It is International Women’s Day, and you will not be surprised to learn that I have occupied it entirely in cooking and cleaning.
I am writing to you now whilst dinner simmers on the stove downstairs. I have not bothered to take my apron off because I imagine I am going to need it again soon. Mark has arrived home from work but popped out to haul some firewood before he comes in to eat it, the dinner not the firewood, obviously.
Apparently there was an advertisement on some website advising men to celebrate International Women’s Day by purchasing an item called a Dust Buster for the woman in their life. This seems to have caused some furore in the newspapers and on Facebook, although I fail to understand why. I wish Mark had seen it, it sounds very useful indeed.
I have not been dusting. Mostly I have been cooking. I have been making things which can be shoved into the oven for ten minutes and then added hastily to a taxi picnic. There are lumps of Chinese chicken, Halloumi Fries, and vegetarian nut burgers. Neither of us are vegetarians but eating very much meat gives me the most ghastly indigestion, and so I tend to leave that part of our diet to Mark. He will eat the nut burgers as well, and by a stroke of great good fortune they have turned out very well indeed. They are a bit squishy but that will resolve itself in the oven, and in the meantime they are ace. I fried some onions and mushrooms and garlic, and chucked in a pile of seeds and nuts that have been shoved in the back of the cupboard for months, and so they have cost hardly anything at all and will be perfect for desperate moments in the stilly watches of the night.
I had a horrible moment at around four o’clock when I realised that the kitchen was utterly and hideously trashed. Everywhere was coated in a floury-dust, the top of the cooker covered in splurges of oil and nuts, and the compost bin was overflowing with vegetable peelings and had started to smell.
I had a terrific panic then, dashing about to get everything tidied up before Mark came home. He didn’t call to say he was on his way tonight, which was probably just as well because I would only have flapped even more, and happily I had just about shoved the last plate back in the cupboard and was demurely stirring bacon risotto for his dinner when he appeared.
I had tipped the smelly compost bin on the compost heap outside by then. We have been having Issues with smells just lately. You might recollect that when I fry things I open all of the doors and windows, which generally dilutes the smell but means the house rapidly becomes freezing.
I do not like cooking-fat smells at all, but for some peculiar reason for the last few weeks we have had the irritating problem that when I hang the washing in the garden has come back in smelling of stale kitchens. This is not related to my own catering activities, because it happens whether I am at home or not, and I have been puzzling over it for some time.
It really smells really grim, like the smellier sort of chef we pick up from the cheap hotels with the unventilated kitchens.
I like the smell of garden on my washing, not kebab and chips.
I discussed it with Mark this morning, and eventually we realised that the smell, of course, is coming from one of the many restaurants that back on to our alley. I had already worked that out, not being entirely stupid, but we have lived behind restaurants for years with no ill effects.
However we now have a sunflower oil crisis. In fact, since various governments the world over have requisitioned all sorts of cooking oil to keep their tank-driving bills down, we have an oil crisis generally.
The cooking oil available now, at least the sort that restaurants are using to try and keep their bills down, is heavier. Droplets in the air will not rise so high, and they will fall sooner.
In short, they will fall on my washing instead of on the park, which is an absolute nuisance.
We have pondered this with some concern. This morning we added washing up liquid to the wash, and bicarbonate of soda to the rinse. This will not stop the outside smell, but it will stop it building up on clothes, and I am pleased to announce that when I brought it all in this afternoon it smelled just fine.
I am going to go. Mark is home and starting to unload firewood. This is because we are expecting snow and need to be well stocked up.
I am very glad I am married.
Happy International Women’s Day.
