Bananas, chocolate and therapy

Banana bread is pretty ubiquitous stuff. Even in houses where baking is not a feature, most people have made banana bread, and that means that if you google a recipe you come up with thousands of them, as well as several websites that seem to devote a disproportionate amount of cyberspace facilitating heated arguments about the right ratio of currants to rum. I have no such niceties when it comes to banana bread. I have three favourite ingredients that I routinely chuck into the standard flour/egg/butter formula: squidgy bananas; chopped up walnuts. And chocolate. Loads and loads of dark chocolate chunks. Nope, banana bread does not contain chocolate in any of the standard recipes but who cares? Banana bread sits in the filing cabinet of my brain in the drawer marked "leftovers". I put into it whatever odds and ends of my baking cupboard happen to be languishing and frankly that means several variations of chocolate. I made banana bread today to mark my first major achievement since reconstructive surgery on my foot, which was, that I made it down the stairs. In a shoe! Not The Boot! OK, I had to cling on to a rail and the wall for dear life but look guys, when you are early into rehabilitation, any progress is progress. One thing nobody knows about rehab unless they are actually going through it, is how painful it is. If you are in the gym working out and you feel pain, that is time to stop. If you are doing a rehab programme, when you feel the pain is the time to push harder. It can be agonising, tearful stuff. So if it produces a result, and in my case it has, a huge one, then it's time to celebrate. Again. With baking. Again. Using chocolate. Again. Unfortunately the copious amount of chocolate I get through in my baking has finally dawned on my partner. Baking ingredients are to me as shoes might be to other women. I buy them covertly in my weekly shop and then get them out and look at them, and then use them occasionally, experimentally, building up a personally satisfying but otherwise generally useless mine of information. I have opinions on Valrhona versus Montezuma chocolate. On Waitrose chocolate chunks versus Dr Oetker chocolate chips. On Lurpak versus President butter (and no I do not give a stuff that Jamie Oliver prefers Lurpak, or he seems to since in his 30 minute meals programmes he always seems to be hauling Lurpak out of his industrial fridge). Since my operation the weekly shop has fallen to my partner since I can neither drive nor carry anything heavier than a pair of metal crutches, and this has been a huge revelation to him. Twelve eggs, he says. Every WEEK? Do we really need 5kgs of flour? Why? And who is eating all this chocolate? You are, I say glibly. I just bake the stuff. Partner is silenced.

Brownies. And boots.

In the course of my day, a day which generally involves hoofing (or hobbling, in my case) up the road to the tube station at what feels like the crack of dawn, even in Spring when it's light at 5am, commuting in a tube train full of sullen, withdrawn, unmade up fellow Londoners, zipping (or hobbling) from meeting to meeting, poring over policy documents with appalling grammar and worse spelling, desperately trying to keep my email inbox to under a thousand emails (I'm like a builder with my emails. "About a thousand". I definitely got that from my last builder, his stock reply to the tremulous question "How much do you reckon it would cost?"), commuting again, and tearing (hobbling) around doing various overdue chores, an average of around 20 people a day, all of them total strangers, ask me about The Boot. This remains a mystery to me. I am of course aware that I am all too restrainedly British and it would probably take a full on collapse in the street by some unfortunate for me to break out of my Cone of Silence and ask someone about themselves, but still. Comes a point, usually around 11am, by which time I've heard the well worn phrase "so what have you done to yourself then", delivered with the hint of accusation in the tone, at least 10 or 11 times, when I come over distinctly curmudgeonly. But, it looks as if for as long as I am going to try and commute unevenly to work and back wearing the bloody thing I am going to have to put up with it. Brits appear to be endlessly fascinated by Physical Difference. They want to stare but that's embarrassing so they shoot covert looks every one and half seconds. And they ask. I think the tone of, you must be one of those losers who is clearly totally incapable of looking after yourself, is a form of self protection. If you've had some catastrophic accident, then there's that much less chance that I will! I don't do anything in my life sufficiently interesting to qualify for a mishap as dramatic as yours! Et cetera. Well, I've done the full and frank explanation, hoping to bore them into disinterest, but that hasn't worked. I have tried full scale five star abuse (station master at Charing Cross: that thing on your foot is HUGE. Me: unlike your PENIS then), and frankly that hasn't worked either, in fact it has elicited a response of a much less helpful kind and I think you can picture the scene. You can't really be that abusive to people unless you are capable of exiting the scene at speed and speed is just not on the menu for me, not by a long chalk. So. I finally stumbled on the perfect response yesterday wnen yet another stranger, a woman carrying heavy shopping bags, on her way into the shop in front of the bus stop where I was waiting, surgical boot stuck out conspicuously, stops in her tracks, asks SWHYDTYT, and I have an epiphany. I look her straight in the eye, unblinkingly, and reply "Nothing". Oh right then, she says, looking at me uncertainly and shifting from foot to foot. She disappears into the shop. Success! I have found the perfect response. Since yesterday I have deployed it a further 15 times. It's working. Time to celebrate. If we weren't experiencing the wettest drought since records began I would get on with my planting - I am an erratic gardener with an uncertain track record, but each year I plant veg seeds with great enthusasism. But rain makes the ground slippery and frankly I do not want to end up with surgical boots on both legs. So. Baking it is. Baking it always was really, and the slightest excuse will find me in the kitchen, sleeves rolled up, surgical boot abandoned by the sofa, me kneeling on a chair with healing foot wrapped in towels. This sort of celebration requires something sweet that you can produce lots of. So that has to be brownies. Not just any brownies. White chocolate ones. I experiment with brownies regularly and I have fads - raspberry and cream cheese brownies, pecan and orange brownies, the list is endless. But brownies with chunks of white chocolate in them remind me of childrens' birthday parties, so that is what we will make. Nigella Lawson has a brilliant recipe for this. I can no longer make it out in the book as I have used it so often it's smeared with butter, icing sugar and melted chocolate, so the pages have stuck together. So I pull it up online, roll up my sleeves, deep breaths, switch on Kiss FM. Let the Magic Begin.

Nigella fantasies

It is not fun trying to dress for work when your left leg is encased in a surgical boot. There is no work outfit on earth that is not immediately reduced to the status of fancy dress costume - or even kids' entertainer - when accessorised with a hulking grey boot that looks like part of a Jedi (as far too many commuters have now pointed out to me. A bit like when people say to you, really annoyingly, "You've had your hair cut" - you know, in case someone did it to you while you were asleep or something and you haven't yet noticed - commuters have no problem pointing out to me that my left footwear does not match my right, that surgical boots are horrendously uncomfortable, and that they make my otherwise smart and intimidating workwear look, well, just a bit ridiculous. I do not need reminding of this. Like the masochist I am, I make myself walk the mile from house to station instead of hopping on a bus, and then I walk another mile at the other end from the station to the office. It is hell. Walking on a surgical boot is not walking. It is not limping. It is as if someone has set your foot in a four tonne concrete breeze block and you can't get it off. That is what it feels like. By the end of the working day, I am in a bad mood. it is unavoidable. You spend the best part of a day smiling and doing your best to keep up with your colleagues as they flit from one meeting room to another, your frustration boiling away under the surface the whole time as you pwer limp after them in an attempt to keep up. By the end of the day I am ready to murder someone. So, in the train home, I channel my energy. Firstly, into pelvic floor exercises. Well why not. Some part of me needs to hold it together. Then I close my eyes and work through the first cakes I ever baked. These are all Nigella. Nigella was the first food writer whose recipes I decided to man up and have a go at. I was, basically, seduced by them. This was back in the day when Nigella wore tight little cardigans in primary colours and flicked her eyes at you seductively as she announced that she would dust her chocolate Malteser cake with "just a teeny bit of cocoa". I was entranced. And finally I decided to give it a go. I selected her chocolate cheesecake. And it was fabulous. It was so fabulous that I made it over and over again, giving them away as gifts and even raffling one off at an auction (it raised fifty quid!!!)It was an easy segue from the chocolate cheesecake to the London cheesecake and just a hop, skip and a jump over to her pumpkin cheesecake with butterscotch sauce, and her chocolate gooey meringue stack. I bake Nigella's cakes because they are a turn on. You pull a glistening cheesecake out of the oven, anoint it with some extraordinarily heart stoppingly rich sauce and you feel ready for anything. OK it's probably just a sugar high but oh wow, it works. It is a ROLLERCOASTER sugar high. They should bottle it and sell it in Ann Summers. So, as I hobble my last mile home, I think through the ingredients, and 45 minutes after arrival, smart suit still on, I pull a chocolate sour cream cake out of the oven. I think about reaching for a knife. But perhaps it would be more appropriate to strip off and dive straight into it.

Organic Green and Black

I am a totally disloyal cook. I have been known to bake cakes from the Green and Black recipe book using Lindt chocolate. This does not spring from any ideology, as a humungously busy working Mum it's all about what's in the cupboards. If I were making Nigella Lawson's wondrous chocolate cheesecake and all I had to hand was a bar of Cadbury's, I would not hesitate to go for it. But I do have a fond relationship with the Green and Black cookery book, bought for my birthday by one of my kids who waited till the very last minute to buy it so he could get it at a price so obscenely reduced it was practically free, as he told me gleefully while I unwrapped it (never mind dear, it's the thought that counts, I replied, grinding my teeth). It's just so, well, chocolatey. If I want something so aromatically chocolatey that the memory of prepping it, baking it and eating it stays with me for days afterwards, I will usually plump for this book. Chocolate bread, swirly chocolate shortbread, and chocolate pots, have attracted so many oohs and aahs at the table that they have morphed into birthday and special occasion recipes. Today it was the chocolate swirly shortbread, which on top of the unctuous chocolatieness of it, is the most brilliant craft task, one to do with your kids. Make up two sets of dough, one vanilla and one chocolate. Stick both in the fridge for a bit. Roll each of them out. Put the chocolate one on top of the vanilla one. Throw chocolate chips in the middle. And roll it up like a sausage. The sausage bit requires three people - one rolling one end, one rolling the other, and the third guarding the integrity of the middle bit, hoping that none of the chocolate bits fall out. Unless you are a kid in which case escaping chocolate bits are a perk of the job. They look beautiful when they come out, swirly and lumpy with partly melted chocolate chips. I need to make something beautiful. It is a reward for putting up with a week of commuting while lame. Every time I ease myself on or off a train I cause a commuter pile up. I realise I used to be one of them but why do they all move so FAST? I crawl up the stairs and I can feel the collective will of the people stuck behind me who are clearly itching to pick me up and THROW me up the stairs, or maybe just trample me underfoot. Kids point at the boot and laugh. Well so they should - it's easy to pass off a surgical boot as part of your kit when you're in trackies and one sneaker, but lopsided walking when clothed in a smart suit and hey presto, you are auditioning for a part in next year's Xmas panto. I have ditched the crutches at least, and was quite proud of myself for tucking a smart black patent walking stick under my arm, till my neighbour informed me that the stick, matched with the black raincoat, black boot and the surgical Jedi leg, made me look like a dominatrix. Weird isn't it, that when you are on crutches you get sympathy, when you leave them at home you get laughed at. Ah well. At least dressing like a dominatrix who has sustained an injury for reasons possibly incurred on the day job, means I get a seat every time. Most people who give up a seat for me do it fast, with eyes averted, and the smell of fear.

Chocolate Bread and Butter Pudding

My first physiotherapy appointment, with a lovely young woman who massages my healing brand new foot, asking anxiously every 2 seconds whether I can feel any pain. Aaaaah, I say. Ooooooh. Is that pain? Does it hurt? What does that noise mean? She asks. Eeeee. Oooooh. I have no words for the amazingness of a foot massage, particularly a foot that has started its life encased in blue fibreglass for 6 weeks and remains strapped in the left leg of a Star Wars Jedi costume equivalent for another 3. My metatarsals are experiencing a release equivalent to an escape from Colditz. It is stiff and unfamiliar but it knows freedom when it sees it, and it is a very very happy limb. You need to flex the toes, she says. Flex the toes!! I whoop. That's brilliant! How often can I do that!! She looks at me strangely. I have to apologise to her for my overwhelming joy. But I've been dragging myself around for so long my shoulders are about to go on strike, I feel as if I've put on megastones and I have huge withdrawal symptoms from my weeks and weeks of abstinence from any meaningful cardiovascular exercise. This is a Very Big Moment. Can I swim, I ask her hopefully? Give it a go, gently, and see how it goes, she advises. I'm off like a shot. Fifty lengths later, I'm as high as a kite. I can swim! Well, I can definitely walk through the water, which is miraculous enough by itself. I can do a sort of a one legged front crawl if I pull my tummy in really really tightly to stop me from drowning. But I'm moving! Without sticks or crutches! It's time for a celebration. I hobble home, back in my Star Wars boot, and open my breadbin. You wouldn't think it would be possible, just a few days after the end of Passover, that there would be any leftover bread, but there is. I pull the whole lot out. Peel off the crusts. Cut them into triangles. Butter both sides. Layer them in a dish with white chocolate and dark chocolate chips in between each layer. Make up a fabulous, gooey sauce with egg, vanilla, milk, and loads and loads and LOADS of my fave baking chocolate. Pour it over my bread. Leave it to stand for ten minutes while I admire it. Sprinkle it with sugar, and when the bread has absorbed most of the sauce, I put it in the oven. I take it out half an hour later. I have no intention of eating this fabulousness of a pudding. I won't get a look in anyway - my family loves this pudding, and this afternoon just minutes after it came out of the oven, one of my kids pitched up from school with a mate who clocked it the minute they walked into the kitchen and made straight for a plate and spoon. See? It'll be gone even before the dinner for which it was baked. No, I made this thing because it smells. It smells rich and rewarding. It fills the house. In fact judging by the way my neighbours are gathering outside my door with their noses uplifted, it's filling the street. And the smell of celebratory food is evocative, it's a memory that stays with you forever. Chocolate bread and butter pudding. I will, from now on, always associate its smell with the smell of liberated feet.

Being British

I went for a blood test this morning. To get there I had to take the Victoria line. The Victoria line in the rush hour is probably the closest you can get to Dante's Inferno. Every carriage is a traumatised, heaving heap of limbs. It is the objective of every Victoria line commuter to make sure they can squeeze into a carriage, no matter how packed it is. Consequently when I hop gingerly in to the minuscule space that exists between the door and the glass partition that divides the standing from the seating areas, nobody clocks that I am wearing a surgical boot and hobbling on crutches. They can't see their own toes. Some of them have lost the feeling in their hands. Why would they notice somebody else's mobility issues? Plus everybody is thinking only one thing. Well,maybe two. Firstly: please please don't let this train either break down or come to any kind of halt in any of the tunnels between here and Victoria. And secondly: Get Me The Hell Out Of Here. Just one minor altercation on the Victoria Line could turn rapidly into World War Three at the drop of a hat. So, desperate as I am to sit down, I do not ask for a seat. This is stupid of me but I cannot help it. I am just too British to yell out, for yelling is what it would take to get the attention of this lot of sardines, guys I need a seat! Someone play a Good Samaritan! So I hang in there, and lurch off at my stop, collapsing on to a bench on the platform to recover the use of my legs before I attempt the scary, Everest-like challenge that exiting the station will resemble. I make my way to the hospital, dodging surly commuters, whose view of life is generally restricted by their pre-coffee tempers at the best of time but who are doubly challenged by classic British spring weather - unremitting spitty rain and wind. To avoid bumping into a million commuters on their way to the station I have just pulled myself out of, gasping and triumphant, requires a dexterity akin to driving a Dodgem car. But I get there, and make my way to the Phlebotomy section for my test. I have deliberately got there early because I know from five years of blood tests at the phlebotomy section of the Oncology Outpatients clinic, that if you do not get there in the first half hour you are doomed to a wait of aeons, clutching a pink ticket hopelessly that has at least three figures on it while the little clock like screen shows "4". I have a genius plan, which is to get there before it opens, so I can achieve the impossible and BE THE FIRST ONE IN. And I am. In fact it looks as if I'm the first one into the entire building as it's deserted. Ok maybe I'm just a bit too early. I get to phlebotomy and it's totally empty. The waiting room is deserted. The pink ticket machine, confusingly, is offering a ticket that says "68" on it, but hey, the clock says "68". Yippee. I poke my head round the nurse's door and there is the bloods woman, at her station, awaiting her first victim. All I have to do is walk in, sit down and present my arm. But I do not do this. What I do is, go back to the waiting room, take the pink ticket that says 68 on it, go and sit down, and wait to be called. Why? Because I'm too bloody British to ignore the queue. There is a queue principle and that means that if the waiting room is empty, I need to initiate the queue. So I do. I sit there like a lemon. Eventually I cough to attract attention. Footsteps are heard and the nurse comes into the waiting room. She looks at the clock. She looks at me. Sixty eight, she says, in a voice dripping with sarcasm. I check my ticket. That's me, I say brightly, and follow her to the chair. Back home, I make mustard encrusted cod, fluffy roast potatoes with pounded basil, and butternut squash with cumin, coriander and Greek yogurt. As I cook I make a resolution, for about the ninetieth time in my life, to match the assertiveness that has characterised all other parts of my life, to my social behaviour among strangers. It just isn't cool to be that British.

Agility on one leg

Once, some years ago, I was in Frankfurt for a meeting. The meeting was a late one -6pm, late for the average German working day then - and when I walked into their office, sure enough nearly everyone seemed to have left for the day. Nobody was at reception and it was a few minutes before a woman happened upon me and directed me to their meeting room. I sat there for a good 15 minutes, and just as I began to wonder whether I was the only person who knew about this meeting, there was a click at the door. Someone had locked it. I was locked in a strange room in an unfamiliar building in a foreign country. Everyone had gone home. Strangely I didn't panic. I spoke German, knew the number of Emergency Services and knew what street I was in. I couldn't quite believe I was in this situation, and anyone who has read my post about the puking dog will have gathered by now that I attract them like a magnet, so rather than make myself the laughing stock of the Frankfurt Fire Brigade, I decided to help myself. I looked around the room. There was a window, and I was on the ground floor. Hooray. I had a plan. I pulled up the window, got a chair, climbed on it, took my kitten heels off and threw them outside, hitched up my pencil skirt, and climbed clumsily out. The pencil skirt was so constraining that I couldn't balance the foot that had found freedom sufficiently securely on the outside sill, and I crashed ingloriously into a bush. No matter, I was free, and more importantly, nobody had had to rescue me. Apart from a personal resolution never, ever to wear a pencil skirt again, I was pretty damn proud of myself. As I stared up at my highest kitchen cupboard shelf this morning, I thought of this episode in my two-legged life with not inconsiderable nostalgia. I needed to reach something on that shelf and with one leg in a surgical boot it wasn't going to happen. Or was it? Months of hobbling on crutches and I have Popeye arms. Time to make a virtue of them. I heave myself on to the kitchen surface, grab a crutch and using the cuff as a claw, pull the marshmallows for which I have such desperate need, from their dusty home. They drop satisfyingly into my hand. Result. I may not be in kitten heels and a tight skirt, but baby, ingenuity is as ninja a skill as agility.

Self service checkout torture

Passover stuff away, I spend a delirious breakfast of multiple toasts with Marmite, leafing through recipe books thinking about what the day's celebratory baking is going to yield. I settle on a loaf of wholemeal bread, almond and caramel cheesecake, and chocolate and Crunchie bar squares. I need to buy half of the ingredients, so I hobble up to my local supermarket to stock up. Supermarket shopping is a challenge - nobody on crutches can either push a trolley or carry a basket - so I have evolved an ingenious method which consists of, hooking a small but robust bag over one of my crutch handles, and hobbling round the supermarket filling it up. Then I deposit it all at the checkout, pay for it, and put it all in my back pack, together with the bag. The most fun bit about this approach is that it looks as if I am barefacedly on the nick. An honest person all my life, I cannot help getting a tiny kick out of the sidelong glances of other shoppers in whose expressions you can read, did she just put that cheese INTO HER BAG? WITHOUT PAYING? I realise this is a small and pretty infantile pleasure but look, I haven't exercised properly in three months so I have to get my endorphins from somewhere.So. I hop and hobble from aisle to aisle stocking up on caramel chips, confectioner's sugar, butter and the like, and since it's Saturday, by the time I get to the checkout every aisle is heaving. So I make the highly ill judged decision to use the self service checkout. This is a mistake. I know it is a mistake just as I know that taking the bus instead of the tube during rush hour is a mistake - just as switching lanes in your car to the one you think is slowest is always a bad call - just as the outfit you change at the last minute before you go out on a sexy date, don't check in the mirror,and only discover when you are too far away from your home to correct things, that there is pancake goo on the hem - but, like all these things, I do it anyway. It is an impulse decision made in a moment of stress. I regret it immediately. I regret it when I look at the screen and it says, begin, or, own bag? I press, own bag. It asks me to put my bag on the scale. I do. And it crashes. I start again. Press begin, or own bag? I press begin. I scan my first item and put it in their bag. The screen crashes. Please call an attendant, the voice says. I look around. No sign of an attendant, and on crutches with a bunch of goods I cannot pick up and take with me, I am now trapped. We have all of us who shop at these supermarkets been taken in by the self service checkout. It is very important we all understand what they are really there for. They are not there to make our lives easier. They are there to ease congestion in the serviced checkout and therefore make the staffs' lives easier. That it takes us twice as long to use the sodding self service checkout because you only have to breathe for the screen to freeze on you and alarm bells to start flashing, is not a matter of concern to the parent company of my local supermarket. After all, I'm trapped right? I'm not going to leave my precious chocolate chips and self raising flour. They are right about this but there are other ways to rebel and I put them into action. I hop to Customer Service. I quote disability legislation. I point to my food. I talk about poor customer service. I reference consumer programmes like Ripoff Britain, fluently. I demand a chair. And the manager. Fifteen minutes later I leave the supermarket, my goods scanned and bagged by the manager her flustered self, money off vouchers in my pocket. Excellent. I hop home, hit Kiss FM, wrap an apron around myself, flex my hands, crack my knuckles, and I am off. It's good to be back.

Fantasy baking

Back on the bus in the morning to stock up on fruit, Passover deprivation making fruit one of the only ways to have breakfast without gumming up either your arteries or your digestive system, and as I get on the only able bodied person in the section loudly labelled PLEASE GIVE UP YOUR SEAT TO SOMEONE LESS ABLE TO STAND THAN YOU clocks my crutches and silently, unsmilingly, vacates her seat. i always say thank you, but I've finally moved on from abject gratitude. Commuter behaviour is strictly one dimensional, except in the case of emergencies when all hell breaks loose. So, equally neutrally, I say thanks (though trying to "smile with my eyes" - like Tyra Banks does - unfortunately you need elaborately coiffed hair and quantities of make up, not to mention boobs like shelves, to pull it off - my attempt comes off as just plain creepy, judging by the expression of the freaked out commuter who places herself right next to the emergency button). I find myself seated next to a genial Indian woman wearing a beautiful and elaborate sari, who immediately launches into speech with me. She touches my knee, then her elbow, and talks about her son who had a double injury and was in plaster for months, then a surgical boot, then he had to have lots of physiotherapy, and she was very worried for him, but it came out all right in the end so I shouldn't worry for myself. At least, I'm guessing that this is what she said. I can't know for sure as not a word of it was in English. For all I know she was complaining about the rising price of onions. But I find it very engaging that she should launch in her own language and just expect - or hope? that I'll catch up with her, or maybe she has decided that I am a linguist (she would be right on that one, though unfortunately my academic prowess extends only as far as the Western European languages, which are of no help whatsoever once you step into any part of South Asia). Anyway. I nod and pat her back on her elbow and point to her knee and smile and generally get into the conversation. And it works. She smiles, I smile back, we nod with emphasis to signal the end of a conversation we have both enjoyed, and when I get off the bus, she yells something incomprehensible to the bus driver who, clearly experienced in the art of responding to passengers speaking languages he doesn't, reacts by letting down the disabled step at the exit, something no driver has ever done for me yet. It clearly pays to speak, well, whatever language she was speaking. On my way back from my fruit foraging exercise (well all right, it didn't involve hedgerows and took place largely in my local Waitrose), I am tempted to step into a small shop with the hyperbolic poster above its windows rebranding it as the Passover Superstore. I just want to see what is left that nobody wanted to buy. I imagine there would probably be quite a lot, but this is largely because my take on Passover goods is that they either taste awful, or they are overburdened with saturated fats and artificial gloop, or they are outrageously expensive, or they are all three. But I am wrong. The place looks as if it has been looted. Shelves are bare and sad, and virtually all that is left is a few scouring pads, milk and meat labelled cleaning brushes, and some nasty looking frozen turkey's feet. No, they are not the feet, they are another part of the poor turkey's body, but they do look gothically like the feet. I make a hasty exit, and on my hobble back home, begin to fantasise. I belong to the lucky (or damned?) group who keep Passover for 7 rather than 8 days which means that come tomorrow, I am back in the land of self raising flour. What to do with it? Only a week without it but it feels like a year to someone for whom baking plays so many roles in my daily life - stress beater, culinary skill, relaxing hobby, way to engage with the kids, pure fun. So many recipes circulate in my head I feel dizzy. By the time I am home I have decided that whatever it is, it will have to be a bulk bake. Watch this space.

Dogs

Dogs love crutches. They think they're trees. You can imagine, right. And given that speed isn't in my toolbox at this moment in time, I've had to haul in the disinfectant. To be fair I probably would have needed industrial strength cleaner for them anyway. Perhaps if I had sat quietly in a corner with my knitting for the last three months they would be pristine. But I don't knit, I bake,and I am the world's worst patient. I can't sit still for longer than five minutes and was baying to be let out of hospital about twenty minutes after I came round from a five hour operation. My crutches have been the hapless recipients of chocolate drips, compost (yup, I weeded standing on one leg), tea, raspberries,icing sugar, extra virgin olive oil and vanilla essence. By now, they probably have salmonella. You can see why dogs would find them so irresistibly attractive. They're like catnip. This morning I spent a deliriously happy two hours playing with chocolate macaroon recipes before hobbling out on my daily constitutional. Dogs across the river valley walk set up an early Twilight Bark to let all their mates know that Father Dogmas had arrived, and within seconds I was surrounded. I'm not a dog person at all so this presents a challenge bigger than my last job interview. Luckily, past experience has made me resilient to all things that come out of dogs. I was 23 and pitching my company's services to a major multinational advertising agency when a dog, which had been sleeping peacefully in the corner of the meeting room all the way through my presentation, awoke, lumbered up to me, and puked. Right down my leg. I was speechless with shock - actually lost my voice - but the Creative Director was unflappable. Annabelle, she yelled out of the door, the dog's thrown up. Then she comes back to the table, sits herself back down, turns to me and says, where were we. I have dog puke trickling down my leg but with extraordinary presence of mind I pull myself together and begin talking through the price list, thinking to myself, it'll take me ten showers to get rid of the smell, and the skirt is going into the nearest bin. So you see, a bunch of canines weeing against one crutch and licking old chocolate off the other, while challenging, is at least something I have some preparation for. For years after the advertising agency experience all I wanted to do was forget it had ever happened. Who knew the experience would serve me well in later years. I should probably track down that Creative Director and tell her.

Your bunions are not my bunions

When I was pregnant, strangers used to pat me on my swollen stomach pretty routinely - in the supermarket, on the bus, on the street. Sometimes they would ask for permission but more often they'd just go for it. Read any pregnancy manual to find that this is a common experience. This socially authorised feeling up session would be followed, nearly every time, with unsolicited parenting advice. When I had my first child and was out and about with him strapped in a baby carrier across my chest, once again I would be stopped, the baby's feet would be pulled about and yes, I would be lectured to, unasked. Honestly? It was bloody irritating. But hey, the kids grew up, stopped being cute, and I was consigned back to commuter oblivion. Halleluyah. I hobbled up the road and on to the bus to do some shopping today, and discovered that it isn't only cute kids or endearing bumps that induce strangers to step into your discomfort zone. Crutches. They bring out reminiscences from others, unsolicited of course, which rest firmly in a box labelled Too Much Information. Let's skip the patronising What Have You Done To Yourself Then, through the oh so predictable Was It Skiing, through to the story of their feet. Or their husband's feet. I was in the Gap when a woman tapped me on the shoulder and told me about her husband's torn Achilles tendon. In the supermarket queue a woman puts a supportive arm on my elbow and says "I'm having my bunions done on Friday". Um, that's nice, I say lamely, my eyes telegraphing: do you really think the fact that my left leg is trapped in a surgical boot means I now take a forensic interest in the feet of every Londoner? In total I am accosted by 5 people in the course of my shopping trip. Funniest in these encounters was that each of the five was oblivious to the fact that I was struggling to carry the various food bits I'd gone shopping for. Me, I think I would have taken my bags of sugar off me and THEN told my life story, kind of like payment for services rendered. Home, and into the haven of my kitchen. Nobody there to lecture me on how many years it will be before I'm fully functional again, nobody to dictate my rehabilitation, or share their hammer toe experiences. And just as well, because in the kitchen I'm a whirling dervish. Crutches cast aside, I kneel my booted foot on a chair, turn my music up loud, and Get Baking. It's flour less cooking week, but my kids and I rise to the challenge. New Order on the radio brings out the energy and in an hour we've made chocolate covered coconut pyramids, raspberry Eton Mess, more weird looking rolls, and fried halibut goujons. Aaaah. A very productive and satisfying escape from my freak show outing.

Withdrawal

So we've all finished hitting each other with spring onions (Afghani Passover tradition adopted enthusiastically by the Ashkenazis among us who aren't content with hiding bits of matza in our bookcases and sprinkling raw horseradish liberally over our hors d'oevres). The morning after two long nights of Exodus reminiscences is a toughie - the novelty has worn off, the hangover born of 8 glasses of scarily sweet ritual wine is setting in, and all there is between you and next weekend is an array of matza crackers. So. It's time to get creative with unleavened ingredients. in between hopping up and down the road and lifting mini weights while catching up with The Voice on You Tube, I have combined fine matza meal, oil. salt and water to make a version of a bread roll. I wouldn't touch them with a barge pole at any other time of the year (or a crutch, ha ha) if I'm honest, but at Passover barge poles start to look incredibly attractive. Something about being denied a basic staple of the daily diet makes you unreasonably desperate for anything that comes close, and matza crackers do not come close. They aren't even in the ballpark. So. The rolls come out of the oven looking, well, a bit like cretaceous rocks. But I will fill them with cream cheese, mayonnaise-thick salady stuff, Nutella, peanut butter...well, anything that helps with the general fantasy. And, weird though they look, and as little as they resemble the real deal, I guarantee that the rest of the family, in s similar state of deprivation, will snarf them down before lunchtime has even been declared.

The Last Supper

The night before Passover, ie tonight, and the night Passover goes out, in 7 days' time (8 if you were brought up taking your Diaspora status extra seriously) are marked in the same way in my household: with pizza and beer. It's like we have to gorge on the things shortly to be forbidden to us for a princely 7 days. And frankly if you clock the disgraceful cost of some specially labelled Passover products, you might be missing out on a whole lot more than pizza for the next week. Ten quid for a box of biscuits? All in a day's ripoff at your local Passover food outlet. Of course for the more enterprising (or bloody minded), there are recipes for cakes, biscuits and even rolls, made with cake meal or potato flour. Me, I prefer simple abstinence. If it weren't for the cholesterol rocketing effect of over consumption of the ritual boiled egg,Passover would probably rank as the healthiest week of my year. Anyway. Pizza, and lots of it. We call around. Ask is booked up. Prezzo is full. Pizza Express has a queue. Even Dominoes has a 1 hour wait for takeout. I see we are not the only family indulging in a last minute dough-binge. All over London Passover-observers are having a final fling with raising agents.

Cauliflower...and chocolate

I made a really beautiful cauliflower salad. Blanched cauliflower, radish, fresh coriander, boiled egg, red pepper shavings and minced celery. It looked like Spring and it tasted fresh and healthy with a zingy lemon, garlic and olive oil dressing. But I made it 3 days ago and had not the least desire to blog about it. I made it. We ate it. End of. Well, not entirely. We compromised our healthiness by mopping up the juices with leftover milk bread -see below. No, what prompted this post, was a scary reaction I had to a conversation I overheard in the bus, where one woman was telling another about her allotment. She had spent weeks preparing the ground, she said. It was hours of back breaking work. But now she had set up courgettes, onions and potatoes, and she had set up blackberry bushes and raspberry canes. Her friend made noises both appreciative and disbelieving. Where did she find the time, weren't blackberry bushes a nightmare to control, etc etc. I on the other hand had an instant foodie reaction, which went, raspberries. Must buy them and bake with them Right Now, I get off the bus, hop to a grocer, find raspberries, and within half an hour I am deep into a recipe for raspberry, White- and dark chocolate brownies. Nobody is coming over, we are eating out for the next two days, in short there is no logical reason to produce 12 of these beautiful things, but I do anyway. I hang over them fondly as they sit stacked in their glistening squares on a White plate ( it has to be a White plate to highlight the dark ,earthy chocolate and the blobby red of the raspberry) and note, not for the first time, that my impulse to bake is a creative force that makes a virtue out of my untameable passion for, well, for food. Comfort food. Ok, chocolate food mostly.

Milk Bread

Never mind panic buying of fuel, step into North West London today to witness panic buying of matza. Passover begins in 5 days and observers of the festival are stocking up as if they were about to re-enact the bit where the Jews wander in the desert for 40 years. Passover is only 8 days, I say confidingly to the woman in front of me in the queue, her trolley stacked so high with Rakusens that you can't see past it. Maybe, she says wearily, but in those 8 days I will be called on to feed the 5,000. Something about all this Passovery brings out the rebel in me. I have bought only 2 boxes of matza, because of course I know that the supermarkets will still be selling the evil stuff throughout the festival. Maybe even at half price. Meantime watching people cart it away by the truckload gives rise to an urgent desire to eat bread, loads and loads of it. Bread is the anti-matza. Actually anything that does not have the taste and texture of cardboard is the anti-matza, but bread is its special antithesis. We can't have it for 8 days. So it's what I crave, right now, even before privation sets in. And not just any bread. Warm , buttery milk bread, recipe taken from Dan Leppard, a man who knows more about the stuff than I ever will and whose recipes are a work of both science and art. So. Straight home, up to my elbows in flour milk, syrup, butter, salt and oil, and all the effort produces a loaf smelling tantalisingly like your childhood memory of teatime sandwiches. In less than an hour, the loaf is history. So is the butter. And the honey. And the Nutella.