“Honey! Honeeeey!!!” I said waking Mr NQN shaking his arm urgently.
“Mmmppffhhh” he muttered still half asleep.
I climbed on top of him so that he could sense the urgency. “Honey, we need a ransom question, you know, just in case one of us is kidnapped!”
“Whaaat? Who was kidnapped?” he said slightly more awake and immensely more annoyed.
“I had a dream that you were kidnapped and I had to ask a ransom question but I didn’t know what to ask” my bottom lip turning out slightly, recalling the dream where only minutes before he had been snatched away from me and his ring finger with wedding ring had been sent to me. “So you see, we need to figure out ransom questions…” trailing off because I started to realise how unlikely it would be that either of us would be kidnapped.
“Oh you’re silly” he said giving me a hug nevertheless. “How about for the ransom question, we ask what your mother’s maiden name is?” he suggested.
“Don’t be silly, that’s like a bank I.D. question and that’s easy enough to find out!” I said.
“Well, what about your favourite fruit?” he then suggested.
Of course I couldn’t answer this question-there are far too many delicious fruits to count. And if anyone has read my blog, they’ll know that cherries feature highly up on the scale. To me, cherries are always reliably sweet, plump and juicy and I can eat bowls of them in one sitting. A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to be sent a 5 kilo box of them and a load of Lurpak butter and after downing down much of the cherries I decided to make a galette. I had originally seen the recipe in the new 10th birthday issue of Delicious magazine, the recipe by Valli Little. Sadly I wasn’t able to make it to their birthday party event as I was overseas but I figured that making something would be just as good. Trying to choose one item though was hard.
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| December 12th, 2011 by Not Quite Nigella
Mr NQN came home from the neurosurgeon one day, plopped down on the couch dramatically and turned to me.
“Guess what the doctor said?” he asked.
“What’s wrong?” I prepared myself for the worst.
“The doctor said that I have to go kitesurfing to get rid of my headache!” he said grinning broadly every tooth in his mouth gleaming in happiness. He raised a hand for a high five. I did not return it.
“Nice try” I said unimpressed.
“Don’t leave me hanging!” he said as I walked away.
Of course I’ll feel terrible if he does have a brain tumah and I was making light of it but I suspect that these man headaches that lead to kitesurfing are an elaborate, expensive extension of the man flu. Because once the doctor told him this the headaches disappeared only to reemerge when housework needed to be done. He actually once clutched at his arm suddenly as if stabbed and writhed on the couch in pain when I asked him to vacuum, I kid you not.
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| October 3rd, 2011 by Not Quite Nigella
A friend, whom I won’t disclose for fear of embarrassing her, once told me that she didn’t understand why men left her. She said to me one evening
“I cook for them, I clean for them. They get a nice meal, what more could a man ask for?”
“”Ahem. Hmmm…” I immediately thought of one thing. “That sounds like a great mum or dad. You left off something quite important to men…”
She looked at me aghast but had to concede the point that perhaps she was describing the role of a parent rather than a partner. But that’s not to say that the relationship between men and food is something to be sniffed at or ignored.
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| September 21st, 2011 by Not Quite Nigella
When we were little my parents rarely gave us dessert. Dessert was a piece of fruit or nothing and I recall keeping Christmas or birthday sweets for months afterwards hanging them up in a big up at the end of my bed and taking one piece out very occasionally and savouring its taste and feeling the sugar hit course through my body. When I would get a tiny bit of pocket money, even 10 cents I would go straight to the corner store and stand in front of the display chewing my lip and biting my thumbnail deep in thought as to how best spend my hard begged ahem I mean earned money. Red frogs were always a good choice but I also liked Redskins and Toffee Apple bars because they seemed to last forever.
One day when my parents went to visit one of my mother’s friends. I found most adults quite strange and creepy and they would always lean down and cluck “She’s becoming a big girl isn’t she! But so skinny!” and I would recoil and feel slightly nauseous at the thought. I didn’t want to grow up and I certainly didn’t want to be examined as if I were on a sample on a petri dish by my parent’s friends. It felt icky and they always said it in a way that gave me the heebeejeebies as if it were planning to cook me and eat me.
Anyway, one of my mother’s friends was one of the adults that I liked. And do you know why? Well, she owned a corner store and one day my parents popped in to see her with my sister and I. This woman also refrained from commenting about how big I had grown (and therefore wasn’t likely to eat me) plus she uttered the very best words my sister and I could have ever heard. “Help yourself to anything that you want girls” she said smiling. She must have seen us looking around her store wide eyed devouring the sweets and ice creams with our eyes and our glance settling on row after row of colourful packaging. She seemed to stock everything and the boxes of treats reached up to the ceiling to the heavens.
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| September 19th, 2011 by Not Quite Nigella
And no I haven’t been drinking…
My phone rang the other morning. A friendly male voice on the other end introduced himself ”Hello, I’m (I missed his name) from the <insert name of scary government agency>”. I was a bit cloudy headed so it didn’t quite click.
“The what? What is that?” I asked semi conscious.
“The <scary government agency>” he said.
“Ohhhh” I said gulping and quickly scrolling through my head to see what crimes I may have committed. I wondered if putting on the washing machine at 8pm or playing 80s music on repeat was now considered a federal crime?
“Is this one of my friends?” I asked. My mind immediately flashed to my chef friend David Tsirekas from Xanthi and Perama restaurant who is a notorious prankster. Plus this man sounded so friendly. Didn’t they wear trenchcoats and speak in monotone voices to get ze information out of you? Oh hang on that’s the movies and that’s also the wrong continent. Still as someone that had just read Suelettte Dreyfuss’s book on hackers and Julian Assange and their battles with the this government agency, I was wary.
“What do you want?” I asked.
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| August 22nd, 2011 by Not Quite Nigella
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