The importance of having hair

“Every morning you have gone to work, but you have never been fully awake. Of course, you have seen the sun and the moon, the stars in the sky and everything that moves, but you haven’t really seen it at all. It is different for the Joker, because he was put into this world with a flaw: he sees too deeply and too much.”
- the Joker from The Solitaire Mystery by Jostein Gaarder

Hair...I am continuously intrigued by how much of a significance it has in our lives.

Hair style is the final tip-off whether or not a woman really knows herself.
- Hubert de Givenchy, Vogue, July 1985

Hair brings one's self-image into focus; it is vanity's proving ground. Hair is terribly personal, a tangle of mysterious prejudices.
- Shana Alexander

I was born with almost black hair, straight and very fine. As I grew older it slowly lightened and developed a very slight wave to it. Obviously my Mum chose how my hair was cut and I was cursed with some pretty hideous hair styles and a big fringe. Near the end of primary school I started growing out that fringe, determined to be trendy like all the other girls. When I started intermediate I got one of those bob cuts that were popular back in the early 90s. After that my hair began to fill with air and would stick out at all ends.

In my first year of high school I sat behind this older girl in orchestra and fell in love with her hair so attempted to explain it to my hair dresser who, in turn (probably having no idea what I meant) attempted to replicate what she thought I’d meant. It didn’t turn out how I wanted but my Mum loved it. In 4th form I was put in the boys line in the class photo although the photographer knew I wasn’t a boy (it wasn’t even that short). That day has been etched in my memory ever since. I’ve never felt so hideous, so despised. I didn’t see being placed in the boys line as being seen as looking like a boy...I saw it as being told I was too ugly for the girls line.

I developed an intense fear of the hair brush and even of simply touching my hair. And if I couldn’t stand touching it, well I’d be damned if someone else was. I became terrible when it came to cut my hair usually having it cropped quite short and then not having it cut for months where it would grow and develop wild curls. By my last year of school I’d had enough of the hideous short styles and wanted long hair. I would go for over a year without having it even trimmed and it waved about wildly, afro when I first would wash it, slowly mellowing as the days went by (I hated hair washing day).

I’ve mellowed out a bit these days helped by the fact that J’s friend is a hairdresser and she loves playing with it but it’s taken a lot of time. I’ve come to realise that to me my hair is so wound into my sexuality and my belief in myself that if it’s having a bad day then I will often feel miserable, ugly, useless. When I am sad my hair often covers my face but when I’m alive I find it flying out behind me. I never want short hair again no matter how much easier it may be to look after. But I’m willing to experiment and live a little.

In the summer time my hair will bleach golden brown under the sun and I have often been asked if I’ve dyed my hair or got highlights. Then in the winter it will darken up again. So right now it is a dark chocolaty red and was dead straight but has slowly developed gentle curls at the ends. No doubt it is looking forward to the water bringing back all those wild curls (J calls it my “crazy hair”) but so far I haven’t washed it since J’s friend last played with it.

Blindly running through the forest

“Tracks,” said Piglet. “Paw-marks.” He gave a little squeak of excitement. “Oh, Pooh! Do you think it’s a - a - a Woozle?”
“It may be,” said Pooh. “Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t. You never can tell with paw-marks.”
- Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne

Orienteering is seriously a crazy sport. It has to be one of the only sports I know of where competitors will do anything to compete despite no matter what ridiculous injury they’ve managed to inflict on themselves either through training or the orienteering itself. You should see the number of people strapping up their ankles to the extreme before the start of the race especially by the end of a big competition. But we’re hardy souls and the race must go on.

The last two major orienteering competitions I’ve been to I’ve come away with frustratingly tedious injuries. Labour Weekend last year I got some weird as lump on my shin as well as shin splints or a stress fracture (the debate never got cleared up as the sports doctor and physio just couldn’t work it out). Yes, a mystery lump. Then just as it looked as though it might be finally on the mend I had the Waitangi Carnival early this year and on the second race (my worst nightmare, the bloody night relay) I rolled my ankle. After stumbling round in the dark for the rest of the course occasionally letting out bloodcurdling screams of agony I finally completed the course (there’s a whole team waiting for me...can’t let them down!). Then, being crazy, I ran the rest of the races with a strapped up, swollen, painful ankle. Yes, I get the mad dandy “don’t you dare try and stop me” attitude from my mother.

Naturally I was hoping the nationals at Easter would be different (well, I damn well hoped so since my ankle was still as swollen anything and the physio was beginning to think perhaps I’d fractured it instead). Well, I did manage to escape injury-free but it certainly wasn’t without its dramas. Sunburn, lack of sleep, trying to put tent pegs into ground that felt like concrete (and quite likely was concrete underneath that grass), weird pains all over the show, hideous blisters, orienteering like a retard (read: hopelessly out of touch with the map and ready to sit down and cry), running even more like a retard (read: slowly...very slowly), ridiculously optimistic time management (trying to get to a wedding at the other end of the North Island on the same day as the Long Distance event with airlines involved).

Day One: the Sprint Distance at Henley Lake in Masterton. After driving down from Palmerston North that morning (and through Eketahuna...my first time in the infamous town although we were just passing through and only stopped at the local 4 Square!) we arrived in Masterton to blistering heat. I had no energy to push through a 2.6km (as the crow flies...do not be deceived by orienteering course lengths...this is no ordinary 2.6km, trust me) course round the lake and with punishing spectator controls and fast terrain I was just relieved to finish.

Day Two: the Middle Distance at Rangiora. I knew it was going to be steep from the casual glances at the landscape on the drive in and I was not disappointed (okay, that sounds wrong...I was disappointed I was correct as a little less climb might have been rather nice!). My course headed straight down into the bush where it quickly became a dark jungle. But hey, I was in touch with the map and all was fine, abet just not very fast. Everything was going okay until the last 3 controls. What was I thinking? Where did my brain go? very good questions. Number 8 I wandered back and forth in the thick, ridiculously steep, bush wondering where the heck that control was and why I couldn’t find it...but clearly I wasn’t the only one since there were a lot of people crashing around in there...unfortunately most of them weren’t looking for the same control! I found several that weren’t mine before finally spotting it hiding away (actually, I saw a couple of people sliding down a bank looking like they had a purpose and since I had nothing to lose I followed them!).

Day Three: the Long Distance at Te Wharau. For some reason the Long is my favourite event. I guess because you don’t have to be fast, you just have to navigate well and there is always time to make up for mistakes! Plus you’ve gotta get your money’s worth at some of these events! With nearly double the amount of climb (and more than double the distance) as the day before I suspected it was going to be, well, pretty physical and I wasn’t exactly mistaken. To begin with the start was 2.5km away (well, you were definitely warmed up by the time you got there!). Steep was, well, an understatement but for a lot of the course we were contouring around the side of these huge slopes (trying not to slip too far down and therefore have to come up again) which caused awful blisters on the soles of my feet. The organisers were right in the instructions when recommending strapping your ankles if they were weak ‘cause I felt my ankle attempt to break free several times...but it survived...just. BUT despite all the pain and suffering I navigated well for the first time in the whole weekend and came in with a fairly decent time. Naturally the Long Distance is still my favourite.

Okay, so what’s next in my mad calender? Auckland Champs here we come...

Pancakes, pikelets, hotcakes, griddlecakes, flapjacks…what the hell are they?!!

“And what’s happened to the Earth?”
“Ah. It’s been demolished.”
“Has it,” said Arthur levelly.
“Yes. It just boiled away into space.”
“Look,” said Arthur, “I’m a bit upset about that.”
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide by Douglas Adams

Now, I was going to talk about the brunch I whipped up for J and I the other morning but I encountered a dilemma…here’s where I got:
Ah, there’s nothing better than
Yeah, well, it seems a bit of a confusing thing having so many different names for the same thing. I think in New Zealand we would call them pikelets because pancakes here are traditionally basically crêpes and ‘cause they’re so big and thin flipping them over always freaks me out! I took a little trip to everyone’s favourite encyclopaedia for some answers to my problem. Here I’ve done a couple of searches. One for pancakes and the other for pikelets (hotcakes, girddlecakes and drop-scones all went to the pancake page too...but flapjacks? I’ll get to those).

Now, on the pancake page it mentioned the word flapjack so when I looked that up I was very confused because Wikipedia seemed to be trying to tell me that this was a kind of muesli slice thing (well, that’s what I got from their description...I guess a tray-bake is a slice??).

This whole thing reminds me of the difficulty I’ve run into sometimes when I’ve talk to my sister-in-law in the States. Sometimes she has no idea what I’m talking about so I have to wrack my brain for another word for it. It happens when I’m reading a book and I come across words such as college. College here is what I think the States calls high school. We call college university. I come across it in recipe books. What the hell is powdered sugar? Oh, right, icing sugar etc. I’ve found that us in little old New Zealand have adopted words from everywhere so we are quite good at working out what some unusual word might mean. Chances are we already use it sometimes.

So, onto our brunch. I’m loath to use the word pancake ‘cause that just doesn’t ring true for me and pikelets seem too much like plain jam and cream things you might have with tea a bit like plain scones so I’m going to settle on hotcakes, after all I have seen a recipe by our lovely Alison Holst for hotcakes and because hers and mine have rolled oats in them they have something in common so I feel on safe ground!! J and I were feeling terribly shady and exhausted on Easter Monday and felt like something tastier than our usual muesli (another one of those words that confuses some people) and fruit so it was a toss up between corn fritters and hotcakes (savory or sweet). It was going to be corn fritters…but there was no tinned sweetcorn in the pantry so hotcakes it had to be!

Shady Hotcakes

1 banana, mashed
¾ cup soy milk (I think although you might want a bit more)
2 Tbsp peanut butter
¾ cup flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 Tbsp cocoa
½ cup rolled oats
2 Tbsp brown sugar
5 small feijoas, diced

Mix the mashed banana, soymilk and peanut butter together in a large bowl.

Sift the flour, baking powder and cocoa into a bowl. Add the rolled oats and sugar then mix together. Add to the wet ingredients, mixing until just combined. Lightly stir through the feijoas.

Heat some oil up in the frypan and drop large spoonfuls of the mixture onto the pan. Turn over when beginning to brown on the other side.

These are best hot and you can put whatever you like on them (we had mixtures of peanut butter, jam and finely chopped dark chocolate) but we had the leftovers cold later in the day and they were still delicious.

I like hokey pokey

And there you lie, Miranda, with a look of indignant, threatened innocence drawn across your face like a veil.
- Caliban’s Hour by Tad Williams

I had a hankering for those damn scones again but decided to try something else from Veganomicon while I have the book from the library. I’d seen a picture of the Lower Fat Banana Bread on Veggiegirl’s blog and decided to make that instead. Obviously it required changes as anyone who’s ever tried to buy apple sauce in New Zealand would know you can only buy it in a little bottle and it ain’t cheap. I cooked up a couple of little apples instead and pureed them. Not smooth and sticky like apple sauce but a damn sight cheaper. I changed some of the flour to wholemeal flour (I love the texture) plus I couldn’t resist throwing in some chopped cashews for some bite (I’d wanted walnuts but didn’t have any). As usual when I bake a vegan cake or a loaf I have trouble stopping the outsides from cooking too fast before the inside is done. The loaf was still a little mushy in the middle but it was delicious and moist.

The other night J and I got pizza at Hells (as usual I got the Sinister (hehehe) vegan pizza with added mushrooms and cashew nuts and without jalapenos 'cause it's always way too hot for me to handle...I'm a weakling when it comes to really hot food). J was studying the menu and eyeing up the dessert pizzas. I had to break his heart and tell him I couldn’t eat any of those but promised I’d make him one the following night instead (we still wanted dessert that night so got Lite Licks soy ice cream from the supermarket…I love hokey pokey ice cream!). So here it is, dessert pizza…delicious. I had leftovers the following night with homemade banana “ice cream” (Mum’s been eating leftovers for breakfast…she must love having me back home at the moment!).

Dessert Pizza

Pizza Base:
1 tsp sugar
½ cup tepid water
1 ½ tsp dried yeast
1 ½ cups bread flour
1 tsp baking powder
¼ tsp salt
1 Tbsp olive oil
1 Tbsp molasses

Dissolve the sugar in the water. Sprinkle the yeast over the water and leave for 10 minutes or until frothy. Mix the flour, baking powder and salt together in a bowl. Make a well in the centre and add the olive oil, molasses and yeast mixture. Mix well, adding extra flour if necessary. Knead on a floured board until smooth and elastic.

Chocolate Custard:
2 Tbsp cornflour
1 Tbsp cocoa
1 Tbsp brown sugar
1 cup soy milk

Mix the cornflour, cocoa and brown sugar together in a small saucepan. Whisk in ¼ cup of the soy milk until well combined then whisk in the rest of the soy milk. Heat until thickened (should be quite thick). Cover tightly with gladwrap and let cool.

Crumble:
¾ cup rolled oats
¼ cup wholegrain oats
1 Tbsp brown sugar
½ cup chopped cashews
drizzles of oil (no idea how much I used!)

Mix all the dry ingredients together in a bowl. Add enough oil until the crumble mixture is coated.

Topping:
2 apples, peeled and thinly sliced
1 pear, peeled and thinly sliced
1 cup frozen berries
4 squares dark chocolate, chopped

Putting it together:
Preheat the oven to 200°C. Roll out the pizza base to the desired size on an oven tray (we always try to roll it out as big as possible…doesn’t matter what shape it ends up being!). Spread the chocolate custard over the top of the base then layer the apple and pear slices evenly over the top. Sprinkle the frozen berries on top. Spoon the crumble topping and chopped chocolate over everything else making sure to get as close to the edge as possible. Cook for about 15 minutes or until the crumble is golden brown. Serve with soy ice cream or plain homemade custard.

Traveling through the madness of Spin

This is a secret: sometimes I am glad when Henry is gone. Sometimes I enjoy being alone. Sometimes I walk through the house late at night and I shiver with the pleasure of not talking, not touching, just walking, or sitting, or taking a bath. Sometimes I lie on the living room floor and listen to Fleetwood Mac, the Bangles, the B-52’s, the Eagles, bands Henry can’t stand. Sometimes I go for long walks with Alba and I don’t leave a note saying where I am.
- Claire from The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

I finally finished reading The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger late last night. It had me up late desperately clinging to the pages of the book as I moved closer to the inevitable end. It’s been a long time since I’ve managed to get engrossed in a book, and even longer since I’ve been moved so deeply by the words on a page. There is something about the characters in this book which touched me deeply. I felt their pain, their loss, their fear, their loneliness. But I also felt their love, their passion, their hope, their beauty. But I was oddly disturbed this morning to discover that the book is being made into a film...

So I didn’t get much sleep after finishing the book as I had to leave the house just after 5am this morning to get to spin class. I was thinking about the madness of spin (Peloton) class the other day. You have to get there for the gym opening at 5.45am in order to claim a bike in time for the class which starts at 6:05am. So when I’m staying at my parents then, well, I have to leave just after 5am. Madness! Plus the class itself is crazy. Crammed into a tiny, darkened room filled with about 30 of these stationary bikes we gasp for air, sweating like anything despite (or perhaps because of) the tiny open windows and 2 fans going at full throttle. Our instructor sits up the front on his bike barking out orders (his microphone has been broken the last couple of times) and instructing us to “add more dial” (read: increase resistance and therefore pain) and to “pick up that cadence” (read: speed up that peddling). He has to shout to be heard above the thumping music blasting out of the stereo even when he’s got a microphone. All the while we are grabbing at our towels to wipe the sweat away and cursing the discomfort of those bloody bike seats (and I’m trying to work out how many more tracks until it’s over!). We battle our own imaginary hills and sprint race against invisible opponents as if it’s life or death. So why do I keep coming back? It’s bloody addictive, that’s why!

Cooking with Veganomicon

"If you go on flirting with the king with those sickly little smiles, one of us Boleyns is going to scratch your eyes out."
- The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory

J and I were both home sick most of last week (well, I was sick ALL week). Finally having a bit more of an appetite by Thursday I made the banana-date scones from Veganomicon (I love that my library has the brilliant forsight to order good books from overseas before I have to hassle them about it) except as we had no dates (and no flaxseed in the flat…the texture was still awesome though) they were more of the banana-walnut variety. They went down so well I had a hankering for them again in the weekend. J wanted savoury scones though so I concocted some corn and sundried tomato scones as well with the leftovers from a tin of creamed sweetcorn.

I also made the famous chickpea cutlets ( I thought I might as well get the most out of the cookbook while I’ve got it out!) for dinner on Sunday. I’m really not sure what all the fuss is about. They were okay but hardly amazing or anything. Perhaps they would have been better pan fried (we baked them) but still…maybe it’s ‘cause I’m not a great fan of seitan or wheat gluten. Hmmmm. Luckily I made some cashew gravey to go with them otherwise it might have been quite a bland meal.

At the Airport

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin

Last week J made me a vegan chocolate cake for my return from Queenstown. It was not only his first vegan cake baking adventure, but actually his first cake so I was very proud of him. We demolished it pretty quickly despite me having come down with some awful viral infection upon my return.

I was terrified I was going to be stranded in Queenstown another night, sick and desperate for real food and a real bed (I’ve decided I’m not a big fan of hotels when you have to go out every night to get food which is made even more difficult with food allergies and eating preferences). It was misty with rain and Qantas wasn’t flying at all. The lady at the Air New Zealand check in counter was not exactly encouraging when she told me that my plane hadn’t managed to land yet and then proceeded to hand me a sheet of paper detailing what happens if a flight is cancelled. Luckily they did manage to fly me out. I can’t tell you how glad I was to finally land back in Auckland (and how awful a flight is if you’re sick). Waiting at the baggage claim was tedious though. It always seems that there is a lot of luggage that no one owns that comes out first and goes round and round and round while everyone stands around, getting increasingly impatient, waiting for theirs to appear.