Ways to spend the summer holidays, my newest recommendations...
...including chicken portraits, Kate Bush aerial displays and unearthing egg dishes.
This week has thrown some rather good things into the recommendations ring and I feel it would be selfish of me not to mention them. One or two of them are child-related - unusual for me, because the blog is normally quite a child-free zone, but that’s where my head is at. The summer holidays are in full swing and my life is one long Q&A session set to a soundtrack of “The Poo Poo Song” and “Mr Fart” played at full volume on the Alexa.
Questions my kids asked me yesterday as I was trying to reverse park my car, which is approximately the same width as a cross channel ferry, between two concrete pillars:
“What’s the smallest sound a human can hear?” (9 year-old)
“Is air lighter?” (9 year-old)
“When they open the new Primark will they close the old Primark on the same day and then quickly move all the clothes across to the new Primark, or…?” (11 year-old)
I’m starting to find it hard to string a proper sentence together. This is not a complaint, just an observation. It happens every August, once my days begin to revolve solely around children and not around work. My cognitive tools go blunt, I become mentally flaccid. My brain feels like a little blimp that I’m gently leading around on a piece of pink ribbon, floating just to the side of my head but not quite connected.
It’s weird, when I think about it properly, because on a normal term-time day the kids are only at school from (let’s round it all up for ease) 9am-3pm: it’s a mere quarter of the twenty-four hour period. But those six hours are so precious, aren’t they? Not just for working and “getting things done” but for being able to do absolutely anything you want to do, on your own terms, knowing that someone else is completely responsible for your children. It’s a short period of relief, like someone else has taken the wheel on a particularly perilous mountain pass.
On that note, some recommendations:
1. Giffords Circus
Have you been to Giffords Circus? Have you heard of it? Forget everything you think you know about circuses (circi?), especially if you last went to one in the eighties: wipe the slate clean, because Giffords is not what you’d expect. Think magical, whimsical musical crossed with the world’s best talent show crossed with a bit of very stylish cabaret and all heaped with a very special sort of sexy-glint-in-the-eye bohemian charm. Every year has a theme - this year it was the English countryside - and special acts are interspersed with music from the live band, dancing, acrobatics and the kind of clowning around that has kids of all ages in hysterics.
We went last year as a family and loved it so much that it was the kids’ number one top thing to do again this year. It’s not too long (forty minutes each half maybe?), there’s a good interval in the middle and loads of food and bar stalls that make it feel a bit like you’ve been to a mini festival.
Peak entertainment for me, this year, was watching the aerial performers gracefully twisting themselves around one another, high up in the air, as the band and lead singer did a brilliant rendition of Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights. Just excellent. So stylish, so cool.
Tickets costs from £14 each for children, £23 for adults and there are various locations around London, Oxfordshire and the Cotswolds, though the remaining dates are all now in Wiltshire and near Stroud. A good one to bookmark for next year, too, as the shows start in the spring and it would be a lovely way to see in the warmer weather.
(I have attended both as a paying customer and a guest of Giffords. Whole family agrees it’s the best value for money of anything we do over the summer, and they’re hard to please!)
2. Unearthed Tortillas
Not a new discovery at all but I’ve been waiting for the right opportunity to mention these delights and now seems like as good a time as any.
I don’t know why they’ve called this product Unearthed: I mean I get it, it’s a nod to how simple and wholesome the ingredients are, straight from the ground, potatoes still with the soil stuck to them, etc etc.
I just find it slightly off putting when we’re talking about a Spanish tortilla, a dampish sort of foodstuff that has eggs in it and so on: the idea of unearthing a moist egg-centric dish from the ground is borderline heinous. Imagine the state of it! Eggs need to be consumed immediately upon deliverance to the table, if you ask me: no type of cooked egg ever got better with time and burying it in the ground to then be unearthed is just lunacy.
Name aside, these ready-made Spanish tortillas are bloody amazing for people like me who want a quick lunch but don’t want to put any more effort into preparing it than simply opening the fridge.
Lunch is often my downfall: if I can’t immediately fathom what it is I’m going to have, then I take out a block of cheese and the butter and I spread the butter into a white roll, fill the roll with cheese, maybe some sliced tomato if I’m worrying for my general health, and then I stretch up to the cupboard that sits above the fridge, out of child-reach, and I get myself a packet of Walkers Salt & Vinegar crisps (the elite crisp and I won’t take other suggestions) to add texture, crunch and variety to the plate.
The Unearthed Spanish Tortilla saves me from myself. There it sits, all fresh and lovely and air-sealed, layers of cooked, salty potato trapped in the firm, eggy goodness. Perfectly seasoned. So much protein! Just slit open the lid with a knife and cut the tortilla in half and tip one half of it onto a plate with the aforementioned tomatoes that would have gone into your cheese roll, add some rocket dressed in good balsamic and extra virgin olive oil! A ten second wonder.
Yes I know how “easy” it is to make a Spanish Tortilla from scratch and save money, it’s also easy enough to wash dishes by hand, or to open a road atlas and read a map. What I want at lunchtime is convenience.
The last time I got shot down for a food recommendation it was McCain’s ready-made frozen jacket potatoes and I’m still reeling - though people had a fair point. Even Rich couldn’t believe my laziness.
“It takes me barely ten minutes longer to cook one from scratch,” he said, “and I can buy the potato for 25p.”
I stand by them, the frozen jackets - absolutely genius idea. Because having to microwave a potato on one plate and then transfer it somewhere else to finish cooking, it’s just too much to think about when I’m mid work-flow. I’m trying to solve world problems such as how to make a curl last longer on mid-length hair, I don’t have mental capacity for potato cooking times in the middle part of the day.
So, the ready-made Spanish Tortilla. They do a plain one and they do one with spinach. Both are juicy, tasty and feel so wholesome and good that you have to find something really processed to nibble on afterwards. I just ate a mini bag of Haribo Tangfastics, balanced it all out nicely.
Do not buy the tiny 250g tortillas, even if you’re just feeding yourself and thinking the other half of the big one will go to waste. The 250g is almost the same price as the 500g. And I can guarantee you’ll eat the other half of the big one for lunch the next day…
In fact, I don’t know how filling you like your lunches! Maybe you’d eat the 500g tortilla in one go - I tend to err light on my lunches because I like to have a stop gap at about 4pm and line up some cream crackers with cheddar to see me through to dinner time (I think I’m probably classified as a grazer), but I have gone in for the whole thing in one sitting and it felt hard going. Proceed with caution.
The Unearthed Spanish Tortillas are here - I get them from Sainsburys and they are frequently on special offer there.
Edit: have just seen this Guardian article about the best supermarket Spanish tortillas: Sainsburys own comes out on top! I haven’t even seen the Sainsburys own! Will try and report back.
3. Child Master Photograper Competition™
Full disclaimer: this idea is a Crilly Original and I only thought it up yesterday, but it was so successful I needed to immediately tell you about it. I was at my friend Harriet’s house and all of the kids were under our feet in the kitchen, wanting various things and needing constant inspiration despite there being a huge garden with hiding areas, laser quest guns and a semi-lethal tree swing whose natural trajectory sends the swinger straight through a holly bush and into the sturdy, wide trunk of an ancient oak.
I am useless at thinking up activities for my own kids but I seem to have some weird brain wiring that makes me the most creative parent on earth when other people’s kids are around. Honestly, the stories I think up! The games I invent! My own kids look at me when this happens as though they are witnessing one of the world’s greatest betrayals. It must be as though they don’t even recognise me as a person.
Anyway, yesterday, on the spur of the moment, I invented this thing called the Child Master Photographer Competition™, where they all had to take the iPhone out and capture the very best photo they possibly could of a set subject. The subject this time being chicken/s. I’ve never seen kids disappear so fast! The best photo wins.
The cynical among you are thinking that they disappeared with my iPhone and hid behind a hedge Googling words like “bum” and “boobies” but my phone was locked, they could only take pictures. And they were gone for a good half an hour. My eleven year-old, bless her, was gone indefinitely because by the time she got her turn with the camera the hens had all hidden in the bushes, traumatised by their enthusiastic up-close portrait sessions. I went out to find her cross-legged on the grass, waiting patiently for one of them to come out.
I didn’t even have to judge the Child Master Photographer Competition™, just look at the various entries and say all of the encouraging things that we as modern parents are supposed to. “Goodness that one is fantastic! Really professional!” (Blurred red beak and a large, shiny eye, widened in terror, whole iPhone reflected in its surface.)
I think I might do more of these comps. “Find me the fastest snail!” “Get the most interesting twig!” “See who can sort this bag of recycling the fastest - glass into the green bin, cardboard into the bag!”
Well there we are, three recommendations. I don’t have a je ne recommendez pas this week, only a long rant about customer services and my missing sports bra, but it’s a rant I need to sit on for a couple of days so that I’m not speaking in anger…