We’ve finally managed to escape to Norfolk for the first time in four weeks, which is quite long for us. When we completed on this house exactly a year ago today we kidded ourselves that it would just need a lick of paint. It has needed rather more than a lick of paint. We’re now five weeks into the total gutting and rebuilding of an ensuite bathroom and a downstairs loo and separate shower. We had to wait 8 months for our contractors’ availability but we’re so glad we placed our faith in them as they’ve been brilliant.

At this point I need to send thanks and blessings to our interior designer - not a concept I would have thought of a couple of years ago - who has been absolutely indispensable in her creativity and attention to detail. I would not have known where to start.

This is the house where I don’t want to have to make design mistakes. I’ve furnished it with lessons learned over the last 59 years. I no longer want to live with an expensive sofa that’s the wrong colour leather for 25 years. I don’t want to have to look at a wall every morning and wish I’d chosen different tiles. I don’t want a tap that knocks the wall when I raise it or a shower cubicle that catches my elbow every time I exit. That sort of thing. The details. From that point of view Jeni, my interiors person, saved me an awful lot of cash and heartache. I always remember Cosmo’s advice here:

I came up on Wednesday missing, thereby missing choir, my weekly highlight, in order to talk the stone templater through the various shapes and measurements of small pieces of finishing touch stone tops. I’m hoping that everything will be finished, painted, lampshades fitted, handles screwed in before welcoming the offspring for Christmas.

Works for me - Microplane Flexi Zesti

I saw this little gadget in Harts of Stur when I was looking for the now-discontinued individual size 54 pudding basins and it looked like another one of those impulse purchases that languishes forevermore in your middle wossname drawer but, benefit of the doubt as always, I purchased one and I’m so glad I did. It’s a little orange and lemon zester that shaves the good bits off your citrus for cakes or pestos, to be tipped out of that orange silicone holder and straight into your bowl. I’ve had grown-up Microplane and Oxo Good Grips ones before and, don’t get me wrong, I like those but this was the ideal solution for when you don’t want to ruin your manicure. And because the shaving blade is so small, and there’s a stretchy bit of silicone to hold them, your shards of peel1don’t go all over the worktop accompanied by shards of your manicure. It’s a definite plus for me.

In which I’m beside myself

Two exciting and daunting things have happened this week. One is weighty and serious and carries a great deal of responsibility - I’ve been elevated to a senior position in the local branch of the organisation for which I volunteer - and the other is more frivolous. I’ve been BEYOND EXCITED for weeks about the arrival of my new environmentally-friendlier electric induction Aga.

I honestly didn’t expect to be in the running of nominations for the first thing, which means making decisions on the daily running of the branch and its 120 volunteers and their callers. It hasn’t really sunk in yet but I’m having to make choices about what I’d like to see happening over the three years, I hope. When I feel a bit of the inevitable imposter syndrome coming on, I remind myself that I’ve stepped up out of my comfort zone twice in the last year, as the Soprano soloist in Schubert’s Mass in G and twice as a LibDem candidate, and Yes, I can.

Let us park this here for the time being, not least because it feels strange and wrong to be excited about something when it involves so many people in anguish and despair. I will do my best.

The new Aga

I have early memories of poring over my mum’s cookbook, which had no doubt been passed down to her. It was Good Housekeeping and it must have been from the 1950’s because the advertisement for Range Cookers in a variety of ice cream colours was enhanced by fairies dressed in A-line new look dresses flitting between their stoves Bewitched-style. (My mum was a big fan of that show.) I was fascinated by this. I’d never seen a cooker like that and they were so pretty. It was a window to a pastel world of which we did not seem part. My mum conjured up her fabulous food on an old and horrible “upright” gas cooker which my parents had no doubt got second or third hand.

I had always dismissed out of hand the smugness of those women in those Aga sagas. Those fragrant and blonde women wearing aprons over their floaty frocks, women who swore by their Agas. (I mean by their cooking ability. I’ve no idea whether they they stood next to their stoves effing and blinding but I somehow doubt it.) When I spotted the old Aga in the kitchen of the Norfolk house last year I was amused and daunted and only plucked up courage to use the thing when there was no other option to magic up last year’s Christmas lunch. Long story short it was the most delicious roast duck and subsequently rib of beef that I’d ever cooked and I was converted.

How to overcome my aversion to the reek of kerosene that greeted me whenever I opened the kitchen door? Or the constant refilling of costly heating oil from it having to be left on all winter? Well, I researched a cast iron Aga stove that could actually be switched off and on at will, with an induction hob for summer cooking and this week it was finally installed.

It’s a thing of great beauty, in my view, but now we have to refresh the kitchen whose shabbiness it shows up. That’s a project for next year. It’s a bit more complicated than the old system where you just shoved something into one of the two ovens or plonked it down on the hotplate. This Aga actually has knobs so you can choose between roasting and baking, and a button to press to switch on the warming oven.

What did I make first? Individual puddings to Marcus Wareing’s recipe. I didn’t want to make a vast pudding that serves 16 when a scant three of us will actually eat it. Here is my mise en place.

As for the mince pies I also made: I was confused between the baking and roasting oven functions. I should have baked the pastry using a roasting oven temperature. They taste okay but not good enough to appear here.

This is going to be another extremely busy week. You know when you’re sort of looking forward to all the activity and socialising but secretly you wish it were all over and you could sit on the sofa in your jimjams and watch Slow Horses? That.

Until next time have fun, take care and be excellent to each other.

G

xx