Stupid sales strategy

I wanted to buy something on Amazon and needed three of them.

At the checkout I needed to adjust my quantity down because I was being restricted to just one item.

I have an Amazon Prime account so bought one item anyway. I tried to go through the buying process immediately to buy another and the site stopped me.

The next day I went back to Amazon and purchased a second item without any problem. 

The day after that I tried to buy another but they were on to me. They wouldn't let me go through checkout. So I used another Amazon account.

This means that instead of paying for one delivery service, Amazon are paying for three deliveries. This makes no sense to me at all.

Mild Panic

Having dealt with solicitors and wills I know that getting my affairs in order would be a really useful thing to do for my children.

I read of Lynda Bellingham's news that she has terminal cancer and has chosen to die naturally by stopping chemotherapy.  

I experience mild panic when I hear things like that because if that were to happen to me then I haven't got things sorted.  My life isn't organised enough for me to die.

When I sort through things I'm keeping in the loft, for example, I try to have rules:

1. Will I need it again in my lifetime?
2. Is it sensible to store this or would I be better to buy another when I need it?
3. If my children were sorting through my affairs would they choose to keep it or ditch it?

I'm not very good at sticking to my own rules and I know that my children won't choose to keep the majority of my belongings.

I'd quite like to ask their advice so I can be more efficient at sorting things but what they say now won't be the same answer I'd get from beyond the grave.

One thing my husband is taking control of is large, bulky photo albums.  We are sorting our photographic life before the digital camera and after the digital camera.  We are getting books printed that contain our memories.  They take up less space and are pre-sorted.

At least we don't have a three piece suite in the loft anymore, although there is a bed there.

I'm not "the hoarder next door" but I would quite like someone else to go through the loft and ditch stuff for me.

I have a horrible feeling though my legacy will be a mess requiring several skips and trips to the tip.

Great Expectations

This is school choice time.  The time of year when pupils and parents visit schools to decide which is best for their little darlings.

We're considering grammar schools for Ethan because he's bright.  That isn't just my opinion  and I am aware parents are prone to over-estimating their offspring's abilities.

Other people tell me Ethan is bright: teachers tell me (as well as telling me his handwriting and presentation is dire), parents tell me because their children sit in the same class as Ethan and that is their view of him, and relatives tell me because Ethan memorises books full of facts and can appear knowledgable through the reciting of these facts.  I am well aware that others at Ethan's school are brighter; they just might exhibit more modesty.

People know Ethan's doing the 11+ exam.  I know how competitive the 11+ is and I am most definitely not sure whether Ethan will do well enough in the exam to gain a place at his school of choice.

Everyone else seems absolutely sure Ethan will do well and will "pass".

The problem with everyone else's expectations is that it piles on the pressure.  The "Oh, he'll be fine!" just increases the stress.  

Nobody wants to fail.  If there are no expectations then there is no failure.  If there are great expectations then there is the opportunity for great failure.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Chocolate fondant pudding

Ethan had been drooling after an episode of The Great British Bake Off and was bemoaning his lack of culinary skill.

I told him to pick something he wanted to cook from my recipe book shelves and we'd give it a try.  If it was something I'd not made before then we'd both learn.  He chose Tana Ramsey's Hot Chocolate Puddings which are chocolate fondants in all but name.

I'd never made these before and I left Ethan to it.  Hannah joined in when she arrived in from school.  They were just the way they should be: cooked on the outside and gooey in the middle.

I needed small pudding moulds.  Posh Silverwood pudding basins are £3.29 each in Steamer Trading Company

Sainsbury, on the other hand, have four non stick pudding moulds for £4.50.

You need six pudding moulds for this recipe.

Ingredients

• 250g plain chocolate (if you'd like it a little sweeter I'm sure milk chic is fine)
• 125g unsalted butter
• 3 eggs
• 2 heaped tbsp caster sugar
• 1 tbsp plain flour (I'm sure gluten free would work)
• 1 tsp vanilla extract

I'm sure you can add orange zest and that would make them very tasty.

 

Method

• Grease your pudding moulds with butter.  I'm sure ramekins would work but turning them out might be trickier.
• Pop butter and choc in a bain marie (bowl over a pan of simmering water and don't let the bowl touch the water)
• In a mixer whisk the eggs, sugar and vanilla extract until frothy.  (You can do by hand if you're a sucker for punishment.)
• Sieve the flour onto egg mixture and fold in.
• When the bain marie has done its job and the butter and chocolate have melted, add it gradually to the egg mixture folding gently with a metal spoon.
• Pour the resultant mixture into the greased pots.
• Rest for a couple of hours.  The puddings, not the cook.  Now we put our puds in the fridge which I think means we could have increased the cooking time by 30 seconds.
• Preheat oven to 180°C (for fan oven) and cook for no more than ten minutes (unless you rested them in the fridge in which case ten minutes and 30 seconds should still be fine.

They are just as they should be with a gooey middle and, whilst we served with ice cream, I think clotted cream would be perfect.

Smart marketing

I'm on too many mailing lists.

I don't mind a lot of the stuff that comes through the letterbox but I do get irritated when it's clear that the company sending me stuff hasn't put any thought into the mailing.

The Great Little Trading Company is a case in point.

I have bought from them when my children were younger but my children are now of an age where the GLTC products aren't suitable. My family has outgrown that retailer.

Surely there is a profile that would indicate that I'm no longer worth the investment.  I probably haven't bought anything for over five years.

Why are they wasting their money on me? Why aren't they applying a data-based approach to their CRM strategy.

Just doing the same old thing just because you always have isn't a good enough reason.

Use analysis and data to drive your strategy. Mailing everyone on your list is lazy and wasteful.

Savoury cake recipe

Ian made this and brought it in to the office yesterday.  At my request he brought the recipe in today.  The recipe used cup measurements, Fahrenheit oven temperatures and imperial loaf tin size.  So I've taken all of this and made it look like a normal recipe.
The concept is a cake like texture in a loaf tin but with savoury elements providing the flavour instead of sugar.  It's a very healthy option, I think.

Ingredients

• 250g plain flour
• 1tbsp baking powder
• 4 eggs (I used large eggs)
• 60ml milk
• 60ml plain yoghurt - I didn't have this in the fridge so I made my own buttermilk with milk and a dash of lemon juice and used that instead
• 160ml olive oil
• salt and pepper to taste
• Savoury filling - I used 150g cooked chopped chorizo, half a cooked chopped pepper, half a cooked chopped onion and chopped double Gloucester to the same volume as chorizo.  The recipe calls for 140g French sausage or salami (finely chopped), a handful of pistachios  (roughly chopped) and a handful of prunes.  The idea is to use up leftover bits and bobs that happen to be in the fridge.  

Method

• Preheat the oven to 180°C (for fan oven) and line a 400g loaf tin (loaf tins are sold in two sizes - this is the smaller of the two sizes).
• Put the flour, baking powder and savoury bits into a bowl and mix.  This coats the filling in flour and helps individual bits to stay suspended in the mixture when baked.
• Put the eggs in a separate bowl and whisk until thick and pale in colour.  Gradually add the milk, yoghurt, oil and seasoning, whisking all the time.
• Fold in savoury flour mixture.  Scrape/pour/tip into loaf tin and bake for 40 mins or until an inserted skewer comes out without any cake mixture clinging to it.

I'll be slicing this and freezing it.  For packed lunches I'll be grabbing a slice from the freezer in the morning which will defrost by lunchtime.

Planning

Planning food isn't really my thing.  

I generally buy ingredients and then invent ways to combine them.  Recipes are for cakes, bread and pastries not for a pasta dish, risotto or jacket spud.  My home cooking really isn't very inspired.

But I found this, which I quite like.  Tesco Meal Planner.

I haven't used it, but I think I might.  I know Tesco has been in the news today because they don't seem to be very good at counting (massive profit overstatement) but they can get some things right.

Parental sexism

Hannah took the 11+ two years ago. Ethan took it this weekend.

I remember thinking there were a lot of girls in the same boat as Hannah when she went through the process but I was not prepared for the number of boys who took the exam at the same time as Ethan.

It might be just perception, but I'm fairly sure there were far more boys doing the exam this year than there were girls when Hannah sat the exam.

I wondered if this might have anything to do with birth rates, and it could.  There are probably a thousand other, plausible explanations, including my faulty memory, but I just wonder whether one of them is sexism.

Do we expect more of our boys? Do we care more about their education?

I discussed this with a friend who had sisters and one brother. The girls all went to the local school, the brother went to a private school.

I'm not asking whether you specifically give your son's education more thought than your daughter's, but do you?

Or is this something that we don't realise is happening because it's unconscious and is only obvious at a societal  level?

Or is this just the mad and crazy imagining of a mother who doesn't have a clue what she's talking about?

Supper darling? Darling supper.

I've been to a few supper clubs.  Thought you might be interested.

Katherine (@mustardseedcook on Twitter) runs occasional supper clubs from her home.

A supper club is an occasion in which one opens one's house up to people willing to pay for your cooking.

The most recent one I've attended at Katherine's house had a Mexican theme.  I booked, in advance, with friends.  Other people also booked and we all turned up hungry with BYO bottles in our hand on Friday evening.

Katherine starts with a theme which evolves into a menu.  The price is fixed in advance, a deposit taken with payment finished after the meal.

Katherine turns one of the rooms in her house into a dining area for up to 24 people.

It's a relaxed environment where you can be with friends, or meet new people, or both.

 

Mixed emotions

Just after I'd got to work, plugged the laptop into the docking station, sat down with a cuppa and opened my email there was a call on my phone.

The owner of the company building the flats next door to us was on the line.

He opened with "Are you in a good mood?" to which my rejoinder was "Why? What have you done?"

It transpires the builders have knocked our wall over.

This will be the long, single skin, six foot high wall that separates us from the building site.

Nobody was hurt.

My initial reaction was boiling rage but I suppressed that and asked how bad the damage was. John (the contractor) didn't know so I asked for someone to send me pictures.

He apologised and we talked about possible solutions; either a patch fix or a new wall.

Apparently the wall wasn't pointed on the side of construction so they had wanted to build a new wall anyway.

We had been told by other contractors working on our property that single skin walls shouldn't be six foot high.  I had been worried it would be knocked either by construction traffic or by residents' vehicles once construction was complete.

So the good news is that the children weren't hurt and this might result in a new, more substantial wall.

I don't know what other damage I might encounter but I can't undo what's happened.

The initial anger lasted a while and resulted in a fair amount of venting once the phone call finished.

The anger was replaced by nervousness because the extent of the damage was still unknown.

I'm sure I'm working through a cycle of emotions and, at some point, I'll get to acceptance. I'm not quite there yet.

Dentists

I visited the dentist the other day.

I hate visiting the dentist.  I hate the intrusion; someone I barely know sticking their fingers, mirrors and sharp, pointy, metal instruments into my mouth.

And does anyone else experience jaw ache after a dentist visit?  It hurts to eat and open my mouth and it's over a day since my ordeal.

I had a couple of x-rays while I was there.  No reason for them other than it had been a while since I had some.  That was horribly uncomfortable; being asked to bite down on some hard, sharp plastic to keep the film in place.

And then there's the scrape and polish which just sounds disgusting.  The "something and something" as a medical procedure.  I don't know why but it makes me think of D&C which is a very unpleasant connotation.

So scraping and polishing means using what my dentist calls the "Instrument of torture" combined with a metal scraping tool to clean the teeth.  When that ultrasonic thing hits the gum and not the tooth my nails dig into my palm to divert my attention away from my discomfort.

And the dentist said it would feel good afterwards.  It didn't.  My teeth felt scratchy and sharp and not good sharp.  

And because I don't know any better I have to trust that what the dentist is telling me is true.  In this case there was no work required but if had said "Five root canals needed to day Mrs Cardus" then I wouldn't have known whether he was right or not.  I'd have said "Er, OK" and gone along with it because that's what you do.

I posted that I felt "a little violated" after a dentist visit.  I seemed to be alone as nobody else felt the same way.  Just me?  Really?

Bounty bar

Julia recommended using coconut oil on hair about 20 mins before washing it and then washing it but not using conditioner.

I bought some coconut oil for the first time. Weird stuff. It's a solid until at body temperature when it turns to liquid.

I did as Julia recommended and it works quite well (but I found it easier to use conditioner too.)

I also did as the packaging recommended and used it as a moisturiser. It does this job very well but does leave you smelling of desiccated coconut.

The children don't like the smell of coconut and ran away when I went near them.  To overcome this I use the coconut oil followed by cocoa butter moisturiser. This means I smell like a Bounty chocolate bar.

This makes me hungry.

Boys books

If you're stuck to choose a book for a ten year old boy who do you ask for advice. Well you could visit a bookshop and ask in there or you could ask in a library. Or you could steal into someone's house and take a peek at what's on the bookshelves of a ten year old boy.

Ethan is ten and has a good reading age. These are the books on his bookshelves.

There are more books downstairs and on the landing but these will do for starters.

Based on this selection what would you recommend he read next?

Bruno, our housekeeper

A few weeks ago I was looking at the mess we make as a family, particularly anywhere where food and children come together, but also where food preparation and I collide.

I needed a solution.  Yes, I could haul the vacuum cleaner out from under the stairs.  Alternatively I could grab the pathetic handheld vacuum cleaner from another cupboard.

Both of these require regular effort and I am inherently lazy.

So I bought a Roomba and so far, so good.

We've called him Bruno because to give him a female name would be to assign a traditional female stereotypical role and that would be wrong (I live in a feminist household - what did you expect?).

Additionally Roomba sounds a bit like Rumba which is a latin dance.  Out of the Strictly Come Dancing judges, Bruno is the most latin so...

Bruno gets turned on every day, usually while I'm out, and he tours the ground floor of the house in a somewhat random and haphazard manner sweeping, brushing and sucking as he goes.

He's not terribly handsome but he is quite effective.

He needs attention daily because he's quite small and needs emptying daily.  His brushes also need regular maintenance because his brushes end up tangled with hair from Hannah and me.  But it beats the heck out of regular hand vac'ing.

Stay calm and draft an email

We are living next to a building site.

I understand that building sites are noisy, dirty places but that doesn't mean I have to like it. 

When work started on the over-priced, under-sized flats next door I checked to find out when I could expect activity over the wall. I discovered that there is a "Considerate Contractor" document on the Council website that outlines the hours that a considerate contractor will work. These are 08:00 until 18:00 on weekdays and 08:00 until 13:00 on Saturday. 

Today, a Saturday, builders arrived on site at 07:20 and were making a racket within ten minutes. Today's jobs required heavy machinery and industrial power tools. At 17:00 the power tools were still giving us 90db as measured in our garden. This stopped us from enjoying the garden and Ethan spent quite a bit of time being angry in the garden whilst wearing ear defenders. 

The builders, however, don't appear to regard their hearing with the same respect. Nobody over the wall today was wearing ear protection. But they don't seem to have much regard for Health and Safety generally. They don't wear hi-vis jackets, hard hats, eye protection or harnesses either. 

Today they were managing RSJs including cutting them with a circular saw with sparks and tiny metal shards flying around. The operator was wearing shorts and a t-shirt without goggles and ear defenders. 

While one crane operator lifted a lump of steel up the storeys, the chap up at top receiving it was wearing neither hi-vis jacket or hard hat. 

Their health and safety is their concern but their complete disregard for my right to enjoy my outdoor space does bother me. I try hard to ignore it. I try hard to be completely OK about it, but I can't. I started the day annoyed when they turned up forty minutes early. My anger escalated as the hours beyond one o'clock passed and as the noise from over the wall continued. 

My frustration and anger achieves nothing. Writing too the contractor will achieve nothing. Writing to the Council will v achieve nothing but I'll draft an email anyway.

Scorned

I have an iPhone and it's a dog. 

Apple are clearly very annoyed with me because it's been a while since I upgraded. I have gone through the £55 battery replacement but that's the only money Apple have had from me for a while. 

I believe that Apple have somehow degraded the performance of my phone. I've read that there's evidence of Apple iPhone performance degradation when a newer model is launched. Apparently Samsung products don't experience the same issue. 

My phone is slow with battery life that means that one charge doesn't last a day of light use. I've seen the gumpf on the new iPhones and there's nothing that floats my boat. The phone I have does everything I need, it just does it too damn slowly. The phone freezes all the time which drives me mad. 

I'm just annoyed with Apple for spoiling the phone that I was very happy with. I don't want a new phone but my current phone is becoming unusable. 

I understand that this created obsolescence pushes normal customers to buy a new iPhone but I'm not a normal customer; I'm a woman scorned.

Sticky ginger cake with lemon icing

We had a birthday in the house today and the need for a cake.  The birthday boy isn't really a fan of cakes with buttercream and lots of decoration.  Whilst he's a Londoner by birth he harks back to maternal Yorkshire roots where cake preference is concerned. 

I searched and found the perfect recipe.

Here's what you need to do to make the same.

Ingredients

• 225g self-raising flour
• 1 tsp bicarb of soda
• 1 tbsp ground ginger (I read this wrong and used just 1 tsp)
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1 tsp ground mixed spice
• 115g unsalted butter
• 115g dark muscovado sugar
• 115g black treacle
• 115g golden syrup
• 250ml milk (any kind of milk)
• 85g drained stem ginger (grated) - grating this isn't easy and if you don't have a rotary grater then I recommend chopping finely
• 1 egg

Icing

• 50g icing sugar
• 1 tsp finely grated lemon zest
• Syrup from stem ginger jar

Method

• Preheat oven to 160°C if a fan oven.
• Butter and line an 18cm (7inch) deep cake tin.
• Put flour, bicarb and spices into a mixing bowl.
• Cube the butter and add to the flour mix.
• Rub butter into flour until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs and put to one side.
• Put the sugar, treacle, syrup and milk into a saucepan and heat whilst stirring gently until the sugar has dissolved.
• Once the sugar is dissolved, take the mixture to just below the boiling point.
• Add the stem ginger to the flour mixture and then add the treacle mixture, stirring all the time. I added the treacle mixture while the beater was whirring on the mixer.
• Add the egg to the mixture and beat until the mixture is combined and it resembles a thick pancake batter.  My mixture wasn't a terribly thick mixture.
• Pour into the tin and bake for about an hour or until it passes the skewer test.
• Leave to cool in the tin.
• The cake can be frozen at this point if desired.
• Mix the icing sugar with the lemon zest and the stem ginger syrup until you have a gloomy icing mix.  I put this icing in an icing bag and I made more than the recipe said to allow for waste.  If you didn't use an icing bag you could drizzle the icing from a spoon.
• The cake can be stored for up to two weeks and improves with age.

 

For canine commitment-phobes

Like the idea of a dog but think it's too much of a commitment?

Want a dog but you'd quite like to borrow one for a while to see if it'd work out?

Like the idea of getting exercise by taking a dog for a walk but don't actually want to live with a dog full time?

Would you be interested if I said all if the above was possible?

There are many centres around the country that re-home retired greyhounds and the nearest one to me is the Brentwood Retired Greyhounds Trust at Ashwells .

Ashwells Retired Greyhounds is home to 50 greyhounds who are all looking for their forever homes.  

All of the dogs need to be walked daily.  If you can spare an hour or so on any day of the week then the greyhounds would be delighted to see you (as would the kennel staff).  There aren't enough kennel staff to walk all of the dogs so the trust is reliant on volunteers to provide some exercise for the dogs.

The kennel opening hours are 09:30-12:30 every day and you can just turn up.  

The address is Suffolk House in Ashwells Road, Pilgrims Hatch, Brentwood CM15 9SG. The telephone number is 01277 373799 and the website is http://brentwood.retiredgreyhounds.co.uk  

You never know, you might fall in love.

 

Comfort Food - curry

Jamie Oliver reckons you'll want to cook up a proper posh chicken tikka masala.

Well you might.  Or you might get a takeaway.  Or you might buy a ready meal.  Or you might make a curry at home, either throwing ingredients together (my method) or by following a recipe.

What you're unlikely to do, is dig a pit in your garden for an impromptu fire.

You're also unlikely to have a few frying pans lying around that you don't mind using on an open fire in the middle of your garden.  I'm not sure what you do when you've finished with the fire.  Do you fill it in and try and sow grass to put it back the way it was or do you leave a gaping hole in your lawn ready to trip up the unsuspecting?

I'm not quite sure how far ahead one needs to plan to cook this meal or how long one is expected to live with the changes it required.  If there are special frying pans kept for cooking on the fire do they need to be stored in the kitchen or would they be stored in the shed?  I'm not clear.

The other thing I'm very clear you'll want to do is buy the 26 ingredients.  Yes, 26.  I'm not even sure my weekly grocery shop has more than 26 different food items.  I am being a little harsh here because many of the ingredients are store cupboard staples but who likes cooking something with so many different ingredients?  Especially for a Friday night curry with the lads (which is the way this particular dish was presented.)

Let's address the Friday night curry idea.

You've had a full day at work and you rush home via the shops to buy what's on the extensive ingredients list. Then it's beers in a fridge and get changed into gardening clothes.  Dig a fire pit and nip to a local garage or wood to collect firewood.  Make the fire, because for Jamie's fire you need a fire that's been burning for a while.  Put beers in the fridge (trust me, after going through the prep for this meal you will need beer.) Make a marinade and then bung the chicken in the marinade (the minimum marinade time is two hours). At this point you'll probably need a shower and a change of clothes.

Once you're refreshed you'll be opening the door to your mates because they're probably hungry.

You can't relax though because you need to make the sauce.  Once the sauce is made you need to cook the chicken.  At some point you'll also be making your own parathas.  Whilst you're doing all of this you'll be making your guests comfortable, tending to the fire and ensuring everyone has a beer in their hand.

Am I the only one whose thinking a take out is probably easier, (cheaper) and less stressful?

Comfort food

I caught a bit of Jamie Oliver's Comfort Food this evening (in between helping Hannah with History homework and Ethan with English homework). The two snippets I saw covered the cheese toaster and chicken tikka masala. 

I understand the premise for the show; the idea is to take the nation's favourites and make them a little more special. 

Let's look at these two, cheese toastie first. Jamie's cheese toastie was a cheddar and red leicester sandwich (white bread) which was fried, both sides and then enhanced with a cheese crown and bottom.

 I don't know about you but a cheese toastie is my "I've got in late and I've been drinking to much" snack. I toast bread (whatever is in the bread bin) then add butter or spread, bung cheese on top (whatever is in the fridge - probably mature cheddar) and grill until oozy. 

I don't think drunk people should be encouraged to operate a frying pan and manipulate melted cheese. 

I don't know what Jamie's thinking. He also suggests it is a suitable dish for breakfast. He's wrong. It's drunk food. 

I'll cover chicken tikka masala tomorrow but I think you can guess where I'm coming from.