thedelahayegirls

The Great Escape

L finally gets on “the ladder”

In March this year, I received the most gut-wrenching news that can befall an actor: our beautiful production of Phantom of the Opera, which had barely been open for a month, was having to close due to the Coronavirus pandemic. I was completely devastated. Due to the nature of my job, I’m normally fairly resilient with the ups and downs of freelance work, but this one really, really hurt.

Vince and I had planned to move out of our lovely rental flat and explore the possibility of buying once I had finished my tour of the UK, in the summer of 2021. When my job closed, I felt like my whole five-year plan had been scuppered with it. That afternoon, we went out for a Covid-safe walk to clear our heads. During this ramble, Vince floated the idea that we bring our plans forward and rather than letting the pandemic get the better of us, we would use it to our advantage and get a head-start.

Oh how clever we thought we were! That evening we toasted with a couple of Coronas – the beer variety, not the viral one – to changing plans and settled in to an evening of house-hunting and interior lusting. Unfortunately for us, it seemed that every other first-time buyer in the UK had the same bright idea. The battle for good properties was fierce and not in a sexy “Selling Sunset” kinda way.

Thankfully there are plenty of incentives and schemes to help first-timers get on the ladder. What no one tells you is how long and arduous that process can be. I had been squirreling away my savings into a Help To Buy ISA (which gets a 25% top up from the Government on completion), so we had a healthy deposit, but this did not prevent banks interrogating my career and accounts to within an inch of their life. A number of friends who work in the theatre had cautioned me against even whispering that I was an actor in front of mortgage companies but I’m proud of what I have trained long and hard to do, and how I earn my crust, so “actor” was duly inserted in the box asking from my occupation. And then the cross-examination and Spanish Inquisition-esque probing began. I so should have listened to advice and simply given “part-time singing teacher” as my job. That’s definitely a lesson learned.

I didn’t go into house-buying wearing rose-coloured specs. I’ve watched enough Kirsty and Phil in my time to know that finding the house was the hardest part. Right? Right?? Wrong. We loved nearly all the properties we saw: Vince and I are fairly aligned in our design tastes (and on the rare occasion that we are not, he listens to me anyway(!)) We decided on “the one” in June -dramatic pause followed by a sharp intake of breath – and finally got the keys in October. I know that doesn’t seem so long in the grand, interminable scheme of 2020, but it felt like several lifetimes to me; as I was furloughed, I dedicated my every waking moment to helping this deal go through. I have no clue how people manage to move when they’re working full time or – as my superhero parents did – have young families to move too and are the last in a chain of nine households needing to move in perfect choreography.

The location we selected took us both by surprise. Despite being a pair of “town mice”, we fell in love with a new build in the heart of leafy Surrey, just outside Guildford. I’m delighted with how quickly we have embraced country life. Wellies and raincoats were among the first items we brought into the house and we made it our mission to discover which pubs were within walking distance of home. Our rapid assimilation into the Surrey green belt is possibly a result of the refocusing on what really matters a pandemic prompts, or perhaps because, try as we may to fight against it, the old adage is true and we all eventually become our parents. Whatever the reason, our reality is that we felt more content among the fields and quiet. And, also, that I just really, really, really want to get a cat and I needed a decent sized garden for this!

Our new garden featuring a couple of fairy rings

At the moment, we’re at a delicious half-way point: half moved out of our town flat and half moved into our new house. And the house is starting to fill with our belongings and to feel like home; as Vince shouted across the hallway to me yesterday evening: “It really feels like our kitchen now!” Of course we have the couple of inevitable, tedious, new-build snags to get sorted (an over-tightened hot water tap and a too-loose seal on a pipe into the boiler), the joy of waiting in all day on Monday for the satellite company to hook us up to the internet and TV and I know I’m going to have to brave a socially-distanced Ikea trip in the middle of half-term, but we’re in. I feel so blissfully happy and grateful to have achieved this.

Already planning on ideas for Christmas – I’ve never had a staircase to decorate!

A big thank you to all of my friends and family members who’ve put up with my whingeing and bad tempers for the summer. They all assured me that if I persevered, it would be worth it in the end. How completely right they were.

I’m sure I’ll be sharing some room tours here on the blog and over on the de-la-Haye Girls Instagram in the coming weeks, but for now I’m just enjoying making those early memories inside our new casa. Years from now, I hope to remember pizza dinners, sitting on the floor, surrounded by boxes and the ill-fated house “smudging” I decided to embark on, much to E’s enjoyment. “It stinks of weed!” she screamed as I wandered around, wafting the smoking sage bundle in each room. Her reaction was so very, very her and still tickles me. We’re off to buy blinds and curtains this weekend together, though she’s got me to sign in triplicate and cross my heart that said shopping trip will not involve Croydon Ikea. ~L

My Ends

Get out exploring with E.

Since the late 90s, the de-la-Haye ancestral seat has been on the outskirts of a small village on the borders of Surrey, Kent and the Sussexes. And by ancestral seat, I mean a small, farmer worker’s cottage and when I say late 90s, that’s the late 1990s. Still, you get my drift…

The ‘Rona and ensuing lockdown, partial lifting, tiering, rumoured circuit-breaker, and whatever comes next, have meant that the vast majority of us have been at home much more than BC (before Covid). Throughout April, again like many millions of us, I was uber busy establishing my home office, doing my bit to build the business as a viable virtual entity and baking and eating. When I look back, I reflect that all I did in April was work, sleep, bake, eat, repeat. I’m delighted to report that I smashed the national average weight gain of the Corona stone by a gut-busting 124 per cent.

May brought with it gorgeous weather, lighter evenings and futile attempts by me to fit into my summer clothes. I chomped my way through my final Bosh Boys’ choc-chip cookie – those zesty circles of delight are so addictive – laced-up my old trainers and started walking. (You’re not fooled by the “old trainers” line are you? You know me well enough now to be confident that I totally had to order three pairs of new trainers – pink, blue and green, thanks for asking – before I could contemplate hitting the tarmac.) Very slowly, but always upliftingly, me and Steve (my husband) started to explore our patch. We’ve lived here 23 years and discovered more about our local area in the first 23 days of walking than in all the previous years.

We stumbled across – literally – an airfield. Yup, an airfield. Three kilometres from our front door and you are standing in the middle of an airfield. Almost a quarter of a century living here and we hadn’t spotted this! It was the orange wind socks that gave it away. In the other direction, and on an exceptionally blowy day in May, we found Dry Hill trig point (Google trigonometric surveying, if curious). For a cartophile like me, this was thrilling. The highest point around, site of an Iron Age hillfort, a Scheduled Monument and just 2.8 kilometres away. Returning from Dry Hill we came across Matthew’s Bug Hotel, a landscaped resort for local insects, including porticoed entrance and detached solarium. We’ve walked past the bug hotel heaps of times this summer and every time I wonder who Matthew is. I hope he’s enjoyed this bit of woodland as much as I have.

Matthew’s Bug Hotel – should’ve been called an Air Bee’n’Bee

We’ve bravely crossed fields occupied by cows with menace in their eyes and followed a path across another that had a sign on the gate advising caution as police dogs trained there. We decided against using the permissive right of way across a local field that had a bull for a resident, although I subsequently read on a local community page that he’s very docile and fine with walkers. Maybe next time.

Some days, we’ve channelled our inner River Phoenix à la “Stand by Me” and crossed the main railway line to London at two different pedestrian level crossing. On other days we have, or rather I have, gone full Roberta Bobbie “Daddy, my Daddy” Waterbury and waved hello to passing trains from the Mill Lane bridge, though not with my red bloomers. I’ve had two toots and several waves back.

Dashing across the bridge to announce the winner of “Pooh Sticks”

We’ve played Pooh Sticks at Pooh Bridge in the Five Hundred Acre Wood, the inspiration for A A Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood. We’ve walked and cycled past Gulledge Farmhouse, which is Grade II* listed, but which now looks to be unoccupied and seems to stare at you from blackened windows. It is well on the way to Seriously Spooky classification. We’ve crossed the entrance-way to the 15 Century manor house used as a filming location for both “Anne of the Thousand Days” and “The Ghost Goes Gear”. On a bright Sunday morning, and with both Steve and my mum for company, we strolled to the ruins of 17 Century Brambletye House. Another bright weekend saw us puffing up the slope of the Greensand Ridge to Toy’s Hill but it was so worth it for truly spectacular views over the Weald of Kent from the top. As well as menacing cows and (allegedly) docile bulls, we’ve seen horses, sheep, goats, deer, llamas, ducks, geese, swans, pheasants, a heron, two owls, a very inquisitive fox and more squirrels than you can shake a stick at. We also inadvertently trespassed at Lingfield Racecourse, but legged it before the Rozzers could collar us!

The spectacular ruins of Brambletye House

Covid has ruined so many plans this year, and it’s not finished with us yet. Very unexpectedly, I’ve found exploring locally has been a silver lining. In anticipation of further confinement, I’ve spent a couple of hours this week elbow deep in OS Explorer maps. A Grade I listed windmill and Octavia Hill’s cottage currently top the “to do” list. In the interests of full disclosure, I have to concede that a pair of those cute and oh-so-environmentally-sound Allbirds boots rank pretty high up the list too – well, I can achieve anything in the right pair of shoes, even a winter of lockdown! ~ E

Boshing About With Baba G

Cook up a vegan storm with E

As I’ve mentioned previously, I love my cookery books and over the past years my collection of vegan and plant-based recipe books has grown and grown. One of my favourites for straightforward and exceptionally tasty vegan food is “Bosh!”, the original publication from Henry Firth and Ian Theasby. I was excited to get my hands on the latest release from the Bosh boys in early September: “Speedy Bosh” promises lots of new recipes for “amazing food” in 30 minutes. I know (because I bought them) that Nigella and Jamie have previously put together volumes for the time-conscious cook, but this is the first, all-colour, mainstream (for plant-based eating has undoubtedly swum to the mainstream) release I’ve seen for vegan cooking.

“Speedy Bosh” has great kerb appeal: it’s all hot pink and black, stuffed with Insta-worthy photographs of plates, bowls and boards of the prepared recipes and offers lots of hacks (for anyone not down with the latest lingo, this means hints and recommendations) for speedy cooking. The recipes are clustered together in sections covering hearty, takeaways, sharing, lighter, sweet, drinks and breakfasts. The weekend I got my hands on the book, I thought I’d start by cooking the first two recipe in the hearty section: cheat’s toad in the hole with curry gravy and aubergine and lentil meatball pasta.

The cheat’s toad in the hole is a great idea, using ready-rolled puff pastry instead of a traditional egg and milk-heavy batter. It was quick and easy to assemble and the addition of a tablespoon of curry powder to the wash for the pastry is inspired, adding richness to the colour and taste of the finished meal. The curry gravy is also a doddle to make though I deviated from the recipe by crushing in a couple of cloves of garlic and allowing them to cook out with the onion, rather than putting them in whole and removing just before serving. It added a few extra minutes to the overall cooking time but I wasn’t in a rush and wanted to get a more garlicky depth to the gravy. As ever with the Bosh boys, as well as dollops of ketchup, mustard and soy sauce and a good sprinkle of curry powder, the gravy had the extra flavour boost of nutritional yeast (nooch, as the L likes to call it). If you haven’t investigated nutritional yeast, let me introduce you to this incredible product: deactivated yeast, dried and sold as feather-light golden flakes which, when added to dishes, gives a nutty cheesy taste. My incomparable sister-in-law, Christine, says it smells like old socks. I think it smells delicious and opening the tin and having a deep sniff is a guilty pleasure and takes me back to being a child and inhaling greedily the scent wafting from a bag of freshly opened cheesy Wotsits.

A quick and easy recipe that made for a tasty Saturday evening dinner, served with a green salad, and left plenty for lunch on Sunday. Apart from anything else, the recipe reminded me how utterly joyful it is to cut into well-baked puff pastry and watch the explosion of flakes land in a close perimeter around your plate, and the pleasure of collecting up all the crumbly flakes with a (washed, sanitised and) dampened finger. This one is being added to my rep.

The following morning I went in search of a tub of baba ganoush for the second recipe I wanted to try: aubergine and lentil meatball pasta. I won’t retell here the sorry story of the lack of baba ganoush in the Surrey/Kent/Sussex borderlands in mid-September but four supermarkets, three convenience stores and a seven-day Post Office later, I gave up on my quest to find a tub, instead buying five aubergines and deciding to make my own. Inevitably this drove, as we like to say, a coach and horses through the 30 minute prep time. And all for four tablespoons of baba G in the meatball mix! It was worth it though, as we had enough left over to enjoyed as “cracker snacks” until mid-week.

Essentially this is a “spaghetti and meatballs” recipe where the meatballs are speedily assembled (baba G permitting) using a packet of pre-cooked puy lentils, breadcrumbs, pine nuts and sun-dried tomatoes. The baba ganoush acts as the binder which, of course, results in quite crumbly meatballs, a fact acknowledged in the recipe. I cooked the meatballs in the oven, rather than risk them falling apart in a frying pan as recommended by the boys. Oven-baking produced a crispy shell and soft inside, and they held together. The addition of fresh mint to the meatballs alongside the more usual parsley was an innovation I wasn’t sure about, but it worked very well and I’ll definitely use this again.

The recipe called for the cooked meatballs to be added to and moved through the warmed pasta sauce prior to serving but I decided they looked too fragile so served them on top of the sauce which resulted in a finished dish that had a look of the falafel about it, but tasted great. I’m not sure I’ll return to this recipe any time soon, partly because of the memory of baba G-gate is still too raw, but mainly because Waitrose does excellent frozen vegan meatballs – better even than Ikea’s, I think – which taste great and do hold their shape so I can throw them around the pan with abandon.

The next recipe in the hearty section of the book is for a deep, dark and smoky chilli, and I’m going to head there next. ~ E