Fun Day

We are off out tomorrow to a fun day at our local farm shop. I have just been outside with the dog and it's like monsoon season outside again. (thought this was supposed to be summer?) Lets hope it's dry tomorrow or it could be a day for wellies and the bush hat!

Yawn!

It's late and I'm tired, but my oven is finally in! Yay! After much cleaning up, I now have a functioning kitchen again. Small sprog and I will now begin the mammoth task of sorting the kitchen cupboards at the weekend. Hubs is leaving me to it, says that's my department or I would only grump at him for putting things where I can't find them!

Kitchen Uproar!

My kitchen is like a disaster zone. My new oven and hob arrived today, so hubs is in the process of fitting it. Now that's usually pretty straightforward you'd think right? Wrong!

The work bench had to be recut as the old hob was slightly smaller in size. Not an easy job as the only place the cut could be made was at the back of the work bench, which made for an awkward cut angle to maintain a straight line. There was a support strut at the front, so that was that! Combine that with the blasted electric supply socket for the oven is wedged behind a supporting leg for the bench. The tight wad suppliers also didn't supply electrical cable with the hob and oven. *sigh* So now I have a hob sort of wired in and two ovens taking up my kitchen floor.

Add to that, the island in the kitchen is boxed in on one side with packaging from the oven et all, tools all over the place. I could go on....... Are you kind of getting the picture here?

Maybe by this time tomorrow night, I will possibly have an almost functioning kitchen again!

New Blog

I've specifically set up a new blog to note my bento progress. It will prevent this blog becoming too cluttered with bento posts. So for those of you who are into bento , you can find my new blog at Bento Beginner

Please feel free to come over and have a read, then leave a comment to let me know what you think!

Back on the bento wagon!

I need to get my butt in gear and focus back to my bento lunches. I have slipped badly over the last lot of weeks and have been grazing on junk :0(

I'm off grocery shopping tomorrow and aim to stock up on tasty and healthy foods for my bento. Variety and ease of eating is key in my lunch as I usually don't have a lot of time to spare. Mostly I graze through the day to be honest!

Rice balls (onigiri) will be back on my lunch menu as I find them filling, more so than a sandwich. I have some furikake (rice seasoning) in my cupboard which will spice these little boyos up nicely!

Raw veggies don't appeal to me much, so I think I need to find ways to incorporate that in my daily diet. All good in helping toward my recommended 5 a day :0)

Wish me luck!

I won an award!!!

Thank you so much to New Mummy for the lovely award! I'm chuffed to bits!


OK so this is what I have to do with the award

1. Accept the award, post it on your blog together with the name of the person who has granted the award, and his or her blog link.

2. Pass the award to 10 other blogs that you’ve newly discovered. Remember to contact the bloggers to let them know they have been chosen for this award.

So here are my 10 new blogs I've found:

Catzcorner

Dragonfly

Greenpixey

Cupcakes at home

TrashCan

Rocks In My Dryer

all about eden

Mollybean Farm

Potio Appotment

Our Red House

Disaster!

I had a bit of a disaster today. My face came together with a bungee cord. You know one of those springy things with hooks on the end? Well one flew off in the back of my van and hit me square in the mouth! Ow ow ow!! I now have a lovely lump on my top lip and the feeling is just starting to come back into my top teeth several hours later. Needless to say, there were a few choice (not very nice) words said when it happened!

Pulled Pork

Today I'm having a go at making pulled pork.
I'm using this recipe

Now I didn't have any barbecue sauce in the house, so I made my own version and it tastes pretty darn good!

This is the base recipe I used for the barbecue sauce, but I tweaked it a little. I ran out of ketchup, so I substituted 100mls of Bulldog sauce instead and a squeeze of tomato puree. I also added a good sprinkle of paprika to the finished sauce. When it had cooked, it was whizzed with a stick blender to make it nice and smooth.

I then followed the recipe to continue making my pulled pork.

I'm serving the pulled pork with creamy mashed potatoes and veggies. The potatoes being home grown of course!


Unfotunately since I wrote this post, the hungry hoarde in my house have vacuumed up a the pork, so I don't have any pictures for you. Rest assured it was a success so it will be created again. Hopefully I'll get pictures next time!

Potatoes or tomatoes?

These little beauties appeared on my potato plants recently. I was puzzled and thought that my potatoes and tomatoes had cross pollinated, they are after all from the same family. However after a little research on the wonderful world wide web, I discovered that these fruit are actually the fruit of the potato plant.

Good job we didn't save them to eat though, it turns out that they are highly poisonous!

Yukon gold potatoes are the most likely to produce fruit out of the potato varieties, guess which variety I'm growing?

As it turns out, I could have saved the seed from the fruit to grow more potatoes, ooops! I have them composted now and it's a bit late to go fishing them out!

You can read more about the experimental growing of potatoes from seed here

Beef and Guinness Pie

Tonight I'm making a beef and Guinness pie for tea. here's the recipe if you'd like to have a go.....

INGREDIENTS

1 lb steak pieces
1 large or 2 smaller onions sliced
1/2 lb button mushrooms
1/2 pint beef stock
1/2 pint Guinness
Worcester sauce
Flour
salt and pepper
butter
veg oil
puff pastry (Frozen ready rolled sheets are ideal for this, less mess!)
1 egg, beaten


METHOD

Toss the beef pieces in some flour. Plain (all purpose) is fine for this.
Fry gently in 2 tablespoons of oil to seal and brown the meat.
Add oil to the pan each time you fry off some beef.
Do this in batches or you will end up sweating the meat instead of browning.
When browned, remove from the pan and leave to the side.
In the same pan, add a large knob of butter and fry off onions until soft.
Place beef back in pan and add Guinness and beef stock.
Add button mushrooms, Worcester sauce, a large glug! Season well with salt and loads of black pepper.
Turn heat down to low and allow the beef and onions to simmer away very gently for at least an hour.
After an hour your beef should have thickened wonderfully and be meltingly tender.
Remove the beef mix to your pie dish with a slotted spoon.
Boil the remaining liquid in the pan to reduce and thicken it to a glorious sauce.
You can add extra flour here if you need to thicken it some more.
Check seasoning and adjust to taste.
Pour sauce over the beef mix and allow to go completely cold.

When the beef mix has cooled,
Brush the edges of the pie dish with beaten egg.
At this stage if you have one of those pie funnel thingies, pop it in the middle of your pie dish. I don't so I'm missing this step.
Place your sheet of puff pastry over the dish and press the edges down to seal them up.
Crimp round the edges to help the seal and make it look pretty!
Cut a small cross in the middle of the pie to allow steam to escape, this prevents soggy pastry.
Brush the top of the pie with the remainder of your beaten egg.
Place pie in a pre-heated oven at 200oc for 30 to 40 minutes until pastry is cooked crisply and pie is bubbling hot.

I'm serving this with mash, steamed stir fry cabbage and braised carrots.

Enjoy!!

Monsoon Season

It's really wet here today (I mean torrential downpours), so my plans to get into the garden for a little bit of weeding have been scuppered again.
Ah well, I suppose I can't complain as I have actually managed to empty the ironing basket. It's amazing what you can achieve when you really really have to! (Did I mention, I absolutely hate ironing?)

So for the rest of the day it looks like we will all be confined to quarters. Suppose I could do some housework, but, no that has been ruled out. Wee bro has borrowed my vacuum cleaner. Hmm, the dog hair will just have to stay on the stairs a little bit longer!

Maybe this is just the sort of day that I need to find a good movie on the telly and curl up with a cuppa?

Back to basics

I hate clothes pegs!

Sorry about the opening statement, but I have been pinged several times over the past few days after some of my pegs decided to part company from the spring mechanism. So I made a decision, I'm taking a step back in time to the good old dolly peg!

I purchased several packets this weekend on the Internet and they arrived today. They were no more expensive than a packet of traditional pegs and I hope that they will do a fine job. I've tried many types of peg, both wooden and plastic, cheap and expensive and they all end up going ping! Hopefully I can now leave my safety goggles inside when hanging out my laundry. What a relief!

Here they are in all their newness!

More upcycling!

I've been creating again. This weekend I was sorting through my stash of fabrics and I realised that I had loads of denim scraps left. So, I started randomly sewing the denim pieces together. I made a rough sheet of denim squares which I then trimmed up to make it straight. After this I sewed up the sides and made a lining for the bag from another fabric in my collection.

To make the strap for my bag, I re-used a fabric belt from a pair of combat trousers which have long since gone to the charity shop.

Add some iron on patches I found in my button barrel and a bit of velcro for fastening the top closed and voila! Here we have the finished project.

I didn't add a stiffener for the bottom of the bag as I prefer a soft bag. (I didn't have any to hand anyhoo!)

Not including the time it took to sew the denim together, the bag only took half an hour to make.

I'm really liking this bag and so I think I'll keep it, it was after all an experiment. But in the same vein, I think I'll be progressing down the route of giving old denim items a new lease of life!

Burgers!

I've been awful at posting recipes lately and for that I apologise!
So here's an easy one we made at the weekend for you to try....


Turkey Burgers

1 pack (500g) minced turkey
breadcrumbs
garlic salt


In a large bowl place the minced turkey, (you could also use minced up chicken to make this recipe)
To this add a sprinkle of garlic salt and a good handful or two of breadcrumbs. The mixture should be really thick after youadd the crumbs and these help bind the mix together.


(Do you notice how I don't measure anything much except maybe the meat, but that's only as it comes in a weighed pack from the farm shop!)

Mix really well with your hands to get the meat really well combined with the garlic salt and breadcrumb.

When thoroughy mixed, form into patties and gently fry in a moderately hot pan until cooked through. I use a tupperware type burger press thingy that my Mum gave me, but you can just squish the burgers together with your hands. My mixe gave 8 good sized burgers.

We served these with creamed mash and lot of veggies, but you can serve how you like.

The mix works best and holds together better if the meat is cold, so if you aren't planning to make the burgers to eat straight away, leave the mix in the fridge until you're ready to do so.

Sorry for the lack of pictures with this post, but the familly had hoovered up the burgers before I could get a snap :0)

Where did our manners go?

Where did all our manners go? That was the question I asked myself at work this morning. I was making my way through a building, carrying all my equipment for my job as I usually do, when I came to the exit door. A very smartly dressed lady, I would say in her late 40's was coming behind me. I pushed the door open and held it open as I stood to the side to let her past in front of me. She marched through the door, didn't even glance in my direction and walked off. Not an acknowledgement nor a simple thank-you. To top it all off, she then let the door close on me as I was coming behind her. Grrr!!! I was furious!

A simple smile and or a thanks would have done, but no, I was treated like an invisible person. Was it because I was in uniform? Possibly. Was it because I was younger than her and she thought I'd have no manners either? Possibly. I will never know.

On the same subject, is it just me or do shop staff nowadays have no manners either? No please or thank you when taking your money, change and receipts dumped in a heap in your hand. I could go on and on!

What experiences have you had in regard to basic manners or the lack of them? I wonder sometimes if I'm just unlucky and get the rude people all the time. Leave a response to let me know what you think!

Thank you for taking the time to read my rant today :0)

Manners cost absolutely nothing to carry and they make life a little nicer.

A soother for bites and stings

As we have really glorious weather at the moment, I thought I'd share a tip with you that I collected at at the game fair last week. A really easy remedy to help soothe bites and stings.
Firstly when you next do your grocery shopping, pick up a bottle of cider apple vinegar. Then go for a walk when you get home and find a nice patch of elderflowers. Pick a large handful of the flower heads. I chose ones that were well in flower and left any that were drooping of turning in colour.

Take the bottle of cider apple vinegar and pour a little of it out, then start to push the elderflowers into the bottle. Push in as many as you can to fill your bottle almost to the top.

When completed, screw the cap back on and leave to stand. To apply just use a small piece of cotton wool or a tissue to dab the affected area with the vinegar solution.

This will keep indefinitely as it "pickles" the elderflowers.