How to make your home ready for spring.

Spring cleaning is not just about emptying cupboards and de-cluttering, banishing cobwebs lingering high up in the stair well or cleaning windows inside and out. Spring cleaning also presents a good opportunity to review how well your housing is running generally and to adjust your organisational skills. Here are 4 steps to a spring clean sweep:

Once a year it pays dividends to take the time to review how you manage your home.
MOT your central heating boiler, water tank, and other regularly used household appliances like the dish washer. These simple checks will ensure that you avoid unexpected breakdowns.

Check your standing orders/direct debits for utility bills are accurate, ensure your meter has been read recently and your have no outstanding credits/debits.

Check guarantees for household appliances like toasters, vacuum cleaners are up to date, if not check out if further household insurance for appliance failures are available.

Sit down with a notebook and list the bare minimum needed to keep household systems flowing on a weekly basis. The usual tedious chores: washing up, the kitchen tidied fairly regularly, food shopping, laundry washed and ironed and put away, vacuuming, dusting, changing bedding and cleaning bathrooms and toilets. This is a list of the bare minimum health and safety standards for your home.

Divide your list into daily jobs and weekly ones. It is for example not necessary to change your bedding every day, but washing the dishes or filling the dishwasher is a daily task.

Next draw up another list for: Spring-Cleaning Tasks.
This should include some of the following:
clean interior windows - remove curtains/blinds (have those dry-cleaned).

Open windows (silly as it sounds people usually keep their windows shut all winter) air the whole house thoroughly. Keeping a house ventilated is very important to avoid the growth of mould. A damp house is essentially an unhealthy house.

Take all your rugs (if you have any) outside and take your aggression out on them by beating them thoroughly. (It is good exercises too). Carpet beaters are still available at old- fashioned hardware stores.

Move beds, vacuum underneath, also vacuum the mattress and turn it over to ensure even wear.

Empty out and clean all cupboards in the house: this is an ideal time to de-clutter and get rid of things you never use. Charity shops, car boot sales and ebay are just a few options of recycling your unwanted belongings.

Employ an Oven cleaner, but get a reputable company. They can deep clean your cooker so it looks like new.

Hire a carpet cleaner: choose a day when it is dry and you can leave all the windows open. Clean carpets in high traffic areas thoroughly. If you don’t have carpets, you can also hire a floor polisher to give your wooden floors a boost.

Use these lists to divide up chores between your household members and get started.

Reading by the fire

Reading by the fire is something I would recommended for cold wintry afternoons. There is a certain smugness about it, a feeling that all is right with your world. A cup of tea and a modest plate of biscuits enhances the pleasure. But finding the right book to read is the real purpose of this treat. It must be a book that is captivating, that has the power to transport you to the author's world completely and allows you to wallow in all the emotions unfolding in the tale.

It is so strange when you look up from reading a intriguing book to find yourself back in your comfy armchair with the fire blazing merrily when seconds before you had been lost on the forbidding Kilimanjaro volcanic mountain range, or fighting off a murderous assailant in a dark city ally way. I love those books that have the power to chill your bones and make you shiver just from the prose describing the snow, to make your heart race with fear or your eyes swell with tears.

I suppose that writing blogs is a way that we have to set down our emotions, to describe our lives, make observations on the world around us and engage with a wider audience, people we will never meet in real life. Yet so many of our authors feel like close friends, like people we know and love. That is the power of the written word. I have started writing blogs before and certainly kept on doing it even when I knew that no one was actually reading anything I wrote. Essentially I write for myself, for the cathartic value and to capture a snapshot of my life that I can reflect upon years later and assess how much or little I have changed.

Prose, Poetry and Lyrics

I love poets and poetry, I like prose that makes you stop and listen to the sound of the words resonating in your head after you've read them. I love lyrics that do not need music to touch the nerve endings of your heart and make your emotions fly. I love the sheer beauty of words and with them the peace that can be made, the humour that can be shared, the wounds that can be healed. Poetry saved me from my wretched childhood and swept me up on its comforts and took me far away, books were my friends, they were whole worlds that I could live in for hours at a time. The worst thing in all the world is to be shut out of the world of words, to be unable to express your thoughts in prose that will linger in the memory of others. I read poetry every day and today I read the following:

Candles
by C P Cavafy

Days to come stand in front of us
like rows of burning candles -
golden, warm, and vivid candles.

Days past fall behind us,
a gloomy line of burnt out candles;
the nearest are still smoking,
cold, melted, and bent.

I don't want to look at them: their shape saddens me,
and it saddens me to remember their original light.
I look ahead at my burning candles.

I don't want to turn, don't want to see, terrified,
how quickly that dark line gets longer,
how quickly one more dead candle joins another.

The Hardship of Accounting
By Robert Frost

Never ask of money spent
Where the spender thinks it went.
No one was ever meant
To remember or invent
What he did with every cent.

Christmas Past

Because it is the season to be jolly and because there is an anticipation of good things to come in the air, there can surely be no reason to feel a little sad and tearful? Sitting at my desk, Classic FM providing the sound track, I was as close to tears as it is safe to get at work today. Suddenly I had a feeling of the world changing and reforming and sliding away from the safeness of the past. I felt the urge to capture a picture perfect life and never let it change. I suspect when we indulge in the traditions of the season; when we put up our Christmas tree and order our turkey, send Christmas cards with red breasted robins and listen to Christmas carols on the radio; we are harnessing a Christmas past, clinging on with our finger tips to a better world, nourishing ourselves on the 'milk of human kindness' that flows with abundance at this time of year. When, more than now, are we inclined to wish good wishes for others, or to give generously to those without, or to pity those 'alone' at Christmas? It is a time of family gatherings, a reunion of souls and a period of thankfulness. Any bad thing that happens at Christmas is automatically twice as bad, it is after all the season to be jolly. Misfortune, badness, crimes and wickedness can not be tolerated, not at Christmas. At other times, we shrug off such things and explain it away with the phrase ' thats' life these days'.
The Ghost of Christmas Past haunted Ebenezer Scrooge showing him scenes from his past that occurred on or around Christmas, in an attempt to demonstrate to him the necessity of changing his ways; most of the events which negatively affected Scrooge occurred around the Christmas holiday season. With the media hyping us all up to have a picture perfect Christmas, is it any wonder we all experience a twinge or two of disappointment.

I wonder if Christmas is a time of reflection we humans need to allow us to regather our energies for the year ahead. It is a time to reinforce ourselves with the nourishment of the love given by others, in which ever way it comes: gifts, a good meal, a card in the post. It is a time for remembrance, to look back before we move forward, to feel sorrow, before we experience joy.

Nearly done

Kitchen is nearly complete. Just a few tweaks. I will be able to reclaim my home before Christmas.

Waiting to reclaim my home

We're having work done on our house. So far it has been a nightmare which started in April 2009 and I've just been informed by husband that it will not be completed until sometime in early 2010. I am so frustrated, I could cry. Mostly it is the endless promises that are broken that defeat me. It is the way that my home feels like a workshop or a garage or a pit stop for builders with five minutes to spare. It does not feel like my home, my heart does not sigh with contentment when I open my front door. The feeling is one of anxiety: what mess, or broken ruin thing will I find today? Husband is endlessly stoic and patient, I am not. I am that broken and ruin thing that the builders have created. I started out with so much hope and excitement and now I am the exact opposite. Yes worse things have happened at sea, this is not the end of the world..it just feels like it.

Entertaining in style: how to cheat in the kitchen at Christmas

Christmas in my experience means cooking and baking and cleaning. It is an exhausting time of year if you are the one responsible for everything. Over the years necessity has resulted in some clever shortcuts. It is not necessary to make your own pastry, let alone your own mince pies. Christmas cake? Does anyone eat it except the old man? Buy one, if you simply can’t imagine Christmas without a cake. But don’t even consider wasting the two hours it takes just to assemble the ingredients, it’s not a crime: buy a cake.

Hire a cleaner for the week before Christmas. It may cost you about £60 for a thorough clean but just think of the time and effort saved. The pleasure of having a fresh sparkly clean house to welcome your guests without you being bone tired and disgruntled makes the price as cheap as chips.

In October start stockpiling bottles of wine, brandy and other hard liquor, tins of biscuits, sweets and chocolate, pack your freezer with mince pies (the bought variety darling). If you are really organised make extra meals to freeze, so you have dinners available at your fingertips for those unexpected dinner invitations you issue at random when you are completely inebriated and full of goodwill.

The thing is, if you are a good cook, there is no reason at all to panic about Christmas. But if you can’t cook at all, the recipes that follow are for you; they are easy and quick and won’t send you mad with having to assemble 47 ingredients just for the gravy.

Here is the simplest recipe for Roast Turkey you’ll ever find, basically you just have to sling it in the oven.


Simple Roast Turkey

Ingredients
4 oz butter
2 large onions (chopped in half)
3 or 4 cloves of garlic
1 very large 12 - 13 pound fresh or frozen and thawed turkey
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
Large pack of stuffing (choose your favourite)
6 medium carrots, peeled and cut in two length way
Coarse salt and ground black pepper
Jerk chicken seasoning
White wine (for the pot and the cook)
Brandy
Mustard
Plain flour

This recipe should serve 12 not so hungry people but in our family this is sufficient for 6 healthy appetites.

Preparation time: 20 measly minutes.
Gravy cooking time: 6 minutes.
Roasting time: 3 hours. (ish)
Standing time: 15- 30 minutes.

Cooking Instructions

Heat oven to 350 degrees F. Wash your turkey thoroughly in water with a little lemon juice. Pat it dry with a very clean tea towel. Place onions, neck, and heart of turkey in bottom of roasting pan. Make up stuffing as directed on packaging. Add stuffing to front and back cavities of turkey, but do not pack it tightly. Push the butter under skin of turkey along with garlic, massage it in well. Sprinkle turkey with salt, pepper and Jerk Chicken seasoning. Fold wing tips under bird and place turkey breast side up on top of onions. Add carrots around turkey.
Place turkey in oven. You can breathe easy for a while, but periodically check and baste. After 2 hours, add 2 small cups of water (or white wine) to the bottom of the roasting pan.
Roast about 3 hours, or until instant read thermometer in thickest part of thigh registers 170 degrees F. Let rest at least 15 minutes to half an hour before carving. You too should rest, get a glass of wine and sing carols.
At some point you must make gravy. Its simple: Pour liquid from roasting pan into measuring cup. Discard onions, carrots, heart, and neck. Skim off fat from liquid and pour all but 1/4 cup back into roasting pan. For every 1/2 cup of liquid (what's in the pan and what is set aside as the reserved liquid) use 1 tablespoon flour. Stir that total amount of flour into the 1/4 cup of cooled, reserved liquid, and mix together well. Add a glug of white wine and a tiny bit of brandy to the liquid in the roasting pan and place over a medium heat. Slowly add the flour mixture to it, stirring constantly. Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, and cook 2 minutes, whisking constantly. Adjust salt and pepper to taste. Add a teaspoon of mustard to spice it up a little.