Use up the cupboard, men's housework

I'm less only half way through the my four week cupboard challenge and I'm already feeling rather tedious chronicling the cupboards which never give in.

Today: a triple batch of oat bread. I'm still only half way through the treacle jar and half way through the Surebake yeast jar. Blimey. Obviously if we were very poor with no new money coming in each fortnight, these things would appear to be running out scarily quickly. But we're not. I bought three loaf tins off Trademe (NZ equivalent of Ebay) earlier this year when I started to get into bread making again (last phase: 1995). It's no more work making three loaves of bread than making one and if they freeze well, then we might be saying goodbye to spending around $20 on bread each week. My oven would fit one more loaf tin on the rack so if I can get another off Trademe (I want an old one, not a new non-stick surface one), then I'll experiment with making quadruple batches of bread.

Then double chocolate muffins. I didn't even notice the container full of chocolate chips when I did the cupboard audit. Granted it was under my pile of clean resusable kitchen cloths, but still. Fionn asked for something chocolatey and we did indeed find and then make something chocolately.

Separate topic. I'm doing some Favourite Handyman jobs tonight. His turn for the flu so I've brought two basketloads of wood in for tonight's fire. At the history of labourism day I went to at Easter in Blackball, Neville Bennett (retired University of Canterbury history lecturer who introduced me to some very interesting schools of historical thought when I was an undergraduate) spoke about housework as the key means that working class people survived. He mentioned not just the usual female domestic stuff which I've read about forever it seems (valid though it is). He also talked about men catching rabbits, chopping wood, mending things. Today I was reflecting that much discussion about how women's domestic work keeps families going in poor times, particularly in previous generations in NZ, is in a suburban context. Urbanisation has taken many male 'housework' jobs out. Certainly in London when our home was gas heated, Favourite Handyman had no extra burden of work in winter.

Not that I'm suggesting that such roles must be gender prescribed. Just thinking that in times past they have been and I'm sure I'm not the only feminist to find herself at home looking after children, doing washing and cooking meals because they largely have to be done during hours before breadwinner gets home and then opting against also taking on wood chopping and fire lighting. Oh and I pass on the job of emptying the mousetrap. Cos yes we do kill mice in our house. Every single one we can.