Elaine

Today is my first bag of chips/crisps of 2023. I decided to make it a good one: Lightly Salted Crinkle Cut Crisps (aka Plain Ruffles Chips) with crème fraiche and caviar. Delightful.

Mary, one of the ladies in my walking group, took me to a flower arranging class last night. I’ve never tried flower arranging, but said yes when she asked (after all, what the heck else am I doing on a Thursday evening in February?). She told me to bring an oblong container and £3, so I dug out a plastic bento tray, and gave it no more thought. Until I saw her yesterday at lunch time, and she started checking with me: did I have oasis? No? She’d bring me some. Had I read the email she’d sent? Did I need any branches or stems? Had I gone and bought some flowers? Would I like to borrow her secateurs? Then she got home and started texting me: was the oasis she had enough for me? Did I know where to park? I should get there early to get a ‘good table’. Did I have a way to get my arrangement back to the car? Really, it was becoming most stressful, clearly this needed more prep than I had realised. So, I took some kitchen scissors and headed out into my rather barren garden and cut some stems from shrubs, and grabbed some tulips at the supermarket.

Well it turned out to be an excellent evening – over 30 women, all ages; there was a ‘meeting’ first, then a demo from a local expert, then off we went to make our arrangements. Then tea and goodies. I ran into a few people I already knew in town, met some new people, and I’ve been invited to a lecture series at the library later this month. I really wish I had gone the first evening that Mary invited me months ago, but I kept forgetting and she felt like if she kept asking me it was nagging. I am so looking forward to going again next month – this was exactly the sort of social event I’d been looking for.

Anyway, here’s the result of my work – it was meant to be an ‘L’ shaped theme.

I’ve mentioned before how cold this cottage is. There is forced air heat in the kitchen and sitting room, but none in the front living room, the bathroom, or the bedrooms. I suppose I can’t really count the bathroom, as it does have a heated towel rail, which I leave on all the time but without hanging any towels on it, because if I hung towels on it, the air in the bathroom wouldn’t warm up. The house isn’t insulated, because the guy who installs insulation got sick last fall. So even tho I set the thermostats in the kitchen and sitting room to 25°C, those rooms only heat to 17°C unless I supplement the forced air with something else. In the sitting room it’s a small electric heater (what we would call a space heater), and in the kitchen, if I want it to be warmer than 17°C, I turn on the oven and open the oven door.

I have a oil space heater in my bedroom, which I turn on a couple of hours before going to bed, but I don’t sleep with it on all night (all the Brits I’ve talked to agree with me on that one). So I wake up to a very cold room.

I’m used to it now and have gotten into a routine. I keep the ‘lounge around the house at breakfast-time sweats’ under the covers beside me in the bed, so they’re not frigid when I put them on first thing in the morning. Then I get out of bed and turn the heater on in the bedroom to low, so when I come back to get properly dressed for the day the room will be comfortable. Then I turn that heater off.

I come out and turn on the forced air thermostat in the kitchen (I don’t heat the kitchen at night), and the one in the sitting room, if it has inexplicably gone off (it doesn’t go off every night, or even the same night each week – it just does its own thing). I turn on the little heater in the sitting room and go and make my tea. I drink tea, read the news, and wait for the house to warm up.

I spend my day in either the kitchen or sitting room (if I go out I turn off the space heater, of course), and in the late afternoon I will suddenly notice I am very cold, and realise the sitting room thermostat has shut off. Yes, my landlord has suggested (quite sensibly) that I go online and learn how to work the timer, but whatever, I just get up and press the on/off button and things are fine again. Every day.

In the evening I turn the bedroom oil heater up to full, so when I go to bed my room will be nice and toasty.

I bought a thermometer to see just how cold the house is:

Today is the last day of chip-free January (yippee!), so I thought I’d share some info about my favourite food group: snacks. I mentioned how much I love Walkers (or Taytos, but that’s only in Ireland) Cheese & Onion Crisps. That’s the most common flavour of crisp in the UK. Many of the other flavours are similar to Canadian flavours: salted (what we call plain), salt & vinegar, and, hmmm. . . maybe not that many. I know we have lots of flavours of chips back home: Sour Cream & Onion, Ketchup, Dill Pickle, All Dressed, Barbeque, etc.. I can’t tell if there’s more flavours here or that they’re just different (I’m not counting the bizarre Christmas Dinner or Pigs in Blanket flavours that come out only at Christmas – I’m still not fully over that experience). But there’s Paprika, Roast Chicken, Roast Ox, Haggis, Chorizo, Tomato, Sweet Chilli, Pheasant, Ham & Mustard, and of course, Worcestershire. And those are just from the major producers – I haven’t touched on the niche market producers with their Truffle, or Iberico Ham, or Chardonnay Wine Vinegar crisps.

But really, it’s British snack food that fascinates me. It’s quite different from Canada.

Skips are prawn flavoured crackers, shaped nothing like a prawn, but instead like a clam shell (association of ideas?). Yum. Quavers are sort of like a potato curl with powdered cheese. Again, yum. I know I have seen Pork Scratchings back home, but they are everywhere here, and come in all sorts of flavours. Wotsits just seem to be Cheesies – I haven’t tried them.

Then there are the three that I buy the least but love the most. Well, sort of. The first is Twiglets (it’s the ‘sort of’ – I have a love/hate relationship with Twiglets). The first time I bought Twiglets, I didn’t look too closely at the packaging. When you see them in the store, the main things you see are the words ‘Twiglets’ (obvs), and ‘oven baked’ (also obvs, they are pretzels), and there’s a picture of the dark brown pretzel sticks on the bag. So, I bought a bag of the chocolate-covered pretzels and took them home, thinking, “well, I don’t really love pretzels or chocolate, so it will be easy to monitor my intake of these.” Yes, it is indeed easy to limit my intake of Twiglets. Because they’re pretzels covered in Marmite. Not chocolate, Marmite. Have you ever tasted Marmite? You’ve heard the song lyric, ‘ gave me a vegemite sandwich’, right? Same thing. A paste made out of yeast extract, the waste that comes from beer-making. They dip the pretzels in this delicacy, bake ’em and bag ’em and sell ’em to idiots like me. And I can’t believe I’m saying this, but . . . I do kinda like them. I usually have a bag in the house (mainly because it takes me weeks to finish a bag of Twiglets) and when I want something crunchy but don’t want to eat more crisps, they’re a good alternative. Apart from being high in sodium, they are actually among the healthier junk food choices out there and I’ve developed a taste for them.

And then we have Bacon Fries and Scampi Fries, my faves. Oh dear. The Bacon Fries are shaped like little strips of streaky bacon (sort of like Purina Beggin’ Strips, but smaller & crispier. And for humans.), and tasting vaguely of bacon. With their big brother, Scampi Fries. My youngest sister remembers both of these from her years in England which is also when I first came across them, and like me, will pick them up if she sees them in the Best of Britain store in Mississauga. The Scampi Fries are like little square hollow pillows and are supposed to taste like the scampi that come on a plate of scampi & fries. Scampi & fries are on pretty much every pub menu in the UK, and refer to a very specific way of serving shrimp: battered, breaded in electric-orange bread crumbs, and deep-fried. These little Scampi Fries pillow snacks are also electric-orange, but there the resemblance ends – they don’t really taste of anything identifiable. That could be because there is not a single natural ingredient in these snacks. They are made of chemicals and they taste like it. And I don’t care – I love these little things. LOVE THEM! Thank God they only come in these peedie wee bags – I never allow myself to buy more than one bag at a time.

But tomorrow is February. Happy sigh.

Every year at the end of January, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) holds a national garden bird watch, where hundreds of thousands of Brits spend an hour of their weekend counting the birds they see in their garden, and reporting it in. It’s been going on for over 40 years as a way for the RSPB to understand how bird populations are changing and how to plan their conservation efforts.

I heard about it after the fact last year, and by chance this year, a friend mentioned it yesterday morning. People are asked to spend one hour over this weekend to observe and count the birds they see in their garden or park, and then to report in to the RSPB using their postal code as a location identifier. Over 700,000 people participated last year. 700,000!

I want to be part of all things British (well, maybe not all things – I still don’t get the whole carpeting in the bathroom thing), so this afternoon I set up a cosy wee corner in my sitting room, with the stereo on and a cup of tea beside me. I had my Birdwatch Tally Guide and I watched. And learned. What did I learn? I learned that when winds are 40kmh with gusts of 57kmh, birds wisely hide in trees and bushes. And that maybe I should have picked a different time & day this weekend to become a twitcher.

Yesterday was Robert Burns’ birthday and it is traditional to have haggis for dinner. Because he wrote a poem. A poem to a haggis. A poem to a massive lamb & oatmeal sausage. He actually used the words ‘Great chieftain o’ the puddin-race’. In a poem about a sausage. Okaaay.

And every year, people around the world recite that poem, often while holding a cooked haggis aloft (think Mufasa presenting Simba to the animal kingdom), and waving a dagger at it.

My Rabbie Burns’ dinner was a tad more prosaic. I did have haggis, but not a whole one, just a couple of slices from the local butcher, with neeps (turnips) and tatties (potatoes). Maybe not as festive or dramatic as some Scots and Scot-wanna-be’s, but delicious nonetheless.

* I gotta admit: it wasn’t until I looked at this photo the next morning that I realised I had plated my meal to look like blossoms on the top of a stem with leaves. Clearly I am an instinctive artiste.

I’ve mentioned before that food waste really bugs me. I also like my cupboards to be tidy. And I think the UK’s 1/2 pint milk cartons are very useful. (Stay with me; I do bring this all together.)

I don’t like scrunched up plastic bags of pasta, or rice, or lentils, lying about in my cupboards, spilling over and attracting bugs; so any time that I have opened one of those bags, back home I pour them into a cleaned out jar. Here I buy very little in jars, so I use the milk cartons instead. They have a narrow opening, so I will stand at the counter and very carefully feed the grain or pasta into the little carton (which has been thoroughly cleaned & dried beforehand, of course).

On Sunday I splashed some water on my cell phone. I wiped it quickly, but thought I’d better dunk it in a bowl of rice (the accepted methodology for drying cell phones). I set my phone in a little chafing dish and poured over about 1/2 carton of rice. After half an hour, I figured the phone would be fine, so I removed the phone, carefully poured the rice into a pitcher, and then laboriously poured the pitcher into the milk carton. There, all done – a pain, but done. Some time later my phone started making funny noises, so I figured a half hour in the rice hadn’t been long enough. So back into the tray, rice poured back over it, and I left it overnight.

Yesterday morning, after retrieving the phone, I poured the rice back into the carton – this time with a makeshift funnel (fyi – tin foil funnels don’t work). I was careful not to spill any rice (no food waste here!) but that was not easy. The phone is now completely fine.

Yesterday afternoon Scout & I got back from a lovely walk at the beach. As usual, I tortured Scout by bathing her paws in a basin of warm water to clean off the sand. And my ear buds dropped into the basin. F*!$! So, for the third time in 24 hours, I poured rice over one of my electronic devices. This morning the earbuds were fine. But I just couldn’t face another ficking rice-funnel. I held the carton over the garbage can, tipped the glass into it, and whatever didn’t make it into the container is going out with the trash. Waste, schmaste.

Last fall (autumn) I started volunteering at the Greener Orkney Community Fridge, whose goal is to reduce food waste here on the islands. They applied for and received a grant to purchase and give away a few hundred slow cookers. In this time of ridiculous gas & electricity costs, anything that will help people save money while reducing food waste is a good thing.

As part of the slow cooker give away (locals had to apply and then based on their situation were ranked to receive one), Greener Orkney has been running a series of recipe contests. Every two weeks is a new category of slow cooker food, and people submit recipes – at the end of the fortnight someone wins a £50 grocery voucher.

I was the judge for the first half of January (our theme was Soup), and as well as choosing the winning recipe (Root Veg soup), I posted a couple of my own. I went with a Canadian vibe for one, and a waste-reduction bent for the other. I think this is such a great initiative.

While COVID has certainly cut into my alcohol consumption, no, I’m not going Dry January. I mean why would you pick one of the longer months of the year to give up wine? If I ever do try a dry month (stop laughing), it would be February and not in a leap year. But I have given up on something this month: crisps.

Those of you who know me well know that I consider potato chips/crisps a food group unto themselves, and one that, if one looks closely, must be somewhere near the base on Canada’s Food Pyramid. More specifically, Walkers Cheese & Onion Crisps are my all-time favourites. I could give up chocolate, or sugar, or bread, long before I would consider letting go of my crisps habit. But, it was an indulgent December (God, my cousin is a good cook), so I thought I’d forego crisps for the month of January.

The options to substitute are limited: Brits don’t eat a lot of popcorn or pretzels. I could cheat and go after some Quavers, or Skips, or Wotsits, but that feels wrong. Yes, I do know about carrot sticks, and cucumber slices, and apple wedges. And I do eat a fairly healthy diet – certainly during my little bout of COVID, I’ve been living on homemade veggie soups. But around four o’clock each afternoon, I feel like something crunchy and munchy. So this month I’ve been having pretzels, popcorn, and peanuts, all of which I normally eat in much smaller quantities than I do potato chips. Sigh. If I’d known I was going to have COVID, I wouldn’t have picked this month to give up my favourite treat. Ah well, only 13 days to go.

But typing this has made me think – over the next few weeks, I should share some of the typical snack foods that you find in Britain. No Bits & Bites, or Ketchup Chips, or Orville Redenbacher here. Wait until you hear about Twiglets. Seriously.

Not in the obvious ways – I feel reasonably fine. Still just feels like a cold with a lingering cough. The fever came back, but it’s gone now again and so is the headache. I’m able to walk Scout myself – each morning walk is anywhere from 20 to 60 minutes, depending on the weather. So that’s all alright.

But this week has been a missed opportunity, thanks to having to quarantine. For the past 15 months, I have not once seen the Merry Dancers (aka Northern Lights). For the first six months, it was due to my nervousness at driving after dark. Then it was the summer months, and the sun wasn’t setting until 11p.m., which is just a tad too late to be out driving, even if I was more confident. And then, this past autumn, I did try going out a couple of times, but the clear evenings were few and far between, and like anything with nature, there are no guarantees.

But this week, the lights have been phenomenal. How do I know? From all the photos people are posting from all over Orkney. Every evening this week the northern sky has been very busy. One person even saw them from here in town; unusual, as you normally have to get away from the lights of the town – my house faces south, so I can’t even view them from my front yard. I could still isolate and get in my car and drive up Wideford Hill, or over to Inganess Beach, but that doesn’t seem like a good idea. It’s one thing to take the dog for a walk in a deserted field less than 200 yards from your house during the day, and another things entirely to get behind the wheel of a car, in the dark, on icy streets, when other drivers are out too. What if I was in an accident? Even a fender-bender would have me interacting with people.

So, I’ll just sit here in my house, waiting for the test strip to show only one line, and admiring other people’s photographs.

And – I just found out that they’ve been visible in Southern Ontario too. Killing me, just killing me.