Rowan Tree Design Blog

Minimalist cooking: super-simple garlicky pasta

Published on September 2, 2010 in General. 0 Comments Tags: cooking.

I haven’t been feeling much like cooking lately. Not sure why, really – I go through phases where I would quite happily be chained to the cooker, but sometimes it just feels like a chore and I’d rather eat stale Doritos for supper than have to actually cut things up and combine them, ohhhhhhh the humanity. But! I recently stumbled across the fantabulous Stonesoup, and my ennui, it is cured! Jules at Stonesoup specialises in minimalist cooking – five ingredients, ten minutes, that sort of thing. To be honest, I’ve never gone in for the ‘quick and easy’ type recipes before – partly because most Q&E recipes seem to include premixed spice blends, which is CHEATING! and also because most of them seem horrifically bland. I love using lots of abstruse spices, and while the trend in cookery these days seems to be towards simple dishes focusing on the flavours of a few well-chosen ingredients, I’ve always been more of a fan of the alchemical approach. When I’m done cooking, I want the final result to bear little or no resemblance to what I started with.

However, as previously stated, lately I’ve just not been up for all the reducing and pureeing and what-have-you. Yesterday I tried a recipe from Stonesoup, and HOLY MOLY, it was SO very yummy. And so, so easy! Leaving out the time it took to cook the pasta, it was less than ten minutes from start to finish, including prep. This is possibly my new favourite way to cook garlic. I can sense an obsession with quick, simple, healthy dishes coming on.

Here is the original recipe, and here it is with my variations:

Big handful of spinach
Coupla cloves of garlic
Half a tin of beans (I used black-eyed peas, but chickpeas, butter beans, or just about any other kind would work)
Big sprig of rosemary, leaves picked
Olive oil
Pasta (any kind you like – I think whole wheat tastes WAY better though!)
I added half a stock cube as well, because I add stock to EVERYTHING, but totally optional

Roughly chop the spinach. Cut the garlic into thin slices. Start cookin’ up your pasta. Heat some olive oil over medium heat, and fry the garlic and rosemary until the garlic is golden brown and the rosemary has darkened, stirring fairly often to avoid burning. Chuck in the spinach and crumble in the stock cube (if using), and sautée for a minute or two until the spinach is nice and wilted; then add the beans and stir until warmed through. Remove from the heat, add the pasta and stir through. Season with a bit of salt and lots of freshly ground pepper. NOM NOM NOM.

Thoughts on my recent reading list

Published on August 27, 2010 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

The Bellini Madonna: An art history mystery. In theory I should have enjoyed it, but the main character was unlikeable and not very believable and the plot kind of went nowhere. Meh.
Headlong: Another art history mystery. I liked all the info about Bruegel (the Elder) (in case you were wondering), but just wasn’t caught up at all in the ridiculous scheme to procure the painting, and again, the main character came off as a bit of a self-absorbed twat. More meh.
The Devil of Nanking: Creepy. Compelling. Atmospheric. Some of the images are still stuck in my head, giving me the heebs. I will be reading much more Mo Hayder.
Crime and Punishment: I’m starting to really ‘get’ the genius of Dostoyevski. But I often feel a strong desire to shout “Can everyone just CALM THE FUCK DOWN here?”
The Best Novels of Nancy Mitford: Charming, in the very best sense of the word. Kind of ‘P.G. Wodehouse meets Fay Weldon’. I wish Uncle Matthew was my dad.
Hungry Hill: Good ol’ Daphne du Maurier! ‘Nuff said.
Party of One: Finally, someone stands up for the loners in the world. I feel vindicated in my strange solitary habits. The language was a bit strident, though.
Dracula: See, I can stand a goodly portion of cheesy Victorian melodrama. But by the end of this I was totally on Dracula’s side and wished he would eat the heroes just to SHUT THEM THE HELL UP. And the erotic bits, with their misogynistic virgin/whore subtext, made me feel squicky.
M.R. James – Collected Ghost Stories: Brilliant! I love the utter, utter Englishness of these stories. The most bone-chilling of scenarios is met with cool unflappability and a cup of tea. “I was beginning to doubt the soundness of either my senses or my mind.”
Seven Pillars of Wisdom: I’m still reading this – it’s slow going. What a strange and fascinating character T.E. Lawrence was. I do enjoy how he takes care to explain within the first five pages that occasionally during the campaign the young men sought solace in each other’s bodies, but that this was only the pure, natural outlet of their virile youthful energy. Hey man, nobody’s judging! What happens in the sand dunes stays in the sand dunes, right?*
The Famished Road: I put this down without finishing it, and that is extremely rare for me. Especially with a Booker Prize winner. It was beautifully written, and I liked the hallucinatory feel – sort of like an African Angela Carter – but…I don’t know. There wasn’t enough narrative thrust, or something. It seemed to be the same thing over and over: boy goes to Madame Koto’s bar. Sees some weird one-eyed midget or something who is really a spirit. Runs away into the forest. More spirits. Runs home. Dad is drunk on palm wine and shouting a lot. Repeat.
I Know This Much is True: Engaging, with an appealingly simple style. A few too many extraordinary Dickensian coincidences, though, and the ending was overly neat.

*Has anyone else clocked the use of the grammatically suspect phrase “What goes on tour stays on tour?” This drives me nutso. It should be “What happens on tour stays on tour.” Otherwise you are saying that someone who goes on tour will not come back. (Of course, this is a phrase most often uttered by brainless, beer-bonging frat goons, and their abuses of the English language are generally a minor element in their overall offensiveness.)

Folksy Friday and new STEAMPUNK collage sheet

Published on August 13, 2010 in Collage sheets, Etsy and Folksy. 0 Comments Tags: steampunk, treasuries.

My Folksy Friday collection today is inspired by blue and cream tones.

And here’s a new collage sheet: Victorian steampunk ladies. Rarr! I’m pretty chuffed about these designs – I had so much fun putting them together, and I love the way they’ve turned out. These tags are in a new easier-to-cut shape, ideal for hang tags or gift tags. The sheet also includes a bookmark – just download, snippy-snip, and add a bit of ribbon or string. See my Etsy shop or my Folksy shop for purchase details.

Steampunk Victorian Ladies

The Last Waltz

Published on August 4, 2010 in Collage sheets, General and Reviews. 2 Comments

I apologise for any downtime you may have noticed on Friday and Saturday. I’ve been in the process of switching web hosts, and man oh MAN it is so COMPLICATED. Why is it so complicated? Seriously, EVERYONE has a website these days, and surely changing hosting companies and transferring domains is something that happens all the damn time. How can the process still be so arcane and difficult? What with the DNS nameservers and the ISP tags and creating new FTP accounts and procuring a single griffin’s feather and “answer me these questions three” and so on and so forth, I nearly broke my brain. It didn’t help that I use WordPress for this blog, which is generally awesome, but being open source it is rather DIY, and involves doing things with SQL databases and PHPMyAdmin. I know, right?? Anyway it’s all done now, thank god, and my hosting fees have dropped massively.

Simon recently bought me the soundtrack to The Last Walz. It’s funny how much I’ve come to love The Last Waltz: during my teenage years, I would have had a hard time deciding who I hated more, The Band or Supertramp. (I still fuckin’ hate Supertramp. Screw you, Supertramp.) You have to understand that in Canada, so-called ‘Classic Rock’ is ubiquitous and comprises a melange of the most obvious and/or annoying hits from a small selection of good bands like Led Zeppelin and a much larger selection of unbelievably shit bands like Nazareth, Boston and Journey. (And Supertramp. DAMN YOU, SUPERTRAMP!) Classic Rock, to me, is the soundtrack to Labatt Blue in bottles, Trans Ams, mullets, moustaches, tight jeans and unironic trucker caps. And of course, since The Band are both Classic Rock AND Canadian, they are constitutionally guaranteed radio play on every single station in the country at least once an hour. By the time I was fifteen years old I had probably heard ‘The Weight’ approximately eighty thousand times, and I HATED that damn song.

So when Simon started trying to get me to watch The Last Waltz, I was all, “HA! Yeah right.” But he’s persistent, bless him, and eventually I sat down and watched a few minutes of it. And then I couldn’t stop watching it. Holy shit, what an amazing bunch of musicians. And what a lineup of guests. I even love the interview-y bits, where everyone involved (including Scorsese) is very clearly stuffed to the gills with enormous quantities of drugs. Canadian Rasputin (sorry, I mean Garth Hudson) in particular is highly amusing.

Ironically, the Band song I historically liked the least is now my favourite song in the concert, thanks to the Staple Singers. Hearing them sing ‘The Weight’ gives me goosebumps EVERY SINGLE TIME, for reals. (And did you know that there’s all sorts of geeky debate about the meaning of the lyrics? Interestinger and interestinger.)

AND, as it turns out, Robbie Robertson? Was a bit of a hottie. Who knew? He is hella sexy in Last Waltz, despite the bouffant hair. I’ve figured out why, too: his guitar gurn is blatantly a preview of his sex face. It’s a shame he’s gone so puffy in recent years.

Finally, a new collage sheet…see my Etsy shop for details!

Luscious Vintage Ovals

I’m a fuck off huge teapot

Published on July 21, 2010 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

I have a new teapot. And hard-won it was too. I took a day off on Friday, and rather than do some new collage sheets as I’d PROMISED myself (I’m allergic to anything resembling responsibility or efficiency these days), I did a tour of the St Ives charity shops. There are rather a lot of them – at least eight at last count. (Not as many as there are hair salons, though. There are SO MANY hair salons in St Ives. There are hair salons next to hair salons. How many haircuts can a town of 15,000 people need?)

I’ve been casually looking for a teapot for the last year or so: I drink a lot of tea, like A LOT of tea, and one of my Weird Things is that I actually prefer to drink it lukewarm or cold; so I was looking for a stonking great hulk of a teapot wherein I could allow several gallons of Rooibus to slowly grow tepid to my liking and nourish me throughout the day.

On Friday I found just the thing in the Help the Aged charity shop: a gigantic teapot, kinda funky and vintage. See? How cool!

It was on sale for £5.99 as part of a really rather enormous set, including not one but several creamers, various differently sized plates, and a bunch of smallish teacups. I didn’t want the rest of the bumpf, just the teapot. Bravely, I took it up to the counter and asked the clerk whether I could buy just the teapot on its own. The clerk of course was a little old lady volunteer, sweet as you like, but not the quickest thing on two legs in any sense of the word.

“Can I get just this teapot?” I said.

The little old lady took it slowly from my hands, and slowly examined the barely legible handwritten price tag. “It’s part of a set,” she said. “For £5.99.”

“Yes, but I don’t want the whole set. Can I get just the teapot?”

She peered at the sticker again. “It says £5.99 for the set,” she repeated.

“Yes,” I said. “But I don’t have room in my cupboards for all those dishes. I really just want the teapot. Can I just get the teapot, if that’s OK?”

She looked dubious. “I’ll have to think of a price.”

“OK,” I said.

Thus followed the Longest Pause in the History of the World. I mentally debated offering a starting price to get things going, but I hate haggling and I feared it might throw yet another stick in the old lady’s mental spokes. While I continued to wait, I saw some Help the Aged propaganda next to the till, proclaiming in excited capital letters, “The Bold New Face of Age!” “Not this one,” I thought.

“£1.99?” she volunteered eventually, justifiably hesitant and timorous in the face of the huge responsibility of deciding a price ALL ON HER OWN.

“Sold!” I said, and smartly handed over a two-pound coin. She then proceeded, in the manner of little-old-lady charity shop volunteers all across this great nation, to peel off the price tag, fetch some newspaper, and carefully, painstakingly wrap up the teapot in super slow motion. It was like watching a replay on Sky Sports. “Let’s look at that again. Notice how long it takes her to separate a single sheet of newspaper from the stack. Magnificent form.” Inevitably during the proceedings she made some idle chitchat about the weather, because if she hadn’t, the world would have spun off its axis and fire and brimstone would have rained down from the heavens. I love this country. And I love my teapot!

Whither weather

Published on July 13, 2010 in General. 0 Comments

This summer (so far) has been weirdly summery, for England. In my six years here I have not seen one summer worthy of the name. There is generally a promising week or two in May, all cheery and clement, but then June rocks up and it is all rain, rain, clouds and more rain – in other words, indistinguishable from every other English season. But this summer has been HOT! HOT! HOT! now for several consecutive weeks. Unbelievable! Of course I’m perversely fond of the noncommittal English nonweather, because I come from a land with unmistakeable capital-S Seasons that feel not so much like meteorological phenomena as a punch in the face. And then another punch to the kidneys. And then a solid kick in the ribs when you’re down. (Seriously, Canada has some mean-ass weather.) BUT, since I have been away from the Land of Fire and Ice for a while now and am recovering nicely from my PTSD, I have actually almost been enjoying the recent unremitting heat.

HOWEVER, I am not at all physically suited to hot weather. Like Conan O’Brien, I am “genetically engineered to live in a bog”. The sun HATES ME. On Friday I managed to get a mild sunburn while SITTING IN THE SHADE AND WEARING SUNSCREEN. Yeah. It’s like the sun has a personal vendetta against me. Like I ran over the sun’s dog or something. And the sun is all, “You can run but you can’t hide, bitch. Imma find you and imma CUT YO ASS.” In order for me to spend even a few minutes in direct sun, I need all manner of expensive unguents and protective gear; and I always manage to miss one tiny spot when slathering my entire body with SPF One Trillion sunscreen and end up with a comedic yet painful localised burn somewhere on my person shaped like a map of Bolivia.

Despite my pathetically extreme photosensitivity, I’ve just had a marvellous weekend spent mostly outdoors. On Sunday I went for a long walk all round Hemingford Grey Meadow and Holt Island, wanting desperately to swim in the lovely cool clear river but not quite enough to subject myself to the trauma of wearing a bathing suit. I am very, very Feminista! and RARR about body image issues, but I just can’t bring myself to traipse around in skin-tight spandex. I am determined to swim in that damn river though, so I plan to cobble together a modest swimming costume at some point from a pair of boys’ trunks and a tank top, or something. COVER ME I’M GOING IN.

I capped off the weekend by half-paying attention to the World Cup final at the Floods Tavern, but mostly goofing around in the garden with Buddy the Dog. Buddy loves me (he even followed me to the toilets and waited patiently outside for me to come out) because I know how to play rough with big dogs (boy does THAT sound wrong). We were doing some fairly Extreme Playfighting, which was lots of drunken fun at the time, but yesterday morning I woke up with my arms all covered in scratches and bruises. No, my husband is not bashing me about due to World Cup-induced rage, concerned passers-by! I merely cannot restrain myself when full of Bulmers Cider and presented with a rowdy labrador.

Maneaters and wife-beaters

Published on July 9, 2010 in General. 0 Comments Tags: dogs, football.

L-O-L-A Lola

I got to spend last weekend taking care of Stepdaughter’s dog, the lovely Lola. ‘Lola’ is a great name for a dog, although it does result in me having The Kinks in my head all the time – not that I mind, of course; and the name is especially fitting since Lola is very butch, for a Lady Dog. I feel certain she could break someone’s spine. (AND she could dance all night, under electric candlelight.)

Lola has all my preferred characteristics in a dog: she is solid and stocky, with a head like a pile of bricks wedged on top of a body like a bigger pile of bricks. She is short-haired, with lots of extraneous folds of flesh to tug and stretch out in amusing ways. She has a world-weary air, soulful eyes, and lots of interesting scars. She looks like she could rip your arms off and eat them for breakfast. And most importantly, she is old. I just love mellow old dogs.

Not only does Lola look like my perfect dog (i.e. a grizzled maneater), but she is the sweeeeeeeeetest, loveliest soul on four legs – loves lots of fusses and cuddles and kisses. AND she walks well on a lead, which is SUCH a contrast to MOST DOGS, who act like they are in a race to strangle themselves. We had very nice long meandering walks along the river, occasionally wading into the water and being hissed at by swans. I HEART LOLA 4-EVA!

N’awwwwwww! Whoosa wuzza!

Good effort, Cambs constabulary

I found this poster in the local pub (weirdly, in the ladies’ toilets):

Bwaha! This is all kinds of awesome. Though I shouldn’t laugh, because apparently domestic abuse goes up 30% when England does badly during the World Cup (is this an English thing? I don’t remember Canadian women getting their eyes blacked every time the Maple Leafs failed to get into the Stanley Cup playoffs). Still, though: HA! So much drama! I like that they’ve come up with a catchy little rhyme to really drive the point home – “If England lose, don’t abuse!” Because nothing soothes the savage breast* of a pissed-off lagered-up hooligan like a nice rhyming couplet. I do love the idea of some no-neck meathead, fist raised, about to clobber six shades of hell out his wife, suddenly thinking to himself, “Hang on, what was that rhyme again? ‘If England lose…don’t wear shoes?’ No, that’s not it…”

*Yes, it is ‘breast’, not ‘beast’. LOOK IT UP.

Folksy Friday: sepias and neutrals

Published on July 2, 2010 in Folksy and General. 3 Comments Tags: canada, england, treasuries.

And so, England’s World Cup dreams are dashed once again. I used to get all sad every time England let yet another World Cup pass them by, but lately I’ve decided to start thinking of the national side as an amusingly reliable disappointment. Oh, England! You’ve done it again, you scallywags! If you think about it, it really is quite incredible how a group of such individually talented players manages to form such a totally inept team. It’s an achievement not to be sniffed at.

And anyway the English aren’t happy unless they’re miserable. It brings out the best in them. I was out and about in St Ives in the deathly silence following the match, and came across a couple who had stopped to look at a very freshly dead pigeon on the pavement that looked to have bounced off a window only minutes earlier. “Must have seen the England match,” remarked the bloke.

We participated in a barbequeing/football viewing type event on Saturday, which was very enjoyable, even after I performed my party trick of getting a sunburn in minutes flat through several layers of suncream. Ta-daa! We watched the tail end of the US/Ghana match, and I will freely admit to experiencing shedloads of schadenfreude at the sight of the US team shedding tears after their defeat. I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m Canadian, and for me, seeing the US occasionally get creamed in a sporting event is basically the pinnacle of human happiness (similar to how the Scots felt watching England get Das Booted last week, I should think). G’WAN GHANA!

And speaking of Canada, yesterday was Canada Day, and I’m proud to say that my streak of forgetting about it every single year since I left the country remains unbroken. I was only alerted to the fact by a Canadian colleague, who noted the occasion by bringing in homemade Nanaimo bars. Holy shit, dude, I had forgotten about Nanaimo bars. So much buttery icing. They manage to be simultaneously delicious and disgusting. My colleague and I discussed this strange paradox and comisserated about the foodstuffs we miss most. Weirdly, whenever I talk to a fellow North American emigré about this, Kraft Dinner is always the first thing mentioned. I have not met an expat yet who doesn’t have Kraft Dinner shipped to them by their relatives (my mom always sends me a half dozen boxes at Christmas). If you describe Kraft Dinner to an English person, they will look at you in disgust (of course I brook no culinary criticism from a country that actually considers Scotch eggs to be edible). It’s hard to explain what’s so addictive about it, but MAN do I miss that lurid orangey goodness. Send more please Mom!

Here’s my Folksy Friday treasury for the week…

More bits about moving

Published on June 24, 2010 in Collage sheets and Etsy. 0 Comments Tags: leaves, moving, trees.

We no longer have a garden. The garden at our old house was gigantic and field-adjacent and very pretty, and I will miss it. However, we now have an enclosed courtyard with white walls, which is a total suntrap and very Mediterranean and I-motherf’ing-DEAL for barbequeing. And it puts a lot less pressure on me to actually garden. I like ‘garden’ very much as a noun but not quite so much as a verb. I think of myself as a green thumb sort of person, but I’m much better with potted plants than free-range. So the courtyard definitely falls into the ‘plus’ category. (Added bonus: our house adjoins a passageway leading from our street to the centre of town, so we get to eavesdrop from behind the wall on wonderfully random snippets of conversation. But not whole conversations, which are just annoying, because people as a rule are stupid. This is key.)

Simon is very good at practical, get-shit-done stuff. When we moved into the new house, we tried to put the refrigerator in the designated refrigerator area next to the cabinets, but it was about an inch too wide. “Oh woe!” I though. “The refrigerator does not fit! We shall have to sell it and buy a smaller one.” But Simon just got on the phone to the letting agency and told them we’d need the built-in cabinets shifted. I didn’t know that was even possible. Did you know that was even possible? Apparently it is. A handyman showed up one morning, and a few hours later the fridge fit properly. (The handyman was awesome, too: he happily accepted a can of lager at ten in the morning, and very helpfully told Simon where ‘the snatch’ hangs out in St Ives. I myself would like to see this St Ives Snatch, for by all accounts it is a fearsome creature!)

And now…a collage sheet. These leafy, flowery squares are 2.5″x2.5″ – great for extra large pendants, magnets, cardmaking, scapbooking and all manner of creative output!

See my Etsy shop for details.

Movin’ on up

Published on June 16, 2010 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

God, I am so shit. You don’t have to tell me, because I know. I have no excuse, except for the fact that we’ve been moving house. Even that isn’t much of an excuse as Simon has done the lion’s share of the actual moving, because see above: I am so shit. I’m sorry.

We’ve moved away from Boxworth, a wee little village just north of Cambridge, to St Ives, a not-so-wee market town a bit farther north of Cambridge (no, not the eponymous St Ives of the As I was going to etc poem. That St Ives is in Cornwall. And it is full of bigamists and smells of cats). We’d been in Boxworth for three years, and before that in London. I hadn’t realised quite how much I missed being close to civilisation because I was still coasting on the incredible relief of not being in London anymore. I love London, don’t get me wrong, and I look back very fondly on my time there, but it is far from being the ideal situation for someone with Personal Space Issues, and taking the Tube to and from my (really rather menial though I do love saying:) job in the City was like a daily field trip to the seventh circle of hell. Boxworth by contrast was incredibly quiet and peaceful and there were cows! in the field! who would eat out of our hands!! However, we weren’t within walking distance of ANYTHING except a single awful pub (two words: ceramic dogs) about twenty minutes away, and a motorway services half an hour’s walk in the other direction along a busy road with no pavements or lighting: basically you were taking your life in your hands if you wanted to pop out for a Diet Coke and a pack of fags. One extreme to the other, I guess. We couldn’t even get food delivered, despite being only twenty minutes’ drive from the centre of bloody Cambridge.

Still, I’d have judged myself pretty happy with my locale until we made the move to St Ives and I realised OH MY GOD THEY WILL BRING PIZZA TO MY HOUSE THAT IS SO AWESOME. And I realised that I could walk to not one, but a variety of pubs, and toddle home easily afterwards without worrying about finding someone sober to convey me. It was like a shaft of light piercing the clouds. My dissipate proclivities are no longer hindered by geography! At last!

St Ives is the perfect size: it’s got all the really necessary amenities, a handful of decent pubs, half a dozen restaurants and LOADS of takeaways, but none of the apoplexy-inducing thronginess of proper urban centres. It has a bus station, which means I can take the bus to Cambridge every day rather than drive. This might not seem like a bonus to most of you, but I haaaaaaaaate driving and much prefer spending my commuting time reading a book. There’s a farmer’s market every other Saturday in the town square, which is nice, and a general market every Monday, which is hilarious. Simon calls it the pikey market. Where else can you find discount home electronics, dodgy antiques, airbrushed wolf T-shirts, bras piled up in a heap on a dirty table, gourmet cheeses, novelty toys, holographic prints of your favourite footballers, packs of plastic shoes in baggies, and freshly butchered meat all in one place?

As you may have guessed, St Ives is very working class. Or, in other words, chav-a-lav-a-ling-long! Chav-tacular! There is no shortage of fat folks in tight polyester, nossir. But I will take chainsmoking teenage mums ANY DAY over investment bankers in SUVs.

And it is goshdarn pretty, St Ives. The town centre overlooks a lovely curvy bit of the wonderfully named Great Ouse river, where can always be found many swans gliding around on the smooth water looking picturesquely swanlike. It also has a respectable bit of history, being the home of Oliver ‘I like to party’ Cromwell – he even blew up half the bridge during the Civil War in a fit of cranky republicanism. (It’s all fixed now, thanks.)

We have already made an exhaustive comparison of the local delivery joints (favourites so far are Thai Orchard and Pizza Town) and are familiar faces at the Floods Tavern, which has a garden overlooking the river and a big friendly labrador named Buddy. I am feeling very at home.

More collage sheets soon, I promise! In the meantime here’s a new one of large circles (2.25” diameter), ideal for pocket mirrors.