Cycling in the Olympic Park

It's the time of year where I think about pulling my bike out from under its covers and using it again.  I am strictly a fair weather cyclist, and I would never dream of combining lycra with a bike.  I know - with some sort of spooky sixth sense - that it would not be a good look for me.

Graham and I went for a gentle, pottering sort of ride around the Olympic Park last weekend; now formally known as the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and fully open to the public once again.  It's a very big place, and we wanted to have a good explore and get to know our way around this new part of our local neighbourhood.  The aquatics centre opened a couple of months ago, and now hundreds of acres of parkland and the velopark are open too.  There are only a few more bits still to open (the Hockey and Tennis Centre next month, the Canal Park towards the end of this year and finally the stadium in 2016).

The velopark is the section closest to our house; it takes me just four and a half minutes to cycle there.  The indoor race track, the outdoor 'road' track and the BMX trails are all open at the velopark, and anybody can book a session and ride.  You can even hire a bike and take lessons if you want to.  There will be a massive network of mountain biking trails opening too later this year.  For now, I just wanted to stop off (there are plenty of bike racks outside, of course!) and have a look round.  We wandered into the velodrome and sat down for ten minutes to watch a local cycling club do some time trials.  I really want to have a go at track cycling, and I am totally going to book one of their taster sessions once I have settled into my new placement.

 

There is a very friendly branch of Cycle Surgery in the ground floor of the velodrome, and they didn't look even slightly fazed when I wheeled in my enormous sit-up-and-beg bike (with basket, obviously) to get a new tyre put on.  Admittedly my bike did look a little ordinary next to the shiny, sleek racers they had on display.

There's a cafe upstairs, where you can drink coffee and watch what's going on on the track below while the mechanics fit your new tyre.  Or you could walk round the corner to the Unity Kitchen Cafe and then sit outside under a tree for twenty minutes with a cup of coffee and a croissant, listening to the sound of birds in the trees and children enjoying one of the enormous new playgrounds, and just try and remember the polluted, industrial wasteland that was in the same place just ten years ago.  It's getting increasingly difficult to do.  Our part of East London was utterly transformed by the 2012 Olympics, and have to pinch myself sometimes when I think that all this splendour is now just four minutes away by bike.

 

Mothering Sunday

Early morning in the Olympic Park

In the morning we all went for a swim in the London Aquatics Centre in the Olympic Park, which opened to the public earlier this month.  It is one of my favourite buildings from the Olympics, and looks much better now than it did then, because the wings of extra seating have been removed.  It is beautiful inside and out, and I filled my camera with photos.  Cam shrieked when I asked him to take some photos of Graham and me, and we had a little smooch for the camera.

The children bought me presents (Cam this book, and Olivia a scarf with flamingos on it, inspired by my abiding love of all things flamingo) and made me cards, and Graham bought me daffodils and croissants.  I didn't have to lift a finger all day

In the evening Graham and I popped down to the local pub to listen to some live music and enjoy a pint of beer.

What more could anyone need? Perfect.  

Evolving appetites

Graham is training for a marathon again.  He came home last weekend after a long (over two hour) trail run, and his Garmin showed that he had burnt nearly 1,800 calories while he was out.  Which is an eye watering amount of calories for a single run - over two thirds of the recommended daily amount of calories for a man.  Unsurprisingly he parked himself down at the kitchen table and devoured vast platefuls of food, washed it all down with a banana and oat smoothie and then took himself off for a long nap.

The children too are eating vast platefuls of food and sleeping a great deal.  They are growing almost in front of my eyes...Cam is now within a centimetre or so of being taller than me, and Olivia already taller than her grandmother.  Teenage appetites have arrived in the house with a vengeance.

And so suddenly I find that my years of experience in cooking for four people don't count for much.  My previously precise quantities are all out of kilter, and what used to feed us all comfortably with second helpings and leftovers now barely feeds the children.

Toad in the hole

Baked oatmeal

Potatoes - ready to be roasted for a corned beef hash

Would you like some porridge with your syrup, Olivia?

Cherry and almond cake

I have gone back to doing a big brunch on Sunday mornings, which gives me a break from what sometimes feels like endless cooking and feeding of squawking baby blackbirds.  While Graham is out on a run, the children can lollop on the sofa watching tele, and I can leisurely potter about in the kitchen listening to Radio 4 in peace while I cook and bake.  I try and make at least three big, filling dishes that everyone can help themselves to, and come back to during the day if they feel hungry.  I don't bother making anything for lunch, and then we have supper a bit earlier than usual.  It makes the whole of Sunday feel lazy, indulgent and slow, which is just what I want.

Here's what has made it onto the brunch menu during January:

• corned beef hash
• herb omelettes with spicy tomato sauce
• Amish baked oatmeal (recipe here)
• banana and apple muffins
• huevos rancheros
• lemon and raisin pancakes
• savoury bread-and-butter pudding (grated cheese and bacon instead of the sugar and raisins)
• soda bread
• breakfast pizza (homemade pizza with breakfast-like toppings eg. mushrooms, bacon, tomatoes, eggs)
• spicy burritos
• oat and raisin muffins

We eat brunch at about 11am, but the children can't last that long without food.  While they are lolling and tele watching they are also eating fruit, toast or porridge - whilst waiting for brunch to appear....so basically they have breakfast AND brunch....

Whatever the weather

Last weekend's early morning walk through Epping Forest: sunshine, blue skies, Cam and Olivia for company.

This weekend's early morning walk through Epping Forest: rain, grey skies, Graham for company.

 

Both very different, but both very good.

Seen on the streets

Seen on the streets of Soho, in central London, on the first sunny Saturday afternoon of spring:

•  Hundreds of people, standing outside pubs, drinking wine and pints and turning their faces towards the sky, like sunflowers.
• Two little girls, pony-galloping up Carnaby Street doing a complicated hand-clapping game together.
• Three young dudes, zooming past on longboards.
• A pretty young lady, wrapped in a gold pashmina, photographing her boyfriend's pint of beer with the biggest Nikon camera I've ever seen.
• Three teenage girls, all wearing very high-heeled turquoise pumps, and with huge Primark bags hooked over their arms, teetering along the road singing Abba tunes together.
• Three German tourists, wondering how many millilitres were in a pint.  Nobody could tell them.
• Bubbles in my prosecco, as I enjoyed an afternoon out with some of my nursing friends.

 

Springtime in London

Walnuts, orange juice, cotton buds and baked beans

There's a lovely place I know.

• Which is only two minutes walk from my front door.
• Where you can turn up at 7:40am without having cleaned your teeth, wearing dirty jeans and a University sweatshirt that is over 20 years old, and nobody minds.
• Where even dressed like this you are still greeted with a big grin and a shout of "Morning, Gorgeous!" as you walk through the door.
• Where you can be sure of being able to buy whatever it is that you need - even if that's walnuts, orange juice, cotton buds and baked beans.
• Where you can chat as you do your shopping and find out about how his bad back's doing and discuss the water main up by the hospital which burst again this weekend.

This magical place is my local corner shop.  A good corner shop is the nerve centre of a local community, and I think ours is one of the best.  Their friendliness and always-open-fully-stocked policy means that knocking up a quick coffee and walnut cake for Dad while he's out on his early morning training run is...well...a piece of cake.



Sunday evening

By Sunday evening I'm reflecting on a full and happy weekend. 

I made cheese scones for supper, and we dunked them into bowls of hot tomato soup. Then I curled up on the sofa for some relaxation:

• knitting (this shawl, progressing well)
• a stack of magazines
• The Archers
• a few squares of one of my favourite chocolates
• a large mug of Sunshine Grey tea.

All is well.

View from the sofa - Sunday evening

Friday evening

It is Friday evening, and I am in a contemplative mood.  The no-man's land between the end of the week and the start of the weekend does that to me.

I bought four thick slices of pork belly earlier in the week, and then realised that I've never cooked pork belly before.  I'm not a great fan of eating slabs of meat, so I rarely cook them.  This became an exercise in winging it.  I put the pork in a bowl of fennel seeds and apple juice for two days, while I looked up recipes.  If in doubt, apple and fennel always work well with pork.

I didn't find a recipe I liked so in the end I took the pork out of its appley bath, patted it dry and just roasted it.  I used the soaking liquid to make apple and onion gravy.

While I pottered around the kitchen sorting out the meat, listening to podcasts and laying the table, I opened one of the bottles of wine we brought back from France and I poured myself a glass.  This enhanced the reflective nature of my Friday evening.

It has been a hard week; but then I looked out of the kitchen doors onto the garden and I realised that it wasn't raining, the pork was smelling very good, the gravy was looking magnificent, and the children had finished their homework already.  I decided we would have cake for pudding.

Three blue tops - one of which is red

I'm making new tops for the summer - because I fancied doing some sewing over the weekend and also because I yearned to see something different in my wardrobe.

Pattern adapted from Trapeze sundress in Weekend Sewing by Heather Ross

This red spotty top should have been navy blue and floral.  The fabric which I used as the trim, should have been the main fabric and the red spots should have been the trim.  But as I pinned and cut the beautiful blue fabric so enthusiastically, I failed to notice that I had pinned the front piece with the wrong edge against the fold.  When I unfolded it I realised what I'd done and that I had wrecked the whole metre of fabric.

I stared at what I'd done, willing the fabric to knit itself back together as if by magic and present me with a whole, uncut piece again.  But I don't have those sort of powers, and the blue fabric remained ruined.

Fortunately I had plenty of the red spotty fabric, so I switched things around and it became red with blue trim rather than blue with red.  I like it, and I've cheered up now.  I will wear this all summer - it looks great with jeans and I have cardigans and long sleeved tops which match it.

But...it still should have been blue.

I'm taking MUCH more care over the cutting out of my other blue tops-in-progress.

The pastel, scalloped fabric in the picture above is going to become a summery sundress with nice big pockets.

This very precious, and strokably lovely, Anna Maria Horner voile is going to become a floaty, raglan-sleeved top.  I will check about ninety-five times before I cut it out that the pieces are on the right way round. 

I will also remember to add seam allowances before I start cutting, because I will be using an Ottobre pattern where the seam allowances are not included.

I WILL remember.  I will.  Definitely.

Friday afternoon

It is the end of the week and my mind is full.  Full. Of. Stuff.  I feel a little spaced out as I walk to the tube station to pick up O from school.

Everywhere I walk I see patterns.

----------

The exercise and the cold sunshine did me good and cleared my mind.  This weekend I shall mostly be reading Dombey & Son, in an effort to fill my mind with Something rather than just Stuff.

Amish baked oatmeal

I can't remember where I first came across this idea, but it captivated me right away. 

Baked oats and fruit - a sort of solid, fruity, spicy porridge.  Eaten for breakfast, but with echoes of pudding.  All the recipes I found for it are American, and most refer to it as Amish oatmeal. So the recipe has an old fashioned, healthy German-Swiss heritage to it, which really appeals to me.

Oats are mixed with eggs, milk, a little sugar and loads of fruit and then baked in a pie dish the oven.  My final recipe below is an amalgamation of loads of different ones I found online.  I reduced the sugar content to a fraction of the American versions, because I really don't like my food very sweet, and I upped the fruit content to compensate.

The whole family adore this, and what should feed about six people disappears between the four of us in about ten minutes flat.  G, C and I like ours with natural yogurt on top and O likes hers plain.  Yesterday both G and O had third helpings.

Amish baked oatmeal

Dry ingredients:

• 3 cups porridge oats
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 2 tsp cinnamon or mixed spice 
• 1 cup chopped fruit or berries (I used blueberries)

Wet ingredients:

• 1 cup stewed fruit (I used apple)
• 1 cup milk
• 2 eggs
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 100g butter, melted or vegetable oil

Mix all the dry ingredients together in a big mixing bowl.  Stir all the wet ingredients together in a large jug.  Pour the wet into the dry and mix together until thoroughly combined.  Pour into a large pie dish and bake in the centre of the oven at Gas 4 for 50 minutes to 1 hour.  Check that it is done as you would for a cake: poke the middle with a cocktail stick and make sure that there is no wet mixture left.

This is so easy to make that you could mix it all up while you are half-asleep and then go back to bed with a cup of tea and the new copy of Mollie Makes while it cooks.  For instance.  The smell while it cooks will drive you crazy with desire, and eventually force you out of bed and downstairs so that you can eat great, greedy bowlfuls of it for breakfast, washed down with another cup of tea.

I mean really.  What's not to like about winter when you've got this to get you going in the morning?

~~~~~~~~~~

This would be amazing with any combination of fruit.  I've seen many different permutations online:

• stewed rhubarb and chopped apple, with ground ginger in place of the cinnamon
• stewed blueberries and chopped peaches
• stewed apple and mixed frozen berries (no need to defrost them first)
• stewed plums and chopped apples
• stewed apple and chopped pears

You get the picture.

Seen on the Tube

Hammersmith & City Line, Kings Cross to Mile End

• Nine people listening to music on headphones.
• A young woman doing card tricks with her paper train tickets.
• Her boyfriend, wearing very white trainers, anxiously telling her to be careful with the tickets.
• A jolly, portly man wearing a grey, hand-knitted tank top, offering sections of his Saturday newspaper to those sitting around him.
• A woman with immaculately painted pink toenails, wearing hareem pants and white sandals.
• A man with white hair and black gloves, distressed to find himself on the wrong train at Liverpool Street
• A blushing young man, wearing a blue dog-tooth checked shirt, rummaging in his jacket pocket and then dropping a lip balm and a selection of multi-coloured foil-wrapped condoms all over the floor.
• A middle-aged woman checking her hair, and pulling out a few white ones.

The University Parks and the teapot

A weekend in Oxford, visiting family, resulted in us driving back down the M40 on Sunday evening with windfall apples, wrapped birthday presents, an enormous jar of fig jam and a new teapot in the boot of the car. 

On Saturday afternoon G and I dropped the children off with their cousins for a couple of hours, and we headed for the University Parks, one of my favourite places in Oxford.  This has been a good year for berries - the bushes and trees were absolutely laden with them.  If you know of any hungry birds, tell them there's a feast on at the Parks.

We strolled around the Parks, admiring some very energetic games of tennis on the playing fields, and then we headed northwards, following the river back into the city.  Along the river there were the most elegant swans, a few punts, and some beautiful trees.

Punting

The river Isis, in Oxford

Weeping willow by the University Parks

On the way back to pick up the children we walked through Wolfson College, and I had lawn envy.  They don't have moulting chickens and drifts of fallen leaves on their lawn.  They have croquet hoops and neat stripes from the mower.

Wolfson College's beautiful croquet lawn

And this morning I find myself back in London, looking at these photos to see if the berries really were that red, and to see if the parks really were that beautiful with autumn colour.  They were.  I've turned the windfalls into stewed apple, hidden the presents, made plans for the fig jam and made the first pot of tea in the new teapot.

It was a very good weekend.

The Oxford University Parks

My new teapot (with sweet little matching milk jug)