My adventures in pie making

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This was supposed to be the second half of my post about ante-natal yoga, but who can think about cobbler’s pose and mountain breathing when there is pie in the fridge?

I have been threatening to make a pork pie for about three years now, it’s one of those long-term projects that exist in a completely abstract form, moving from one annual To Do list to the next year’s until I either ignore it completely or am forced into action. It had dawned on me that if I wanted to spend most of a weekend making a single pie, it was better to do it now while I can still attempt to make things that are more complex than toast and Cup A Soup.

I had also made the mistake of telling Ginge, who very kindly placed an order of pig parts at our local butcher so there was no turning back.

So on Saturday morning, I trekked off to the butcher and collected a large carrier bag of pork neck, pork belly, streaky bacon, pork bones and two pig’s trotters (I was trusting a Nigel Slater recipe for this epic). The bones and trotters went into the stock pot…

Mmmmm, gelatinous feet...

Mmmmm, gelatinous feet…

While the bacon, belly and neck were chopped and minced. Nigel advocates hand chopping 1.5kg of meat into 5mm pieces (but concedes that giving half a quick whizz in the food processor is ok) – I opted for hand chopping half and feeding the rest through the coarsest setting of our hand mincer (for mincing by hand, not mincing hands. As a rule).

Mince to the left of me, chopped bits to the right

Mince to the left of me, chopped bits to the right

The stock bubbled away for an hour or so while I fettled with meat and cracked on with the pastry. This is the first time that I’ve made a hot water crust and was slightly fearful of the whole process. It was made easier by the fact that I was lining a cake tin with it, rather than trying to hand raise a proper crust around a mould. It was also made easier my the fact that it was a strangely enjoyable experience, a bit like messing with warm playdoh.

In recent weeks I have embraced lard as an ingredient. This is probably not a good thing.

In recent weeks I have embraced lard as an ingredient. This is probably not a good thing.

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Tin, meat. Meat, tin.

And then on with the lid before going into the oven for longer than I realised (which had the bonus of giving me enough time to clear up AND have a bit of a nap). It emerged shiny and golden, but I still had to wait for the lovely stock to be properly cooled before I could funnel it in. I was a bit concerned about leakage and knowing that the pie was full, but again I needn’t have worried – you know it’s full because you can’t fit any more in….

The pie stayed in the safety of its cake tin for some overnight chilling and until Ginge got home from work (delivering it from the tin was a two-person job), before we could release the first slice.

My first pork pie.

My first pork pie.

I am unfeasibly proud of this venture, but am now faced with the issue of what to do with a pie that’s as big as my head.

Ante-natal yoga class (part one)

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Ever since I found out I was pregnant, I intended on going to my normal yoga class for as long as possible. I wanted to be that woman that makes everyone nervous by being so heavily pregnant that they won’t put their mat down too close, just in case… Unfortunately my yoga teacher had other ideas and disappeared off to spend six weeks with one of her teachers (I’m filled with both pity and envy for the class when she comes back brimming with new knowledge. It will hurt). My plan had less to do with commitment and grim determination, and more to do with the fact that I’m very very comfortable in my class.

Personally, I think that yoga has a lot to offer to a lot of different people, it’s just a question of finding the right class with the right teacher. If you end up at a session that’s not right for you (see Hels’ experience during Juneathon) or with a teacher that you don’t gel with, inevitably you’ll not enjoy it as much as you should and I’ve known it to put people off yoga for good. I struck lucky with my teacher and it’s been kind of interesting to see how her practice has developed over the nearly five years I’ve been with her. I’ve always gone for a fairly physical class (though not as physical as her power yoga) but have been doing a slower class while I’ve been pregnant (stretchy pregnancy ligaments mean that it’s not safe to hold postures for as long).

This all meant that I was faced with the prospect of ante-natal yoga. I was dubious about ante-natal yoga. I was even more dubious about going to a strange class with a new teacher. I took a deep breath and emailed my teacher to find out (a) if she knew of any local classes and (b) they weren’t all going to be whale music and visualising my placenta were they? Luckily she knew exactly what I meant…

Work and anxious procrastination got in the way for a couple of weeks, but a couple of weeks ago I girded my loins, finished work a bit early and drove to a strange class at a leisure centre that I’ve never been to before. After not being able to get into the room and having to stand at the doors, rattling the handles and flapping my hands at whoever could see me, things improved from there.

Obviously, it was a class full of pregnant ladies and weird as this might sound, I’m still a little unnerved by being in a room full of pregnant ladies. At work and at home I am generaaly the only pregnant lady in the room, rock up to anything ante-natal (or Mothercare) and there’s bloody loads of us waddling around…. Anyway, I had had a long debate with myself about whether or not to take my own mat. On the one hand, I didn’t want to turn up with no mat and have to do the yoga equivalent of doing PE in your knickers and vest, but on the other hand I didn’t want to turn up with my mat and look like I was going “See, I do yoga me. I have a mat. And a mat bag. I am Serious About Yoga…” (this is why I tend to stay in my comfort zone). I ended up with my mat (mainly because it lives in the boot of my car) and explained to the teacher that I usually go to a normal class, but my teacher is in France for six weeks. Immediately she knew who I meant, which was a strange relief to me, and said “you’ll find that this is a lot more gentle than you’re used to”.

And she was right. For starters, we had cushions to lean on. I wasn’t so keen on this because I have a tendency to sit with a lazy slouch unless I pay attention to my posture and I’m still comfy enough sitting on just my mat. We did some relaxation breathing, focussing on being an “observant witness” to our bodies (handy if I need an alibi for the last two Monday afternoons). The postures were all familiar (if a little slower and more gently done than I’m used to) and there was no whale music to speak of (though we did get into a bit of a battle with our sitar and chimes trying to compete with the banging tunes from the fitness class next door). The only visualisation that we did involved seeing an emerald light enveloping our bodies and I did try to focus on this, but kept being distracted by thoughts of Lord Percy’s nugget of purest green in Blackadder II…

I enjoyed it enough to go back for a second week…

 

Waddle, waddle, splash

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I appreciate that pregnancy is a binary state – you either are or you aren’t, there’s no being ‘a bit pregnan’t – but over the last week or so, I have felt Very Pregnant. Certain movements, bending forward to reach something when I’m sitting down for instance, are somewhat hit and miss and are often accompanied by a chorus of ‘ooooofs’, ‘bloody hells’, or sometimes even ‘ooooof, bloody hell’.

It’s a bit of a cliche, but one of the times where I feel slightly less lumbering is in the swimming pool. Just as the penguin is a bit ungainly and waddly on land, but sleek and gymnastic in the water, I am a bit ungainly and waddly on land, but a bit less ungainly and waddly in the water. I am still managing a nice 20 lengths on my trips to the baths, albeit a bit slower than before, and am now 65% escaped from Alcatraz. I think I would like to complete my daring swim to freedom by my due date.

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Me at the pool

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve also been looking ahead and doing some forward planning (conveniently ignoring the last couple of weeks of pregnancy, the actual birth and the first couple of months with a newborn baby). This has partly been triggered by other bloggers (particularly the inspiring words of I run because I love food) and hearing about Australian cricketer Sarah Elliott, who was back in the gym after six weeks and scored a Test century in between breastfeeding. I will concede that it’s probably a bit late in the day for me to contemplate an international sporting career and if I’m totally honest, at the moment the concept of running for a bus is as unimaginable as running an ultra. However, there’s only me that can make it happen when the right time comes and so I’ve been pondering my return.

My ultimate goal is an autumn half (to keep up my ‘half-marathon a year’ that I’ve done accidentally for the last three years). This might be helped along by the Lancaster Race Series Wagon and Horses 10 miler. We were up in Lancaster a couple of weeks ago when we saw the organisers setting up this year’s race, and I’ve always got time for an event that starts and finishes at a pub…

The other news that’s made me a bit excited is that I have a new local parkrun at Cuerden Valley. The inaugural event was last Sunday and I did consider having a waddle down, only to fall asleep instead. I’m not sure how the route works, but it looks intriguing and I assume that it will be somewhat undulating. Either way it’s a lovely setting for a run (it’s where I did one of the Badger 10k series  and I last ran there in the snow during this year’s Janathon) – country park rather than municipal park, and it’s handily close to the M6 for all you parkrun tourists out there.

Counting down – the effect of looming deadlines

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I’ve had another of my “similarities between running and pregnancy” moments.

Just as Jogblog wrote last week, I love training plans. They fill me with optimism as I visualise myself sprinting gazelle-like during my interval sessions, watching the mileage clock up on my long runs and this time definitely sticking to the plan so I finally reach my sub-<insert possibly unrealistic time here> distance. I love looking at all the similar but different plans on the internet and filling in apps with my previous times to predict my finish times and training paces. And then there’s the joy in ticking off the perfect first week’s training.

Unfortunately training plans tend to have a deadline and to quote the wise words of Douglas Adams, “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by”. At the end of the plan is usually a race and this fills me with panic and dread. It’s not unknown for me to sabotage myself by simply abandoning running for a couple of weeks because I’m so freaked out by the whole thing. It’s the counting down that gets me. One minute the future race is a tiny elephant in the distance and then the clock starts ticking and before I know it, there’s a whiff of dung on the air and I’m being poked in the bum by a tusk.

I’m finding that pregnancy has a similar effect on me. It doesn’t seem five minutes since we found out and since then it’s been one countdown after the other. First midwife appointment, 12 week scan, next midwife appointment, 20 week scan, next midwife appointment, four weeks between midwife appointments, three weeks between midwife appointments, antenatal classes… Chuck in the usual counting down to paydays, holidays, birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, Athons and the new series of CSI:NY and time flies by in a terrifying way.

I am writing this the night before the countdown flips over into single figures – 9 weeks to go and apparently this is one event where I can’t defer til next year.

Water water everywhere…

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It’s been a bit weird since I stopped running. I’m not sure what to write about. I know not everyone wants to read about me being pregnant, which is absolutely fine, but it is taking up rather a lot of my existence at the moment (my bump is now at a size where complete strangers strike up conversations with me; most recently I went to the shop for a bacon and black pudding baton and ended up having a proper good chat with two blokes in full bright orange hi-vis who were working on the railway…).

So I have to apologise, there might be some more pregnancy-related posts and probably some knitted stuff as well, but I’ll try not to go on too much (I’ve only got 11 weeeks to go now anyway).

Anyway, being increasingly bumpy has made be aware of a couple of things recently. Firstly, stopping running made me realise just how sedentary I am when I don’t have regular exercise built into my week. I’m sure I’ve said this before, but I work in community healthcare, which means that I spend a lot of time sitting down – I’m either at my desk, in my car or sitting on someone’s settee. It’s even worse at the moment because everyone is being helpful to the pregnant lady, so the only thing that I really have to get up for is to go to the loo…

On a related note, I have also realised that I’m even more rubbish than I thought at managing my hydration. I’ve definitely written before about my bearpaw hands that swell up when I run in the slightest bit of warmth and the recent hot weather has certainly proved that.  The Department of Health recommends that we should drink about 1.2 litres of fluid every day, the World Health Organisation says 1.5 to 2 litres (I think some this is to cover all bases climate-wise), and there seems to be agreement that you should drink more during pregnancy, especially during hot weather.

Now I’m not very good at keeping track of these things (I can barely remember how many lengths I’m up to when I go swimming and I only do 20-odd) so I have out-sourced that part of my brain to an iPhone app…

Usually contains water or squash. It's been a while since this glass has seen beer.

Usually contains water or squash.      It’s been a while since this glass has seen beer.

It’s a very simple, free thing called Waterlogged, but I’m finding it really useful to make a quick note of what I’m drinking (whilst also listening to my body so I don’t drink too much) (alright, so by ‘listening to my body’ I actually mean ‘looking at the colour of my wee‘) (that links to a colour chart, not anything to do with my specific wee. And mine has never been green…).

Basically, I click on ‘Record a Drink’, flick through the pictures of all of my regular drinking vessels (favourite mug, water bottle, normal glass, pint glass) and then ‘Record Glass’. Job done. AND when I do reach my target, it congratulates me and suggests that I tell someone my good news (mostly I tell Ginge, I suspect that no one else would be interested. Or as tolerant).

Thinking about it, you could also use it to keep track of how many pints you have on a night out or keep a pictorial record of what you’ve drunk at a beer festival, but that’s probably going against the spirit of the thing.