Learning to relax

Well, we are in the new house.

Our shipping container with furniture and household goods still hasn’t arrived, so it’s a rather empty house and it feels rather like we are camping out (or squatting??) rather than living but it’s lots of fun and so nice to have our own space. And 2 bathrooms. M keeps telling me we can "tandem poop". I'm yet to take him up on that offer but I'll keep you posted .....

We've got the essentials too: bed, TV, Internet, camp chairs, bar fridge, BBQ and then a random assortment of goods we left boxed up in Australia which mostly consists of fancy wedding gifts we never unpacked and extra crockery we didn't ship to France. So I have one (borrowed) frying pan, one saucepan about 13 platters, a whole lotta crystal stemware and kickarse wine and beer glasses. It makes me giggle. I can’t microwave anything, nor produce toast but I can offer you cheese and crackers off a rather expensive Villeroy and Boch platter if you’d like??

What didn't make me giggle was my foolish attempt to make a Sticky Date Cake with Caramel Sauce for our friends coming over for dinner with such limited kitchen resources.

I went out and bought a new cake tin, as my old one is cactus anyway, and I happily bought some new measuring cups and spoons as I have been missing the ½ a cup and ¼ a cup for some time .... which are kind of necessary when baking - unlike good ol' 1/3 of a cup which I still have kicking around the place, mostly unused.  So that was fine. I was also happy to start stocking the pantry with brown sugar (real true blue brown sugar! Huzzah!) flour and vanilla extract, so ingredient shopping was fun. And even though the instructions clearly said to “beat butter and sugar together with electric beaters till thick and creamy” and I was decidedly without electric beaters I was still full of confidence in my ability to do it by hand.

Well bollocks to that.
BOLLOCKS I SAY. 

Hand beating butter and sugar is for idiots and masochists.
I think I may have strained my wrist.

It probably didn't help that we had accidentally turned our little bar fridge up to Maximum so everything on the top 2 shelves (including the butter) were pretty much frozen.

Side note – frozen milk on cereal is gross. Why is that?? 

Anyway, after much swearing and carrying on and splattering the nice, new, clean kitchen with frozen butter chunks, I did eventually manage to cream the butter and sugar together, add the eggs and other ingredients and make the cake. In the fancy Miele oven that I think is smarter than me.

But by the time M got home – and after I’d made the 2 salads and the cake and raced about town buying meat and things and waddling around supermarket aisles and shopping centres. I was done. Pooped. In fact when he came in the door I was leaning on the kitchen bench breathing deeply which prompted his voice to raise about 3 octaves as he questioned whether I was about to have our baby on the kitchen floor. No – Silly mummy just needed a bit of a lie down.

So that’s one thing I'm slowly learning; that little things, simple things are much harder when you’re practically 9 months pregnant.

And that perhaps buying a cake would have sufficed.

It’s hard though – I'm not saying I’m not naturally predisposed towards laziness, that’s a given, but it is surprisingly difficult to do nothing, or to do very little. I guess I should enjoy this quiet time while I can.


Oh – and finally – if you’re interested: The cake was delicious.


xxx
B