The beaver is a proud and noble animal
Notes from a bemused canuck
Got a phone call from our solicitors. The seller wants to complete by the end of the month. Given all the time she’s taken to get back to us, this is rather cheeky. However, it suits us so we won’t make a big deal out of it.
In other words, JAYSUS, WE’RE BUYING A HOUSE!
Choux Pastry
75g butter, cubed
115g plain flour
3 medium eggs, beaten
Whipped Cream
1 vanilla pod, split
500ml double cream
3 tsp icing sugar
Cointreau, to taste
Chocolate Sauce
100g dark chocolate
15g unsalted butter
3 tbsp milk
Cointreau, to taste
Method
1. First make the choux pastry. Put the butter into a medium saucepan with 200ml cold water and bring to the boil, melting the butter. Once it has melted, tip in all the flour and a pinch of salt, then remove the pan from the heat. Using a wooden spoon, beat the mixture really well for about 20 seconds until it comes away from the sides of the pan and forms a ball. Leave to cool completely. You can transfer it to a bowl if you want to speed things up.
2. Preheat the oven to 200°C, gas mark 6. Once the pastry mixture has cooled, start beating in the eggs, a little at a time, until it is shiny and of reluctant dropping consistency. You may not need to add every last drop of the egg to reach this stage, so stop when it gets to the correct consistency. To test this, scoop some of the mixture onto your spoon: it should need a small nudge before dropping off and falling back into the pan. If it needs a flick of the wrist to help it slide off the spoon, then you should beat in a little more egg.
3. Line the baking sheets with the parchment. Pipe 20 walnut-sized blobs onto the sheets, spaced evenly apart or spoon them out and smooth into balls with a wet finger. Bake on the top shelf of the oven for 30–40 minutes. However tempted you are, do not open the door until at least 25 minutes have passed. The profiteroles should appear golden-brown; also, tap them to see if they are firm – they should sound hollow. Once ready, remove them from the oven and, using a skewer, make a hole, big enough to take the 7mm piping nozzle, in the side of each one. Bake for 5 more minutes to dry out the insides, then cool on a wire rack.
4. While the choux pastry is in the oven, make a start on the cream. Scrape the beans from the vanilla pod into a pan with the cream. Sieve in the icing sugar and whisk until strong peaks form. Chill it in the fridge until ready to use.
5. To make the chocolate sauce, first chop the chocolate. Using a double boiler, melt chocolate, butter and milk until smooth. Be careful to not scald the chocolate.
6. To assemble, fill the piping bag with the thick cream and squeeze a little into each bun. Don’t fill them any more than 2 hours ahead: they’ll go soggy if left standing for too long.
7. Pile up the profiteroles in a dish and pour over the hot chocolate sauce.
Lots of things happened in the past week.
My folks came for a visit, which was excellent. They spent a week on this side of the pond, mostly cooing at the Benster. Katy and I managed to have some us-time and spent more money than we should have at Ikea, buying new furniture for the house, and going to see The Boat that Rocked at the cinema. I highly recommend the movie, it’s a blast.
BenBen’s cold took a turn for the worse near the end of the folks’ visit. He’s normally a very chilled out and happy baby. Not these days. He’s a cantankerous snot monster that refuses to eat anything. He went from eating around 35 oz in a day to anywhere between 15 and 20. He just does not want to eat. He’s usually a good sleeper in the night as well, but the last few days have been trying. On Sunday, when he hadn’t had anything significant to eat for his last two feeds of the day, he had a complete meltdown from 4pm and we had to just put him to bed at 6pm. He was exhausted and just didn’t want to do anything but scream and go to sleep. We thought that he’s be wailing down the walls in the middle of the night – because he’d hardly eaten anything – but it turns out that he had a decent night. He woke up around 3 am in a coughing fit, but managed to put himself back to sleep with a minimum amount of fuss. I, on the other hand, hardly slept that night. I was so worried that he’d be waking up that I was dreading it and ended up sleeping at most 5 hours that night, in fits and bursts of 30 minutes here and there.
We took him to the docs yesterday because he was seriously off his feeds and was running at a higher temperature than normal for him. They prescribed us some antibiotics and we went home. He was still fractious but had a better day than Sunday. He ate more, which is a good thing. We put him to bed at closer to his normal bedtime and things seemed to be going well, except that the coughing fit he had at 2:30 am kept him – and us – awake until 4am. He wasn’t crying, but was very vocal in his attempts to go back to sleep. In the end, we put an extra blanket on him, put his bedtime CD back on and Badger Badger’d him again and he drifted off to sleep. We managed to get a few more hours of kip, but I’m rather tired this morning. Katy and I have also caught whatever bug is plaguing him. I’ve been horking up yellow phlegm and Katy has a cough that would make a lifetime shag tobacco smoker envious.
Things might be progressing on the housing front. We had a phone call out of the blue from the estate agent on Saturday and, after a bit of phone tag, it would seem that the seller is “disappointed at having to reduce the house price but is going to be pragmatic about it”. Apparently, she’s had her own electrician do as estimate of the work that would need doing and the quote she got was about 1/3 of ours. We met somewhere in the “middle”. We’re still eating more of the costs than I’d ideally like, but I’m tired of waiting and I won’t quibble for a few hundred quid – even if we are morally in the right. Anyway, she wants to exchange this week, so we’re going to chase up the solicitors and see what we can do. Watch this space.
My mom used to drive up to Montreal, do a grocery shop, wash my dishes and then go back home.
My mom used to come up to Chester, eat all my food, criticize the state of cleanliness of my flat and then go home.
There are few problems in life that can’t be fixed with the judicious application of cured pig products.
The Beeb was running an article this morning about how people were bombarding the Imperial War Museum about information on how people coped with shortages and rationing during the war in case there’s the Great Depression, part deux.
Katy said, as a quote of the day, that she liked WWII propaganda posters because they were cheery and colourful. I like them because they’re sensible, down to earth and are a proper example of the British stiff upper lip mentality.
Any attention is good attention.
If I love you, you can have my butt.
If there is no fuss, there needs to be food.
If there is no food, there needs to be fuss.
Giving me fuss is a privilege, not a right.
My paw always tastes good.
It takes a lot of effort to look this fabulous.
Remember, a few days ago, when I mentioned casually that if the cats brought that same mouse in again for the 3rd time, we’d keep it as a pet?
They did.
Katy phoned me up at work yesterday in a fit of giggles, informing me that she and Sue had seen it when they moved BenBen’s play mat out of the way and had captured it in a cardboard box. Was I serious about keeping it as a pet? Hell yeah :)
I mean, come on. It’s survived Reen-pig’s TLC and managed to escape the (admittedly dim-witted) cat for the third time running. And if it comes where we think it’s from, her story is even more impressive. I just didn’t have the heart to chuck it back into the wild or dispose of it in a more permanent manner so Katy went to a pet shop in the afternoon and bought a hamster cage. We found out the hard way that she’s small enough to fit through the bars of that cage and spent part of the evening moving stuff around in the kitchen to re-capture it. In the end, we borrowed Donna’s old aquarium that she used to keep her tree frogs in. It’ll do until Houdini is big enough to not fit through the bars any more.
There’s still a chance she won’t survive the stress of the situation, so I’m trying (and failing badly) to not get too attached. Still, she touched her food during the night and seemed to be burrowed somewhere in her cage today, so those are good signs.
I felt like crap on Friday so I stayed home from work. I still have a major case of the lurgie and I’ve been feeling off and on all weekend. I blame the new grad student at work for giving me his Ebola.
We had to go to Saffron Walden in the afternoon to go meet our solicitor and sign some paperwork. On the way back, we stopped at the duck pond. BenBen was completely out of it, but we had a bit of fun with Katy’s new phone.
When we got home, BenBen went into a major meltdown. We think that, between his teeth beginning to play up, his last round of shots and a bit of a cold, he’s been feeling very under the weather and has been feeling very tired and grumpy and has been a cast-iron bugger to feed. So, when we got home, he decided that he was most decidedly not a happy camper and wailed. Solidly. For close to two hours. As soon as we brought him upstairs to start his bedtime routine, he settled down and had a good night but Katy and I were rather traumatized because – for all our griping at times – he is normally a really good baby and rarely kicks up a fuss.
Just as we were going to bring Ben upstairs, Reenie barged in the house with another mouse – still alive – and ran to the shoe rack to drop it in my boot. Again. Except this time, she missed the boot and the mouse got away from her. We so didn’t need that extra little bit of aggravation when our nerves were still frazzled from all the crying. I tried to look for it but I couldn’t find it and we had to go get the boy to bed.
Once things settled down and there was blessed quiet again in the house, I was able to shift some clutter around and find the wayward rodent. Lo and behold, it was the same mouse as two days ago!!!
We freed it in some bushes. If it comes in again, we’re keeping it as a pet.
We spent most of the weekend packing stuff away in boxes and got some good progress done. Most of the mice that Reenie brought in over the weekend were deceased, so we didn’t have too much aggravation. She did manage to drop a live mouse in my boot though, and Katy had to use some fancy penmanship to get rid of it. I just hope it didn’t pee too much in my boot.
Such are the joys of cat ownership.
So, tonight, Reen-pig broke her own record and brought in three mice. One, we think, was an escapee from the Sanger, even! It had either been ear-tagged and tailed or had some very coincidental scars. That one was still alive and was released back into the wild (and hopefully won’t be back tomorrow). The other two were less fortunate. And yes, both of the dead ones ended up in my boots.
Gotta love our pussycats.
Katy thinks it’s because the weather is warming up and the mice are getting more active but are still dopey. Hopefully they’ll be able to give the cats more of a run for their money before my mom gets here or she’ll really freak out :)