Simpleton Suppers

I like Nigel Slater. I love his books. I love the fact he's not a chef instead someone with a love of good food and great flavours and by and large his recipes are varied, easy to follow and always work (unlike some from more prominent chefs/writers/tv whores I could mention), however I despise his new tv show.

If you've not seen it, it's roughly about being thrifty in the kitchen, making use of left overs or what you find in the fridge, eating seasonally and growing your own food...it's topical, it's useful, the premise lets Nigel do what he's best at - marrying a few ingredients for maximum impact - and we get to see lots of vegetables in lovely gardens and on allotments and Nige gets cooking up yummy things with what he finds.

So far so good, except the design is too clean..we see his lovely clean, spotless, white kitchen, his nice, cream le creuset set and his curiously empty fridge...where are the M&S custard tarts, the half opened jars of condiments, the chocolate bars...come on Nigel, I've read your books, I know what you like to eat...I don't believe you only have a lump of butter, some unpronouncable cheese from Italy and some unfeasibly thick slices of pancetta wrapped in greaseproof paper in the fridge...I don't 'find' those things in the back of my fridge...where's the recipe for something requiring 3 babybels, a can of carlsberg Export and some out of date tartar sauce?

We sometimes see Nigel pottering about in his garden...that too is well organised, spotless and, well to be honest, a bit soulless - he never seems to pick a vegetable covered in silvery slug trails, go to pick something and discover the aphids got there first, have to fight of a swarm of flies or the cat attacks him whilst he's rooting about his rhubarb...that'd just be me then...

He goes out to visit an allotment each week which presumably is supposed to contrast to Nigel's calm and luxurious world at home. Except these allotments belong to nice, friendly, middle class Londoners, who grow cavalero nero and fennel and have spotless sheds and friendly happy children dressed from head to toe in Boden who help out at the allotment...where do these children come from, I hope the north London vibe rubs off on me and I'm having one...

And the concept is too formulaic...or dare I say it lazy...every week Nigel makes 1 sweet and 4 savoury dishes - one for each night of the week apparently. Except I don't know about you, but there's 7 nights in my week, therefore I need 7 ideas of what to make for tea.

We never find out what he eats on weekends, but if his fridge is as empty as we are led to believe he either eats out or starves...I'm not sure that's something I wish to subscribe to...even if i am hankering after a home grown good life type of existence...and I suspect that many of the dishes would not suffice for a weekday meal for someone who has done an hour's commute on top of days work...

And so far, the sweet dish is always on a Wednesday...why not a different day? Is it bad to eat pudding on a Monday?

The other half can't bear to watch any more as apparently the extremely slow way Nigel moves anything into or out of the pan/bowl/plate is just too distressing. "Hurry up" he cries "just fling it in" as Nigel moves the spoon to put the cream in the bowl in super slow motion...

I can't bear the accompanying music any longer. Indie classics reworked into teeny tiny snippets of musak so I spend the time when I should be watching how to put my pork chops into the hot butter to brown at a snails pace, trying to work out what the soundtrack is...is it Blur or Primal Scream...I'm sure I know it, I definitely know it, then before my mind can grasp it, it fades out...

Sorry Nigel, I know you are a national treasure and I love you and your books dearly, but we won't we watching any more...

Things I have learnt about my baby before we meet:

5am is playtime

Music by Celine Dion is good to wiggle and kick to...

As is the beeping door alarm on the train (or hustle alarm as I learnt it is called this week when a train driver had a shouty rant about people blocking the doors at Finsbury Park)...

As is my colleague's xylophone bongy mobile phone ringtone...

But, much to the other half's disgust, Motorhead, ACDC and Metallica are not...some rockucation is apparently in order (I shudder at the thought of what this may involve...)

Personal space is sacrosanct...balancing a book, a packet of revels or letting the cat stand on my tummy is not on...vigorous kicking at the offending object ensues immediately

Every scan and measurement taken to date is bang on average...not too big and not too small, just right on the button sizewise for age and there has been no deviation over the last 28 weeks (due to my inner Hermione I already take a certain pride in this)

It is a she!

Upside down

My house is being decorated, not the whole house mind you, but it feels like it....

We're having the interconnecting bits decorated...the hallway, the stairs, the landing and the open plan room that leads from the hallway to the kitchen that we set up as a dining room, but never use except to chuck stuff on the table....and whilst I'd never really given these areas of space in my house much thought before, it transpires that they are not just a means to an end but seem to be the bits that matter....

The bare walls currently being readied for plastering make me feel deserately sad whenever I see them as they look so plain and so grim with all the life* slowly being erased from them so they look smooth and flat ready for my funky wallpaper with their splodges of whilte filler...

Ripping up the carpet has exposed the stairs, still with their old style painted edges and evidence of carpets past making me wonder if a stair runner would have been the more stylish choice for a house as old as ours rather than the fully carpetted option, but of course it's too late for that now.

The bare, exposed floorboards mean every creak as the cats trot about at 4am sounds like a herd of elephants rampaging through the house and have put an end to me running to the bathroom without my slippers for fear of a 100 year old splinter...

Moving from room to room has become a minefield of avoiding plaster dust, mess and decorating equipment...I'm happy holed up in the lounge or the bedroom of an evening where I can shut the door and ignore the more miserable looking bits of my house.

We're being incredibly lazy paying someone to do it but we've umm-ed and ahh-ed about it for years, done nothing and neither of us currently have the time, inclination or, if I'm frank, the skills to deal with our 109 year old house and it's idiosyncracies, crumbling plaster and spectacularly badly bodged DIY jobs courtesy of the previous owner, who obviously had the enthusiasm but seemingly even less skill than we do.

'It'll be fab when it's done and the mess is only temporary' the other half keeps reminding me to cheer me up. And I can see what he says is true as already the incremental step changes are making a positive difference and well on their way to what the finished article will look like only 100 times better, but I've always been impatient, unable to see the wood for the trees and look at the bigger picture when mired in the dirty, dusty, inconvenient detail....

* aka the bumps and bash-holes that my wonderfully clumsy other half made swinging his laptop bag around