Vaguely Excusable Pieday

I admit, I had a different pie planned for today.
Apart from anything else it was an actual pie, as opposed to chicken nuggets and breaded mushrooms*.
This plan was tragically derailed by my traumatic experience last Saturday however.

It should have been a nice day out: we went out to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park then to a particularly good farm shop for lunch**.
All was going well until time came for dessert and I saw, in the cabinet, beside the many-coloured, many-layered fancified figments that made up the rest of the contents, a pecan pie.
Naturally I had to order it.
Dessert, and coffee were delivered to our table and the girls dove into some squelchingly sumptuous looking gateaux*** while I nibbled a forkful of my pie.
And then, disaster.
The pie was not as good as mine.
Understand that there was nothing wrong with it, it was a perfectly good pie, syrupy for my tastes, but an entirely reasonable representative of the Pecan nation and all it stands for****.
It just wasn't as good as my pie.
I was sitting, in a restaurant, thinking that the food I had been served was inferior to my own.
I had been suddenly and irrevocably confronted with the inevitable truth.
I am officially old.


So naturally after all that I had no choice but to abandon any plans to make a proper pie and to instead create something unhealthy, impractical and barely deserving of the word pie.


We made chicken nuggets.

We also made breaded mushroom things, because some of us don't eat meat


Ingredients

Enough chicken breast, mushrooms, lumps of quorn or whatever-the-hell-else you plan on cooking to go round
Cornflour
Egg
Milk, yoghurt or buttermilk (enough to cover the things-to-be-breaded when placed in a bowl)
Rice Crispies, or Ritz crackers, or Panko breadcrumbs, or something that'll work as a coating*****
Hard cheeses of your choice, or that soya-flour cheese flavoured stuff, or nothing at all
Marinade ingredients of your choice******
Cooking oil.

First chop your breadable-things into pieces and dump in a bowl.
Add the marinade ingredients and then enough milk, buttermilk or yoghurt******* to cover everything, place in the fridge then go away to watch cartoons and mourn the death of your youth.
But make them horror cartoons, because there has to be some point to being a grown up.
Wonder if you made good choices in your life.

Realise there is another upside to adulthood when alerted to it by the presence of the bright eyed and bushy tailed Chefs Small and Smaller, the one wielding a bag full of library books and the other asking whether it is time to cook the chicken yet.
Drag the kids to the library.

When you have spent a full day chasing after your manic offspring and are starting to reassess that whole "upside" thing, take out and drain your bowl full of lumps.

Put some cornflour into a sandwich bag ********.
Beat the egg in a bowl or mug.
Grate a couple of table spoons of the hard cheese, or sprinkle out about half a teaspoon of that weird cheese flavoured stuff.
Crush whatever you're going to use as a coating and mix it with the cheese or fake cheese powder on a large plate.
If you're trying to crush Panko give up: they are pre-crushed.
Set out a production line: cornflour, egg, plate of crumbly stuff and either a plate or an oiled baking tray at the end, depending on whether you intend to fry or bake your resulting nuggety thingummies.
Pre-heat the oven if you're planning on baking them.

Drop one of your whatever-lumps into the cornflour bag, twist the top to seal it tightly and award to whichever chef has been least obnoxious recently.
Allow said chef to cha-cha round the kitchen shaking the bag like a maraca until the blob is thoroughly coated.
Drop the blob into the egg, fish it out again, dump it on the plate and roll it about till lightly coated, then transfer to the receiving plate or tray.
Do exactly the same thing with all the other lumps.
When you get sick of doing it properly start just throwing in batches: they'll all get somewhat coated and that's all that really matters.
Observe that Small Chef's fingers are now rather more heavily breaded than the mushrooms.
Send Small Chef to wash her hands.
Quickly finish most of the lumps leaving just a couple for Small Chef to do, so she won't notice.
Apologise for finishing off most of the lumps.
And for doubting her powers of observation.

Put lumps of mushroom on the tray in the oven at whatever heat you like: they're mushroom, they won't care.
For chicken blobs you should probably be more careful so settle for around 200 celsius, for fifteen to twenty minutes, flipping them over at least once and poking them before you take them out to see if they're pink in the middle (they shouldn't be...I think).
Or just give up any pretence of healthiness and fry the beggars.

Tip for vegetarians: if making chicken nuggets get a meat eater to handle the breading and cooking.
That way you don't have to explain why Mummy is handling the chicken pieces with extra long cooking chopsticks while holding her breath and pretending to smile.
You also get to listen to Smaller Chef pretending to pay attention to a lecture on food safety.
And you don't have to keep poking the cooking nuggets to see if they're cooked when, honestly, you have no idea what properly cooked chicken should look like.

Serve with coleslaw, a variety of dipping sauces and either chips or sweet potato chips.

Save the left overs to eat cold the next day.
Because you're a grown-up and can do things like that.

*Crust, filling, pie.
Get over it.

**Blacker Hall Farm, their vegetarian platter thingy is rather good.

***Eleanor's was a mocha-cake, with coffee beans on top.
This may have been a mistake on our part.

****I probably shouldn't blog while Avatar is on.

*****Honestly, use crushed Doritos for all I care.

******We went with black garlic, lemon and thyme, but you could use garlic, ginger and cumin (in which case, skip the cheese) or something of your own devising.

*******You know, you could probably use something completely non-dairy-related here, if you wanted.

********If you don't have one, do this bit in a bowl, but expect clouds of cornflour to go everywhere.

Bad Judgement part two

Not all judgement, of course, is helpful.
 When someone is not looking for, doesn't want, and indeed doesn't need help, it is not particularly useful to offer a long, reasoned evaluation of their activities and ways that they can improve them.
Or a short one, really.
 Likewise, even the most constructive and helpful of opinions, eagerly sought, and full of precious nuggets of delicious wisdom*, will be less than gladly received if it is offered with the sort of tactless rudeness that would make Simon Cowell** blush.
 Then there are the comments that aren't even meant to be constructive.
There are people who will break into a Facebook thread, or a forum conversation, to offer what is quite simply an insult: "Anybody who does this doesn't really love their kids" is a popular one, or "People who do this are just lazy"***, occasionally the person offering this opinion is simply rather boorish, but more often than not they're actually trying to be rude.

By now everyone on the internet has probably seen that Facebook post: you know the one from the mother saying that baby boys don't deserve to have breastmilk because they're already stronger than baby girls****, and claiming that if she has a boy she'll be feeding him formula, as well as circumcising him so he can't get as much pleasure out of sex.
 It got a lot of attention and, unsurprisingly, stirred up a lot of horrified responses.
Because, as it happens, that mother already has a son.
She also lives under a bridge and eats billy goats.
 Because she's a troll.*****
Most of the people who offer such rude opinions are trolls too.
They sit, in cosy anonymity behind their screens and, out of boredom, or a weird sense of power, or whatever-the-heck-it-is that motivates them, they poke people on their tenderest areas to see if they can make them jump.

Which is all very unpleasant.
What makes it worse, though, is that because of idiots like this, and because parenting is already such an insanely sensitive issue, and because some of the trolls are disguised as newspapers with inexplicable American accents******, many people on the internet are now preconditioned to expect judgemental nastiness whenever anything child related is mentioned.
I was on a Facebook group the other month******* when I saw a new post from a woman complaining that there was "too much judging" on the group and asking everyone to read an enormous glurgey post about how everyone was equally lovely.
 The thing is, there was nothing remotely judgemental on that group.
Occasionally there has been, in fact from time to time there are massive rows, but for the last month everything had been sweetness and light.
Somehow, however, this woman felt judged.********
Presumably she had endured enough slights, real or perceived, that almost any conversation on whatever-topic-it-was was now felt to her like a judgement on her personal choices.

 What was funny though, was that in reaction to this she responded with a very judgemental post to the entire group, saying that everyone needed to read her enormous sticky sweet post, and especially the last line, which they should read twice (and which, of course just said that everybody was equally great).
And the odd thing is that I think that post may actually have offered a worse kind of judgement than the negative kind.

I tried to find it to repost here, but I couldn't*********.
Essentially, however, it compared and contrasted every facet of parenting she could come up with, though she missed slings versus buggies as well as hitting your kids versus not hitting your damn kids.
After mentioning each option she gave some inane comment about why it was a good thing, following it up with "Good for you!" or "You're a good mom".
The thing is, that most of her opinions probably did more harm than good.
She contrasted cloth nappies (ok, she said diapers) and disposable ones for example.
Why bother?
 Why on Earth take the time to write a little paragraph on how cloth and disposable nappies are equally valid ways to keep your baby from dripping all over the place?
 It's not exactly a subject of furious debate, at most, some people think cloth nappies take too much time or are unhygienic and some think disposables are bad for the planet, or something on those lines.
It's a subject that at most deserves a "meh", a shrug, and a new topic of conversation.
 But by putting it in her Big List Of Things she somehow managed to imply that it was a topic of dissent, that people on either side of the nappy line were glaring at one another with judgemental fury.
 If anyone was feeling a little uncomfortable about their choice of infant-rump-covering, they probably felt a lot worse after that.

There were others in a similar vein.
What bothered me about them was not only the weird sense that if she had to tell us all not to fight we must secretly have been hating each other all along, but also the repeated statement that "You're a good mom".
 Because, seriously, how would she know?
Breastfeeding doesn't make me a good mother, you can't tell whether or not I'm a fiend in human form based on the amount of television I let my daughters watch (though they might claim otherwise).
Breastfeeding just feeds Phoebe, all you can tell from the amount of television I let my daughters watch is how much television I let them watch.
 If you read this blog you know that we homeschool, you know I used a sling, that I'm vegetarian, that we make an awful lot of pie, that I think I'm funnier than I actually probably am, and that I'm terrible at updating my blog regularly.
 Maybe you know a few more things, too, but in general, that's it.
You do not know whether I'm a good parent.
Because none of that information can tell you whether I'm a good parent or the maternal equivalent of Snidely Whiplash.

Generally speaking, calling someone a good parent when you don't really know whether they are one isn't going to do a lot of damage.
 When it came to one of the entries in the list of Things That Can Be Done In Two Different Ways, however, things seemed a little different.
One of her "good mom"s was "The mother who fed her kids takeaway every night this week".
 The thing is, that isn't ok, it certainly isn't the sort of thing that should be met with a "good for you" or a trite little remark about how it's no worse than making a home-cooked organic meal each week**********.
 I've thought this over for quite some time and, honestly, the only decent response I can think of to a mother who's fed her children takeaway every night is "Is everything alright?" or maybe, "What can I do to help?"
 Because the mother who feeds her kids takeaway every night has a problem.
Perhaps it's a temporary issue: maybe her kitchen has been flooded out and she can't cook, or maybe she's getting over the flu and just hasn't felt like cooking all week.
Perhaps there's no-one else in the house who could make a hot meal.
Or a cold one.
Perhaps she just couldn't get to the shops for some reason, perhaps she's too tired, or too busy, and just can't fit everything in.
Perhaps she's depressed.
Perhaps she could use a friend, to pick up the kids from school so she has time to shop, or to bring round a home-cooked meal while her life gets back under control, or to lend her some fridge-space, let her cry on their shoulder, commiserate with her woes, or tell her that, no, that doesn't sound quite normal and does she think it would help to talk to someone?
Perhaps she's fine.
But if all you say is "Good for you! You're a good mom!" then you'll never know.
 So nobody will help poor Mother-on-the-theoretical-edge: her woes, if she has any, will go unnoticed and unanswered, brushed under the carpet with "You're a good mom!"

Ok, enough ranting about the presumably well-meaning woman's awful diatribe.

My point is, that if you just respond to everything with a cheerful "That's great! Everything's fine!" then real problems get ignored.
 It's bad enough to tell someone they're doing everything wrong, when they just wanted to tell you how much their toddler loves Dora the Explorer, but when they're actually seeking help, or even just sympathy, to tell them that actually, they're imagining their problems, everything's fine, hurrah for them,  is to completely ignore their pain and leave them feeling that, actually, no-one cares about their difficulties.
 If poor takeaway-mother wasn't miserable enough before she probably is now.

I remember, some years ago when I was overweight.
I wasn't badly overweight, I was a little over the average weight for my height, but for me it was a nightmare.
I'm naturally thin, my normal healthy weight is a little under the recommended weight for my height.
 But I had M.E. and couldn't exercise, could barely drag myself out of bed in the mornings and this, combined with what was, for me, a huge weight gain, made me thoroughly miserable.
What I needed was sympathy, or some useful suggestions for ways to lose weight without actually starving myself.
 What I was given was reassurance that I looked fine, that my weight was perfectly normal, and various remarks about the way society judges women based on their weight.
I was told to read The Beauty Myth, and Fat Is A Feminist Issue.
 But I didn't look fine, my weight wasn't normal for me, and I didn't care about society.
I cared that I didn't look like myself any more, that I didn't feel like myself, that everyone was too busy deconstructing societal norms of beauty to listen to me telling them that the only norm I cared about was my own.
 So I was miserable.
And the more everyone told me that I was fine or that I looked great, the worse I felt, because what I heard was that no-one really cared.

So here's the thing: sometimes people don't want your judgement.
Then, unless it's really urgent, unless they're telling you how great it is to knock your kid out every night with a couple of shots of vodka and a chaser of cough syrup, you probably shouldn't give it.
But when they are extolling the virtues of the vodka-meltis cocktail, someone really needs to speak up.
 And sometimes people do want it.
Because judgement, as I said before, doesn't mean telling people off, or running them down.
It just means a reasoned opinion.
Sometimes people need that, sometimes they want, not praise, but your real opinion, or advise, or help.
Sometimes they just need someone to hold their hand till the pain goes away.

The trick is to listen, to hear what people want, or what they need.

Listen, be thoughtful, be considerate, be kind.
 Say what needs to be said, do what needs to be done.

Then move on.***********









* Mmmmmm wisdom Mcnuggets.

** Yay, pop-culture references!
That was fun, I'm going to use more!

***I've seen this applied to pretty much everything: feeding formula, breastfeeding, using a sling, using a buggy, cosleeping, not cosleeping.
Apparently all parents are unconscionably sluggish.

****Although actually it's the other way around on the whole.

***** Yes, I know it was obvious, and it sort of ruins the punchline, but I just knew that if I didn't say something then the one and only comment I'd get on this blog would be from someone asking me what the heck I was talking about.

****** Stupid "Mommy Wars".

*******Hey Facebook Breastfeeding Is Not Obscene, if you must know.

******** Given the theme of the page I would hazard a guess that she fed her baby formula and felt uncomfortable among so many breastfeeding-based posts, but I honestly couldn't say for sure.

*********I did find a much shorter, much better one, containing some identical phrases, so I suspect hers was copied from there.
That one was actually rather nice and mentioned a few moments where parents can feeling utterly at a loss and generally rubbish, before assuring them that everyone has the odd bad moment and it doesn't actually make them a bad parent.

********** No, really, that was the comparison.
Did I forget to mention that the juxtaposition gave the distinct impression that, actually, she did think there was a better and a worse choice each time but was pretending she didn't?

***********Unless they've written some awful glurge about how everyone is lovely.
Then you should totally write a long ranty blog about how dreadful they are.