The Potato Harvest

Stephen and I finally moved into our own place.  It's weirdly blissful. Weirdly because there's a lot going on and we've still got a huge amount to organise and work out. But it's so peaceful. We're very busy and very peaceful; quietly productive.

We live opposite a junction and watch a lot of agricultural traffic passing through; enormous slow but very deadly looking farm machinery, mud-splattered jeeps, the occasional horse. Every now and again, we'll be sitting quietly in our living room (our living room) and Stephen will exclaim, "Potatoes!" as a truck, bearing enough spuds to feed the village for a year, goes by.


For almost two weeks, I couldn't believe we'd really done it. We've talked about a home of our own for four and a half years. We've talked so much and planned and schemed, so that actually moving in felt like a further exercise in fantasy, as if we'd been allowed to play house for a few days before having to go home. Home - I was finally given my own key to my parents' house on the day I moved out.

This spell was broken by a new washing machine - strictly speaking, a washer-dryer. Turns out, when the machines achieve singularity, they won't take over and enslave us, they'll simply humiliate us by undermining all logical steps we might take to wash our clothes. We could have fantasised about the peace and quiet, the freedom and the flat-pack furniture (it's so satisfying). I wouldn't have fantasised about spending the best part of a day trying to get one load clean and dry(ish). So it had to be real.  It's real.

When he was a boy, Stephen heard the Strangler's Golden Brown and understood perfectly; Golden brown, texture like sun - Hugh Cornwell was quite obviously singing about his love for potatoes, a love that young Stephen could relate to.

This is one reason why I love him. I've known a few people who have survived periods of adversity by holding fast to some positive in their life; a dream for the future, a passion in the present, a pet cat. At some point, Stephen learned to find joy in the minutia; the pattern of veins on a leaf, the comfort of woolen socks or the glorious versatility of the humble spud. He's carried me through difficult times this way. Bad morning? Then let's make lunch an event. To say every day is special sounds both corny and slightly nauseating, but the truth is occasionally like that.

Manna From Potato Heaven; a large, still rather dirty
potato embraced by a pair of manly white hands.

As the potato-laden lorries turn the corner, they lose a little of their load. You often see this in the countryside, at this time of year; mostly root veg and sugar beet, scattered along the outside of sharp corners, usually cracked by the fall and crushed by the proceeding traffic. The gutter outside our house is strewn with spuds, partially-mashed.

A large specimen lands in our garden, perfectly intact. We'll have that. Vegetarian roadkill.


We've always lived in other people's homes, one way or another. Stephen has always lived with his parents. I've lived with my parents, my ex-husband and briefly, a friend, but I've always had to fit myself to other people's routines and rituals, the way other people want to do things, sometimes infuriating in their futility, sometimes just impossible to abide by fully. When I first left my ex-husband, the relative freedom was overwhelming; when you've had someone else dictating everything from what you wear to how you make a cup of tea, it's hard to know where to begin.

Something similar is happening now, although it's shared between us. We need to work out how to manage our energy, now that we can do pretty much what we like, whenever we like. Fending for ourselves, we need to use a lot of energy on the basics, but those basics don't need to accommodate anyone else, whether in terms of space or timing or anxiety that if there's food on every shelf of the fridge, it may stop working altogether.


It's a long time since I lived in a town; I've never lived in the city.  But I don't know what comes next, once all the potatoes are gathered in.  I'm sure onions came earlier - late August, early September. You could smell them, even if you couldn't see them.  Once the potato lorries drive away (Potato Merchant, one of them declares on the side), is that it, for the winter?

I'm so tremendously happy right now.

This Year's Toned-Down Dalek Cake

A round white-iced cake featuring twelve
small Daleks, some peachy flowers and
a 60 shaped sparkler on top.

Last Sunday, Mum turned sixty.  Naturally, there was a cake. Naturally, it involved Daleks. However, this time we wanted a really big cake and we wanted it to look neat, unlike previous chocolately Daleks which have variously resembled walruses and fire hydrants.

Thus we attempted a collaborative effort which... it still wasn't stunning. The cake itself was structurally unsound. There was a little miscommunication about scale and colour. But hey, this is a Dalek cake. If it didn't look like something produced by an alien life-form, there'd be an issue.

Stephen and I made the cake, iced the cake & made the Daleks (it was about time that Warhammer figure-painting experience came in handy). Granny made the flowers. My sister provided the sparkling 60. Next time, we will make another Dalek.

However, most importantly, Mum loved the cake, it tasted good (a sort of Black Forest Gateau re-interpretation) and a lovely time was had by all.

The Dalek Cake Ignited: A white woman, looking all of 59, is
surprised to see a small explosion taking place on the cake
in front of her.

Move over, Dalek

We missed Doctor Who this weekend. We were too busy living it!

I'm rather alarmed to realise that it has been four whole years since my mother last received a Dalek birthday cake, but this year has surpassed all previous attempts. The idea is that, should the Daleks be considering yet another invasion of Earth, they will see us consuming their life-like effigies without mercy and get on the first bus back to Skaro. Also, my Mum really loves Daleks.

Behold the original Dalek Cake made by my sister back in 2007.

Dalek Cake, 2007 (A terrifying brown Dalek)

Behold the Extermicake I made back in 2008.  

Extermicake 2008 (Another terrifying
brown Dalek)

I couldn't remember it was so long ago. I thought nephew Alex would have remember the two Dalek cakes, and whilst they are undoubtedly etched into his nightmares, he was only two on the last encounter.

Mum's birthday isn't for another few weeks, but since my sister, Alex and baby Sophie were coming for the weekend, Stephen and I set about making a Dalek cake so we could celebrate the birthday while we were almost all together.

Behold, Extermicake 2012:

Extermicake 2012 (A truly horrifying, slightly lopsided, brown Dalek, with terrified on-lookers)

The Dalek leans in a plaintive fashion.

Stephen and I made a cake from a made-up recipe, a bit like this one, only without the baking powder, with added instant coffee and about half the sugar was Muscovado. For the icing, I recalled how a previous fudge-making expedition had gone disastrously wrong and never truly set, so I merely repeated the mistakes I made that time to produce a kind of fudgey plaster. The plunger (technical term in Dalekology) was produced by firing a cook's blow torch at the top of a marshmallow before stabbing a chocolate finger into it.

I can't tell you how to make it stand up straight or be Dalek-shaped because we achieved neither of these objectives.

Right, I hope you paid attention to all that or how are you going to make one yourself?

See the Flickr Dalek Cake Group for more Dalek cakes - some are even better than ours! Some, however, are worse.

Baby Sophie was awake much more than when I first met her. She's a very happy baby and has begun to smile a little. I will put some photos of her up on my Flickr stream once I have organised myself.

Meme Mut8nt-R4

The 8 things Meme Mutated at Andrea's Buzzing About and Andrea (the index case) passed this virulent strain onto me. New genome for Mut8nt-R4:

1. Let others know who tagged you.
2. Players start with 4 recipes they especially like (ethnic or regional recipes and quick meals are especially nice).
3. Those who are tagged should post these rules and their 4 recipes.
4. Players should tag 4 other people and notify them they have been tagged.

I'm afraid I'm not very good at this for two reasons. One is that I don't do that much cooking, and with the stuff I make in my own way (i.e. not just lifting a recipe from elsewhere), I'm rather vague about quantities and timing (frankly, it's really difficult for me to imagine doing without the things in front of me). The second is that I'm pretty bad at writing instructions in any case.

However, when I saw this, I immediately thought of the four people I wanted to tag because they'll each be so much better at it than I will. And that's Seahorse, Bunnyman, Sara and S.. Which may be ever so slightly mean to Seahorse as she already provided a comprehensive week's menu on the Ouch! Blog and Sara gives us lots of recipes anyway, such as Blueberry Pie.

But I have to do this anyway...


1. Onion Gravy.

One of my favourite meals to make (I don't make many) is curly kale, sausages and onion gravy. Curly Kale is a really good lazy vegetable; often you can buy it in a bag and you can just eat heat the bag in the microwave. Ideally, we would prepare our veg from scratch all covered in dirt, but this is not an ideal life. Kale is good with sausages, any kinds of sausages, which are also easy to prepare (I make a foil tray for the grill; a waste of foil, but it saves washing up the grill). And to make this more interesting, I like to cook proper onion gravy.

Unfortunately, my onion gravy is not suitable for vegetarians as it contains Worcester Sauce (which has anchovies in it). But frankly, the anchovy is only a tiny little fish and... no, never mind. Enough to serve two adults. Requires one saucepan and somewhere to chop the onion (see suggestion below).

• 1 Onion
• 1 tbsp sugar
• Some oil - I use rapeseed oil for this purpose.
  
• 1 tbsp plain flour
  
• 1/2 tsp vegetable bouillon (this stuff)
  
• 2 tbsp Worcester sauce
  

Chop the onion. It doesn't have to be very finely chopped, it's up to you. My top onion-chopping tip - do it in a flat-bottomed bowl, under water. If you have to work as slowly and precariously as I do, this will stop your eyes watering. Also, as we're making gravy, it doesn't matter so much if blood is spilt - it merely adds to the flavour!

Using the saucepan you're going to make the gravy in, add the sugar and oil to the onion and fry for a bit. Meanwhile make some stock using the vegetable bouillon and some water... uh, about a teacup worth? Add to this the Worcester sauce.

When the onion is cooked, add the flour and stir well. Then slowly add the stock liquid, stirring constantly. Then let it simmer for a bit. Probably.

I'm really not very good at this, am I? I'll try harder.


2. Orangey Tofu Noodly Surprise (which is suitable for vegetarians)

This is fairly healthy and interesting, something that started off as a proper recipe but which I made my own with several adjustments.

Serves two adults. Requires 2 saucepans, a chopping board, some means to juice an orange and somewhere to put the orange juice.

• Some tofu (I don't know - as much as is in the packet).
• 1 clove garlic
• Some ginger root, roughly the same size as a clove of garlic
• 1 tbsp oil (again, I use rapeseed oil for this purpose)
• Juice of an orange
• 1 tbsp soy sauce
• 1 tbsp honey (clear is best I guess)
  
• About 3 spring onions
• Some brocolli
  
• Some babycorn (um... some.... you can guess how much you need I'm sure)
• Enough noodles for two people.
• A good handful of sesame seeds
  

Slice the tofu best you can and put it in a saucepan. Chop up or crush the garlic and ginger, add this and the oil to the tofu. Stir all this together and leave it alone for a bit to llow the tofu a chance to absorb a bit of flavour. Meanwhile the orange juice with the honey and soy sauce. Cut up the vegetables into thin shreds, or at least small pieces, the best you can.

You can do all this before you do any cooking, so you can chip away at it during the afternoon. At some point, spread some sesame seeds over a flat surface under the grill and toast them. Do watch them carefully because they do nothing, go golden brown for all of a few seconds before going black such that even the birds won't have them.

Now when you're getting hungry, put the heat under the saucepan and fry the tofu in the oil, ginger and garlic for a while. When you feel it's the right time (?), cook the noodles.

Add the as yet uncooked vegetables to the tofu, give them a stir, then add the cooked noodles and the orange/ honey/ soy sauce mixture. Stir it all about. Yum yum yum. It might even help if you chant "Yum yum yum!" as you do this. You never know.

Now put it all onto plates or into bowls or whatever it is you like to do with noodly things (in the bath, if that's your thing). Then sprinkle the toasted sesame seeds all over the place.

This is actually quite nice. Honest. And it is really very healthy. Unlike...


3. Fanny Pasta

That's what it's called. [...]'s grandmother, Fanny - whose name he has been known to use as an alias on occasion - was a very old-fashioned lady who survived into the 1990s without a telephone. But when [...] and his sister would come to stay, she was prepared to make an exotic dish especially for them; macaroni cheese. She wouldn't eat any herself, what with it being foreign food, but she'd do it for the little ones. This is what she imagined macaroni cheese to be.

Requires a chopping board to slice cheese on and a saucepan. It is not very nutritious, but it's a good food in emergencies when you have nothing in the cupboard except for

• Some pasta (macaroni was the original, fusilli or farfalle are our favourites)
• Some cheddar cheese.

Cook the pasta and spread it flat on a heat-proof plate. Thinly slice some cheese and place it on top of the pasta. Grill until the cheese beings to brown.

See, that was very easy, wasn't it? Now for something sweet...


4. Crispy Cake (which may or may not be suitable for vegetarians)

This is one of my Granny's, who is an excellent cook. This is very easy to prepare. It isn't any good for you of course, but what with being made out of Rice Krispies (or similar), most of it is air anyway. That and sugar, of course. Hmm, never mind. Marshmallow is supposed to be good for some things, as a medicinal herb, but I'm not sure you have enough of it in the confection.

Requires some sort of microwave-proof dish.

• Marshmallows (usually contain gelatin but you can get vegan ones)
  
• Knob of butter or margarine
• Rice Krispies (or cheaper own-brand alternative)

Get your dish, put a knob of butter in it and melt this in the microwave. Add some marshmallows, stir them about so that the butter covers them and then put the dish back in the microwave. You can watch the marshmallows expanding, which is good fun, but once they're going sloppy, whip the dish out and stir. You should have a thick pink liquid, into which you add your Rice Krispies. Add quantities of Krispies such that they are all covered and there's no pink stuff to spare. Leave to cool, ideally transferring to fridge when cool enough.

Later on, cut it up and gobble.

Oh, take me to the slaughterhouse; I will wait there with the lambs

Long and boring warning: this one I have been wrestling with for some time, so I thought I would have it out with myself here and see if it helps to write it down (it sometimes does, I fine).

Be nice to yu turkeys dis christmas
Cos' turkeys just wanna hav fun
Turkeys are cool, turkeys are wicked
An every turkey has a Mum.
Be nice to yu turkeys dis christmas,
Don't eat it, keep it alive,
It could be yu mate, an not on your plate
Say, Yo! Turkey I'm on your side.

- Benjamin Zephaniah, first verse of Talking Turkeys!

I should start by pointing out that I honestly don’t make any judgements about the choices other people make about eating meat or not. I never have, perhaps because I am myself so ambivalent about it. However, for my own threadbare conscience, this has long been an area of conflict.

For many years I ate no mammals or birds, consumed no food or drink that contained animal derivatives and refrained from wearing or using leather, suede or sheepskin. I did eat fish though and was quite happy to drink all the alcoholic substances denied to true vegetarians on account of the isinglass. Then I changed my mind.

I felt my abstinence from meat was decadent. It made me a greater inconvenience than I already tended to be. It caused a fuss and used extra resources when someone was cooking for me as part of a group. Then there were all the little ethical objections to what food I might be offered. I knew, for example, that it is far better for the planet to eat beef bought from my local butcher than to eat tofu which has had to be flown half way round the world, having had great swathes of rainforest cleared to produce the soybean. I have a habit of picking up that sort of information and worrying about it.

Added to this was my being pale and sickly. This was a time when I was getting progressively paler and more sickly and I was forever being told that I needed to eat meat, had a responsibility to eat meat if I wanted to get better. Then I was asked to take medication where there was no alternative to gelatine capsules – I had to break the rules or suffer the physical consequences for a tiny amount of gelatine.

But a philosophy module about humans and other animals was the real killer. I realised that even people who had thought very hard about this didn’t have any better or clearer arguments than I did. Suitably flummuxed, I resumed the default position.

Naturally, having felt guilty about my not eating meat, I have felt guilty about eating meat ever since.

Of course, we are part of an ecosystem whereby our interests as individuals and as a species are necessarily in some conflict with some of the interests of other organisms. We are forced to consume other organisms, whatever happens – organic matter is all we can eat – and we are also forced to compete with other organisms for our food and our own flesh.

In some cases, it would be in our best interests to annihilate other organisms altogether: it might have been a cave-man’s dream that he should stick a spear in the last sabre-tooth tiger, although these days we’re only intent on killing off our tiniest enemies like viruses and bacteria.

Is there a difference between a sabre tooth tiger and a virus? Well, yes; the sabre-tooth tiger was capable of experiencing fear and pain, a virus is not. A fundamental of most moral codes is that fear and pain are bad things which we ought to avoid causing and prevent wherever possible.

Its death, or at least its subsequent absence also has moral consequences although being the very last one, no offspring would suffer and the effects on the ecosystem would already be inevitable.

I don't see that there is any difference in principle whether fear and pain is experienced by a human being or another animal. But... Peter Singer and others argue that the reason that human interests are generally more important than those of non-human animals rests entirely on our increased capacity to suffer. It is assumed that our capacity for fear and distress is far greater because of our imagination and reason, our capacity to anticipate pain, the strength of our relationships with one another and so on. Singer also famously argues that by this score, the other great apes have just as much or more moral claim than some humans, such as those with severe intellectual impairments.

However, this assessement depends on some sort of measure of fear and pain which could be applied to all organisms. To even imagine that such a thing is possible is simply anthropomorphism (Ping! You were waiting for that word to feature, weren't you?). We can observe behaviour and physiological phenomena which suggest there is fear and there is pain in other organisms, but we don’t have the faintest idea of what that is like.

Many plants have physical or chemical reflexes to injury or even touch. They do not have brains, so we do not entertain the idea that they feel a thing. The humble goldfish exhibits physical and chemical reflexes to injury or any startling event. The goldfish has a brain about one fourteen-thousandth of the size of the human brain and no neocortex. As a result, the scientific community cannot agree whether or not its reaction to stimuli involves can possibly be described as pain. The only reference we have to the experience of fear and pain is our own experience, our uniquely human experience and there is no way that a brain weighing less than a tenth of a gram is going to have an experience comparable to that of a massively larger brain with a completely different architecture.

Which is not to say that a tiny wee brain cannot have a negative experience. Only, any organism, from amoeba up, can have a negative experience. Oh yes, Goldfish, but this is a red herring; you ate fish, you were presumably never unhappy about gobbling a goldfish – or indeed, a red herring? What about fluffy things with big eyes?

All non-human animals have dramatically different brain architecture from our own and from one another’s. Primate and human brains, impaired or not, are quite different, let alone the brains of the sort of animals we might eat. To compare the experience of animals from two different species is a bit like comparing a digital alarm clock and a satellite navigation system – both have certain, very basic components and mechanisms in common, but they are functionally very different.

Hmm no, I don’t like this argument either. We can’t help making comparisons; we know what distress looks like and we have all seen it in non-human animals, particularly other mammals. We just have no means of establishing degrees. And indeed, the selectivity with which we can transfer our experiences onto non-human animals indicates what appalling judges of these things we must be.

This is why our species bond, our need to put people first, is a rational evaluation as well as a defining instinct. Humans are the only animals whose experiences we even begin to understand. Humans are the only ones playing by these rules; the rules of reason and arguments and concern for the welfare of others. We are a squillion times more capable of helping one another, of minimising suffering and maximising happiness within our own species. This very post would be far more usefully and effectively used to talk about human affairs, and any energy I spend worrying about animals would be better spent on concern for my fellow man.

However, fear and pain are bad things which we ought to avoid causing and prevent wherever possible. I am fairly convinced that it is possible to decapitate a chicken without the animal having much idea of what is happening and without there being significant negative consequences to its death; unless it is caring for eggs or chicks at the time.

Yet we know that chickens are not individually taken in the farmer's arms and quickly decapitated after a pleasant life pecking in the dust. Some of the chickens we eat (and whose eggs we eat) have lived and died in conditions which even the most unsympathetic assessment would consider a deeply negative experience.

Hmm, I have run out of steam on this one and I notice that you have lost consciousness. I'm still wrestling.



My vegetarian icon was George Bernard Shaw, who is hero of mine for many different reasons. But he was a veggie ("Animals are my friends ...and I don't eat my friends.") and all along doctors advised him that he was putting his health and indeed his very life in danger. Shaw lived to 94 and finally died... falling off a ladder.

The best philosopher on the subject is Mary Midgely, who at 87 is still rolling up her sleeves to take on Richard Dawkins, another philosophical hero of mine. How I would love to invite those two round for dinner (or possibly, a food fight). Shame I don't agree with either of them.