we're all making our own sense of things
Herewith the circumstances under which I abandon my commitment to cleaning with unique, patented microfibres and spend a fortune on products available in the cleaning products aisle of all good supermarkets.
And not to mention the money spent on industrial strength face masks and disposable overalls.
My grandmother did not exactly pass this recipe down to me, and because of an extremely unfortunate series of events – into which it would be unseemly of me to delve in such a forum – her recipe books are not, to my knowledge, knocking around in the bottom of anyone’s cupboards. Nuts and bolts was (and I use the singular deliberately), however, a family gathering staple, and I did once see her making it.
I reproduce it here to preserve something of the flavour of those times my family spent gutsing themselves on Nuts and Bolts.
Nuts and bolts
Ingredients
Nutri grain
Nuts – definitely peanuts, and possibly for the more fancy occasions mixed nuts such as walnuts, the dreaded brazil nuts (does anyone ever eat them), almonds and the odd hazel nut.
Curry powder. This would be keens for sure. A teaspoon or two depending on how fresh or stale it is.
I do not remember seeing it, but I imagine it is not entirely unheard of to add a packet of french onion soup to the mix. Which makes me wonder: has anyone ever had a packet of french onion soup actually added to hot water and taken as soup?
Method
Mix all the ingredients in a bowl. I suspect you would need to add a bit of oil to make sure the coating sticks to the nutri grain and the nuts.
Spread mix out on an oven tray (probably sprayed with pure and simple).
Bake in the oven. How long and at what temperature? No idea, but it wouldn’t be too hard to work it out. Moderate oven would be safest I suppose. No longer than fifteen minutes, no less than five.
Serve in brown fake-thatch bowls such as used to be given out with the packets of chips in pubs. You may wish to lay a serviette out in the bowl before scooping the nuts and bolts in. For Christmas, obviously the serviettes would be green or red and possibly be edged with holly or snowmen or both.
Best eaten in large handfuls.
This morning, my internet connection has been rusty, and I tried all (which turned out to be most) of my usual tricks before calling my ISP’s support number. Does anyone know about this ‘turn everything off, make small talk with worn out support person, switch it all back on and it works again’? Is there any actual science in that?
Also, you know those mornings when you get to nine o’clock and you think ‘goodness me, is that all it is, surely it’s later than that, I’ve been awake for hours’ and ‘what a very strange night that was, how am I going to stay awake all day, and even possibly get some of that enormous pile of work done’? Well, I am having one of those.
And one other thing, I left my vacuum cleaner out on the front verandah all night (after vaccuming my car which was in a right bloody mess I can tell you), and it is still there this morning.
The laundry floor is cold, even through her socks, but she can’t put her shoes back on. Not now. She could get another pair of socks, or the slip-on flip-flops, but if she leaves, she won’t come back and she has already offered. A gift of five ironed shirts.
‘It’s a present,’ she has promised, ‘not a precedent’ and the joke gets better as she relives it in her mind.
The iron ticks itself warm and the collar is first. It makes her think of her mother and wonder why did she teach me to iron, but not to sew?
The part after the collar, what’s that called? She reaches for the word. Is that the yoke? If she had learnt to sew, she would know. Collar, yoke (if that’s what it is), cuffs, then sleeves.
You need to set the sleeves up carefully. It’s quite a trick, isn’t it, flattening down the seams and not doubling up the fold. No tramlines. They are her mother’s words. When the shirts are striped, as many of them are, the fold might still be crisp, but it never lines up right. It makes a satisfying job less so.
The heat of the shirt on her hand, the creak of the board, the kink of the cord, these are the things that have always been.
And the sigh of the iron when you rest it on its base.
Was that asbestos, that piece of grey at the end of her mother’s ironing board?
The shirt is back on its hanger, hooked over the laundry door. She begins again. Collar, yoke, cuffs then sleeves. It depends where you are in life, whether ironing is the cold of Monday morning or the warmth of Sunday night.
When she has finished the shirts, she does the handkerchiefs because they are there and because she likes the smell of cotton warmed by an iron. Handkerchiefs don’t take long.
She does the handkerchiefs in squares, because it’s squares for a man. Grandma taught her that. Squares for a man. And triangles for girls.
And when Grandma packed the bag at the end of the holidays, she put in the knickers, the bathers, the shorts, all clean, and the handkerchiefs. Ironed. Triangles for girls. Grandma said I wonder what your mother will think about that. Did she lift her eyebrow or sniff after she spoke? Triangles for girls. Because it was the same voice she would use to say it’s hard for mothers, mothers lose their sons.
And it depends where you are in life. Sometimes ironing is a gift to someone else. And sometimes a gift to yourself.
When you arrive at a BBQ, you should be able to see at least one man wearing an apron. A lasting favourite is the apron of fake breasts. Personalised printed aprons are surprisingly rare. There is often an apron option in one of the NGO Christmas catalogues, and men with daughters doing arts degrees have very often been given one and will be wearing it with real, but hidden, pride. Aprons with Leunig cartoons are last century, but are still seen at the BBQs of cusp-of-retirement teachers (generally history, biology or English).
If there is just one man wearing an apron, he is your host. If there are two men wearing aprons, one is your host and the other is his best mate or brother-in-law. Any more than two men wearing aprons is not natural. You will learn nothing about the real Australia at such a BBQ, and you may as well be at home reading Patrick White.
I understand that this house is not on the cutting edge. But is this wonton display of dagginess really necessary?
At least they’re not embroidered with your initial. I suppose. And it solves all our birthday present dilemmas. I suppose. There’s a box of tissues over by the fridge.
Her bring a salad was generally gado gado with what can only be described as a most excellent peanut sauce (three secret ingredients, all of them essential). The thing about gado gado is it’s so easy and has something for everyone.
But sometimes, when she looked at the salad table after she had put the gado gado down, she wondered how long it would be before people started to say ‘there’s ThirdCat’s gado gado‘ in the way they might say ‘and there’s Aunty Mary’s curried eggs’.
I can see the day my boy is so grown up that he gets on a plane and finds adventures of his own.
I can see the day he goes to his lover’s family for Christmas and when he rings me, I can hear them all in the background because it’s so quiet at my house.
I can see the day he finishes school and celebrates with his mates and not with me. I can see the weekend he doesn’t want me on the sidelines and the day he won’t kiss me goodbye.
If I squint, I can see him with children of his own.
But I just can’t see the day I’m gonna let him walk across to the bakery on his own.
It has been six? no, seven? oh, eight! years since the cat has died, but the girl is still in the shop where they used to buy the mince (of kangaroo – and that’s what did the cat in in the end, and led her along the cat-prozac path – don’t feed your cat kangaroo).
The girl was young then, and not old now. Her nails are still chewed, her hair is still cropped short. Does the smell of roo mince follow her home? She wears an apron smudged with wipes of meat, a chain with a cross of gold, and the smile of someone who hopes, believes. There is more to life than asking: mince or chunks?
It would be a perfect day
In our backyard
Were it not for the whiff of bin
I wonder whose it is? Not ours
Which lives around the front
Perfuming our neighbour’s boudoir
Because they leave their window
Open
