Been teachin’ my honey to blow bubble-gum. And to take pictures of me teaching. It’s pretty hard to get the timing right.

FITTINGLY I am wearing this fetching bubble-gum pink baseball(?) shirt which I bought for ninety nine pence a few weeks back. Sometimes, not often but sometimes, “new stock” in a charity stoch is golllldmaaaaaahn territory. Blue, green, navy & grey – they’re my daily uniforn currently.

I promised you two pies, and I won’t disappoint. Unless you are a vegetarian or a vegan. But I shall provide a vegetarian version for one of them! I am sorry, but I do just love meat.

The first pie: Pheasant, leek and bacon

I know that usually a food will be called “one or two ingredient pie, with other main tastes involved secretly” but I am having none of that nonsense. This pie also features cheese, but not noticably.

You see, I had the meat of a medium-large pheasant in the freezer. And I also had some pastry left over from the pork pie that I introduced this club with. These two situations came together!

ingredients
Loose base pan such as this
Meat of one pheasant (chicken, pigeon, etc?)
One medium leek
approx 8 rashers of streaky bacon
small lump of gruyere cheese. I can’t remember exactly how much I used, so you should improvise. “Just enough to mix in with the cooked leeks without overwhelming the picture”.
pastry (use wholegrain flour with seeds)
salt and pepper
thyme
bay leaf
30z water
olive oil

Slice your meat into manageable pieces; about 3×2 inches. Season with salt and pepper on both sides. Heat 1tbsp oil in a frying pan, and once it’s hot enough to sizzle as the meat is moved in add the meat. Once 3-4mm of the bottom side of your meat is white (cooked), turn the pieces over. You want to seal the meat on all sides, so it’s lightly browned but not cooked all the way through.

Move your meat to a separate dish, add a little more oil if needed, and place your bacon into the pan. Fry the bacon until it’s as rigid and browned as you favour; for me it’s dark and solid. Move the bacon into another dish again.

Turn down the heat, add oil again if needed, and chop and add your leeks. You need a medium-low heat because they need to soften, not fry. Once they’re silky (keep stirring), move them to a bowl and grate in your cheese. DO NOT WASH UP THE PAN YOU’VE DONE ALL YOUR FRYING IN. Turn the heat up to medium and add some of the 30z of water (your decision as to how much you use). Boil all the tasty bits off the bottom of your frying pan, basically. Put this gravy aside.

Roll out your pastry, and lay it into your pie dish. The method recommended by Lorraine Pascale in the pastry recipe link above works as well as she suggests! Now you need to cut your meat into bitesize chunks, and snap (or cut, if you like it floppy) your bacon into workable pieces. You need to layer the three different ingredients into the pie, pheasant/leek/bacon etc. When you reach the top add the gravy (just pour it in to the gaps) and close the pie by either beating up an egg and sticking your pastry lid to the pastry walls or by using milk to do the same. Glaze the top of the pie with your egg or your milk, and oven bake for forty-five minutes, give or take (180 on a British fan oven).

If you have leftover innards and leftover pastry, make pasties! If you have only leftover filling, mix it all together and eat it.

YUM YUM.

The second pie: Valentines pie!

Beetroot chilli with a middle layer of leek and feta. That’s basically it.

Ingredients:
Beetroot chilli
Two small leeks
100g feta
pastry, as above

You see, this is just a pie full of chilli. If you know how to make chilli, you know how to make this pie. Vegetarian chilli? Beef chilli? Pork mince chilli (which we used)? You do the leeks the same way as you did them for the recipe above, only you add crumbled feta instead of grated gruyere. What I would suggest is that you try adding brown sugar to your pastry recipe. That’s the only extra effort involved here.

Except for making the lid pretty!

It doesn’t stay together very well once sliced but who cares? Pies is for eating.

I just can’t stop wearing these! And there’s no reason that I should. I have been looking at a lot of fighting game and scrolling beat-em-up character designs, which probably only encourages me.

PIE OF THE MONTH CLUB is coming at the end of this week, and to celebrate february I am bringing you TWO pies, so get your plates ready a’aight?

Ebay‘d me some 70s ridin’ trousers!

In a song called Video Games. What do I see?

Every. Time.

Now I don’t give a toss whether Bayonetta is “really” a “bad girl” or not, in-story, so shut up; she’s clearly two things. One is a Bad Girl (she had guns and a catsuit), the other is an idealised capital-F Female. She is everything that has ever hurt my heart about video games; everything that made me, as a conventionally facially attractive thin flat chested angsty white teenaged girl, feel like I wasn’t good enough to be a real contender for a (any of the type/s that I wanted) boy’s heart – or anything that a boy’s heart symbolised – that is, like I wasn’t good enough for anything fulfilling full stop.

Now I don’t mean to say that my entire teenagerhood was dominated by these feelings, that it was my only problem, that it is the biggest problem someone could have, that I had the worst of it or that I could never see out from under my worries and insecurities. I am saying that I remember how it felt to feel hurt and in pain directly because of the idealised sexual objectification that I saw in video games and other media. When I think about the design on Soul Calibur or Dead or Alive or whatever nowadays I do it with a curled lip and an analytical brain; I find it wanting, in the extreme, and I feel that it is a part of the visual sexism that regularly invades my life but I don’t want to CRY ABOUT IT any more, or at least I very nearly never do.

But I remember when I did, and Lana Del Rey sings it for me. She sings it for other people, too. Sometimes I think the whole song is turgid with that “I just stopped crying and I guess I should get something to eat, because what else is there in all the world” atmosphere and sometimes it just tastes like doing your best. That line (the one about bad girls) isn’t sung in a way that makes me think that she’s feeling it right then like I felt it in my further youth, but it is like the grown-up development. When you feel like you’re not quite good enough to be what you want to be to someone, but you know you’ll ever be more than you are and being what you are to them then feels like much better than nothing.

Why on earth should I care if she is “fake”?

When Sherin asked for people’s opinions on LDR I said “Video Games” sounds like memories. This is true. Some of them are the ones I say above, and some (for the rest of the song) are from later. The ones from later are not so unhappy, don’t worry. They’re just transitional and precious and a little afraid.

But those ones are private.

By the way, I also think that Bayonetta’s design is bad.

OMGMOTORCYCLING!

I did my first solo round-trip today (as opposed to just “going a way and then coming back”, which I’ve done maybe three times since my CBT curse the weather); only nine miles, a route I’ve done on my bicycle many times, but – SO SATISFYING!! SO FUN!!

Problems: Didn’t go down to first gear for a stop-and-turn on a slight hill; stalled twice with a big yellow truck behind me. But I fixed it! And continued!

Toed the pavement on a tight turn from stopped, caused a pedestrian to look askance at me. I’m sorry, walking lady! I am not sorry to the the youth loitering by the shop, who smirked at me. WHAT OF IT, BOYO? You can see the L-plates..

I remembered I had these vintage glove/armwarmers under my bed last night. I’ve long known that fishnet tights are much warmer than they look, and the fact travels! I’ve been wearing them alternately under some Dents repro day-gloves that I think I got from the British Museum, and with the rabbit child’s muffler you’ve seen in the past couple of posts.

Everything I do, and no funny business now, involves the use of my (left and but mostly) right wrist(s). Drawing, riding, typing, sawing – all wrists a’plenty. Letting them get cold is about the stupidest thing I could do!

And yet..

So it’s lucky that I like the look of these so much. They go up just past my elbow and I don’t know why I stopped wearing them regularly and put them under my bed (hahaha “put” like it was a studied decision); it’s a mistake I’ll just have to make up for by wearing them non-stop until summer.

I won’t pretend that I don’t think my hair looks SUPER.

Jacket: second hand Hein Gericke
gloves: eBay?

And to keep your head warm with a whirling brain full of thoughts, click the picture below to read my account of seeing Miss Representation last week on British Style Bloggers.

I dressed with a mind to warmth and not having to shower, but accidentally ended up a bit ’40s socialite reporter’.

FUR FUR FUR second-third-fourth hand dead before I was born allows me to sit at a laptop/sketchbook all day without having to turn on any of the heating.

I hope to differentiate my “wearing clothes in the snow” post from others by offering you a series of animal prints.

Animal foot prints.

A fox;

A pheasant that ran in a circle (I love pheasants, they are so ridiculous!);

A bird of some other sort;

A “I threw a snowball at my dad and lost track of where my feet were”;

We saw three deer, just strolling about the roads. Their bodies are so strong.

And here is some general country loveliness!

The story of this fur, for new readers: 15p left over at the end of a jumble sale when I was eight or nine. Then the seller left as I was playing with it, so it was mine. There is nothing warmer.

I’ve been wearing these four different-coloured baseball shirts that I found for 99 pence each the thursday before last pretty much non-stop since I bought them. But it’s been too buggering cold to take pictures of them!

I would be a terrible hoaxer, because I care too much about feelings. I shall state before matters become complex: the friend I am speaking of is soup.

The Real Tea Cafe does good tea (I’ve taken notes) but it also does good soup. Really good soup. It’s terrific soup, and I don’t mean “for a cafe, it sells good soup”; I mean that the soup that they sell is a really excellent soup.

Sometimes, it’s parsnip and sweetcorn and butternut. Sometimes it is tomato and red peppers. Once it was three bean and something, which I wasn’t so keen on because the beans were whole – but most of the time the soup is smooth, and thick, and.. I like it a lot. I like it almost, perhaps, maybe, more than I like soups that I have made myself and while that doesn’t sound like much of a compliment please be sure I am self-congratulatory enough that it really is.

I eat this soup when I go into town once a week to visit the job centre. Visiting the job centre is crappy and the journey is unwieldy but I look forward to eating the soup and that’s a good thing.

Except I should start saying “ate” and “enjoyed” and so forth. I ate this soup when it was three pounds for a hearty bowl (with bread and butter). Now it is four.

I do not write this post in anger or in bitterness. Business, I comprehend! I asked what the extra pound was for and apparently the soup now includes “more stuff” – it is probably more delicious now! Even more. If you are in Stratford-Upon-Avon you should go to the Real Tea Cafe, and you should buy the soup. You should buy the soup because then you will be able to eat the soup and then you will be happy!

This post is just a salute to something dear to me..

.. as it travels on the outbound ferry, leaving me mournful on the dock.