Martha's Marvellous Munchies

My feet were twice as heavy as usual, with a pound of mud stuck to each shoe, and my hair was plastered across my forehead in the warm humid air. I had splashes of dirt up to my knees and sweat was dripping off my nose. Graham paused a little further up the rocky path and turned to see how we were doing. In his carrier on my front, Toby gave a little wriggle and a big gummy smile to his dad. Well, one of us was happy, anyway - the one who wasn't getting his feet mucky! Our Texas State Parks pass was withering away from lack of use when we planned this weekend away, but now it didn't know what had hit it. Its first outing was at Ray Roberts State Park, barely 45 minutes from home. We stopped for a snack on our journey north and stayed a little longer when we discovered a 2-mile buggy-friendly trail. So often the paved paths are tiny quarter-mile loops, and anyone who knows me knows I don't consider quarter of a mile any kind of walk! This one wound through trees d...

After spending a number of weekends on house- and baby-care, we decided it was high time we had a proper day out. So we packed up the baby and locked up the house, and set off for Eagle Mountain Lake. Our first stop was Fort Worth Boat Club, which was having its annual Wood, Waves and Wheels event. This started life as an antique boat show but has gradually moved more towards land-based vehicles. The sun sparkled on an array of polished curves and shiny chrome, lighting up a 1920s Model T here, a sleek Porsche there, and the giant clockwork key on a quirky bubble car. One of the more exotic attendees was a Cunningham C-3 , of which there are apparently only a couple of dozen in existence. In impeccable condition, it came complete with a matching suitcase in tasteful cream leather, fitted into its own little nook in the rear. I was rather taken with the pop-up seat on the back of a Ford Model T - it folded down to become a luggage rack. The Cadillac with longhorns definitely h...

One of the highlights of being in catered halls for a couple of years at university was the sponge puddings. Great big sheets of chocolate or vanilla sponge, carved into hefty blocks and doused with thick custard. The main courses were edible at best, but those puddings would fill you up for a week. Good solid puddings, whether baked, steamed or boiled, have been a mainstay of English cooking for centuries. Something about the cold, damp, dark winters inspired British cooks to endless variations on suet, jam, currants, custard and other comforting ingredients. Once I left the nurturing environs of my parents' house and university halls, pudding stopped being an everyday affair and became a more haphazard, if-I-feel-like-making-any event. And steamed puddings especially, with their two hours over simmering water, don't really lend themselves to spur of the moment dessert-making. However, technology has moved on since those first days of puddings. I'd been vaguely ...

Compact Disc? Certificate of Deposit? Change Directory? No, in the brave new world of babies' bottoms, CD stands for Cloth Diaper. And that's not the last piece of jargon you'll encounter on the subject by any means. It took me a good few hours of reading to get my head around all the different types, and I've come across several parents who have toyed with the idea and got put off. Which is a shame, because there are all sorts of good reasons not to use disposables, and the actual practice of cloth diapering is not hard at all. So I wanted to share some of my experience so far. Come delve with me into the mysterious underworld (or should that be underwear?) that is cloth diapering. Me? Messy? Never! OK. Where to start? Most stuff you read tells you that prefolds are the basics, the ones every cloth diapering mum has. So we got some prefolds. These sound like they ought to be shaped ready to fit around your baby's darling derriere, right? Actuall...