When I started High School my friends and I subsisted mostly on pocket money from chores and homework and money was at a premium at least in the first couple of years of high school. Still, there was one friend that was a little tighter with her cash than most and this continued way beyond when we got after school jobs.
One day towards the end of lunch she came up to our group and said ”Who wants to buy the rest of my frozen yogurt? There’s half left so I’ll give you 50% off!”. We demurred, after all a yogurt half eaten wasn’t particularly appealing but one that we had to pay for was even less. If she had offered it to us and said that she couldn’t finish it then I think someone would have taken it but we watched as she went from group to group trying to sell her half eaten yogurt to no avail.
I murmured to my friends “You know, it wasn’t even a good deal…” and they looked at me like I was a bit alien.
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June 20th, 2013
by Not Quite Nigella
A little while ago a dear friend of mine called me in a panic.
“You wouldn’t believe what I just did!” she said anxiously. “You know how I hate the phone at work and it just calls people back when I accidentally hit the same button twice…” she said barely pausing for breath. “Well I was at work at the law office (where she works as a lawyer) and then a friend rang me on the other phone. We were having a good old session talking about well you know how I don’t mind talking about my love life to my friends and I was discussing how I got myself into a compromising position with my husband when I realised that the other phone had redialed a client and left an entire long X rated message on a client’s answering machine!”
After laughing I offered up “Are you sure that the machine didn’t just cut it off? Some of them do that after thirty seconds”, trying to give her hope.
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June 18th, 2013
by Not Quite Nigella
One of the most annoying things about losing some weight are the compliments. I know that people mean well but there’s a part of me that cringes when someone says “Oh wow you’ve lost SO much weight!” and their hands go from measuring a size that effectively doubles their girth to something smaller. I know it’s often meant as a compliment but it has me thinking “How big did you think I was in the first place?” or indeed that irrational part of my brain says to itself, “Wow I have no idea how big I was!” The logical part of my brain (yes there is one) has to then take over and say “You’ve only lost one dress size, calm down” but all the while, the “compliment” rattles around in my mind.
Anyway, for those of you like me that get these strange sort of backhanded compliments but love food but need to balance out good food with healthy food, can I offer you this low fat eggplant dip as a creamy dip substitute. So many dips are high in calories or fat because they contain nuts or cream cheese which of course taste good but this one is creamy but not calorific at all.
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June 9th, 2013
by Not Quite Nigella
My work tends to entail a lot of meetings or phone calls, both of which are a normal part of the day. I try to make these phone calls rather than face to face meetings as travelling to a location and having a meeting can take up the better part of the day while I would rather be in front of the computer writing or in the kitchen creating recipes. However, there is one person I speak to on a semi regular basis that I prefer to have face to face meetings with.
It’s not because I like to stare into his eyes or anything, really it’s because he speaks so quickly that I find myself not understanding most of what he says. I’ll catch the occasional word in a sentence and if I’m lucky, I’ll get the meaning of what he’s trying to say but as he speaks a mile a minute, I find myself saying “sure” to basically everything and then asking him to put it in an email to me so that I can ascertain what I’ve said yes to. Sometimes, I really have no idea what he is saying and I could have sworn that he said “mushroom pate” whereas we weren’t talking about food at all. I had to wait until he emailed me to find out that mushroom pate actually meant “Martin’s party.”
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May 30th, 2013
by Not Quite Nigella
This year’s Valentines Day passed by in a bit of a blur. Mr NQN was sick, I was busy working and it wasn’t until the day before that we realised in alarm that neither of us had organised anything. My thinking was that it’s usually time for the guy to organise something while Mr NQN’s thinking was that I usually organise everything so why wouldn’t Valentines Day be any different? Neither of us were upset, we knew that we could redo it but wanted to do something nice that evening.
The evening on the 14th I went to pick him up from work. It was a busy day on news sites (he works for one) and so he finished late, around 8pm. During the day, I had hastily cobbled together a decent-ish dinner after a hasty visit to the shops and some fast baking and I told him that we had dinner ready. But he needed to bring something too apart from his adorable self so I asked him to pop to the shops and get me something, anything really. Knowing that nothing was really open near where he works, I thought that I might get a single plastic rose or a chocolate bar. And I was really hoping for the chocolate bar.
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February 28th, 2013
by Not Quite Nigella
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