The way to love butter is to realize that it might be lost

Okay, so I'm slightly misquoting GK Chesterton, but the point still holds: be careful with your butter ration. I've been being even more sparing than usual in order to save up butter for a fat-rich weekend meal with my herby potatoes as a main feature. Done properly, they take a lot of fat, so saving up is good.

I didn't count on how the smart the stupid dog could be. Our two Border Collies, Rosie and Jen, are chalk and cheese. Rosie is a typical Collie - obedient, smart, quick to anticipate and always ready to round up sheep, other dogs and the smaller of the humans and keep them penned.

Jen, however, is about as untypical a Collie as you can get. Not only will she not round anything up, she also won't obey, can't anticipate and, when she's not sure what to do, will roll on to her back to have her belly rubbed. If we got burgled, I'm sure that she could easily be persuaded to help pack up our belongings by a quick belly rub.

But some of this is an act. After a walk, the dogs sit in the utility room to dry off - they usually play in the sea for a bit. The utility room has a purpose-built gate across the entrance to keep them there and stop random shaking-off-of-water occurring anywhere else.

Jen dislikes unexpected loud noises - thunder, fireworks, the doorbell - and has learnt to hurdle the gate when such a noise occurs. She has no idea what to do after that and has usually forgotten the noise by the time she's over, but it's a good trick nonetheless. What CJBS hadn't anticipated was that, having learnt to jump the gate, she had actually learnt to jump the gate.

CJBS and the dogs got in soaked. He put them in the utility room and headed to the shower to warm up. I continued to work. My first clue something was wrong was the sound of something metallic falling in the kitchen. I got up, went downstairs as was confronted with a scene of devastation. Jen had leapt the gate, headed straight for the kitchen and, being greedy like all dogs, made her way along the counter tops dislodging anything edible on to the floor and eating it.

In those few seconds, she'd had all the remaining bread, foolishly not put back in the bread bin and, most importantly, my hoarded butter ration. 8oz of butter were gone, much of it to be found around her mouth. And she wasn't prepared to stop there, continuing to lick out the butter dish even as I dragged her away, finally stopping when her fear of my annoyance overcame her greediness. Then she ran for it, attempting to find somewhere to hide.

Oh, but I was annoyed. Annoyed with the dog, although she was just being a dog, annoyed with CJBS for walking away from the gate without realising the trap he'd set and annoyed with myself for only telling him four or five times that she was now willing to jump the gate unprovoked. Why oh why did I not nag him more about this? I should've been bringing it up at mealtimes and during favourite radio programmes, leaving him small notes and sending him text messages - you know, the standard "nag+" way of getting a man to remember stuff.

The butter, once gone, could not be replaced until the next rationing week, but CJBS has never let the rules of this project get in the way of a happy life and he bought me butter anyway. So now I had butter in but couldn't use it until next week. Worse than that, rather than buying the cheap, tasty and multi-useful butter I get, he "treated" me to some expensive branded butter that has no taste and is only good for cooking. So my hot buttered toast treat was not just gone for a couple of days, it was gone for the entire next week as well.

And he didn't understand why I didn't thank him, so I had him making hurt puppy-dog eyes at me every time I mentioned it. Which, frankly, I did a lot.

That was last week (I'm still not over it) but today, once I've waited in between 9am and 7pm for a delivery (it'll come at 6.59pm, unless I pop out before then and come home to a card saying "we called but you were out, please drive to Plymouth to collect your parcel") I'll finally get my new, edible fat ration. And then I shall eat hot buttered toast in front of him and look smug, whilst he will have forgotten the whole incident.

A little Blitz

Do you believe in luck? For all my atheism and scientific rationalism, I'm still a superstitious person, in so far as I believe there's a limited degree of luck in the world and sometimes you have lots and sometimes none. Also, luck comes in flavours, ranging from extremely good to extremely bad, via a sort of crappy middle. "Cheese" is the analogy I'm trying not to make.

Image by marfis75 on Flickr: Creative Commons licensed BY SA 2.0

Today, it seems, is the crappy middle good luck. I woke in a good mood, bounced out of bed and started my busy Bank Holiday Monday. Having done all the ironing and washing that had built up on Saturday morning, had a fabulous food n' laughs filled evening over at Scott & bf's house for the Eurovision Song Contest (Britain came very very last, if you missed it) on Saturday night and had a lovely lazy (and hangoverless, oddly) Sunday with a great tomato, basil and olive soup, I had reason to be cheerful.

Today was to be a deep clean of the bathroom, a tidy and bleach of the kitchen (I'm a bleach queen: little satisfies me more than massacring germs that dare to lurk in corners using environmentally damaging chemicals and boiling water until my hands are red and shredded) and an exchange of sweaty bedlinen for lovely "lavender-style" scented freshly washed stuff. This was to be followed by another soup and the assembling of something in the slow cooker for tomorrow night's dinner.

I started in the bathroom, squirting bleach spray everywhere, scrubbing down the tiles, dissolving the (oddly pink) limescale from the grouting and other intense sparkling activities. I washed the tiles down with the shower, turned it off and went downstairs for my grapefruit-scented antiseptic wipes.

From the kitchen, I could hear running water. Frantically running water. Hmmm, odd. This was joined by the sound of urgent dripping much nearer. I went back upstairs to find the shower running. Strange. Looking closer, it wasn't running. It was gushing. And from the back of the shower unit. The main flow of the water was clearly running into the false wall and from there through the ceiling into the utility room. That explained the urgent dripping.

Now, I'm good in a crisis. I think fast and can usually see not only all the options available, but the consequences of each one and therefore the best action to take, all in a second or so. I pay for this by never being able to make any non-urgent decision at all, unless the person asking is actually on fire.

Electric shower, running water. Right, item one: isolate the electric mains supply. Thought and done. Item two: water still running. Isolate gas boiler then find stopcock for the water supply. Grab phone, out of back door, into The Cellar for the first ever time. Terrified of spiders, and this is where they filmed Aragog's scenes in the second Harry Potter movie. It's this or drowning. Into The Cellar, despite being in flip-flops, shorts and nothing else. Call CJBS and ask where is the stopcock, exactly?. Lefthand wall. No stopcock. Where on the wall, EXACTLY? Am I in The Cellar? Yes. On the wall on the left. No, no it isn't. Go into The Cellar, walk through the cobwebs, go through a doorway covered in cobwebs into a pitchblack subroom filled with cobwebs. It's on the lefthand wall in there.

Now, over the last two years, we've had building work done, generally by the cheapest and uselessest builders we could find. Except for the house not actually collapsing, everything else they did has broken, fallen down, peeled off or remained unfinished when actually inspected. To that list we can now add "didn't bother with a skip for the rubble, broken glass and other unwanted items". It's all in The Cellar. And it's all piled up in front of the doorway into the subroom. And covered in cobwebs.

So, in cheaply made, given-away-free-by-Merseyrail flip-flops, shorts and nothing else I climbed over the rubble and the glass shards, walked through about three billion cobwebs and turned off the stopcock. The torrent stopped. I climbed back over the rubble, broken glass, razor wire, bear traps, used needles and scorpions^{(note: some of this may not be actually true)} and called the insurance company's plumber.

He came over urgently, 4 to 8 hours later, turned another stopcock off (behind a secret panel under the bath, who knew?) and opened the shower unit. This is where the crappy good luck kicks in. There's a plastic clamp holding the water pipe in place. It had sheared off and could've gone at any time. Like in 3 weeks when we're in London for the weekend. Or in 4 when we're in Belgium for a week. That it went today, when there was someone in the house and I wasn't working... very lucky. Just crappily so.

Of course, being a plumber from the insurance company, he couldn't repair the shower, since he had made it safe (turned the tap off) and we have alternative facilities (the bath). So a real plumber and a part will be needed. Until then, we're bathing instead of showering. I'm tempted to draw a line around the bath, as people did in the war to ration hot water (including the King and Queen, as noted with amazement by Mrs Roosevelt, but excluding Mr Churchill, who did a lot of speechwriting whilst immersed, to the distaste of his dictation secretaries).

This little crisis was followed by a trip to the shops, which had mostly closed early because of the Bank Holiday so I missed them. In the supermarket, a plague of locusts must have been through, as there were almost no vegetables to be had and random shortages elsewhere.

So, for the purposes of this project, I'm going to pretend we got caught in a little Blitz (explaining the state of the bathroom, the dust and cobwebs on my clothes, the unchanged bedding and the food shortages). And we all know what that means: chips from the takeaway chip shop for dinner tonight.

Spud-u-might-like

Tonight is part leftovers, part points and part unrationed. For the leftovers, CJBS is having his cat sick (mentioned yesterday) plus a small tin of baked beans and a baked potato. Meanwhile I'm having baked potato as a main course, with a cheese filling.

But how, I hear you cry. This is the fake cheese sauce I made recently as a Welsh rarebit, adapted: it uses very little cheese (although I have some blue cheese to give it a kick) as it's mostly a roux made with beer. To that I'm going to scrape out the insides of the baked potatoes, mix the pulp into the beer-cheese roux and put the whole lot back into the skins and bake again.

The result should be cheese-filled potatoes of the first rank. If not, I won't be able to rescue it with extra salt, that being this week's unexpected actual shortage of a non-rationed product. Could this be winter related? It certainly didn't go onto Wirral Metropolitan Borough Council's roads and pavements; but then they haven't collected our rubbish yet this year (loss-making) but have been round to get the recycling (profitable). But I digress.

And to digress further, my thumb is no longer bleeding. And whilst it looks disgusting and mutilated without the bandages, it does appear to be healing at a normal rate. In a day or two I'll start putting aloe on it to promote that a bit.

Thumbing my nose

Tonight's meal is leftovers again for me: always dull to write about. So here's last night's meal described.

I had bubble and squeak (recipe earlier) and made what CJBS called "corned beef hash" for him. This wasn't what I would've called a hash, but he loved it as it replicated a school dinner of the 1960s for him. From that, I therefore understand that his school dinners looked like, and smelled of, cat sick. But there we go.

If you're insane enough to want cat sick for dinner, here's how it's done: boil and then mash or rice enough potato. Mince, blend or otherwise pulverise a tin of corned beef. Dice a carrot and boil it. Combine, sprinkle with a little grated cheese and bake for half an hour in a medium oven. Serve, then leave the room. As a starter, we had the last of the mushroom soup and the winter salad on the side.

In the meantime, two other culinary events have occurred. First, on opening the tin of corned beef (one of those wind-a-key-around jobs), the beef got stuck in the tin. I attempted to prize it out, and quickly and efficiently severed the tip of my thumb. This was painful, messy and is now disabling (you'd be amazed at the number of things having two opposable thumbs lets you do; and consequently the number of things that having just one on the "wrong" hand prevents you from doing).

In all the drama, I forgot to boil my stock pots. This evening, I went to boil them and lifted the lids first. Now, a useful thing when you're cooking is to trust your nose. Fundamentally, we're born able to tell when food is off. It's innate, a survival-of-the-fittest hereditary thing. Modern processed foods contain chemicals to inhibit mould and bacteria growth, but they also inhibit the smell of these things as the food goes off. Artificial flavourings also help mask the smell of bad food.

My stock pots contained nothing artificial. And they didn't smell "bad", just "wrong". There was the usual vegetable-soupy aroma to one and the slightly nastier meaty smell to the other. But underneath that was something else. Sweet? Sickly? A sugary note, of sorts. It was just something, not unpleasant, but... well, "wrong". That's all the clue I needed: both are now gone and I'll wash out the pans on the dishwasher's hottest, scrubbiest setting. And start again with new stock tomorrow.