Adventures in Cooking

Seeing as I'm back to my usual routine of occasional voice work and a lot of tidying*, I've decided to help pad out my day with plenty of cooking. Not just for my own sake, because it's a pleasant and cheerful thing to do, but also because V has been too tired to eat properly while I was away, and because F has a great wealth of new foods to try.

By all accounts, F is very much going off the jarred foods she's mostly been raised on so far. Now that she's old enough to eat basically whatever we do (within reason - she can't have my chilli sauces or V's christmas chocolates, for example, despite her own ideas), she's tried fresher foods. And she's not one for looking back, thanks.

So I'm cooking evening meals that we can all eat together as a family.

There's a slightly thorny menu selection process. I'm blessed with two very selective and choosy ladies in my family. As well as the dietary requirements of a one-year-old who isn't, for example, allowed much salt in her food, I have to consider the dietary requirements of my wife who isn't, for example, all that keen on food that isn't properly salted. Salt is an easy one, because you can cook without it and add it later.

Fishcakes are another matter.

I like fish. Fish is good for you and should be part of F's diet. V also likes fish. Fishcakes can be prepared in advance and cooked relatively quickly when needed, so if V isn't home until late I can mix them up for F's 1800 dinnertime and then fry a new batch later. They are easy to chew and can have fresh vegetables blended into them or served on the side. You can even keep a batch of the mix for subsequent servings.

All good reasons to consider the humble fishcake as an evening meal. So cod and sweet potato fishcakes was going to be dinner last Wednesday. F got diced yellow pepper with hers, V had fried onion and soy sauce added in for the later servings.

I proudly served F her portion, feeling all smugly daddy-ish that I was cooking real food for my baby girl. She took one bite, squinted in horror, spat everything out, wiped her tongue off with both hands and then spent the next five minutes fervently swiping the remnants off the table, determined to remove every last trace of the abomination from mealtime history. I've seen surgical equipment less clean than she left her place mat.

To be fair, her mother had exactly the same reaction.

It wasn't the greatest fishcake attempt, in all honesty - I'd put too much soy in, so they'd gone very sloppy, and the fish was a piece we had in the freezer that had probably been there a bit too long. Tough and bland in equal measure, even when shredded into sloppy yam mash. At least V didn't actually spit it out. And she even tried to eat it, very politely considering I'd forgotten that she hates fishcakes and that she'd usually rather suffer a sulky husband than force down something on her List of Nopes.

It crossed my mind to provide a list of V's likes and dislikes along with F's Cans and Can'ts and see if any of my readers might suggest recipies. Then I realised that a) I have no way of factoring in F's as-yet-mostly-unknown likes and dislikes, the strength of which I suspect she may have inherited from her mother and b) an accurate and precise list of V's likes and dislikes would take up too many pages on this blog. And c) I'm not even able to recall them correctly anyway, because I'm a halfwit.

Ah well, back to the chopping board. Chicken fajita night, the following dinner, restored my wounded pride, everyone ate that heartily. This is going to be a long and gruelling learning process, I feel.

*I'm as surprised as anyone else is on this. But I fill F's daytime sleeping hours with cleaning and tidying routines, restocking toy boxes, removing chewed bread from underneath the kitchen table, scraping nappy slime off the bath, etc, rather than the exact opposites of these behaviours that one might generally expect of me. As a student, for example, I was too damn lazy too concerned with the effects of excess deturgent use on the environment to wash both sides of a plate. That's the baseline I'm converting upwards from. 

Meet the New Boss

Bit of a weird first week back, really. Mostly for that usual reason, the part of your brain that immediately denies you've ever been away and stitches the events and experiences of your travelling self into some sealed internal pocket of memory. So Keswick feels like a pleasant hallucination, and even though I'd lived in this flat for all of five days before leaving, it has established itself as 'home' and therefore 'normal'.

F, however, is quite an altered wee beast.

She weighs what feels like three times more. This is a clear exaggeration on the behalf of my atrophied baby-carrying muscles. A midweek trip to the midwife revealed that she's only put on about 300g or so since I last hefted her. But it's all solid muscle. She packs a punch. Also a kick and an occasional accidental headbutt.

She can crawl. Pretty fast, slamming her hands down as she goes. Her approach is heralded by platching slapping noises, a bit like the plungers of a human fly sprinting up a plate glass window. She can also haul herself to standing on any handy surface - tables, chairs, daddy's trousers. This last particularly when daddy is cooking in the kitchen or trying to write at his computer.

She points at things and wants to be told the name. She can trace the words in the books I read to her, or if I'm not there to read, trace them herself and babble nonsense appropriately. She asks to be passed things at breakfast (usually inappropriate things like coffee or knives). She can beg with puppy dog eyes, and even the heart-rending words 'pls, pleees!' if heartless daddy won't let her type on the laptop or use the TV remote. Her vocabulary is tiny but expanding. She can play peekaboo (tittut in Swedish) with a blanket.

She can whistle. Is that even normal for toddlers?

She has very definitely crossed the rubicon that divides babies and toddlers. Not a proto-person anymore, but a small and often frustrated one instead, delighted and desperate to express and communicate in equal measures.

She's still the same person, though, very recognisably. It's more as though she's come into a sharper focus, an impression I also get from her garbled chatter. Another few months and she'll be explaining in great and exact detail what I'm supposed to be doing and how quickly, I suspect.

After a mere week back home, I have been groomed speedily back into dadhood. Once more I sport the badges of my trade: -

• toothpaste/inotyol stains on all my shirt lapels
• haggard face
• limited and erratic personal grooming
• Can recite the Gruffalo by heart
• inability to stay awake past 2100
• ability to walk about, make bottled milk, change nappies, etc without conscious thought
• blazing sentimental pride in all she says or does regardless of comparative banality

Pappa Kom Hem

Theatrical tradition dictates that once your show is done, you should have some kind of massive emotional slump to tide you over the next few weeks. That, or another job to start straight away, which you can rub in the rest of the casts' faces to help them be all the slumpier.

Not me! I had neither. Hot on the heels of the almighty last night, I had a hideous early start and a fifteen-hour travel day, with my family reunion at the far end. Not much of a respecter of theatrical tradition in that regard. More of an edgy rebel with my own dramatic agenda, I like to think. Like Stringfellow Hawke in tights.

Not that I don't have my own traditions. I'd been on tenterhooks all week, dreading the travel day. Mostly dreading the inevitable bit that happens every time I arrange my own transport, the bit where I have to call V and explain which country I'm calling from and how late I'll be. On the way over to the UK, for example, I merrily went to the wrong Gothenburg airport (City not Landvetter, neither my ticket nor the website specified which was correct and I guessed wrong) and had to get a very expensive, very fast taxi at the last minute.

This time, I lose my passport.

After lots of goodbyes at the aftershow do, I went back to my digs to finish packing and make sure I had everything ready to go. For most of the next hour, instead of getting as much sleep as possible, I instead ran round Keswick in the rain. I rummaged in the glove compartment of my hire car. I alarmed everyone at the theatre by going through the bins in the dressing room and hunting under the party tables. I went back and forth over a midnight back alley, searching the muddy floor with the only light to hand - the dim red LED on my doorkeys - like a crap one-man forensics unit.

All to no avail, because my passport is inside my laptop bag, safely tucked inside an inner pocket. Where I stashed it earlier after picking up the hire car, so that I wouldn't lose it. Top work, Hogg.

After this, I can't sleep properly, I'm far too adrenalised. So the fifteen hour travel day begins with two hours of sleep, then a rainy, three-hour drive to Edinburgh. Then there's a blur of travel lounges and parched, air-conditioning on a pair of airbuses down to first Heathrow, then Landvetter. Sweaty and unshowered, I feel almost like I'm melting into the overheated malls I have to wait in. My skin is the same temperature as the chairs, I don't want to be here, it's expensive and aggravating. But there's nothing to do but wait out the transition, floating rootlessly between countries.

Then Gothenburg, at last. It's much colder here, snowy even. I like the cold. I know where I am in the cold. Indoors in a jumper, if possible. Dragging my now-broken suitcase (the pulling handle refuses to emerge from its sheath) through the frozen slush and cobbles of Haga seems to take about a hundred years.

But at the end of it is V and F, standing in the open door of home, warm light behind them.

I've been longing for and slightly dreading this moment, seeing F again. I know where I am with V, generally speaking, but I don't really know how F is going to react or how I'll react to her reaction. Tears? Hiding from the stranger? Ignoring to punish me for being away?

I needn't have worried. A quick double-take, then she smiles just as much as V, and laughs and laughs and laughs as I tuck her up in bed and sing her Litte Katt.

Good to be back. Very good.

Farewell and Adieu

Top Five Keswick Moments from the last three months: -


1. Before the show, I like to go for a short walk round the edge of the lake. I've not managed to do this much, it's been raining too hard or it's been too dark in the evenings. But this afternoon, it's stayed dry and the afternoon show starts at 1330, so I follow my favourite path past the caravan site and down to the woods on the isthmus not far from the theatre.

The path back to the theatre, when I reach it, is totally flooded.

Not the first time this has happened, I should have seen it coming. Warmup starts in twenty minutes, so if I turn back I'll have to run. The flood covers a dead straight stretch of path through a small patch of boggy woodland, and it doesn't look too deep. Plus there's a good, hot shower in our dressing room, a mere five minutes away. So I take my shoes off, roll my jeans up and step in.

Half way along the 150m of path, the dark, freezing, murky water is about a metre deep. I'm holding my shoes over my head with one hand, holding the hem of my coat up with the other and hoping I don't wander over the edge of the path into the invisible bogs on either side of me. My jeans legs have unrolled and are sodden to the crotch. Nobody knows I'm here.

Even then, it's not until I start having to use my thighs to shunt a heavily water-logged plank bristling with nails out of my way that I actually start questioning the safety of my actions.

Five minutes later, however, I'm striding into the theatre foyer barefoot, leaving a trail of muddy water behind me and happy as Larry. The shock of the water has even temprarily rid me of the stiffness in my knee joints, perhaps because I can't feel them anymore. Foolhardy? Or pioneering? Whichever, I know I'd rather drown unnoticed in a metre of pitch black ice water than have to jog anywhere, so this is nothing but profit as far as I'm concerned.


2. Skyping with F and V. F is shufflings round and round the edge of the coffee table, holding a stuffed seal and her comb. The comb makes a good drumstick too, she's banging the tabletop as she walks.

"That's your comb!" I tell her. "Have you got a comb? Does it make a good noise?" I then ask, in the bewilderingly numbskulled way that parents converse with their kids.

F pauses, looks at me, looks at the comb, looks at me again rather pityingly, and then starts combing her hair. V says she's never done this before, which is brilliant - I've caught one of her 'my first' moments during Skype - but it does cross my mind that it might be 'my first sarcastic rebuttal to daddy'.


3. We do a rehearsed reading at the theatre. It's a play that thoroughly demonstrates the writer's knowledge of the subject, the life of Arthur Ransome, whilst carefully avoiding anything that might be mistaken for drama.

After the reading, the audience gets an opportunity for a Q&A session with the author. The audience is mostly made up of local Ransome enthusiasts, a hearty and be-tweedened breed. There isn't much in the way of a Q&A as a result - like the playwright, they just want to show off how much they know about the author. Questions like "have you heard that recording he made for the BBC? Because I have and it's really quite wonderful" are generally answered by other members of the audience with statements like "I've got the one about fish!"

That isn't my favourite bit, though. That goes to the old lady who is outraged that the playwright has based two very minor characters (if that's not too strong a word for a pair of hollow and contrived plot devices) in his work on real life people. And here's the shock horror - the real life people don't hold the same opinions as the fictional characters! O The Humanity!

Once she's worked through the gut-wrenching queasiness that this authorial liberty has engendered in her, she goes on to ask if, in a full production of the play, the writer would consider putting in a narrator. His job, she suggests, would be to explain who the characters are and where the scene takes place. Much in the manner, one imagines, that costumes or a set might do in a more traditional staging than our rehearsed reading, which has naturally taken place with us all in everyday clothes, sat round a table.

This is as close to (badly needed) criticism of the play as we get. We all go and sit in a pub afterwards, and I'm not quite sure whether what I'm spluttering with is repressed rage at idiocy or hilarity at same. Whatever it is is extreme enough to be memorable, at any rate.


4. It's raining (of course) but I've gone kayaking on the lake. It's very still down here, although the low clouds, shredded and torn where they've been dragged across the top of Cat Bells, are swiftly moving overhead. The rain is hard enough that the entire flat surface of of the water is alive with millions of silver beads. These are rebound drops from where the raindrops hit, balanced on the surface tension for half a second or so. It's lovely.

(4b. Later that afternoon, wandering round one of the islands on the lake. Nancy, most intrepid of the cast explorers, walks quite hard into an unsuspecting branch. As the Chinese observe, there is nothing so funny as seeing your neighbour fall off a roof; luckily I am well repaid for my mirth when brushing past a branch causes an entire tree's worth of water droplets to leap into the neck of my coat a few minutes later.)


5. Last night at the theatre, and the audience have been encouraged to come dressed as pirates. We're mustering on top of the set, in beginners, already feeling a bit of an adrenaline spike at the prospect of the final show. Before the curtain comes up, the house lights dim, and the full house all go "ooooo!" like schoolkids. And then, because they're pirates after all, correct this to "aaarrrrrr" instead.

It's an amazing last show, for all sorts of reasons. Mostly from the colossal support from the crowd, who whoop and cheer as though we're rock stars. The show ends with the Swallows and Amazons tearfully bidding each other farewell, and there's not much acting required as its our last show together. Three curtain bounces and a massive standing ovation later, we're done, it's all over and this wonderful collaboration is finished.

Best company I've ever been a part of*, most fun I've ever had in a Christmas show, most professional use of egg shakers - this has swept the board in my own personal Oscars.

*with a tiny apologetic acknowledgement  to other, previous company members who might be reading this. To be fair, you were all shit.

Resolution

It feels like years since I last wrote anything. It feels, actually, like years since I last did anything other than rush up and down the attic stairs of our set, singing and yelling enthusiastically. I'm not saying this to set up a lame joke about the fact the year has turned since my last post (unusually). Just that I've fallen into a slightly exhausted routine this fortnight, and it's nice to see the other side of it.

Our last ten show week finished on Saturday. By the end of that, after a non-stop Christmas, I was walking like a half-cut pensioner, hobbling arthritically round the backstage areas of the theatre. On stage, there was the strange perception that the entire show was happening to someone else. "I can't possibly do this next dance," I'd be thinking. "None of my joints function that way any more. Oh look, it's happening anyway! How funny."

The human knee is a singularly wretched piece of anatomical design. By all accounts, it's manufactured to last you about twenty-five years of hard use, then leave you abandoned in a field as the youth of today bound energetically after whatever their generation are passing off as elk these days. My own pair have clearly reached retirement age. Either that, or someone has lined them with the polystyrene packing beads I hear creaking on every step. In keeping with Cameron's Britain, of course, their pension will always be a few years ahead of them, linked to some impossibly-climbing curve of performance-related pay.

Same with my voice. If my legs are on their last legs, my voice is virtually that of a horse (I told you it was unusual for me not to be setting up lame jokes). At odd moments in the songs, it cuts out, or changes octave unpredictably. We sing a lot of the numbers straight out, so I'm often looking straight at some dimly-seen audience member as this happens. I do my best to brazen through this, but I have to fight the impulse to wince apologetically. No! Never apologise! That's conventional theatre wisdom. Nobody knows you screwed up until you apologise.

This is not true of other actors, of course, who know perfectly well when you've trampled their lines, feet or feelings in the course of the gradual, exhausted collapse you're now turning in for a performance. Always apologise then. Assuming you've even noticed you've made a mistake, I'm not sure I always do.

Two short weeks to go, then home. I am steeled and ready for this, bring it on. Even the eels are silent.

-

Three days off, almost! That's been much needed. All I've done is eat a single copious meal each day and then skype home between burpy naps. F is huge, roaming freely round her poor tired mother, bashing duplo blocks together or performing what look like complex engineering checks on the undercarriage of her electronic rideable Disney jumbo jet. She shouts "hey! ha ha ha ha hey ha hey ha ha" when I come online, and waves cheerfully. V is back to work after a short Christmas break and already having to steel herself against the routine of missed sleep, unavailable babysitters and stroppily rejected food.

My mum visited last month, to help with babysitting, and raised a parental eyebrow at the bottled foods we've been feeding F. Meh - I'm sure I would have raised an eyebrow myself, before being confronted with the practical realities of feeding F. Probably quietly and away from whoever I was raising the eyebrows at, but well, that's not how close family tend to raise their eyebrows at one another. Eyebrows are more usually raised in the manner of close-quarter assault weaponry where I come from - with lethal intent and scant regard for collateral damage.

Since Christmas, F, who was entirely happy eating her mushy lasagnes and slottgryta, has apparently decided Farmor might have had a point. Once you've had pork fillet with creme fraiche, prawn omelette and prinskorv from the the Julbord, fresh broccoli and tiramisu ice cream, suddenly a warm bowl of soggy orange pasta just isn't going to cut it.

This is good news in terms of her growing up and eating healthily, of course. I don't for a second regret having used bottled food - she's big and robust, has gained weight very healthily all through what is now almost her first full year, and aced every test the midwives have thrown at her. So despite the naggings of my middle-class conscience, I think the stuff she's been eating has been healthy and good for her, especially fleshed out with fruit and milk. Still, despite the low inward moanings of my innate laziness, I'm looking forward to getting home and cooking for her so she can try new things. If nothing else, I'm certainly good at flabby pasta and neon stews.

-

F spent this afternoon's skype call kissing the screen and trying to lift the iPad to see if I was actually secretly behind it all along. I need to go home now.