Birthday madness

As much as I love my children, their birthday parties must be my least favourite yearly events. Lisi's 6th proved to be no different, making her a very happy girl indeed, and leaving me falling into bed at 8.30.

I am no great baker, but each year I go and get all ambitious. I had seen these on a blog and got the stupid idea of trying to make them myself. 

not bad I guess, but what exactly is wrong with a Victoria sponge? They taste a lot better too.

I managed to stick with the one guest per year rule, Lisi invited 6 friends. They managed to create mayhem within 30 seconds of arriving.

oh, but helium balloons and huge pink teddy bears = happy, happy birthday girl. My masterpiece managed to provoke some interest

I managed to herd them to the table to do something constructive. German has the very handy verb "basteln" meaning to partake in arts and crafts. Please find me a handy English translation, until I have it I'm just going to use the German word. We basteled some boxes, painting and decorating them.

Norah and her motley crew of younger siblings turned up, the obligatory happy birthday was sung (in 4 languages: English, German, Italian and Mandarin. Such genius children we have ;-) )

Cake was looked at, but barely eaten. And then they went home. Another year survived!

the aftermath

The next day was Lisi's proper birthday, and we got to do it all over again. Thankfully on a rather smaller scale.

I'm going to let Gerti do Norah's in February.

The Marathon Post

I started training for the Lake Garda Marathon last May. I had been playing with the idea of running one for years, and now I couldn't find a good reason why I shouldn't do it. Everything had been going perfectly, a few niggles but I was never ill or injured, I only had to move a run once due to the weather. I was even enjoying the discipline of the regular training. A week in to my taper (the last part of training where you run less in order to let your body recover before the race) my shins started playing up and I got a cold which turned into a (mild) sinus infection. We have had the mildest and most beautiful autumn I can remember, the sun has shone with only a few exceptions since mid-August. 

Until last Friday when a cold front moved in.

And we were meant to be camping down in Lake Garda. 

And I was meant to be running a very long race on Sunday. 

Still, the forecast down there wasn't AS bad as it was here in Sterzing. I could swallow ibuprofen for the legs, inhale cortisone for the sinuses. AND THEN my friend Sol and her sons came for supper. Santi looked a bit peaky, then very peaky, and then threw up right into his dinner plate (poor boy) which sent me into a blind panic - Santi's got a stomach bug, and now my kids are going to get a stomach bug, and we're meant to go camping, and now I'm going to get a stomach bug, and I've been training for this since May.... you know me, you probably don't need to imagine very hard to know what I was like.

Still, feeling mildly ridiculous we pulled out all of our camping gear, packed up the car leaving a Sterzing looking like this:

The photo is actually a couple weeks old, from when the last cold front moved through -
the only other blip in the otherwise perfect autumn. Last Saturday was the same but worse.

And drove the two hours to Limone sul Garda to be greeted by this:

Windy but sunny and lovely. We found our campsite and pitched the tent with two very excited little girls.

The site was wonderful, our pitch being just a few metres away from the lake shore. If only Limone weren't so isolated we'd be here more often!

tent with a view

The finish line at Malcesine taunted me from across the lake. It seemed like a very, very long way away.

We had to be at the start a good hour before the race began. The sun was still tucked behind the mountains and it was cold, windy and thoroughly unpleasant. I huddled in a tunnel wrapped in a plastic bag and waited.

(Hideous self portrait warning. I have a lovely camera yet almost all these pictures come from a mobile phone. Oh well.)

I started chatting to a couple British guys. Their girlfriends sensibly only let them do marathons in holiday destinations: the French Riviera, Jersey, Lake Garda... 

Once in the starting pens the sun finally appeared and I heard some more English, this time a lady in her late 50s running with a young chap from the same running club. 

a picture I found of them from rather later on in the race

I love how collegial British running clubs seem to be. Here you're pretty much left to your own devices. Anyhow, where should this pair be from? Evesham. The very small, rather insignificant town just down the road from my parents.

I ran the first 10km chatting to them, through the tunnels of the Gardesana

a road that is so narrow and winding that only those with a death wish would normally run it. At Riva I noticed that 1) my gps tracker wasn't being as accurate as it should and 2) I seemed to have been dawdling so I said my goodbyes and took off.

The next part of the run left the lake and wound through the vineyards and orchards towards Arco.

I was still feeling good, light and positive, though by the time I got back to the lake my legs were rather heavy.

 

Turns out I had got my timings a bit wrong at the beginning, and rather than dawdling I had been going too fast. Now I was paying the price, but still I only had 14km to go, and an hour and a half in which to do it. I should have carried on timing every kilometre, but I was tired, I thought I had plenty of time, who cares any more, just get me to the end. It's funny how I wavered between "only 14km, that's just Mareit and back" and "eeew, 14km is a really, really long way" Looking at my split times, I slowed down a lot here. The road is also mean - Malceisne castle is on a small headland sticking out into the lake, meaning you can see it from a very long way away. It looks so near, but never gets closer. I slogged on and on, at least passing several people on the way. Then came the 40km sign - nearly there! Then the 41km... then the only hill on the route started and went on and on and on. It seemed like 10km, not one!

Once up, I only needed to go down, the crowds got thicker,cheering, I could hear the music and announcer at the finish line

then there were Lisi, Norah and Gerti waving. As cheesy as it sounds I welled up and got all emotional. To the point that I had to give myself a good talking to as the lump in my throat got so big I could no longer breathe. Still, I was at the end, jubilant - my tracker had me on a near miraculous time of 3:49:32 it turns out that my official time was not quite so amazing - 3:56:00 but none the less, decently under the hoped for 4 hours.

maybe I'm going to actually have to buy this photograph to get rid of the watermark!

I'm sitting here now with rather aching legs - I could barely walk up the stairs when we got back, but none the less am looking forward to the next race. Lake Kaltern half marathon in March, and with a lot of luck London 2013. Keep your fingers crossed for me with their lottery!

Hommage à Deb

Deb from home life simplified has been inspiring me of late with her weekly meal plans . She and I have the same taste in food it seems. I, however, can't bring myself to post everything we ate last week every week, I would have to hang my head in shame at the repetitive, unbalanced diet that is ours. It's not all bad though. In fact, sometimes there are a few really good things, so I'll just post those instead. Maybe somebody will get a few ideas. Or not.

Like Deb, heck, no I'm going to be lazy about this and just copy and paste from her site (is that ok?)

Please note that most of my meals are not being eaten by my kids so I will indicate if a meal is one for our whole family.  Between our desire to eat foods with a lot of spices and our kids desire to eat foods that don’t touch or freak them out we only eat the same foods an average of twice a week.  We are working on this so you will see more family style meals in the next 6 months.

except I'm a lazy mother and we aren't working on this.

This week saw us with

Black beans (cooked from dry with just a bit of epazote, dried chilli and chicken stock) with rice and pico de gallo salsa

mr HLS's chicken tikka using the second half of the marinade which I had frozen. I hadn't made chicken tikka before, so have no comparisons, but this recipe is AMAZING. We ate it with Nigel Slater's fragrant rice from the 30 minute cook (one of my very most used books), and a fresh tomato chutney I found in an Indian cook book, but is to all intents and purposes pico de gallo salsa. Still, the astringency fits perfectly.

Lasagne, again using up freezer stocks. I had tonnes of ragu, and I do make good ragu, but I make seriously lousy lasagne. I need help. Please!

Home made pizza with buffalo's milk mozzarella (just 'cause it was on 2 for 1 at the supermarket), rucola-rocket-arugula-what ever you want to call that stuff and fresh tomatoes. The tomatoes go in the oven on the pizza, the rucola gets dumped on once it comes out of the oven. My dear husband is pizza baker around here, he makes the dough in batches and freezes it in portions in freezer bags. Yeast being the clever stuff it is seems not to care that it gets frozen. You just need to remember to pull the dough out of the freezer at about lunch time. By dinner time it will have quite literally risen again. We've even been known to defrost it in the microwave, but extreme caution is needed!

What else have I cooked this week?

Oh, yeah, these muffins. The recipe's for a bread but I made it into muffins. They're good! http://allrecipes.com/recipe/banana-pumpkin-bread/detail.aspx



 and Nigella Lawson's grandma's bean and barley soup I needed to use up a bag of mixed legumes which had been hanging around my cupboard for at least a couple of years longer than I care to remember. I feared it was going to be rather too worthy and wholefoody, but it is saved by the parsnip. And a liberal dousing with olive oil and parmesan at the table. Saves most things I find.

Tonight's dinner will be an experiment involving pappardelle (would use tagliatelle, but for some bizzare reason my husband doesn't like them), salmon, zucchini, saffron and some lemon zest. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Our tried, tested and fail safe pizza dough recipe (from the Joy of Cooking )

Enough for 2 crusts. We usually double the recipe

Combine in a large mixing bowl or the bowl of a heavy duty mixer and let stand until the yeast is dissolved, about 5 minutes:
        1 package (2 1/4 tsp) active dry yeast
        1 1/3 cups hand warm  water
Add:
        3 1/2 to 3 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
        2 tbs olive oil
        1 tbs salt (yes, really)
Mix by hand or on low speed for about 1 minute to blend all the ingredients. Knead for about 10 minutes by hand or with the dough hook on low to medium speed until the dough is smooth and elastic. Transfer the dough to a bowl lightly coated with olive oil and turn it over once to coat with oil. Cover and let rise in a warm place (the kitchen does just fine) until doubled in volume, 1 to 1 1/2 hours).

Preheat the oven to HOT we use 250c / 475f. Cut the dough in 2, stick the part you're going to freeze into a freezer bag and freeze. Roll out the other part as thin as you can. We make oblong pizza for the sake of convenience. This amount should perfectly fit on to one of the tin shelves in your oven. A little tip from my friend Sol who got the tip from a pizza baker is to dust your counter top with fine semolina before rolling, rather than just using flour. It is better, but we used flour for years and it was still just fine.        


Don't bother make a sauce for the pizza, a can of chopped tomatoes is perfectly acceptable. We use polpa which is finer but not as fine as passata, but use what you've got. If they aren't salted, sprinkle over some salt

1 125g / 5 oz mozzarella chopped very finely will be (just) enough to sprinkle over


the husband has to add dried oregano, the jury's still out on this one.

Then add your toppings, drizzle the whole lot with olive oil and bake for 12 minutes.

Ok, that just took me over an hour and a half on a beautiful autumn afternoon. And I don't have any fancy formatting or stuff. I think I'm going to have to get rather quicker if I'm to keep it up!