Random pictures from Saturday.
1. Best breakfast ever, pancakes and hot blueberries.
2. Friend’s house
3. Friend’s house
4. Pimm’s
5. Downpour, maybe not a good day to be wearing Toms.
6. Sunshine
7. Look who it is! BBQ cat!
8. BBQ cat (we actually were having a BBQ).
9. Many people out for a friend’s birthday.
10. Then on to another place. This would have been after midnight but let’s still call it Saturday.
I feel I’m in some sort of waiting phase with all sorts of trips and adventures just around the corner. I think it’s partly because there ARE trips and adventures around the corner hopefully. I’ve been planning for a big trip next year and some things before this year is out (fingers crossed). Also I have some projects that I’m getting on with that are at their beginnings. This weather at the moment is also very waiting-ish neither very summer nor autumn.
So I thought I would shake things up for a week or so by taking and posting daily pictures if I can. These are today’s.
1. I was sitting on the back door step looking at Twitter on my phone with my feet in the rain while the rest of me was in the dry. Beep came to see what I was doing.
2. Weeds
3. Weeds
4. The kitties like to take running jumps onto the new carpet so its usual state is all bunched up like this.
5. Brief bit of sunshine.
6. Making pizza dough. I use this recipe.
7. The garden is a bit overgrown at the moment.
Some other things that we did for my dad’s birthday. I cooked haddock, with mashed potato, spinach, and mustard sauce. There is a roughly similar recipe here. I was trying to recreate something I had eaten here on the Monday before. My sister made bread and butter pudding which is one of my dad’s favourites. It’s the dish with the candles in the third picture. We joked that it looked like lasagne :) She used the recipe from the Dorie Greenspan book Baking From My Home to Yours
I made Elizabeth David’s Chocolate Almond Cake again, this time for my mother’s birthday celebration. It is such a good cake anyway but I love it because it so happens to be gluten free so I can make it for my family. It is made with almonds rather than flour so it has that lovely brownie type moistness. Sometime I would like to give it a go with some other flavours added, orange would probably be awesome.
I kept it straight chocolate on this occasion as I wanted to also make a ginger ice-cream to go on the side. To do this I made a vanilla ice-cream then just before I was putting it in the freezer to set I mixed through lots of chopped crystallised ginger and little pieces of dark chocolate. Crystallised ginger is quite sweet anyway so I kept the vanilla ice-cream on the less sweet side. I however think this could perhaps be made with shop-bought vanilla ice cream – just get a tub of it and mix through the ginger and chocolate pieces. I got the idea from having tried a Waitrose version at Simon’s parents house, my mum loves ginger so I had to give it a go. It was a success! Definitely a good combination.
1. I grew some roses and now I get to pick them :)
2. Space Invaders ice cubes, I got the tray for them from Bristol Guild. The glass is Aranzi Aronzo and I bought it from their shop in Tokyo [Google street view]. Longtime visitors to this site might also remember the Lego ice tray, it is still going strong.
