The Most Amazing Summer Salad in the World

This whole post starts with a sad story which is actually, for me, kind of a happy story. I made this recipe again last night and it was so beautiful and so magnificent and so exactly what my mouth wanted that even though my phone was - at most - eight steps from the table, I ate the whole thing before I remembered to take a photo. And it was so beautiful. Truly. So the sad part of this story is that I had to instead just take a photo of the original Sainsbury’s recipe card photo, as folded and mangled as it is. Also, mine looked better. 

It was a good initial recipe, but I’ve made some teeeeny tweaks to make it perfect. 

Serves 3 (I know that’s not a standard measure, but I think it’s perfect - two plus leftovers, or you and your two best buds. I’m sure you understand the concept of ‘three’.): 

200g king prawns (I used frozen, defrosted them that morning, and saved £££)

1 red chilli, finely chopped

50g fresh coriander, finely chopped

2 limes, zest and juice of one, other cut into wedges

2 tbsp dark soy sauce

1 tbsp runny honey

1 tsp rice vinegar

2 x tins green lentils

2 avocados, peeled and sliced

200g radishes, finely sliced

1 tbsp sesame oil

4 pak choi

1. In a bowl, mix the prawns, half the chopped chilli and half the chopped coriander, the zest and half the lime juice together. Leave to develop into something magical while you do everything else.

2. Drain the lentils. Don’t just do what I did the first time I made this and vaguely tip the liquid out - put them in a sieve and preeeeesssss those bastards down. Don’t worry if a few of them disintegrate a bit - they’ll be in your mouth soon enough. But you want to get rid of as much liquid as you can, otherwise that salad will sloosh all over your plate. 

3. In another bowl, mix the soy sauce, honey, rice vinegar, and remaining chilli, coriander and lime juice. Add the super-drained lentils, the sliced avocados and radishes and stir. 

4. Over a medium-high heat, heat the sesame oil and cook the pak choi (with heart-ends snipped off) until wilted (approx 2 mins). Remove, plate, then add the prawns in their marinade to the pan and cook through for a minute. 

5. While the prawns cook, pile the lentil-bowl-contents onto the plates of pak choi. After a minute, add the prawns on top. Squeeze the wedge of lime over that. Demolish. If you’re really hungry, serve with some nice sourdough and lashings of ice-cold butter. 

Bien manger. 

#YesAllWomen

I don’t think I should be kept away from electronic devices before bed because the blue light keeps my brain up for too long. I think I should be kept away from them because I have no chance of sleeping when my blood is boiling like this. 

In the wake of the terrible murders in Santa Barbara, there have been essays written - two particularly excellent ones here and here - arguments started, and hashtags created. The #YesAllWomen tag has been trending for a while now, used by women to talk about their own experiences of abuse, assault, misogyny and male privilege. Despite the many, many women sharing on this tag, it’s still being dismissed. Obviously, we just. Don’t. Get it. 

Silly women. Stupid fucking women, missing the point again. It’s not ABOUT you. Shut your mouths, and stop hating on men, you feminazis. Stop whining. Stop banging on about that stuff. Just… shush. 

I am so angry. But more than that, I’m so tired. The anger wells up and then it saps my strength away, and I’m so exhausted that we’re still having these conversations, that I’m still always, always, always, intrinsically and inherently and inarguably bad, just by my gender. By my personhood. 

I’m so angry and so tired that when I was eight and a half months pregnant with my first baby, and a man got on the bus after me and told me that he wished the baby was his, and all the ways he’d have got me pregnant, and I asked the bus driver to kick him off, and the bus driver just stopped the bus and turned his face away, that I got off the bus half way to my destination because not one person on that bus thought they’d back up a crying, heavily pregnant 26-year-old woman when a man was shouting aggressive sexual terms at her. I’m so angry and tired when I think of my fourteen-year-old self at a party with some public school boys, who at the end of the night when I didn’t want to do what they wanted, asked me in baffled voices, ‘But why did you think you’d been invited?’ and threw bottle caps at my head until I pretended to go to sleep. I’m so angry and tired when I think of the hundreds, hundreds of times I’ve managed to escape the threat of physical or sexual violence by explaining I already belong to another man ('Oh, cool, sorry, I didn’t realise you had a boyfriend’) and how that didn’t feel like power, it felt like a foot on the top of my head. I’m angry and I’m tired when I tense up while walking past more than two men, and that I can tell - and have been able to for years - from half a street away whether they’ll say something or not, and I can feel my blood-pressure rise when I know I have to pass them anyway, and I find myself thinking of what I’m wearing, and making a note not to wear that outfit that way again. Because that’s my choice after all - if I don’t like the reaction, don’t wear those clothes. Yeah, totally my choice. And I’m angry and I’m tired at all the stuff I don’t even talk about. To anyone. Because it’s so usual and so common and so pointless to dwell upon because it only makes me angry and tired, and no one can go back and tell that past version of me back then that these things happen, and you could instead try - no. Wait. There is no other way to handle it. Not if you don’t want to get told by any and all authority figures that you shouldn’t have reacted. You shouldn’t have sworn at them. You shouldn’t have told them to fuck off because you were escalating it. And it’s not their fault if they react to that. I feel angry and tired at being taught at a young age by my white, hetero, Tory, middle-class surroundings that 'disabled black lesbian’ was a punchline, a ridiculous example of liberalism gone mad, rather than a perfect example of how far our patriarchal society will go to explode intersectionality, and turn us against each other when it’s the best example of how they hate women, in one poisonous, brutish nutshell. I feel angry and tired at the thought of my sister saying to me with infinite weariness, 'But not everything is about feminism, Sam.’ Do you know what? From where I’m standing, as a woman, it fucking feels that way. From music to advertising to film to politics to news reporting to economics to history to business to sports to policing to deep, deep internalised social constructs - it really fucking feels that way. 

I feel so angry and tired, angry enough and tired enough that I might never get out of bed again, at the thought of trying to raise my daughters and son better than this. Trying to make them good people. And trying to even imagine how we can make inroads on the bullshit of the world around them.

Answers on a postcard, please. 

DANCE, everyone! It's ice cream time!

Hello! After the success of the porridge recipe - you would not believe the number of people I have stopping me in the street to thank me for making their morning routine, and thus their life, so much easier - I’m now sharing this ice cream recipe. You don’t require a machine, and you only need to blitz it up from the freezer twice. Plus, it’s beyond divine once you put the finished thing in your mouth. Evidence A: the day after I was made redundant, I found half a box of this in our freezer, and ate it for breakfast. It turned the whole day into a thing of beauty. Evidence B: F has requested it instead of birthday cake. CASE CLOSED, Your Honour.

You need: 

300ml whole milk

1 vanilla pod or 1/2tsp of vanilla extract

5 egg yolks

125g white caster sugar

300ml double cream

175g melted dark chocolate

1. In a saucepan, gently bring the milk and vanilla to a boil. 

2. With a hand blender, whisk the yolks and sugar together in a bowl until they are thickened and pale. Like me in the winter hahahhaha

3. Into the same bowl, pour the warmed milk and vanilla, mix gently, then return the whole thing to the saucepan and heat again. 

4. God, you have to heat even more gently now, and stir all the time to stop it curdling, until it’s thickened further and coats your stirring wooden spoon. But do you know what? If it does curdle, just blitz it with the hand blender again. It’s not a total disaster. (But it’s preferable not to.)

5. Once all nice and thick, take it off the heat, scrape out the vanilla seeds into it and take out the vanilla pod (if using), and stir in the cream. NOW, and only now, do you also stir in the just-melted chocolate. When I make it, the chocolate somehow spilts into a million shards, flavouring the ice cream but also leaving tiny nibs of chocolate which melt in your mouth when you eat it. I told you, it’s amazing. I hope it works out for you this way too.  

6. Pour it into a wide tupperware box, and put it in the freezer. After 90 minutes or so, when it’s freezing at the edges, run the hand blender through it to loosen it up. Do it again another 90 mins or so later. That ought to do it. 

7. When you want to eat it, it’s one fiiiiiiiiiiirm ice cream. This ain’t no Mr Whippy. (But it does mean it transports really well.) Give it time out of the freezer before serving to soften up, then eat, all at once, like it’s your sixth birthday. 

Enjoy. 

I Came Off Twitter For A Week And This Is What I Achieved

1. On my first two days, I wrote thirteen thousand words for my upcoming book deadline. Yeah. I know. Someone get me a medal, quick, before the meaninglessness of the achievement sinks in. 

2. My son said at bedtime that he was scared of the monsters coming in. Quick as a flash (aka undistracted by twitter), I replied that I’d had a meeting with the monsters and they’d promised not to come anymore - they hadn’t realised they were scaring him. He went to sleep secure in the knowledge that not only are monsters very much real, but that his mother is in cahoots with them. *high five*

3. Shortly after, I got so ill with tonsillitis that I was bedbound for almost four days (I got up in the middle to get my dental crown finished #hero). For 72 hours, I couldn’t eat a single thing bar a medicinal McFlurry*. I genuinely thought I might die. My bedroom was a bit like this. 

4. I also had a minor breakdown. We don’t need to cover the details here; suffice to say I left the windows wiiiiiiide open for the neighbours (amateur) and subsequently received a stamp of approval from my loved ones to go holidaying on my own this summer ‘anywhere in the world’**. That almost makes up for all the horrible shit that caused it in the first place. 

5. I finally introduced the kids to their first ever episode of Doctor Who. Looking at the cluster I had on the digibox (what do we call them now?), The Girl in the Fireplace seemed the safest option (it was either that, the episodes with the bloody Vashta Nerada, Midnight [BEYOND TERRIFYING] or the one where fascism takes over Britain and Donna (I love you, Donna) kills herself. Nope). Why yes, I had forgotten that the whole story was about crazed space robo-monsters cutting humans up to power their ship! Thanks for asking! But I’m also reasonably sure that any child of mine who goes on to be attracted to men will now always, always go for a skinny bloke on a horse who gives a good wink. But they’ll never be able to work out why.

6. A friend asked if I could name any good children’s books with a decent heroine with agency. I literally can’t think of anything I’d rather be thinking about, so stayed up til 1.30am collating my Power List***. I would otherwise have been on twitter.

Honourable mentions: washing, not eating the kids’ Easter chocolate, watching the first three eps of The Great British Sewing Bee (WHY CAN’T THEY JUST FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS AND STOP STITCHING RICKRACK BOWS TO EVERYTHING?), catching up on Mad Men 5, silent crying at Eleanor & Park, loving The Trip. 

Then I missed you all too much and came back. Bonjour encore! 

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*it made me feel a great deal worse. I’m starting to suspect those guys behind the counter aren’t real doctors at all. 

**FYI, this is awesome.

***available on request