weekend 12/13 march 08

Lazy, by and large. We found a tub of goose in the back of the freezer that we didn’t know we had (more on that project later), so half of it was stir fried on Thursday, and most the rest was shredded, and turned into a goose and leek rissotto. The balance went in the soup pot.

I made the dough for hungarian fennel bread on Saturday night, then got up at ridiculous o’clock on Sunday to knock it back. It was worth it - gorgeous. perlmonger went out on his velocipede yesterday afternoon, and I made a carrot cake. Supper was roast chickie! with roast spuds, and courgette and kale stir fried with some tamari, and the carrot cake with a rather splendid blood orange compote, and vanilla ice cream.

weekend 5/6 april 08

Friday night made banananananana muffins in readiness for purple_peril’s impending visit on the Saturday. Sadly, an accident befell them. OK, we ate most of them.

So on Saturday morning, while perlmonger cycled over to Bedminster to do some shopping, I cleaned the kitchen, then made a proper old fashioned gingerbread from Nigella’s Domestic Goddess book. And it were utterly fab. It transpires that purple_peril is trying to lose weight, so we have had to (wo)manfully dispose of the ginger cake this week. We managed.

The three of us sallied (that’s a pun, for those who know her) off to Costco - nothing exciting: pork, chicken thighs, another shiatsu cushion (for Dave WINOLJ), part-baked baguettes. Very boring, as we are on an economy drive.

Then home to cook pork with sage, cream and shallots, and natter. Sally stayed over, so we fed her crumpets and muffins with jam for breakfast, and then… I can’t actually remember what we did Sunday. Spodded, I think. Lazy time - was good.

balance of Easter weekend

We didn’t do much Sunday - ate a humungous fry up for brunch (lamb and rosemary sossidge, apple-smoked bacon, egg, black pudding, beans, sourdough toast), and then some nice fresh home made scones for supper. And slumped.

Monday I decided to go to Ikeal. Astonishingly, perlmonger elected to accompany me. The roads through Bristol were very quiet; this was because everybody in the area was already *at* Ikeal, and it was *packed*. Still, we trundled round, buying 2 wicker hampers to tidy up Under The Stairs, a plastic mat with fish on for the cats’ food bowls, a new step stool, two mats for by the patio doors, and some tealights.

Came home and cooked dinner. We bought half a salt marsh lamb last year, and so we decided to cook the leg (why did we only have one leg, when it was half a lamb? Was it deficient in the leg department?). This leg of lamb was *huge*. And utterly gorgeous. Studded it with garlic and rosemary, and bunged it in the oven with a good sloosh of red wine. Had it with green beans and garlic in tomatoes, and roasted spuds.

While it was in the oven, we did indeed clear out the horror under the stairs, and put down the new door mats. So Project House is continuing well.

Last night, perlmonger chopped the rest of the meat off the bone, and we minced up most of it. We cooked some into Madhur’s Ground Meat with Peas, which unaccountably I have not put online yet. There are two more tubs of mince in the freezer, and some sliced lamb in the fridge, so thats [counts] five exceedingly generous meals from that joint.

weekend 20/21 jan 08

Fairly quiet, as the weather was vile. Seems ages since we went for a yomp across the fields :(

On Saturday, we had lunch in Cafe Ceiturica - they had only one portion of kofta meatball casserole left (wah), so we shared it, and had a plate of their lovely kebabs too. Then Aldi for bits, down to Stoke Bishop for episode x of the Eternal Hunt for the Perfect Gas Lighter (no, this one ain’t it either), and the farm shop on the way home for meat and veg. We were still full when it came to supper time, so I made some cheese scones and some banananananana muffins. We ate the scones, but had to leave the muffins …

Sunday was mostly spent in evaluating visual mySQL tools, as the data we have inherited on the New Project is utterly incomprehensible. These tools seem to be pretty much all awful - Aqua Data Studio would be the best if it a) weren’t so slow, and b) didn’t disconnect itself silently from the database server. And at $400 a copy, I’d like to see a searchable help file, thankyouverymuch. I think we’ve settled on DBVisualizer, which seems to work reasonably well, and is priced at a more acceptable $149. 20 days left of the evaluation copy, so time will tell.

Had a brunchette of scrambly egg and bacon on toast, then cooked pork pot roast with mushrooms and apple for supper. This left 3/4 of a bramley, so I made the world’s smallest apple crumble with it. Freehand, as the battery in the scales gave out just as I’d measured the wholemeal flour. Still good, though.

And that’s it, apart from a rather soggen Cat Incident, which I am about to write up on the cat blog, should anyone be interested.

working weekend

we spent most of the weekend working;. I don’t think we’ve had a full day off for about four weeks, and it’s starting to show … making silly mistakes with server config files and flailing formed a large part of yesterday afternoon :(

which meant that the Complicated Cooking I’d planned fell into abeyance - it will have to be Duck with Lentils and Ceps tonight. Anyway, we scoffed a full english for brunch, and all we could manage at the end of a long afternoon was a bag of Kettle chips and some chocolate raisins. Very healthy. I was thwarted in my probably foolish desire for a last half glass of wine by finding that the bottle I’d put in the fridge was in fact *red*, due to perlmonger’s inability to put the white wine in the left side of the wine rack. Probably just as well.

weekend 2/3 dec 06

Saturday evening was a tub of mutton and date tagine from the freezer, and X-Factor. Good riddance to the dreadful McDonalds, I say.

Sunday morning I made a batch of carrot and coriander muffins for breakfast, then faffed about for a bit before being Good, and taking the plastics to Sainsburys for recycling, and doing the shopping.

Made a pot roast out of a piece of topside and half a bottle of red wine that had gone over a bit, then out on the monthly Village Walk, yomping up very steep and very muddy fields and paths - I found this hard going, and my knees were Not Happy, but at least I did it. I think the glucosamine are helping quite a bit.

Home for a rest, and to consume the pot roast, with potatoes and cabbage from the Riverford box - it was utterly delicious; probably the best I’ve made evah. And then - astonishingly - the Jordans sallied forth to meet Pat and Dave (WANOLJ but are known to many of my readers) where we formed a team for the Quiz Night at the British Legion Club in the village. We had a whale of a time, although what inspired Dave to play the joker on the Classical Music round, ghod only knows. We called ourselves The Aliens, and we will be making a regular event of this, I’m sure.