Heather Taylor : Writer, Filmmaker, & Speaker

So as we wandered Paris yesterday we discussed my Kryptonite – cheap noodles. You know the kind. 35p noodle packs that come from the newsagent. I’ve been addicted since I was a kid and they truly hit the spot. I’ve had them for breakfast, lunch and dinner – they go good with any kind of day.

But they are oh so bad for you. So bad.

As I start toward my half-marathon/ marathon training, I’m quite aware that I need to eat better. My cousin and I have made a “lose 25 pounds by 16th April” pact, I’m determined to drink the right amount of water every day and I am running 3 times a week starting this week. WITHOUT FAIL. So this means the days of the quick and unhealthy snack of empty calorie, MSG filled noodles, are over. (as are crisps but that’s a given)

Instead, I’m going to make my own.

In preparation for this mission, I headed over to Recipease in Clapham to take their Pasta Making course.

All you need are eggs and ’00′ grade flour. Though often recipes call for a larger quantity, we made a small batch of pasta (as in, could feed 3-4 people) using 2 eggs and 200g of flour.

First you put the flour in a largish bowl, then add the eggs in the centre. Poke the yolks with a fork and stir the egg in by stirring around the outside and pulling the flour into the middle where the eggs are. Keep stirring until the mixture resembles scrambled eggs.  You then tilt the bowl a bit to the side, drag your fork through the mixture and pull it into the side of the bowl. This will get the lumps out and mix the flour into the egg better.

Don’t worry if all the flour doesn’t make it into the dough.  It all depends on the moisture in the air. The more moist it is, the more flour the dough will take, and the less moisture, the less flour it will take. Get me?

Once it’s mixed enough, it’s time to kneed. A great way to get some aggression out.

Place the ball of dough on the table, hold the side closest to you and stretch it out with the heel of your hand. fold it back over towards you, turn 90 degrees and do it again. Keep doing that until you can’t see a divot when you poke the ball of dough. It should just bounce right back.

Wrap that sweet ball of goodness with plastic wrap (get out all the air) and put it in the fridge. This can be for 5 minutes or a few hours but don’t leave it too long or it will dry out.

This is the perfect time to start making your sauce and to get your water on to boil.

Your sauce is now simmering, so it’s now time to roll the dough out into pasta. First thing first. You got to silkify the dough.*

Using your pasta maker on setting 6, you roll half your ball of dough through the machine, fold in half and roll it through again. If it’s sticky, add a bit of flour before you fold but ONLY if it’s sticky. Remember, we don’t want to dry it out. Another tip is to never feed in the dough with the fold at the top. This will trap air in your pasta dough which will burst your pasta when you cook it. Kaboom.

Once the dough feels silky smooth to the touch, you’ve silkified it! Tadah! Now you need to run it through the machine once at each setting from 6 down to 2 (if you are making ravioli, then go to setting one as you double the pasta).

At this point, you can run the long, flat dough through the cutter. It’s 500 times easier if you cut the pasta dough in half first.

As you cut the pasta into noodles, flour it so it doesn’t stick together. You can either freeze it (lasts for months), dry it (lasts for a couple weeks) or cook it (only takes a couple of minutes).

Tasty! And so begins the year of homemade pasta.

*Yes. Silkify is not a word. But I don’t know what else to call it.

Me, my mom and my sisters, having fun the Taylor way

As 2011 draws to a close, I’ve been thinking of 2012 and what I want to achieve. It’s going to be a big time of change for me – a new job, new projects and a whole new city – so I’ve been thinking about what I want to be at the heart of what I do. Though I’d love to change the world, make it a better place, start a movement, the thing that is really important to me is that I am happy and bring happiness wherever I go. I do love to smile, so that’s a good start.

My mom would always say, it doesn’t matter what you do in life as long as you are happy. As long as you can pay the bills and keep a roof over your head, you can find the happiness in anything.

I do think that happiness and fun should be at the heart of life. No matter how bad it gets, find a way to enjoy it. Make the hard things fun. Because if you can do that, you will spread joy to those around you. It’s like a song I remember from my childhood, except I think of love also as happiness:

“Love is like a magic penny, hold it tight and you won’t have many;
Lend it, spend it and you’ll have so many, they’ll roll all over the floor.”

When I was growing up, my mom’s agoraphobia was at it’s worse. I was raised with a diet of TV and imaginary friends on the bad days, and on the good days, on the magic of one of the most crafty and artistic people I know. My mom can make anything from needlepoint to homemade painted chocolates. She has a garden to rival the Chelsea flower show, has renovated our house and makes stain glass. She fed my sense of curiosity but also my independence so I could take care of myself when she couldn’t.

Sometimes on the days my mom couldn’t get out of bed, we’d have bed picnics. Some of my best memories came out of the hardest times for her. She only told me when I was older, that it was all she could give us those days. Tried to make it fun so the debilitation wouldn’t scare us. It never did. It was part of life. And it made us try to make the bad days good, the best ways we could. Sometimes having pizza in bed is the best you can do.

So as I head into 2012, I’ll bring that with me. How can I be happy, how can I bring happiness to others, how can we all bring that philosophy into our lives. If you’re not happy, why are you doing what you are doing? What are you going to do to change it? How are you going to spread your happiness?

I wouldn’t normally post a spam email but this one was so full of awesome, that I had to share it with the world. Or the 7 people who clicked on the link to get here. So this email is from “Sweet Irina” (though the email address says Kathleen Medford which may or may not be this lady on Facebook. I’m assuming it isn’t)

Anyhow…long story short, here is the email:

Knock Knock Knock..? Is the door of your heart open…? Perhaps you let me come in?

Oh sorry.. I forgot to introduce myself..My name is Irina.   I also love cooking and some other things. My free time depends on my mood, sometimes I like being alone  reading some book or listening to the music, sometimes in a gym or in a small caffee with my friends. But no matter how I feel, no matter what time of the year it is, I always love to be in the nature. Sometimes I think that when all is bad, just look at the sky, at the river, at the trees and I understand that life is beautiful and is not over.

If you got interested in me, write on my mail…

Do you have an email that rivals that? Please stick it on here! If you want to get in contact with Sweet Irina after being wooed by her lovely words, I’ll happily give you her email address.

Photo by www.flickr.com/photos/sarah_jane/

Yes. That’s right. You’ve heard it here first. I am making the move back from the South to the North. Of London that is.

Five and a half years ago I left the dirty streets of North London (Archway to be more specific) for the leafy greens of Clapham Common. I can’t say it’s all golden in the south. If you’ve ever been on Clapham High Street on a Saturday night somewhere near Infernos, you’d know what I mean.

Moving happens a lot. I know. I’ve lived in 22 places in the last 30 odd years in 6 different cities. But London is the city I’ve lived in the longest in any one time and I’ve lived in my current house longer than I lived in any other house. So you can imagine I’m excited but also a little sad.

In a way I don’t want to move. But my landlord gets nothing done and raised the rent by over £300 4 months ago and my flatmate can’t afford it.

So I’m going. And before I leave, I am making a list of the things I need to do down south that’ll I’ll miss when I go.

• Go to a show at the BAC
• Have a picnic and a kick about
• Go to a day of a festival on Clapham Common
• A night of music upstairs at the Ritzy
• A wander through Brixton markets
• A pint on the sunny banks of Richmond
• A day at Hampton Court Palace
• One or two or three more movies at Clapham Picturehouse
• Have a go at as many restaurants and pubs as possible

I know this isn’t much but that’s where I’ll need your help. What things do I need to do in south London before I’ll go up North? And yes, I know I’ll still be in London but I also know how often my friends visit. So I don’t think there will be a lot of trips this way.

One Christmas, my mum bought my sister and I a movie for our stockings. Mine was Space Camp. The ever informative IMDB describes Space Camp as the story of a group of American kids who go to space camp during the summer holidays. They learn how to operate the Space Shuttle. A team, consisting of a guy who just entered to meet girls, a wannabe astronaut and an instructor (who wanted to go on a mission instead of teaching), win the chance to sit in the Shuttle while the engines are tested. Then they’re launched by mistake…Ooo kids in space. It also starred a bevvie of (now) well known actors including Kate Capshaw, Lea Thompson, Kelly Preston, Tate Donovan, Tom Skerritt and the super cute kid version of Joaquin Phoenix who played Max, the little boy his robot friend Jinx wanted to send to space (hence the whole being accidently launched thing). Read more…