Good, Good Things

Thank you so much for all your warm wishes and kind words after my last post. You really are such a lovely lot. Angus is quite better (bouncing off the walls, in fact) and, while not sleeping completely through the night as he usually does, is not waking hourly any more. Really, I do take for granted that my two sleep well, and when they stop I just can't cope.

Despite the illness and lack of sleep and general hectic-ness, it's been a very nice week. Some good things that stand out are...

These stunning muffatees I won in a giveaway recenty, knitted by Annie of knitsofacto. Thank you Annie - they are comfortable and warm and complimented upon daily. I modeled them and Angus modeled them, but still we could not take a photograph of them anywhere near as good as yours.    

Cheap supermarket roses in my pretty new bud vases bought in the Tate Britain gift shop are brightening up my sideboard and my mood.

More blog giveaway goodness, from Ellie of Feltabulous; a really beautiful macrame bracelet, a pair of earrings and a very cute felt heart, all handmade by Ellie - thank you, Ellie - you are just too talented, it's not fair!

It was my turn to host book group last night. I do love a mid-week get together. Friends, wine, food, chat, lots of laughing.  Our chosen book was The Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O'Farrell. Everyone said it was excellent. I have not read it yet - it's been sitting on my bedside table for the last three weeks. I will read it, I will. 

I saw my very good friend Debora yesterday and she said "I bought you a radio". I thought I'd mis-heard her and said, "Err...what?" And yes indeed she had bought me a radio, but not a real one (I have quite a few already) but a biscuit tin shaped exactly like a radio!! What could be more perfect?

Look, see, it's full of biscuits! Debora, vielen dank meiner lieben freundin. 

I have been very busy making and crafting and stitching and will have so many things to show you very soon. I have just finished a granny square scarf for myself in hot pink, black and white and I'm so pleased with it - I will show you tomorrow. I did sneak out tonight for a nice Italian meal and a few glasses of house red with some friends, so it's not all work, work, work.

I hope you are well and all is good where you are. Thank you for being here and for reading. x

A Bumper Year for New Cookery Books

Oh my cupcakes! There are so many gorgeous new cookery books coming out this Autumn. Where do I start?

I am always a sucker for a beautifully packaged book with a pretty title, and this new title from Tessa Kiros looks very tempting. She has the most fascinating heritage; Finnish mother, Greek Cypriot father, raised in South Africa and Britian, and now married to an Italian and living in Italy. I have Apples for Jam and Falling Cloudberries and love them both. A new offering from the magnificent Nigella Lawson...I think I own all of her cookery books and they are all excellent. Her recipes just work. I love the jacket design of the newest title from the kitchens of Leon, and Yotam Ottolenghi - I've never bought any of his books but my recipe scrap book is full of clippings from his article in The Guardian magazine.

What's next on my wish list...two gorgeous big baking books, by Rachel Allen and The Great British Bake Off (which I am loving, by the way - is anyone else watching it?). Nigel Slater's follow up to the beautifully written The Kitchen Diaries, The Kitchen Diaries II is, according to the blurb, a "collection of small kitchen celebrations" - how perfect. And my last choice; I don't know much about the author, Diana Henry, but love the sound of Salt Sugar Smoke, obsessed as I currently am with preserves and stockpiling for the coming colder months.

(John, if you are reading this, start saving please as these are all going on my Christmas list. As is this and this. Thanks. Your loving wife.)

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Apologies for my erratic blogging lately. Since Angus started nursery I thought I'd have more time for crafting and blogging, but no, it appears the opposite is true! I have also started volunteering twice a week at Bella's school, helping kids with their reading and so far I am enjoying it enormously. But it does mean less time to craft and less time on the laptop. But I'm sure we'll find a balance soon.

I will be back tomorrow with...A GIVEAWAY!!! It's long overdue. Homemade goodies are being stitched, ironed and photographed.

Book Group by Candlelight

Last night was our monthly book group meeting. It was so warm we sat in my friends house with the patio doors wide open, listening to the sounds from the garden and enjoying the evening breeze with a glass of wine. Debora, our hostess, had baked a lemon and ricotta tart. As it grew dark she lit lots of candles. Book group is not usually a candlelit affair, but the summer evening seemed to call for it.

We started our group almost four years ago and found that "I'm going to book group" sounds a lot better than "I'm going to the pub" when trying to organise a night off, babysitters, that sort of thing. The book part is incidental, it just gives us a valid reason to meet up. Last night we read The Restaurant of Love Regained by Ito Ogawa. We all agreed that it is a very odd little book, but no less enjoyable for that. A young woman is left suddenly by her boyfriend, who takes all her possessions and money with him. Broke and desperate, she returns to the mountain village she grew up in and opens a tiny restaurant on her Mother's land. It is full of lengthy, vivid descriptions of food - from the killing of the animal to the serving of the meal - and these are wonderful. But I felt vaguely dissatisfied when I'd finished it by too characters and situations that weren't fully explored or resolved.

Next month's book is F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and I am really looking forward to this one. I read it about twelve years ago as a student but after hearing a brilliant adaptation of it on Radio 4 a few weeks ago, I am dying to re-read it. What are you reading at the moment? Can you give me any recommendations for future book group meetings?

RIP Maurice Sendak

Morning! Firstly, thanks so much for all your kind words, advice and opinions about the tea towel yesterday. I do love it that you comment, it means a great deal to me, and I also love the forum of crafty likemindedness that exists in the blogging community. It's such a good way to bounce ideas around and discover new ways of doing things.

I heard on the radio yesterday that the author Maurice Sendak died. He wrote, among other things, Where The Wild Things Areare, a superb children's picture book. I remember it from my childhood fondly, and it was one of the first books I bought Bella. In fact, she had this print framed in her nursery as a baby. It is currently in the attic - I need to get it down.

Bella has gone off the story since it does not feature a. Hello Kitty or b. Rapunzel, but I know she will come back to it. Angus loves it, and one of my favourite memories of reading to him at bedtime is how he giggles when we do the voices "Roar their terrible ROARS, and KNASH the terrible TEETH (mime teeth knashing)". Angus loves an over the top bedtime story with shouting and sound effects. Before he moved into his bed, we would sit on the chair in his room for bedtime stories, with him on my lap, all warm and cuddly in his pyjamas after his bath, drinking milk from his sippy cup.

It is a true classic of a children's book, written in a time before books were marketed at boys or girls, before merchandise deals and advertising and TV tie-ins, but full of a joyful spirit of adventure and imagination that lives on.

Our Favourite Bookshop

I took this photo a few weeks ago, back when we last saw that thing in the sky called the sun.

Yesterday we visited a nearby bookshop a few miles away in the centre of Bradford. Bradford is a city that is so often in the news for all the wrong reasons - racial tension, riots, economic woes - but it has such a rich heritage of wool, mills and textiles that is often forgotten, as well as some truly beautiful architecture.

Bradford Wool Exchange is a gem. It must be one of the most striking buildings in the city.  How many bookshops have a ceiling like this?

It recently won a place on The Independent's list of The 50 Best Bookshops. The polished marble columns are all numbered from when the building was full of wool traders going about their business.

The building has a coffee shop on a mezzanine level, which provides an excellent place to sit and look down over the shop and do some people watching.

I love these arches. They are so beautiful.

We love this shop. We often go over on a Sunday afternoon when it is very quiet and have a coffee and browse. We went yesterday, in fact, to escape the freezing rain and enjoy hot chocolate.

The children's department is wonderful. I love Amazon, and it has it's uses, but you cannot beat the feeling of a real book in your hand when you are browsing. Especially when the setting looks like this.

Do you have a favourite bookshop? I would love to hear about it.

Madeleines

I can't really think about madeleines without thinking about Marcel Proust, whose bite of this small cake provokes a vivid childhood memory, the lengthy examination of which lasts for seven volumes of A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu. Now he really was a navel gazer. He would have been an excellent blogger. 

"[My mother] sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called "petites madeleines", which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrims shell...I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place."

Proust, M, Swann's Way,  Penguin 1957, pp 55-56.

I did not get on with Proust. I read Swann's Way, the first in the series, when I was an undergraduate, and found it rather like wading through treacle. It was not for me. One professor told me that Proust is "the Everest of literaure" which I think he thought was a good thing. Well, I got halfway to base camp before giving up and going home for a cup of tea and a murder mystery. How I passed that semester I will never know.

The recipe is from my current recipe book obsession. I promise I will put it down now and cook from another book. Madeleines are basically small light, buttery sponge cakes baked in a shell shaped tin and the recipe can be found here on the BBC website.

I overfilled the tin when I made the first batch and they came out looking like this:

so I was careful to put half as much in for the second batch, barely a small tablespoon. I wanted them to have their pretty shell shape, and the second lot came out looking like the ones in the book. They are very, very delicious. I have eaten four. Possibly five. The sharp, moist bite of raspberry and lemon curd in the middle is wonderful with the buttery sponge. I baked them first thing in the morning and the house smelt wonderful all day. Perfect to cheer one up on a cold and wet Wednesday morning!

Books I'm Reading

Good morning. It's a quick one today as the snow is melting and Angus and I have a date with a soft play centre, coffee and friends.

I wanted to share some books with you today.  Pre-children, I used to read a lot. I would aim to read 50 books a year. I think I once managed 45 (I am now amazed that I ever had that amount of free time). But now I read each night in bed before going to sleep and so it takes me a good month to get through a book.

I have recently finished reading What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt. It is very, very good. A story of two closely connected families, artists and academics, who live in New York. It spans twenty years of their lives and all the love and loss and children and thrills and fear that life holds. It is very creepy in places, dark and full of menace, which just made it even better.

I am currently reading The Help by Kathryn Stockett. It is for next month's Book Group. Essentially, it is a story of black maids who raise white children in the Deep South during the 1960's. So far, it is gripping. Full of tiny but vivid details of what people cook, eat, wear and how they behave, but hinting at much bigger themes to come like social injustice and the Civil Rights Movement. I think this will be a good Book Club choice.

Lastly, The Silver Spoon, the definitive book of Italian cooking, apparently. John found a copy of the old edition for a ludicrously cheap price and we spent all last night leafing through it planning delicious meals. Has anyone cooked from it? Is is good?

I would love to hear what you are reading!

A New Book for Bella

We bought Bella a new book on Sunday and I am very taken with it. It's called The High Street and it's by Alice Melvin. It's one of the most simple and beautiful children’s books I’ve seen for a long time. I bought another for a friend's daughter who turns five soon, and i intend to keep buying copies as a gifts for everyone i can think of who will like it, it's that good. 

It's about a little girl called Sally who has a shopping list (which rhymes, of course) and she goes from shop to shop buying everything on her list. It feels very English and nostalgic, and reminds me of the sort of shops I visited as a child. I especially like the sweet shop, with it's rainbow display of things to buy.

The illustrations are full of colour and detail in a gorgeous palette that feels a bit retro. Each page folds out to show the shop front, then to reveal the shop interior. John said the people in it reminded him of Mr Ben, a programme on tv that he loved as a child. It’s quite possible that I like this book because, well, I do like shopping, I like writing lists, I love retro design, and I like the name Sally as it’s my Mum’s name.


Bella's favourite page is when Sally visits the toy shop. She loves looking for all the toys she and Angus own and spends ages poring over it.

Bella is at home with me today as she was sick during the night. Her first day off school ill.