POST 10, PART I: WHEN I’M 64...

We’ll hopefully have the whole voluntary euthanasia thing sorted. Or, failing that, legalise the efficient despatch of sleeping OAPs with pillows, providing your reasons are entirely selfless. Like your mum’s lost her marbles, say. She’s just a drooling vegetable taking up a hospital bed that’s so desperately needed to give the obese toddlers of the not-so-distant-future a gastric bypass. Or she’s announced she’s blowing your inheritance on a cruise. Any court of law can see that a 70-year-old woman swanning off on a cruise when you’re struggling with a family, a mortgage and repayments on that hover-board you’ve been wanting ever since you first saw Back to the Future II is madness. And, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, therefore legally justifiable grounds to get all Harold Shipman on her incontinent ass. I rest my case.

Because – let’s face it, folks ­– getting old sucks. And I mean proper old. I’m totally at peace with spending a second year at 29. I’m talking 89. That’s old. And, as a case in point, my dear granny happens to be both 89 and, thus, officially old. I went to see her this weekend. It’s been a while since my last trip and I guess she’s at that stage where, well... There’s this great Lily Tomlin line – “Things are going to get a lot worse before they get worse”. That pretty much sums it up.

She’s always had her ailments and complaints – in fact, she’s quite the drama queen and even seemed to revel in the gloom and doom of her latest diagnosis or hospital stay. This is a woman who once cried “stroke!” when we rebelled against early arrival on a Sunday as instructed (why is it the older people get, the earlier and earlier they get up?!) and we had to dial 999 for a hissy fit. Death’s probably not a-knocking at your door when you’ve got the audacity to complain to paramedics that the siren is too loud and the ride too bumpy. “I definitely did feel a stroke coming on”, she insisted. Hmm... Perhaps those five hours spent trying to explain/yell her ‘symptoms’ to that brown doctor with the terrible English acted as some kind of miracle cure..?

But there’s a marked change in her. In her heyday, she was the life and soul of the party and, as such, her dogged refusal to accept her limitations in later life has been a recipe for disaster. Have you ever tried getting a heavy suitcase across central London? Train it, tube it, taxi it – whatever, it’s a nightmare. Now try getting a fairly hefty old lady in a wheelchair across town – and then up Tower Bridge, the world’s most inconvenient wedding venue. Via a really small lift that she’s trying to jam you into as well because she’s developed a sudden and super-dramatic fear of enclosed spaces. And then do it all again in reverse order. They should make it an Olympic sport, it’s such bloody hard work. But did that stop her nagging the world and his wife to – p-l-e-a-s-e! – take her on holiday to Portugal or Spain, or somewhere? Even Devon or Cornwall would do..? Or maybe the moon..?

Did it heck! Until now...

She turned down a funeral the other day, which says it all – she flippin’ loves a funeral! She’s lost interest in all forms of entertainment aside from snooker, which is another worrying sign... And her speedometer’s dropped to tortoise. After it’s been picked up and turned in the opposite direction by its annoying child owner for the umpteenth time and really can’t be arsed anymore. Even food – one of her life’s great pleasures (like grandmother, like granddaughter) – is a challenge too far. I treated her to lunch at a posh pub this weekend... But eating out isn’t quite as much fun when you’re making your menu choices according to what’s mushiest. There’s, um, stew...

And – argh! – soup! Book me on the next flight to Switzerland! Now!

She went for moules mariniere and I tried not to watch. Or laugh at an old lady’s befuddlement upon being served dessert in a jam jar on a piece of slate. Because I’m sure I’ll be just the same when my crème brulee arrives in a rusted tuna tin on an old piece of crazy-paving 60 years from now.

Conclusion – sadly, even a lunchtime jaunt is coming too much for her. Never in all my drinking career has the short walk from pavement to pub seemed so epic. It’s her legs, you see – I’ll spare you the details... But given my generous thighs and fat knees have caused me nothing but grief so far, I’m now convinced they’ll be the death of me too.

And, thing is, my granny is one of the lucky ones. She had my granddad to grow old and grey with until relatively recently. God knows she’d rather he were rubbing lotion into her creaking, weeping nooks and crannies than my reluctant nurse of a mother. So all this has got me wondering – who’s going to need me and, more importantly, feed me when I’m 64? Never mind the fairytale marriage, the growing family and mortgage, or even starting to see the merits of a life insurance policy sold by Parky and appeal of a cruise. I need to think long-term. Because, ladies, we’re in this for the long-haul, thanks to our longer life expectancy.

I need to find someone to grow old and grey with.

In short, I need to work on my stew.

POST 9, PART II: AMERICAN PIE

So, pecan pie...

INGREDIENTS

120g plain flour
60g cold butter, diced
1 tbsp maple syrup
2 tbsp ice-cold water

2 eggs, beaten
50g butter, melted
100g soft dark brown sugar
4 tbsp golden syrup
2 tbsp maple syrup
175g pecan halves

METHOD

1) Pulse the flour and butter in a food processor until they resemble breadcrumbs. Add the syrup (just to sweeten the pastry) and add the water one tablespoon at a time until it binds together. Cover the ball of pastry in clingfilm and pop in the freezer for one hour.

2) Preheat the oven to 200 degrees.

3) This is going to sound odd, but coarsely grate the frozen pastry and then press it out into a 9in/23cm pie tin with your fingers. I came across this pastry method in the wonderful Waitrose magazine and it really is worth trying – it’s much lighter and more delicate than other pastries. The uneven, ‘frilly’ edges also give your pie a certain rustic charm.

4) For wetter pies/tarts like this, I’ve found it’s best to blind-bake the base for about 10 minutes until the base is just cooked through, so do that while you make the filling. No need for baking balls or any of that as it won’t puff up. But word to the wise, here – don’t use a pie tin with perforated holes at the base as it will leak!

5) Melt the butter for the filling over a gentle heat until it just turns a light golden brown (not burnt!). The technical term for this is beurre noisette and it gives the pie a nice toffee-nutty taste, if that makes sense. Set aside.

6) Mix the sugar and two syrups into the beaten egg. Loads of pecan pie recipes call for three eggs, but I find that’s one too many and leaves you with too much of an eggy taste, hence I omit one. And I like using a bit of maple syrup as it’s the perfect partner to pecans, IMHO. Stir in the butter.

7) Arrange the pecans in the pastry case, pour the liquid on top and transfer to the oven. Bake for 10 to 15 minutes before turning down to 180 degrees for a further 15 to 20 minutes. Turn out the tin when slightly cooled and serve warm or cold (when it’ll be even stickier!) with ice cream, cream or crème fraiche.

Ahh... One of the best things about writing this blog is that I get to whip up treats like this pie for no particular reason and then pig out. There’s a slice of the States on a plate, y’all! Now, I wonder how difficult it is to create an authentic Dunkin’ Donuts experience in my own kitchen? Or get a pretzel inside an M&M..? Both delicacies I didn’t eat while in New York. I did, however, enjoy my very first Subway and a dinner consisting entirely of crisps, thanks to my brother’s gastronomic discerning.

But before you go thinking we had an entirely terrible time, we did manage to pack in plenty of fun stuff around the, er, hiccups... Up the Empire State Building. Circle Line boat tour to see Lady Liberty. Central Park, even though we got lost for a further hour after I said I had to go home and thought my feet were going to fall off. Having a wee at the United Nations knowing I was on international soil. Oh, and ogling all the True Blood season three billboards. So all good, cultural stuff.

I guess we got off to a bad start, is all... On our first night at the hotel, I woke up around 3.00am after having a bellyful of Diazepam, beer and no sleep for some 24 hours in an effort to beat jet-lag to find our bathroom completely flooded. There was a good inch of water on the floor, which was seeping out onto the bedroom carpet – all a bit Fear and Loathing. No sooner had I sleepily tossed a towel down – about as much use as bailing out a sinking ship with a teaspoon – than hotel staff were banging on our door. Water was dripping down into the room below, so they promptly moved us.

All of which I apparently found hilarious at the time, judging by the photos I took to document the whole sorry affair. ‘Their leak, their problem’, I figured. The next morning, not so much... The hotel manager rejected our leak theory in favour of a tap left running. My brother had no recollection of the night’s proceedings. But, to me, a leak seemed the only logical explanation. So we tried to carry on our holiday regardless. Which isn’t easy when your brother’s secretly worrying he had the bright idea of running a midnight bath in a highly litigious society. And so, at the end of a hideous day spent trailing solemnly around the Financial District contemplating the atrocities of 9/11 in between my throwing up with heatstroke, I realised that my life movie more closely resembled The Hangover.

A review of the evidence – photo times, a pair of wet socks and the fact that we are a couple of British binge-drinking buffoons – revealed that we were guilty as charged, m’lord. The likelihood being that one of us (ie, my brother) left the tap running for some three hours til it overwhelmed the overflow before he finally turned it off without doing a thing about the water, all while I was sound asleep. I think his soggy socks would be enough to convict him in a court of law.

So I phoned the manager and fessed up. And cried. Because I’m good at that. And after leaving us to stew for a few days that lovely, lovely Ace Hotel let us off the hook without charging us a penny! Which was the best un-30th-birthday present I could have wished for!

Plus has also stopped me filing for divorce from my drunk and disorderly brother. The end.

POST 9, PART I: AMERICAN PIE

So, 29 again... No, seriously – I’m still 29! Forget that 30th birthday update I promised. See, I made the mistake of heading off on holiday with my brother for lack of a more suitable companion, which turned out to be perfect preparation for being (fingers crossed, someday) unhappily married. And as he made almost zero effort to mark my big day, I figure I get a free pass.

Yep, we must have looked like ‘that’ couple... Shared surname, but we’re checking we’ve got separate beds booked the moment we check into the hotel. Sitting in silence at either side of the table, masticating. Miserable. No sex, which kinda goes without saying – in fact, I feel pretty weird to have pointed that out to you, but, dammit, it’s a good analogy so I’m going with it!

I mean, sure, we love and occasionally even like each other on some level – usually when we’re drinking or a close relation has died. But aside from that our God-given mission is to provoke and generally piss off our worser half by being as inconsiderate and uncaring as we can be. My brother, for instance, believes conversation and mutually enjoyable activities to be optional on even a day as delicate as my hitting the big 3-0. So, having tearily hit 30 in a toilet UK time (as mentioned in my last post) I woke up Officially Old in New York to my brother grunting “happy birthday” from his bed before dragging me off on a ‘surprise’ trip to... An aircraft museum. His treat. I kid you not.

Now, to be fair, this was the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, which is pretty frikkin’ cool, even for a girl. You get to go inside a Cold War submarine and everything! But, see, my role in this unhappy marriage is to sulk. And sometimes cry. But claim in a high-pitched, whiney voice that,“I’m fine, it’s fine, absolutely fine, whatever you want to do is fine,” and so on and so forth. Until I cry again.

So after stomping around this fuck-off big boat for a few hours, I was ready to eat. And drink. “I’m not really all that hungry,” my beloved brother remarked. “It’s too hot to eat. Maybe we should just get a McDonald’s.” At which point I vowed to never – ever! – go on holiday with him again. And told him in no uncertain terms I would not be dining at a McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway or Wendy’s or whatever else unremarkable eatery he had in mind on my 30th birthday of all days and was very far from fine. So together we stomped off to the Meatpacking District, stopping at every bar we could find en route to drink until we forgot why we were so hacked off with each other in the first place.

But the Big Apple is just so darn big, isn’t it? And he insisted on us walking everywhere, the bastard. My feet are still in bits... So, in spite of my best efforts, I pretty much metabolised every last drop of alcohol as we traipsed from one block to the next in the blistering heat. But I was feeling chipper and looking forward to ‘getting my drink on’ once I’d got a good meal down me.

And then it started to rain. Boy, did it rain! New York does not do things by half! Thunder, lightening. Rain, rain, rain, rain. We like to think we know rain back in Blighty, but that rain – it was like having a bath-full of water chucked over your head. We were soaked and in no fit state to go to some trendy bar. So it was back to the hotel for us, in theory to spruce ourselves up for my big night out. But then I cracked open the bottle of red wine sitting atop the mini-bar and... And before I knew it we were eating a burger because I sorta had to admit it was too hot to eat (a Breslin Burger ordered from Ace Hotel room service I hasten to add, possibly the best burger I’ve ever eaten).

But then my brother passed out with the booze he hadn’t burned off and the jet-lag he definitely didn’t have. Out. For. The. Count. So that was that. As we’d kind of had our mini-bar key confiscated earlier in the week for reasons I’ll explain in Thursday’s finale, I necked a couple of the Diazepam I’d been prescribed for the plane for wont of something more intoxicating and polished off the last of the red wine while watching CNN. Only to wake up a couple of hours later having spilled that last half glass all over my pyjamas and the white linen.

Hardly fitting behaviour for a woman of 30. Which is why I’m remaining 29 until further notice.

So as we’re in need of a dessert to round-off the roast dinner from last post, I’ve decided to make a pecan pie in tribute to all the delicious American specialities I failed to devour while in New York...

Thanks (I think!) to Bex for the illustration - we don't really look like that! Xxx

POST 8, PART II: MUM’S THE WORD

Right, recipe for roast pork loin with proper crackling... I adapted this recipe from a Jamie Oliver one that involves roasting a much bigger hunk of meat over bones, which seemed a bit of a palaver to me so I’ve just nicked the seasonings, really.

INGREDIENTS
(Serves four)

1.5lb pork loin
Boiled water
Coarse sea salt

1 tbsp fresh rosemary, chopped
1/2 tsp fennel seeds
3 cloves garlic, crushed

Drizzle of olive oil
2 large carrots, washed and cut into rough chunks
3 celery sticks, washed and cut into rough chunks
1 onion, sliced
2 bay leaves
Good glug of balsamic vinegar

METHOD

1) Preheat your oven to its highest setting. Meanwhile, get cracking on your crackling – score the skin all over with a super-sharp knife in a crisscross pattern. Place the loin on a rack over your sink and pour a kettle-full of boiling water over it – this helps dry out the skin and open up the cuts. Dry thoroughly with kitchen towel. Rub generously with sea salt, really working it deep into the incisions to draw out the moisture. If I’ve got time, I like to leave the meat sitting there like that for an hour as all meat is better cooked from room temperature anyway, plus the dryer the skin is the better. I do take pride in my crackling, even though I never eat the stuff – this is one of the last meals I cooked my granddad and I remember him being terribly impressed. Good crackling is the mark of a good woman as far as he was concerned!

2) Drizzle the bottom of a roasting tin with olive oil and chuck in the carrots, celery, onion and bay leaves. Splash with balsamic vinegar – about six tablespoons is right and (IMHO) the syrupy, sweet Belazu Balsamic Vinegar is the best. Cover with about half a pint of water and place a roasting rack on top. Sit your pork loin on this and rub the skin with the rosemary, fennel seeds and garlic.

3) Roast at your highest temperature for 30 minutes and then turn the oven down to about 220 degrees. The meat will then need 30 minutes per pound, so time according to the weight you’ve bought. Another good crackling tip I heard recently was to open the oven door every 20 minutes or so for just a few seconds to let the steam escape, which seems to work. When cooking time is complete, rest your meat for at least 10 minutes.

4) What I love about this recipe is that it makes for foolproof gravy. A good mum must make good gravy – mine does, thank God, as my own efforts are consistently ghastly. I think it’s because I find the final throes of a roast dinner so stressful – the carrots are overcooked while the cabbage is raw, plus I’ve forgotten to heat the plates... So I panic when it comes to gravy, my Achilles heel. I once ruined a Christmas dinner subscribing to my ‘more is more’ policy when it comes to wine and made gravy that tasted like you’d just spilled a whole glass of Chardonnay over your turkey. But this is so simple even I can’t screw it up. Sieve the liquid at the bottom of your roasting pan into a pint jug, giving the veg a good squish to get the juices out. Leave it to settle for a few minutes so you can skim off the fat. Meanwhile, melt a knob of butter in a pan over a gentle heat and whisk in a tablespoon of flour or cornflour to create a roux, then gradually whisk in the liquid to make a gravy. Job done!

5) Serve with steamed carrots, green veg and – what else?! – roast potatoes. And on the subject of tatties, I have Queen Nigella to thank for the best potato tip ever – rather than cutting your average-sized potato into straight quarters, you cut it into three on an angle, thereby creating the optimum surface area for roasting. Devilishly simple! Nigella’s ‘patented roast potato technique’ as she called it on her show. You will never chop potatoes for roasting the same way again, promise.

So, future kids – this is the one roast dinner you can look forward to without having to stomach my terrible homemade gravy. Or maybe I’ll have surrendered to the Bisto and Aunt Bessie’s by then...

The closest I’ve come to motherhood was a bad case of constipation three Christmases ago. It had been a full three months since I’d last slept with someone – whilst on the pill and using a condom, plus I’d had my period in between – so it was absurd. But I do worry about the prospect of unwanted pregnancy... I once had a fumble in the silver closet with a sergeant twice my age when I was in the army (working as a mess waitress at sweet 16, but it sounds better that way). I spent a full week worrying I was pregnant even though no bodily fluids were exchanged and I was wearing tights the whole time. I swear you could stand me next to a man in full raincoat and galoshes and it would still cross my mind I’m up the duff next time I feel a bit fat and full.

So, yeah, that Christmas I spent a lot of time thinking about babies and becoming a mum... It was the first one we’d spent without the family dog (Jack, RIP) and I figured a toddler would be the next best thing to dress up in novelty reindeer antlers and go crazy for wrapping paper. Yep, motherhood sure would beat the umpteenth game of Scrabble. Not to mention make my annual demands to watch The Muppet Christmas Carol seem a lot less retarded...

However, there was a good deal of drinking to be done, and so I delayed doing a pregnancy test until January 2nd and hence spent my sober moments weighing up the pros and cons of the wretched life ahead of me caring for my horribly booze-damaged baby against a bottle of gin and a hot bath. When it just turned out to be one too many roast potatoes.

I think we can all agree I’m going to make one heck of a mother. Good job I’m back on the pill, eh?

Illustration by Bex.