Snow days

Sledging: traditional British winter activity

It's day three in the ice bound house. The snow started on Tuesday and schools across Essex, and the country, were closed the following morning. It's been like that since then. There have been the usual moans that we're a country that falls apart at the first sign of a bit of snow, and why can't we be more like Switzerland/Norway/Germany... anywhere but here.
To be fair to the school first of all, this is the first time in more than six years that bad weather has closed it. I'm sure things will be back to normal on Monday - we're expecting a bit of a thaw from tomorrow. Then this little break will be filed under cultural enrichment.
So, what have we been up to?

What we've done

Tattie soup: with sprouts

• Went sledging, obviously. That's twice in one winter my £10 purchase has been used - more than we've managed in the past five years, and we're heading out again today I hope.
• Made cakes and biscuits.
• Composed a space opera. Number one son took the opportunity to work out a rather dystopian sounding piece on his keyboard. The weather made it seem even more ominous.
• Made potato heads for World Book Day. Sadly these haven't been taken to school - don't know if Harry Potato-er and Dumbledore will make it through the weekend.
• Fed the birds.
• Made soup.
• Cleared snow from my the neighbour's steps (polishing my halo as we speak).
• Rearranged the office slightly - CDs now in the next room.
• Read books.
• Worried about global warming, but less about Trump.
• Got new cyclocross wheels on my new (to me) cross bike.

Snow tree: actually from earlier in 2018

What we haven't done

• Ridden our bikes.
• Panic bought anything.
• Made a snow man - it's the wrong kind of snow. Too powdery.
• Seen many people.
• Driven the car?
• Thought as much about Brexit.
• I haven't done much work, as I haven't had any, so I should probably add 'Worried about lack of work' to the first list.
• Been proactive.

What we could have done

• Been proactive.
• More craft activities.
• Played board games - not sure why we haven't done more of this. The kids have actually been very good at entertaining themselves (that's my get out clause anyway). Their games tend to be mind-bogglingly complex, especially if the eldest is in charge (i.e. all the time), and being a bear of little brain, it's probably best that I excuse myself.
• The 1,000-piece Minion jigsaw puzzle that the younger one won in a story writing competition last year (I'll just drop that humblebrag in there as a bit of catch up on what's been happening of late).
• Demanded that school reopens, or started up some home schooling activities :)
• We could have been out more. I gladly cleared the neighbour's steps yesterday as I was getting cabin fever.

Winterval: Abbey Fields Colchester

What have we learned

• Snow days pass very slowly.
• Being freelancers, we're lucky we didn't have to go anywhere.
• After initial mad forays into the snow, the kids are quite apathetic about it. Yesterday they didn't get out of their pyjamas.
• Not all snow is equal. The powdery stuff won't even hold a snowball. It is very beautiful however.
• That it doesn't really matter. This little three-day event will soon be a memory - hopefully a pleasant one.
• Local Budgens doesn't sell logs beyond about late February. We could have done with some of late - there's nothing like a real fire when it's cold outside.
• The house is a lot warmer than the first couple of winters we were in here, thanks to better insulation. Back then we were wearing hats in bed and waking up with cold noses.

Are we really rubbish at doing winter? Were we better at it in the past? I don't know really. Generally we have better cars, better clothing and better communications. People are by and large kind and help each other out at times like this. We sort of know what we should do, although we don't always do it - much like life generally. 

It's starting to melt.

Tracks: cat I think

Dads in the kitchen (what am I gonna do)

Happy New Year and all. I've been too busy denying myself alcohol this month to write anything meaningful or otherwise. Normal service will be resumed etc.

So apologies dear reader for yet another cut and paste from my Colchester NCT magazine column - available in no good newsagents. This issue we're pondering the politics of food preparation a.k.a. who's making the flipping tea tonight.

Fruity platter: digital media, £45,000

When I was a child I reckon that about 90 per cent of my meals were provided by women: my mum; my gran; aunties; friends’ mums, and school dinner ladies. My dad could cook, but he kept his powder dry for special occasions, such as the Sunday roast, Christmas dinner and barbecues. He also had a penchant for exotic new dishes, such as spaghetti bolognaise, which was about as far out as things got in the area of rural Scotland where I grew up. Maybe it still is.

The everyday grind of turning out breakfast, lunch and dinner was given over to my mum, despite the fact that she also worked. It was just the way things were in those days.

As a consequence I was largely brought up on convenience food. My mum was one of the first generations of women to benefit from the widespread availability and relative cheapness of processed food. She was also a sucker for TV advertising. My sister and I used to joke that whenever there was a new product advertised on TV, we would be seeing it on our plates next week. We were brought up on fish fingers, potato waffles, crispy pancakes and frozen pizzas. Whatever veg we shuffled to the side of our plates inevitably came from a tin.

Well, it never did me no harm!

Fast forward 30 years or so, and haven’t things changed! Thanks to Jamie, Gordon and a host of other TV chefs, cooking has been reinvented as a suitably male friendly activity – it’s competitive, has lots of gadgets and even more swearing - and the kitchen is no longer a place where we dads fear to tread. Dads are as likely to be hustling everybody out of the kitchen to make room for their cheffy touches as they are to be banging cutlery on the table and demanding to be fed.

But it’s no longer enough to shuttle a frozen offering from freezer to microwave, et voila, dinner is served! Nowadays, parents can spend as long fretting about the provenance of the food they serve their children as they do cooking it. Is it local enough; is it GM free; is it Fairtrade? And that’s before it has even felt the hot side of a frying pan.

I’m as guilty of this as the next new man. I’ve certainly gone down a different route to that taken by my parents. By and large we cook meals from scratch, try and use fresh vegetables as much as possible, and try to all eat together. And I do a lot of the cooking. It’s something I love to do.

One of the reasons, besides innate greed, is that it’s a great way of bonding with our kids. Like many NCT parented children, both of our boys were breast fed, for the first year, which seems to have given them a great start.

It does however limit a dad’s involvement in the early stages of childhood. Unless your wife or partner is expressing milk, or you are mixing feeding, there isn’t a lot dad can do to interject into this cosy little relationship.

So the introduction of solids is a happy time for dads, as they can start to become more involved with feeding. This is probably of great relief to partners as well, as they can share a bit more of the burden. It’s a time for dads to step up to the hot plate and start showing off their finely honed chef skills.

Or maybe not. In as much as cooking for children can be fun and fulfilling, it can also be a soul destroying affair. There is little appreciation of your efforts and little discernment. A carefully crafted, nutritious, homemade meal will inevitably be trumped by a turkey twizzler and chips. Kids don't really care about provenance or how long it took to make. They care about having something that they recognise and having it now, or five minutes ago.

Food in the early stages of weaning also bears little resemblance to anything you might want to eat yourself. I couldn’t believe it when our eldest actually liked Annabel Karmel’s misleadingly named ‘lovely lentils’. There was little to love as far as I could see, but as he seemed to appreciate them, I cooked up a vat and froze huge quantities for future meals. Job done!

Except that as quickly as he’d taken to them, he went off them. I still recall the look on Jamie’s face as he decided to eject them from his mouth – never again. I can’t remember what we did with the rest of the batch.

Tastes change though and soon enough children start to eat similar foods to us. It’s not just food as fuel though. Food is also part of bonding. I used to take Jamie to a singing class when he was a toddler. Afterwards we would head to the local playground and then to a lakeside café where we’d always eat the same thing – a shared plate of scrambled eggs and smoked salmon on toast. I was inordinately pleased at his sophisticated tastes. I had no idea that salmon came in any other form than canned until I was a lot older. Each time we went to the café he’d eat a bit more and I’d have less.

As the children get older, cooking becomes another of the activities that we enjoy together. Just occasionally mind you. I’m too much of a prissy chef to let them run riot too often. Cakes are a favourite, unsurprisingly, particularly licking the spoon and bowl clean. What child hasn’t enjoyed that?

For dads who work unsociable hours, cooking is a great way to show that you know that family meals are important. Doing a bit of cooking can give your partner a break and brings you closer to your children. Even if you’re not much of a cook you can rustle up a signature dish or two that only you can do just how the children like it. As much as the temptation may be to sit back and wait for somebody else to cook the bacon you have brought home, it can be much more fulfilling to prepare the food that your children are going to eat.

And if the resulting mealtime is loud, chaotic and messy, who’d have it any other way?

Cooking with kids

First catch your child...

I do most of the cooking in our house. It's something I really enjoy and I think I'm not bad at it, but this evening's effort brought home to me how degraded my skills have become.

The thing about cooking for children is that there is little appreciation for your efforts and little discernment. A carefully crafted, nutritious, homemade meal could inevitably be trumped by a turkey twizzler and chips. Kids don't really care about provenance or how long it took to make. They care about having something that they recognise and having it now, or five minutes ago.

This relentless drive to get food on the table at an allotted time is what makes cooking drudgery, and it's why women of my mother's generation turned to convenience foods as their saviours. I can well remember as a child the close correlation between what was advertised on TV one week and what appeared on your plate the next. Crispy pancakes, chicken nuggets, and my particular favourite crispy batter fish fingers. I loved these so much that I'm sure I had them every day for a week until I was completely sick of them.

Anyway, I'm enough of guilty Jamie and Hugh disciple  to try and go down a different route (as well as being a hypocrite for denying my children the tasty treats I so enjoyed). By and large we cook meals from scratch, try and use fresh vegetables as much as possible. However this can take so long that inevitably you end up eating the same as the kids. This in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. It's good for the family to eat together. The problem is that I don't always feel like eating at 5.30 when the kids do. And the lack of seasoning and adult flavourings like chili, does result in slightly bland fare.

The upshot is that I'm falling, ever so slightly out of love with cooking. I don't get many chances to indulge my love of cheffy touches these days. It's a bit more of a bish, bash, bosh approach. Hence tonight's meal, which was a hurried Annabel Karmel salmon tagliatelle, albeit with a few ingredients missing. It just looked a bit of a mess to me, and I cooked it.

Of course, the kids loved it!