Day-Before-Payday Baking: Partially-Eaten-Apple Shortcake.

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Find, in every room of your house, a partially eaten Granny Smith apple. This is your reality now. Don’t fight it.

In a large bowl sift 2 cups of self-raising flour, 1 cup of brown sugar and a pinch of cinnamon. Add to the dry ingredients 1 tablespoon of vinegar (I use Apple Cider), 6 tablespoons of olive oil and 1 cup of luke-warm water. Mix until combined. Pour half of the mixture into a cake pan that you have either greased or lined or is made of silicone because you are terribly modern. Do this all very quickly, as to not attract the attention of the children. If they do wander into the kitchen, looking for something to eat or ruin, simply hold aloft one of the partially eaten Granny Smith apples and make leading and severe eye contact.

Thinly slice 2 partially eaten Granny Smith apples. Layer these on top of the mixture and sprinkle with brown sugar. Pour the last half of the mixture over top and smooth over with the back of a spoon until it is completely covering the partially eaten Granny Smith apples.

Bake at 175 degrees for 30 minutes, or until a knife comes out clean.

Cool on a wire rack, dust with icing sugar and serve.

Pro-tip: The children will still not eat the apples. But Partially Eaten Partially-Eaten-Apple Shortcake is so meta it’s best not to think about it.

How To: Cure a Hangover.

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Spend the evening in charming company. Drink cheap beer and expensive whisky and cider from Sweden. Solve all the worlds problems. Dance in your chairs. Tell each other all your stories until you run out and have to tell all of your secrets. Laugh until you cry and leave before you get thrown out. The radio will play your songs all the way home.

Fall into bed in your clothes. Sleep soundly for two hours and then fitfully for another two. Be unable to get back to sleep after 6am. Using only one eye, check your horoscope from your phone. Make sure to cross-reference it with the Person You Have a Crush On’s to see if today will bode well for postitve vibrations between you. This will also enable you to feel closer to them in the likely event that you are not speaking/they do not know you exsist. Feel free to assume a more preferable horoscope if yours is no good. It is important not to dwell on things when you are in your condition. Get the hell out of bed.

It is critical that you ignore your hangover at this stage. Any attention given to it will only increase its power. This phase is called ‘Action’. Clean your kitchen with great focus. This will serve you later in the day when your hangover evolves. Only when your kitchen is spotless should you allow yourself pause, albeit briefly, to swear and hold your face in your hands and vow never again. Now snap out of it. Make an enormous cup of very sweet tea and wait until it is lukewarm before drinking it. Your body will be very sensitive to liquids at this stage, so you need something non-threathening. DO NOT SIT DOWN. If you stop moving in these early stages you will never get up again. Think of your constant action as penance for posioning your temple.

It is now very important that you go and swim in a very cold ocean. Make it happen. March in with great determination. Do not pussyfoot around. The hardest part will be submurging your bits – this will be unpleasant but it will take your mind off your hangover. Get your head under. What you are doing here is confusing your body into not knowing which of the horrors it is experencing is worse. The cold or the hangover. The cold will win, I promise. The longer you are able to stay in the freezing water, the less hungover you will feel. This is science. When your body is pleasantly numb exit the water. Again, it is important that you do not stop yet. Drink the entire bottle of water you have brought with you and drive directly to the supermarket in your togs.

Do your grocery shopping. Productivity is the perfect thing for you in this state. The key to this, again, is DO NOT STOP. You are a perfect, unfeeling robot of efficency right now. Keep it moving.

The next phase is called ‘Peckish’. Once you have finished your grocery shopping, reward yourself with a very cold coke with lots of ice. It is important to keep your body thoroughly chilled. This will not only serve in assisting you to burn off all the calories of the alcohol you consumed, it will keep you at maximum freshness. By this stage of your hangover you will be ready to eat something. Keep in mind however, that once you begin eating today, you will not be able to stop. You will get stuck in that endless quest for the food item or product that will fix you. No such thing exsists. Bake a cake. Eat a huge meal. Eat a tiny meal. Have a snack. Eat an orange. None of this will fulfil you. But it is part of the process.

Now you are in the final phase; ‘Reward’. You got up…and cleaned your kitchen! You went swimming…in the ocean! You went and did the groceries…on a Sunday morning! All with a raging hangover! You are so good! Look at you! You are a saint. You are now In Credit. Send a few messages you’d usually regret…if you weren’t so virtuous! Eat the entire cake you baked…because you have excercised! Make an elaborate dinner…because you did the groceries! And finally collapse in a heap…because you haven’t stopped all day!

Try it out and report back your findings. Good luck and good livers.

Let That Be A Lesson To You – The Story of a Saturday Morning.

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A morning with the house to myself. I sleep in and make a lavish breakfast that no one asks me for a bite of. I roam the internet with abandon, even though there was a beautiful day at the door. I do all the things that seem like indulgences to those with children, and like a regular Saturday to those who don’t. You lousy ingrates.

I hear the hound; whimpering and wailing and tearing around the property. ‘Cat’, I think. But his behaviour persists long after any cat would stand for this nonsense. Then I hear it; not one, but two sets of scrabbleclaws raging around in my kitchen.  I storm through the house with those footsteps you use when Someone Is In Trouble.

And there she is; Otto’s Girlfriend. A Pitt-Dober-Weiler with a belly of saggedy nipples.  As I approach her she takes off, hauling her heft over my 6 foot fence. She’s had a lot of practice at this, you can tell. Otto is naturally forlorn at the hand love has dealt him – she was delivered to him, his dream girl of questionable morals, only for her to be taken from him as quickly as she arrived. He has not spoken to me since.

I tell him that no nice girl has even had to haul ass over a fence to escape a boys mother. And then remember, I have been that girl.

Which has produced the pervading thought: NEED TALLER FENCE.