Poetology

I've been studying like a frantic thing this week. With barely twelve days to go until I start college, I'm trying to get a grip on the whole reflexology theory doo-dah malarkey by reading as many books as I can find, backed up by research on the good old interwebbly. I've been making notes. I've been trying to apply different techniques to my own feet which is quite tricksy as I am, in effect, working upsidedown, and to be honest, I can't cock my leg up quite as far as I want to. I've started making notes, have taken to wandering round the house chanting the names of bones in feet, muscle structures and the associated locations of specific reflex points. At the hairdressers today, I got chatting to one of the stylists whose mum has regular reflexology for her thyroid problem and I caught myself thinking ' plantar foot, base of big toe, walk ball of foot times 6,' but luckily I didn't say it out loud.

But what I liked about yesterday's study - '8 moves for pre-treatment relaxation' - was finding out they had such poetic names. You start with the Angel Touch, then move on to Apollo's Breath. Then Atlas's Orb, Poseidon's Pull, the Healing Tornado, followed by Toe Rotations, Hermes Stretch and the grand finale, Phoenix Rising. How fab is that?!

The four basic techniques used in the actual treatment sound less romantic - walking, circles, hooking and rocking - yet they still have an air of comfort about them.

I am really looking forward to starting this course. I just hope my brain won't let me down.

This week, I have also been dazzling Andy and Heather with a range of creative vegetarian recipes. You'd think vegetarian cooking would be a doddle, wouldn't you? Not if you don't want to die of jacket potato boredom it isn't. I am beginning to think it was much easier to slap a bit of meat down on a plate with some veg. But I've been veggie for 5 months now and have no inclination to go back to carniverous ways.

So this week, with various cookery books balanced against various kitchen surfaces that are becoming increasingly swamped with various herbs and spices, I have presented to the hungry masses 1) rice and lentil pilau (a hit both hot and cold) 2) red lentil and ricotta lasagne (mild enthusiasm, remains are still languishing in bottom of fridge 3) veggie shepherds pie (a hit with Andy who took the remains to work the next day for his lunch, not a hit with Heather whose plate was left languishing in the oven for over an hour as she was on a late finish at work and the cooker did a magnificent drying job on her food) 4) sweet potato streudel (a HUGE hit, can we have it again?) and 5) random leftovers risotto ( a hit, but leave the veggie parmesan off Andy's because it smells of cat sick. Apparently).

And because there was much tolerance of my vegetarian experiments this week, I bought Andy some proper meat sausages made from proper dead pig for tea tonight. Heather has gone to visit a friend and is probably gorging on animal flesh as we speak! I had veggie sausages, and very nice they were, too!

Vegetarian Ham

Grace from Year 8 popped her head around my classroom door yesterday. It was lunchtime, and as usual I was eating 'n' marking at the same time, and trying to scrape the pips of a particularly exuberant tomato from an essay on 'Of Mice and Men.'

'Eeurgh!' said Grace, looking at my lunch box. 'You on a diet, or sumfin'?'

I looked at my lunch. A multi-seed bagel with cream cheese, some cucumber, salad leaves, tomato and celery, a few nuts and a banana.
'No,' I said. 'This is what I usually eat.'
'You should to eat junk,' said Grace. 'I do.'
'Right,' I said.
'So, don't you eat burgers?' said Grace. 'And what's that?'
'It's a Brazil nut,' I said. 'And no, I don't eat burgers. I don't eat meat. I'm vegetarian.'
'Is burger meat?' said Grace, genuinely surprised.
'Yes,' I said. 'It's cow.'
'God,' said Grace. 'Did you see that programme about India, and chopping up cows and turning them inside out and scraping their skins and making them into handbags. Eugh, it was disgusting. All blood and fat and cows with no heads.'

I stopped chewing my bagel. 'No, I didn't,' I said. 'But it sounds like the kind of programme that put me off eating meat.'
'Yeh. Poor cows,' said Grace. 'We was eating take-away at the time and I thought, 'I ain't eating any more of this. But then I did. What about chicken? Is chicken meat?'
'Yes,' I said. 'And I have chickens in my garden.'
'Do they give you eggs?' said Grace.
'They do,' I said.
'So what if you eat an egg and it's really a chick?' said Grace.
'That won't happen,' I said.
'Why not?' said Grace.

Oh blimey, I thought. Here we go.

'Well, to get chicks, the eggs have to be fertile. And for that you need a boy chicken. A cockerel. And all my chickens are girls.'
'Are you sure?' demanded Grace.
'Positive,' I said.
'I like bacon,' said Grace. And she paused in a whistful bacon-sandwich dream moment. 'Do you eat bacon?'
'No, it's meat. From a pig,' I said.
'Blimey,' said Grace. 'What about ham? That's good for you.'
'Again, it's pig. And full of salt. Not good for your blood pressure,' I said.
'I told my mum I was fed up of being fat,' said Grace, who, I have to admit, is a tad tubby, but not that I would worry about.
'And she said, 'Well, what are you going to do about it?' Grace continued. 'And I said 'Eat salad and do trampolining.'
'It's an idea,' I agreed. 'You could try growing some salad. It's really easy.'
'Trampolining is okay,' said Grace. 'But it gets boring after a while. Up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down...' And then her face lit up.
'What about sausage rolls?' she said triumphantly. 'I bet they haven't got any meat in them!'

And I guess in some cheap brand, cost-cutting way, she could well be right.

'Sorry, Grace,' I said. 'But sausage rolls come from pigs, too.'
'Bugger,' she said. 'Is it time for lessons yet?'
'Yes,' said I.

Vegetarian Triumph - not!

Being away on holiday encourages one to make some strange decisions. And one of the decisions I made whilst stranded 'pon the top of Exmoor was that I should return to being vegetarian. Whether this was because we shared our holiday with friends who are vegetarian, nay vegan even, or whether it was the near-kidnap of a lost lamb I do not know, but I do know I carried home with me a determined resolve to be vegetarian. And I have bought two books and a vegetarian cooking magazine just to prove it. I even went on the Vegetarian Society website which was very informative and only a teensy smidgeon evangelical.

So last Saturday, I started a week where I endeavoured to eat only veggie food. Andy said, 'I'll be veggie, too; it'll be good for my health,' and then he pulled the kind of a face that suggested he'd rather die young and happy and stuffed with a nice Cumberland sausage than old and miserable choking on lentils.

I said, 'You don't have to.'
He said, 'But I want to.'
I thought, I am not convinced, dear husband, because you have a meat-eating gene therewithin, but for the sake of ease, what with me being main chef and back to work this week, I decided he could join me for the inaugural veggie ride. (Although I did give him tuna sandwiches half way through the week because I started to feel sorry for him.)

Anyway, this morning I was feeling pretty triumphant that I'd managed a whole week without roasting a chicken. Actually, thinking about it, it's the chicken thing that's done it for me. Seeing Misses Miggins, Pumphrey and Slocombe going about their daily business whilst I am, at the same time stuffing a chicken, or dismembering a chicken, or dicing a chicken, well, it all seemed very wrong. I kept thinking, 'Miggins looks like this under her glorious ginger feathers. All pink and dimpled and puckered.' And I wouldn't dream of eating any of our egg laying ladies, so why would I eat one of their non-egg laying relatives? It suddenly became very hypocritical.

I know some people keep 'egg birds' and 'meat birds' and to be honest, I was almost convinced we would do the same, when the land came our way and we could expand our self-sufficiency. But now I think that a chicken is a chicken is a chicken. And chickens are all the same under the feather and should be treated thusly. I rest my case, m'lud.

So, a whole week of veggie eating! Aha!! But then...

...I kid you not, I woke in the wee small hours this morning and thought, 'I put Worcestershire sauce in the homemade baked beans...damn!'

And why damn? Because Worcestershire sauce has anchovy in it, doesn't it? And anchovy is fish, isn't it? And fish has a face and is therefore beyond the veggie radar. Damn, damn...DAMN!!!!

You see, it's little things like that which will catch you out. You've got to be ON YOUR GUARD ALL THE TIME.

Still, onwards and upwards. Andy has planted some melon seeds (vegetarian), which have grown about a foot in the last week. Well, okay, maybe not a foot, but given they were only planted last weekend they've shot up PDQ; whether their seedling enthusiasm goes on to produce melons remains to be seen, but with the glorious weather we've been having, I won't be surprised if we are knee deep in melon sorbet by the end of the summer.

And it's bee-keeping part three tomorrow, my two Marina Lewycka books arrived yesterday for a weekend of indulgent reading activity and McVities Dark Chocolate Digestive Biscuits are suitable for vegetarians - hurrah!!

The Trickiness of Rice and My Life of Nuts

'Is Mrs Poo still alive?' I asked Andy as he brought me a cup of tea in bed this morning.

Saturdays are our only 'cup of tea in bed' days, as Monday to Friday we are up early and getting ready for work, and Sunday is our up early and down the allotment day. Thoughtfully, he had brought me peppermint tea, following the Mexican extravaganza we had for dinner last night. I don't do spicy food very well. I think I have a delicate constitution hidden beneath my stern exterior.

'Of course she's still alive,' Andy laughed. 'She's had a peck at some food and knocked over her water bowl.'
This is a good sign. When a chicken starts knocking over their water bowl, you know they're starting to get a bit of their previous feistiness back.

We spent a companionable hour putting the world to rights about various issues (including the meanings of two bizarre dreams about 'Mamma Mia' and 'Turner and Hooch' and a gorilla hitting Andy with a breadstick) before getting up for breakfast eggs and reading newspapers. Andy administered medication to Poo, and then I thought, I know, I'll give her some left-over rice from last night.

The chickens like cooked rice. Mrs Poo ate some rice. Well, she decanted it bit by bit from the bowl and spread it around the floor of the cage. She banged it about with her beak. I think she ate some. If she didn't, at least she got a bit of occupational therapy from it.

I always do too much rice. Last night's Mexican meal was a family do, with myself and Andy, Heather, Chris and Leane and grandchild-on-the-bake making her presence felt via the power of morning sickness. I did chilli con carne, chicken Fajitas, tacos, tortilla chips and dips. I did rice to go with the chilli. The rice packet said 'Allow 50g dry rice for each person.'

So 5 x 50= 250g rice. I weighed it out. I thought, as I always do, that doesn't look nearly enough rice, so I bunged in a bit extra. And then I didn't eat any rice, neither did Chris, so we ended up with a great bowl left over.

But as I said, the chickens like it so that's their dinner sorted for today.

When I was shopping for the meat for this meal, I started having the same 'Yuk, meat,' feelings that I developed when I was expecting Heather. Perhaps I'm having pseudo-morning sickness out of sympathy for Leane, I don't know. But as I looked at the beef and the chicken lined up in the butchers, I thought, I can feel a vegetarian urge coming on again.

We eat around three vegetarian meals a week already. I only started eating meat again because my GP wrote me a prescription for iron tablets a while back because he thought it possible I might be borderline anaemic. I thought his diagnosis sounded a bit vague, but then I didn't want to take iron tablets because of their constipatory effect. I looked up daily iron requirements and decided a pork chop and a dollop of spag bol a week would rectify my possible borderline anaemic effect.

But now? Well, I'm being drawn to the Complete Vegetarian Cookbook again.

It's funny how tastes change, isn't it? Sometimes you like something, and then you don't?

And that my only food constant in life has been nuts.