Warming Up

Oh God, today was so much harder. Not that I was hungover (I hadn't drunk that much, but was regretting the whisky I had at the end of the evening), just that we didn't get enough sleep and had to tag team our way through the day.

I had 45 minutes in the bath playing online poker and that was better than any idyllic countryside walks. There is so little time alone now, that you appreciate these simple escapes so much.

Whilst my wife had been in the bath I had tried to fill the time with races in the garden (very hard on our tiny strip of lawn but we just ran in a tiny circle) and then when the kids thankfully tired of that I made some ginger biscuits with them. I was halfway through making them when I discovered that the recipe called for 250 precious grams of self-raising flour. The other day we'd found a bag at the back of a cupboard that we'd forgotten about. It was like we'd discovered a stash of gold hidden under the floorboards. I guess I knew biscuits had flour in them, but not so much. My wife lay in the bath, presumably enjoying the solitude, not realising that downstairs I was blowing the kids' inheritance on ginger biscuits.

Left for a second with the job of mixing the flour, ginger and bicarbonate of soda, my son started chucking the stuff around and put a lot of it in a bowl with golden syrup in it. I suddenly knew how my grandparents had felt when we wasted food as kids. They still had that war time mentality that every scrap is vital (and how the Hell did we lose that mentality?). Luckily I scooped most of it back into the mixing bowl. 

The biscuits went in the oven and came out pretty well. I'd put in lots of fresh ginger and extra ginger powder, but they still weren't quite gingery enough for me. But I ate three of them and was looking forward to the lion's share of the 17 that were left.

Once cooled, my wife put them in a little glass sealable dish and left them on the island in the kitchen. They were out of reach of tiny hands (well not all tiny hands - I took another one when I was out of the bath - just to see what they were like now they had cooled down). They were fine. 

An hour or so later I was in soul charge of the boy and he was hungry and wanted a “cookie”. I was disappointed that he used this Americanism, but what can you do? He bolted for the kitchen and I followed him saying I needed to check with mummy as I didn't know if they'd had biscuits already. I was maybe 2 seconds behind him, but he used that time well. Somehow (possibly utilising the plastic sword he was carrying) he managed to drag the bowl within reach and then a little bit further and there was a crash and a smash and I came in to find the biscuits on the floor and the little dish broken and shards of glass everywhere. Luckily my son was unhurt, but we'd lost the dish (which had looked like it was tough enough to survive such a fall) and all the biscuits (unless we wanted to risk ingesting glass). All that flour used up for nothing.

I know that I must have done similar things as a child and my son was aware that he'd done something terrible - though was still asking for cookies so didn't understand the magnitude of his transgression. All that (twenty minutes of) work and all those ingredients gone. On the plus side he had probably stopped me eating 1000 calories of sugar and butter over the rest of the day.

That's 220 grams of flour that we won't be getting back. How much could we have got for that on the black market?