March Favourites
A wholesome collection of favourites, this month. At least it feels so to me. One of the things on my list is completely free, another is “big garlic from M&S”, which might sound slightly mad and abstract if you’ve never experienced the (relative) joy of peeling big, fat, oversized garlic cloves rather than the standard little pissy ones that most supermarkets offer up non-apologetically, the ones that yield a clove that is about the same size as a mouse’s ear once you’ve laboriously taken off the skin.
I hate peeling garlic. I know you’re supposed to just bash the clove with the side of a heavy knife handle and then all of its clothes fall off but I have health and safety issues with handling a knife in this non-traditional fashion. I also don’t like to get any garlic juice or smell trapped under my fingernails and so I tend to peel my cloves in the most precise, clinical way that I can possibly manage. I am the opposite of the TV chefs who smash things around with gay abandon, squelching finely-sliced red onion into the coleslaw mix with their fists and massaging oil and salt over a whole raw chicken.
Nope. Don’t want to do it. Don’t get me wrong, I love cooking - I love things to be packed with flavour - I just don’t like it all over my hands. I think this stems from a time in my childhood when I accidentally went to bed with hands that were sticky from the honey on toast I’d eaten as a nighttime snack. The feeling of this still haunts me.
Anyway, yes. Wholesome. At least, more wholesome than usual. I write this in my work cabin, surrounded by jars of dried flowers and piles of cut logs; outside in the garden the birds are tweeting away and it’s an unseasonable eighteen degrees - hotter than Spain! - and I almost definitely, in my mind, think that I am some sort of rustic off-grid settler.
[Ad info: this post contains a paid AD with SURI. Affiliate links are marked *.]
Would my rustic off-grid settler approve of our first monthly favourite, the SURI toothbrush? I most certainly think that she would. Built for durability, longevity and with the idea of sustainability absolutely at the forefront of the design process, it’s almost entirely the opposite of the landfill-bound toothbrushes that crowd the market.
I’m massively impressed with SURI; they’ve managed to make a toothbrush into a thing of beauty, with its sleek aluminium casing and muted, stylish colourways; and they’ve fixed one of my biggest bathroom annoyances, which is the fact that every time I stand an electric toothbrush up on its base it inevitably gets knocked over again. God forbid you have more than one lined up, they’re all there falling over into the sink like drunken idiots…
SURI comes with a clever magnetic mount that attaches to your mirror so that the SURI toothbrush can just snap into place when you’ve finished with it. A neat solution and the toothbrushes actually look lovely, gorgeously designed, so that you don’t mind at all having them on display.
Use code RUTH for 20% off SURI
Many of our toothbrushes (and we’ve had loads, at different price points) have ended up conking out just as the warranty has ended and I’ve been reading up about this - it’s called planned obsolescence. The business strategy is to make products purposefully to have a shorter lifespan so that customers have to buy more than once, thus driving sales. This is the sort of thing that mugs me right off (said in Tom Hardy’s Bronson voice) because we’ve had a particular brand of toothbrush that has now done the same thing three times, the battery completely dying just out of warranty. By maybe a week or two.
Well, we won’t be getting those again, because we’re in a new SURI era. The brush heads are plant-based and recyclable by SURI and the brushes themselves are made to last. On a purely practical note, I love that the battery lasts for 40+ days and that the brush itself is quite compact, so great if you’re a frequent traveller. The special cleaning case is also a touch - it gives the whole brush a UV clean when it’s plugged in to charge!
If you’d like to give SURI a go then I have a special code - RUTH - that will get you 20% off your order here. If you’re sick of rubbish plasticky toothbrushes that constantly break and have to be thrown out then these thoughtfully-designed SURI brushes will no doubt float your boat.
Something that is not so thoughtfully designed but no less of a favourite: the Oura Ring. I have some more detailed blog posts and reviews coming up on this but I’m so impressed with it after just a week of use that I had to include it in my roundup. It might look like something you’d get in a budget Christmas cracker or receive as part of an Amazon-bought fancy dress costume but boy is the tech behind it good. Look beyond the (impossibly) shiny outer that comes in such faux-metal tones as “copper plumbing pipe” and “600 year old pirate gold”, “chrome curtain ring” and “weird holograph” and you have a device that really does monitor stress levels, sleep quality and general state of health.
For example the ring gave me a near-perfect score for almost everything last Tuesday, which was a day spent at home, working but in a relaxed way, eating well and doing some moderately intense exercise and a dog walk before going to bed on time and sleeping deeply. On Thursday, however, I awoke to Oura Ring stats carnage. I’d had two glasses of champagne the night before, a later dinner than usual (restaurant meal, amazing, richer than my digestive system is used to) and then a late night and an interrupted sleep because I was having anxiety dreams about my second wedding. (There is no second wedding, it was a dream.)
What was my readiness score that morning? A measly 62%! I was ready for nothing! It even said to me something along the lines of “you must have had alcohol or a heavy meal before bed”. How TF does it even know this stuff?
Some might find this information pointless, others a bit too “Big Brother”, but I find it fascinating. And I like that there’s no screen to look at, there are no distractions, you don’t feel like you’ve “added more tech” into your life: you can have notifications on your iPhone to tell you when to get up from your desk, which I find very helpful (and have been following, which is amazing in itself) but otherwise the ring leaves you well alone.
More details to follow. The Oura Ring 4 is online here*.
OK, the big garlic. I know you’re desperate for the details. It’s just M&S’s normal garlic! But the one sold singly, not as a trio. Don’t make that mistake. The trio of garlics is smaller. But even bigger than the large single M&S garlic is the PAIR OF ORGANIC GARLICS IN THE NETTING BAG! They’re enormous! (There’s one pictured left above.)
I have now been able to conduct a scientific experiment and can tell you that the average clove from an M&S organic garlic weighs in at a whopping 9g - compare that to the measly 3g standard clove (pictured right, above) and you can see why I get excited. We go through a lot of garlic in this house: over an entire lifetime the big garlics will probably save me at least half a day of peeling.
Sainsbury’s also do big garlic, by the way - they’re called “Large Garlic” because a grown-up has named them and not me. Alas our nearest Sainsbury’s, on the outskirts of Bath, doesn’t stock them. Or Padron Peppers. More the shame. We sometimes drive to Frome just to get the few things that they don’t stock. I feel as though Frome people must have a more varied and adventurous diet, but I don’t want to cast aspersions here…
My next favourite is amazing and entirely free. BorrowBox. Have you heard of this? It’s a library service app for borrowing audiobooks, e-books and e-magazines. If you register to your local library you can just download the app and enter your membership number and away you go! I have spent an absolute fortune on kids’ audiobooks over the past eight or nine years and so it’s a relief to be able to give them something new (they listen to them before bed every night) without always having to buy more Audible credits.
One thing I’ll say is that they don’t have nearly as much choice as Audible and most of the popular books are on a waiting list system, so it says things like “Harry Potter will be available to download on July 23rd!” to you, which when you have kids may as well be next century.
And so it doesn’t replace Audible, for me, but it’s sure as hell a good little supplement. And an absolute cracker of a resource if you don’t have the budget for audiobooks. Ditto the library in general, which I feel has gradually been forgotten about over the years…
Can we move to a slightly less wholesome “ooh isn’t everything great and let’s make a vest from string!” vibe: can I be a shallow biatch for a second? Because I think I’ve found the best, slinkiest conditioner for bleached blonde hair that God (it must have come from God) has ever invented.
It is this.
Kerastase Blond Absolu Cicaextreme Masque*. Now that I write it out, I think that I must have posted about this before and then forgotten about it. There was a certain degree of muscle memory going on when I typed out the product name, for sure. But I just don’t know how they’ve made this conditioning mask quite so very good. I have fine hair, dried out on the lengths, prone to oiliness (and itchiness) at the roots, but this stuff turns it into silken threads. You know when you want that weighty sort of silkiness? That feels expensive and sort of like your hair felt when you were a child and not colouring the absolute life out of it? That.
I don’t even leave it for any real length of time - two minutes? three? - before rinsing it off and it performs this minor miracle. Imagine if I followed the instructions! Perhaps I will.
This ain’t cheap, but it’s a rare gem in a crowded market of hair masques that never seem to do much for me. Make sure you get the CicaExtreme version and not the one that tints your hair violet!
Finally, I present to you my new Zara Home bed linen. And it is actually linen. Linen linen. I was on the hunt for something for the reading nook in my cabin (it’s basically a little inset cabin bed with a small single caravan-sized mattress, which was way cheaper than having a bespoke day bed made) and I came across this lovely ticking stripe fabric on Zara Home. I don’t often browse on there because my laser focus is usually on the Soho Home website, where I formulate wish lists and then watch for the sales and discounting events with an obsessive level of fastidiousness.
Anyway, it felt pricey for Zara - £74 for the single duvet cover - but then I looked at the other one I’d liked, which was from Piglet, which was far more expensive, and also remembered that it was linen, and then I managed to convince myself that everything was completely OK and justified.
I’m delighted with it. The quality’s great, the colours in the ticking stripe are exactly what I was after and all I need to do to the reading nook now is completely change the colour of the interior wall and perhaps get a different blanket or throw. I nicked the floral one from The Dorset Nook but not sure it’s quite right…
Imagine how much extra work I’d produce if I didn’t spend my time continuously overthinking my decorating decisions. Mind you, the Oura Ring is telling me that I’m very relaxed and unstressed so perhaps I can just count it as productive downtime?
Favourites video here, if you want more of a cabin glimpse and a garlic-peeling demo…
I love BorrowBox, I’ve been using it for years! Supplemented by audible credits it works so well for me. I have the app on my iPad for the ebooks and that works really well too.
My library service has Borrowbox and Libby which is books and audio books. So might worth checking your library website to see if Libby is also offered. No idea whether the catalogue varies between the two however.