Day 10. A Recipe! Of sorts.

As any organised stay-at-home parent of young children knows, you need to have an arsenal of games up your sleeve to pull out on rainy days. 

Here is ours:

• Mattress in the living room
• Um... that’s it.  (Unless it’s the weekend, in which case it’s electronic-mania)

So anyway, it’s bucketing down, and the kids are launching themselves off various bits of furniture and crashlanding on the mattress (mainly)  while I type. I am successfully – for the moment - ignoring the punches and the wails and the STOPITS because I am trying to be more zen.  Also because, between the tears and the cries, they seem to be having fun.  At least that’s what I assume the slightly hysterical screaming denotes.

On mattress jumping days (currently - the rainy season - most days), only their favourite dinners will prise them away from the airborne activities. Tonight it’s crispy salmon and rice.  Basically you fry the salmon until it’s no longer recognisable as a foodstuff, scrape it off the pan, and serve it with rice and some sort of vegetable. To liven up the rice – because kids (as least not most spoilt, Western kids) tend to not always love plain white rice – I serve it with lime  “gravy”: a lime / soy sauce concoction which is brilliant with most rice / noodle dishes. (It’s also a great fish (and, so I’m told, chicken) marinade – just add more honey to make the meat really sticky as it cooks).  It’s also delicious on plain grated carrots – throw on some coriander and/or peanuts if you’re feeling racy – or, if you’re one of my salt-loving children, drunk straight from the cup. 

(All the ingredients are necessary, but serving it almost exclusively on Ikea-ware is optional.)

Handy “Asian” sauce

You need – for a decent amount, about a cupful

• Juice of two large limes
• Equal amount of soy sauce
• A large tablespoon of runny (or, I suppose, any) honey
• A knob of fresh ginger, peeled, about 2cm long.

Mix the limejuice, soy sauce and honey, stirring well to blend the honey, then finely grate the ginger straight into the mix. 

At this stage I taste, and decide if it’s too strong, in which case I add a small amount of water, one tablespoon at a time, tasting in between. Sometimes the limes are very bitter, or the soy sauce is strong – you may not ever need water at all.  Then I pop it in the microwave for ten seconds to properly melt the honey, take it out and stir again.

Et voila.  Serve on incinerated fish, over-cooked rice, or just sprinkle  in a line from displaced bedding to the dinner table.