The only slight problem with this is that both seem to have occurred in our kitchen.
Many life-affirming things happen in our kitchen. My signature dish of toasted bacon sandwich is obviously a highlight, as is the making of really quite passable cappuccinos, utilising the bargain espresso machine we picked up reduced to clear. True, it is made almost entirely of a type of plastic seemingly designed specifically to absorb liquid coffee, but it’s rather unpleasant brown-stained exterior is forgiven as it brings forth a decent fluffy beverage.
Living in a terraced house, the kitchen is also the portal through which everything ‘out the back’ has to pass to get to the front, including the lawnmower. I suppose I could walk all the way along the terrace at the back, but I’ve been enjoying the expressions on the faces of our neighbours when I emerge from the front door with a lawnmower. Especially as we have no lawn.
Being an allotmenteerist, this time of year involves desperately trying to figure out what to do with the sudden glut of fruit and veg. Our ancient fridge has been groaning even more than usual (which is a worry) as it desperately tries to contain a bounty of beans.
Our relatively tiny apple tree has produced so much fruit this year that I’m convinced it’ll probably take the rest of the decade off to recover. A couple of hundred apples have moved into our kitchen in the last fortnight, with a further batch of the suicidal ones that leapt to their doom collected, battered and bruised, and taken into work for a colleague’s pigs.
After spending an entire weekend peeling apples last year, we invested in an ingenious device that, at the wind of a handle, peels, slices, then cores in a matter of seconds. I’d shake whoever invented it’s hand, were mine not so dripping with apple juice and weak with RSI from rotating the handle for hours.
Apart from eating them, we’ve had apple pies, made several varieties of chutney and yet there are still three carrier-bags bulging at their seams on the floor, and more still on the tree. Although our allotment is a mile away, I think I can hear them taunting me. Following the chutney marathon was last weekend, our house still has the curious, and faintly disturbing, odour of boiled fruit, onions and vinegar, which I’m hoping no visitors take as us attempting to embalm something surreptitiously. Standing in the miasma of steam emanating from the hob-sized maslin pan was a psychedelic trip that I still can’t wash out of my clothes. The compost bin, fattened by tons of apple-cores and peelings, smells like a week-old explosion in a cider factory.
We may now be one of the few households in the UK to have an entire cupboard devoted to chutney.
On the bright side, as long as I have cheese, I’m sorted for a decent sandwich until at least 2016.
This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column in the North West Evening Mail on the 18th of October 2013. You can view the version used by the paper on their website here
It received a minor five word trim, and I've decided that I really am not so pedantic as to attempt to figure out which words have gone. Although, trust me, the voice in my head really, REALLY, wants to.
In the great world of home produce, today was jam day, with a batch of some dayglo pink stuff made with blackberries, rhubarb and apple. We've christened it 'Blrubap! Jam', which sound faintly street, blood, fo' shizzle, innit. Yeah.
I probably shouldn't have licked the spoons, bowl, maslin pan, wooden spoon and every other implement afterwards, as I currently contain more sugar than Tate & Lyle's main depot.
(Compilation CDs? Hell yes - will probably still be typing that in January. Tonight's is called "The Rare Groove Mix", featuring 70 hits of the 70s mixed together. They aren't rare. I feel cheated, and a bit dirty...)
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