I am yet again trying to make the damn stuff form peaks. It's a tradition, after all.

Sloely Sloely Catchy Monkey

For all those hankering after another Sloe-based pun and an update on the gin...

It looks like this and it tastes like cough mixture.

I am hoping that further time thinking about what it's done will improve the situation...

Sloe, Sloe, Quick-Quick...

A playdate fell through this week, so I decided to spend the time I would have been drinking tea on another beverage... sloe gin.

I have tried in the past for fruit liquers, although this is my first foray into sloes. I have a friend who is able to produce marvellous, toothsome, fruity beverages; my efforts usually have the tang of raw ethanol with a hint of fruit.

Still, this doesn't put me off. Armed with a recipe I got from the internet, I went a-foraging in the hedgerows and emerged with a small bag of sloes.

Day One

Recipe

150g sloes
75g caster sugar
35cl gin

• Prick sloes with a pin
• Put sloes, sugar and gin in sterilised jar.
• Shake jar, then place in babyproof cupboard.
• Wait.

It'll take ages for anything to happen, I thought. Like the whole thing is going to go purple overnight? P'ctha!

Day Two - The whole thing went purple overnight.

Still got to wait until Christmas to drink it, though...

Free food!

Well, almost.

One of the benefits of slinging your baby for a walk when he's being an awkward little toad in need of distraction, is that you can wander around the countryside and acquire blackberries and (with a mild act of scrumping) two large apples. These can then be taken home and rendered into one large crumble. Hurrah!

Om nom nom