Death by a Thousand Haircuts

I don't like going to hairdressers. No, I mean I really don't like going to hairdressers.

It's hard to say what I dislike the most: the aimless chit-chat; the scalp-scalding water in the obligatory wash (no matter if you've given it a good scrub that very day); or the realisation that the final result (plumped up helmet of hair, rendered stickily immobile with spray/gel and 30 minutes of grueling blow-dry action) is definitely Not Me.

When I finally manage to convince myself that my long-hair patience is at an end, it's usually partially due to having seen someone at the local mall with a stunning short hairstyle. "That's the one!" I say to myself, "It looks so natural! So casual! So unpretentious, and lacking in hair-care products!". With such inner urgings, I get myself to a salon which doesn't look like it specialises in crew-cuts for $5, seat myself in the almost-comfortable chair, and start stammering out what I want. Now - I've never really learnt much in the way of hair-care jargon besides the term 'layered'. And I only know this term, because I was a child of the 80s and layering was all the rage back then (I also know of the term 'perm', and am forever grateful that one was denied me during my fraught teenage years. Think of all the photographs which would have needed burning!).

What I mean to say, without rambling on too much longer, is that it's jolly hard to describe what you want, when you don't have the right words for it, and when your hairdresser (unfortunately) wasn't with you that day down at the mall. So, I'm often forced to fall back on the stock of hairstyle books kept on the premises, to find something like.

I don't know if you've ever browsed one of these books, but they are to hair, what the catwalks in Milan are to casual house-attire.























I mean, COME ON! If I wanted to spend 5 hours a day oiling my cerulean hair extensions, or ironing my perfect 35 degree slide-cut, then don't you think I would have teetered into your salon in a pair of these?



As it is, eventually the despairing hairdresser moves me onto the Gossip Mags, where I have half a hope of spotting a celebrity with a coiffure not too far off the mark. "I guess sorta .. that one?" I say, pointing to a picture of Jodi Foster, all square-jawed and perfect teeth. "That's kind of what it looked like..". The hairdresser is relieved to finally be doing something, and so whisks out the scissors and starts snipping away. And here comes the problem. In my tiny, sorry, addled mind - I don't see myself finishing up as me with shorter hair, oh no. With the change in hairstyle, my chin strengthens, my eyebrows thin, and with the moderate application of some hair grooming implements, I am no longer me - I am Jodi Foster. So you can imagine my disappointment, when the hairdresser ceases their ministrations with a flourish, and turns to me with a breathless "What do you think?"

Yes, I smile, I nod, I pay up and leave, and fervently wish I had a hat I could pull on to cover the over-styled atrocity perched atop my head.

On Cooking, and Other Kitchen Disasters

I'm not a great cook, but I consider myself to be competent. I can add a pinch of this, and a splash of that, and generally manage to turn out something reasonable without turning the kitchen upside down. I attribute much of this competency to my mother's decision to go back to university while us kids were still at school. Since she was no longer a full-time carer (and what teenager wants a full-time carer, I ask you!?), she laid down the new house rules. Each of us would have at least one night cooking a week. Myself, my brother, and my father were all to take a turn. The other four days were still mum's - after all, we still needed to consume something edible during the week.

There were a few doozies. One of my initial recipes involved cabbage. Lots and lots of cabbage. In fact, I think, more cabbage than the recipe's author had ever dreamed any sane person would want to eat in one sitting. I'm still not sure how I managed to get the proportions so wrong. Perhaps I just found a particularly large cabbage, and was determined to stick to the recipe like glue - even as I watched all my other ingredients disappearing under the massive mound of brassica. It's not as though I even particularly liked the stuff.

Or there was my dad's attempt at an exotic recipe which involved salting a cucumber. As I recall, he salted it, then spent the rest of the evening running it under the cold tap in an attempt to water down the saltiness to an edible level. I can remember sitting in my room doing my homework (or - more likely - reading a novel), with dad popping in and out offering updated ETAs for dinner, and a light drink or biscuit to nibble in the meantime. Dinner was served at 11:30pm. I think dad had finally conceded defeat, and just served up the noticeably salty cucumber.

Interesting dishes aside, we learned the basics of coordinating the various dinner components. Even if you're going for something as simple (hah!) as a steak with some vegetables on the side, you need to know how long it takes to cook your slab of meat, and how long it takes to steam the green beans, and then make it all happen so that everything arrives on the plate hot. That took me some time to learn, I can tell you. And I still can't cook steak.

Dad was never put off by failures, and has always liked to be adventurous in his cooking. He'll spy a recipe with a unique ingredient - verjuice! aha! - and off he'll rush to purchase the other 37 mundane ingredients to concoct a dish that, to be fair, is nowadays usually pretty darn tasty.

I have ended up following mum's style. I hate throwing out food - and so I'll pickle through the fridge and the cupboards to find what needs eating up: "Hmmm - this spinach is a bit wilty. Better make something with it. Do I have enough eggs for a quiche? No? Soup it is.. " This might sound less exciting - but I have a few decent cookbooks which have resulted in some successful experiments - and I've ended up preparing vegetables in a variety of ways that I otherwise wouldn't have, simply because I'm too lazy/obstinate to go shopping for more ingredients.

So All This Aside, why oh why do I still flop? Haven't 20 years in the kitchen taught me anything?! I recently spent a day cooking and baking, and I'm not thrilled with the results.

I'm going to start with my flopped tart crust. I just wanted to make a savoury pie-crust - I had a recipe, so I wasn't going out on a limb, but the recipe called for some portion of a "stick" of butter. Now, this is a US thing, where I assume that 'sticks' of butter are some kind of standardised measure. And sure, we have blocks of butter here too - but it's very apparent that our 'block' and the US 'stick' are not to be equated. The pastry I was making matched the recipe description when all the dry ingredients were chopped in together ('coarse meal', check), and it continued to behave much as the recipe predicted during the 'roll into a ball, freeze, remove and roll out' phases as well. Where it all went pear-shaped was when it hit the oven for blind baking.

Apparently I'd gone overboard with the butter. Muchos overboard. Flashback to The Great Cabbage Incident. Instead of a nice smooth golden-brown tart shell, the pastry had sort of slumped into the bottom of the pie-tin, and was bubbling in a vast lake of butter. Of course, being me, I couldn't toss the whole mess out and start again - for one thing, I was running low on flour. So I grabbed a fork, and started pulling the half baked mess back up the sides of the tin, while trying to tip out some of the excess fat. The results were less than spectacular. I did eventually manage, by dint of turning the oven temperature right down, and continuing to drag the reluctant crust up the sides of the tin every 5 minutes or so, to make the crust into a rough shape that would probably hold a quiche filling. And look, in the end it was edible enough - but I think my cholesterol levels are going to need checking after I'm done eating this puppy!

Okay, I hear you say - that's pastry, pastry's hard (you did say that, didn't you?). But what about banana bread? I tried that, too. And again - not an inedible disaster, but just not very nice. I followed the recipe - yes I did! But the result tasted a little too much like bicarb of soda, and the dough had compressed somehow during the baking process, so that I wound up with
this line of dense banana-flavoured sclorge* at the bottom of the loaf. Was the recipe at fault? Had I managed to add or subtract some vital bread-puffing ingredient? Or is there some baker's secret where you need to turn your loaf as it's cooling, so that the sclorge is evenly distributed throughout?

I don't know. All I DO know is that on the same day as the tart and the banana bread, I was also boiling two christmas puddings for the first time. That's 8 hours of boiling. And I have a few days yet before they're ready for eating.

I'll keep you posted.



* sclorge - cake/bread dough which is not raw or, indeed noticeably undercooked, but which is dense enough, and slightly sticky enough to imply either or both. Not to be confused with scloop**

** scloop - again, I'm taking liberties with the English language: a dough which is definitely under-cooked, and on-the-way-to-raw. This is deliberate in some cakes, such as my favourite 'collapsed mud cake', which is essentially warm chocolate scloop surrounded by chocolate cake (and as far as I can tell, the only purpose of cooking it enough to get the 'cake' texture at all, is simply to stop the whole thing dribbling off the plate and onto the kitchen bench when you remove it from the cake tin. *drool*)