If it ain't broke

There's a double meaning in that... When I started this blog, it was a bit of fun, a place to share my creations, a place to waffle on about life.

Then more teaching happened, and I began to get noticed on the Threadnoodle Facebook page...and I started to get confused about who I was, and who I was writing for (am I Iz, on a quest for the ultimate flapjack? Or am I Isobel Moore, Textile Artiste and Teacher extraordinaire?) So there followed a year-long dry spell in the land of Blog.

But I'm back. I'm both Iz and Isobel. I have accepted my random teaching style, my tangents and digressions. I will try and mindmap as a way to tame the thought processes or at least make them accessible to my students (Jan!).

But meanwhile, here is a blog post about breakfast.

A certain celebrity chef popped up on my Facebook timeline with a video about a kushti breakfast recipe. Let's call him Damie Jolliver. I was intrigued. I was tempted. Girl had expressed a dislike and boredom of the homemade birchermuesli offering (summer breakfast; winter breakfast being porridge) and wanted packet cereal and milk again. Oh no, thought I. I will make this kushti granola sweepings just like Damie Jolliver and all will be well.

Except it wasn't. It never is, is it?  As usual, I quickly concluded that Damie doesn't do his own prep or washing up. "Just" toast 1kg of oats and 1/2 pound of nuts? Like how, Damie? I didn't have a big enough oven tray so thought I'd use a dry pan on the gas and do it in batches.

One hour later.

The next step shows an excitable Damie cramming it all in a food processor. Uhuh. Not going to work, no Magimix in these parts. So I did batch blending in my mini chopper.

Fatal error no.1 was adding the ground coffee. Fatal error no.2 adding orange zest with cocoa. The only chocolate orange combo I will ever eat belongs to Terry, and I'll only eat it if I'm in a post-Christmas torpor and not thinking straight. I hate chocolate and fruit, loathe it. Why did I not trust my instincts?

Then there was the dust. Oh, the dust. Dirty, dirty. Oaty chocolatey coffee grounds dust. Then I didn't have a big enough container for it all. What a palaver. 

By this stage it had already taken nearly two hours to do what Damie's little video suggests you can knock up in a matter of moments, and that's before I'd cleaned up the kitchen.

Then, the first taste...hmmm, strangely gritty but not too awful. Was hoping for more than "acceptable" so I went in search of Mr Gonecycling and commanded him to eat a small bowlful of the stuff with milk. The results were not good. The final reckoning was at breakfast the next day, with all three of us. All three of us who then had a bowl of emergency porridge. 

I tried to salvage the granola dust muesli sweepings in the form of flapjack - not many things can't be helped along with the addition of butter, sugar and syrup. But I was wrong. 

We put it out for the birds. They weren't partial. 

Since when, I've actually been skipping breakfast altogether. Sort of lost my taste for it. The others are back to porridge. 

Moral of the story? Don't be in the thrall of celebrity chefs who don't do their own washing up. 

Secondly, blog as myself: it's good to be back! Next up, tales of cupboards and knocking holes in walls.