Sunny reflection....

As part of the decorating and renovating that I've been doing recently, I now have a new front door. Which I love! I've posted a pic further down, but I just wanted to share this one first.  I was going out to put out some rubbish this morning, and as I walked into the hallway I was greeted by this lovely reflection from a burst of winter sunshine coming through the glass in the door....

Here's an outside view of the door so far, it needs another coat of paint, but the weather had been so so bad that it wasn't drying well and couldn't be rubbed down to put on another coat. I love it's bright redness, and it's really shiny too which is just what I wanted!  Shows up the rest of the house though,so that will need a new coat of paint too when the weather's a bit better.

Mmmm....tasty.....

I've had a squirrel rootling about in my garden lately.  He seems to be there most days for the about the last couple of weeks. Not too unusual for most of you I suspect, but we don't see them in Walthamstow very often...I think the herds of cats that hang around and the foxes probably keep them away most of the time. Anyway this little fella has been having a right old time grubbing about in the flower tubs and borders, but I haven't been able to get a photo of him.  You know the scenario, by the time you walk away to the other room to get the camera or your phone to take a picture, when you back, he's disappeared! Anyway, I managed to snap him yesterday, it's not a very good picture, probably because I took it through the glass window in my back door, so it's a bit fuzzy.  He appears to have a very tasty tulip bulb in his little paws!

Double 0 Heaven...

Well, despite a rotten cold, I managed to sniff and snuffle my way through Skyfall, the latest Bond epic(apologies to anyone in the cinema who may suffer later from my selfishness!)

I'm sure we all remember the delicious Daniel Craig in Casino Royale...reproduced here just for the sake of gratuitous eye candy...

Source: homemadecosmetics.blogspot.ca via Sandie on Pinterest

Then there was the grand Royal Premiere of the new film at the Royal Albert Hall, just along the road from where I work....just to give you an idea of the scale of the Hoo Ha, here's a very bad picture taken from the roof of our building, by a very kind (and tall ) young man who leaned precariously over the parapet to get it. The whole road was closed off for the whole day.....

So we come to Skyfall....on general release now (as they say)

Source: whereisthecool.com via Katie on Pinterest

I thought it was great. Back to the quality of Casino Royale, although I would say that Casino Royale might still be marginally better.  I recommend a viewing, there's a twist at the end, that I'm not going to tell you as I would have to kill you if I did.  But my friend and I turned to each other and said "Well...they kept that under wraps, didn't they!"

Enjoy!

Elvis has left the building!

Elvis is the plasterer, who has left me with wonderfully smooth walls in my bedroom which, when dry, will be gasping for a coat of paint!

End of an Era....

Sadly, I had to go to a funeral at the weekend.  RIP Auntie Irene....

This was taken this time last year when she was the grand old age 91and 1/2 with the youngest member of the family! I find it very sweet that the cardigan she is wearing is one my mum knitted for her....and sadly, mum's been gone for 12 years! She was doing very well for her age, still in her own flat with a little help, but contracted an infection that she couldn't fight, so for the last couple of months had been deteriorating, but not in any pain (something to be thankful for) anyway, she's now reunited with her brothers and sisters.  The oldest of them, and the last to join them.

It's Nice To Be Appreciated....

A little pressie arrived on my desk this morning as a thank you from a member of staff that I had helped out...very sweet! (no pun intended)

Wot I did at the weekend...

I did a couple of nice little things at the weekend with a couple of friends. Nothing very adventurous, but just a couple of local things (I live in Walthamstow)

First we visited the newly refurbished William Morris Gallery (known locally as The Water House)  in Lloyd Park. I met my friends there, so when I eventually found somewhere to park I had to walk through the park to the house. If you come on public transport you would normally approach from the main road and then you are directly in front of the house.

Anyway a nice little stroll and I made a friend on the way...

It's a pretty little park, although they are doing some works at the moment, so it's not as picturesque as it is usually. 

And eventually....to the front of the house....

It's been spruced up no end, compared to a year or so ago when the work started.  I believe they have had Lottery money to do it. Unfortunately no pics of the inside, although I did take some without a flash, but they were just of fabrics and wallpapers for my own inspiration. I hadn't visited for many a year, and I remember it being very dark and fusty, but it's now bright and modern, and very well laid out, with the compulsory interactive areas for the young'uns.  I recommend a visit if you are ever over this side of London, and they now have a nice little cafe with sandwiches and cakes and so on. (That bit of Walthamstow has a severe shortage of coffee shops)

The other thing we did was to visit the "village" show in Wanstead (I use inverted commas because strictly Wanstead is part of London, but it prides itself on having a village atmosphere, and it does, too!) There were various displays in the church hall, along the lines of a WI type show. You know the sort of thing...who had the best tomatoes or victoria sponge. It was the first time they had done this, and sadly there were not too many entries in some of the categories, but it was good fun.  Then there was a flower display in the church itself, and this entry caught our eye....

I thought that deserved a special mention.

We went on from there to follow part of the Art Trail, and ended up at a little craft fair in the Library. Which had some great stuff and we all treated ourselves to a little gift!

Been waiting long?.....

Just had to share this picture of a very patient lady in Walthamstow Central Bus Station....she's been there a week or so at least!

She is actually part of the E17 Art Trail

Recipe organisation.....

I was just reading Heather's post on Lavender Blue about how she organises and culls her cook book collection.  I'm always interested in how other people organise things....probably because I'm not very organised myself!  Anyway, I thought I would just jot down a few notes about how I cope with my ever expanding recipe collection....hope Heather doesn't mind me stealing her idea! 

My cookbook collection is not very huge, but I do have quite a few, however, at the moment most of them are in a box in a storage unit, while I try and decorate and renovate my house, so I seem to be collecting new ones, and a huuuuge pile of recipes printed from the recipe sites that I visit.  Mostly the BBC Good Food and Food.com sites but also from the various inspirational blog writers that I frequent.  Oh, and magazines too!  I quite like Easy Cook for simple quick ideas.

So what I do is this....

I have an ancient laptop that someone was going to throw away, and I use it for my recipes. I only have a desktop pc, so the laptop is easy to take out into the kitchen.  I don't have a special programme, I just use Word.

If the recipe is printed off the internet, and doesn't have a particularly helpful picture I type them into a word document, and save them, organised into folders for different course, and sometimes even within that folder into other headings, like low carb, or vegetarian.  If it's a recipe from a magazine, then I will scan it and save the scan.

I'm slowly reducing the pile of "tried and liked" recipes that I had accumulated, and keeping up with the new ones. I still have a pile of magazines, but they should gradually dwindle as I go through them and decide there's nothing else in there I want to try...although I guess I could scan the ones I might like to do and save them too! The only drawback with scanning them is that I can do a find in Word for a particular ingredient that I might have and want to use, but obviously that doesn't work with scanned items, as they are basically a photo.

Olympic Sleeping Event....

AND THE WINNER IS.......

And she got Silver in the hairy paws event!

Arancini

Just wanted to post a quick picture of some Arancini that I made yesterday.  We are having a "do" at work and everyone is bringing something from their country....we're very international!  I was born in the UK to British parents, but before them I'm a mixture of Russina, Polish and Italian, so I chose to go with the Italian bit!  I've made these before from a recipe here on Food.com and I love them.  I didn't have enough ingredients at home to make a tomato dipping sauce, so I have a jar of Roasted Pepper Pesto to go with them....
Excuse the bad photo, it was taken very quickly on my phone...

One of my favourite blogs....

I got a new computer a while ago, and had to try and reinstate all my bookmarks. For some reason I forgot about this blog, which I absolutely love. I came across it the other day and remembered to bookmark it. It's always good for a laugh, but also check out the weekly post with the absolute best cakes you could hope to see!

Today's lunch...

Apropos of nothing in particular, here's a shot of my lunch today....

It was just a throwing together of bits and pieces from the fridge...a few cooked new potatoes, a chopped hard boiled egg, a couple of slices of ham, a little bit of red pepper, and a chopped pickled gherkin.  Stir in some mayo, right there in the box, and hey presto....lunch is ready to go!

How uncomfortable must this be.....

A Very Special Evening....

Well, you'll never guess where I was last night! 

I was at a very special performance of La Boheme, at the Royal Opera House.  A friend of mine who is a real culture vulture had a spare ticket because her husband couldn't attend, and she very kindly offered it to me. This production was the 20th anniversary of Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna first meeting in this very opera at this theatre, and the first time they have sung together for 2 years.

It was beautiful....the music, the voices, the stage sets, the surroundings. I even shed a little tear at the end! And even though we were sitting quite high up we saw everything, and my friend even had a spare pair of opera glasses (told you she was a culture vulture didn't I!)

I'm going to say I haven't been to the Royal Opera House before although in truth I went on a school trip when I was about 14 to see La Fil Mal Gardee, and although I remember that I enjoyed it very much, I don't remember much about the theatre itself, except for the little opera glasses on the backs of the chairs that you deposited a threepenny piece in. Here's one of them, in case you aren't as ancient as me!

It was a very special treat....I wouldn't say I'm an opera buff, I like some, but I'm not a real connoseuir (sp?)

I've seen a couple of production of La Boheme over the years, one on stage, and one live screening, and even I could tell that last night's performance was a cut above!

And what I really loved at the end as well was the fact that people really do throw flowers on the stage when the leading lady takes her bows.  I know we see it in the movies, but I never really thought it actually happened!

Now here's a very bad picture of the auditorium....

You see those fabulous red curtains?  They were the cause of the start being delayed by about 25 minutes. Due to "technical" problems they were unable to open them.  So we sat and waited and every 5 minutes or so someone would pop out on stage and apologise and then they would try again and it didn't work, and another 5 minutes or so went by and someone would pop out again and say bear with us for 5 more minutes.  Then they decided that they could manage to open them but didn't want to take a chance on closing them  in case they couldn't open them again, so they would leave them open and at the end of act 1 we were treated to the crew coming in to change the scenery, it was quite interesting and amusing. They did manage to close the curtains after act 2 though and everything was fine.  It made for a late finish though, and I didn't get home till nearly midnight....very late for me on a work night!

working at home....

I've been having a problem with one of my knees which is making it difficult to get around and walk very far...and is extremely painful to boot! So I managed to work Monday and Tuesday and thought I would work at home on Wednesday to give it a rest. 

This is what the cat thought of my work....very boring...but good to use as a pillow! (Luckily the keyboard is on a shelf underneath!)

Rain, Rain go away......

If you are in the UK, you will undoubtedly know how much rain we've had over the last month or so....unfortunately because of that (presumably) my roof has now sprung a leak.  Luckily my brother has contacts in the building business and knows a roofer, but there's not much to be done till the weather improves and he can actually get up on the roof.

Now this leak, is in my bedroom, not over the bed luckily! and up till last night had only been a slight drip which didn't disturb me, but at 4.30 this a.m. it started to come through in quite a constant trickle, which kept me awake for some time....I eventually managed to ignore it enough to drop off to sleep again...although this did involve lying on my right side which cut off the sound to my right ear a bit, and the left one doesn't hear so good anyway, so it all got a  bit muffled!

I have managed to put the approriate receptacle under the drip though....

The Stresses of Knitting.....

on double pointed needles…..

I've been off work since last Monday, so I thought I’d show you one of the things I've been up to. 

I’ve been making these cute little bunny huggies to a pattern very generously posted by Sandra on her blog Cherry Heart .Now I spent half the day trying to get to grips with knitting on double pointed needles! Never having done it before, I’d watched my mum in the past, and I figured “how hard can it be!”….Wrong!! After quite a long while struggling to figure out how to start I eventually dug out an old magazine with some instructions, and still didn’t get it, but I found out why I had 5 needles instead of the 4 I thought you should have! I was about to throw the whole cat’s cradle across the room but resorted to good old Google and YouTube! 

In the past I’ve always managed to teach myself most things from a book, but this one just escaped me… I don’t have as much patience these days as I used to either! There aren’t any pictures of my progress, suffice to say it looked like a dogs breakfast!

Why did I find it stressful? Well, I was just petrified that one of the needles would slip out of the stitches while they were flailing about as I knitted on just one of them! However, eventually I managed to finish one…and of course it doesn’t look a bit like the one in the pattern. For some reason I had one ear longer than the other…but hey, no bunny’s perfect are they?  The second one (the lilac one in the photos)  was much better!

I seem to have accumulated quite a few eggs of different sorts over the years, and they all get brought out at Easter and displayed in this pretty spring egg holder...hope you like the photos, and thanks again to Sandra for the pattern

More Marshmallow Madness....

Photo from original book...in other words what they should look like!

OK, so I've made my first attempt at marshmallows!  Not particularly successfully, as usual, my first attempts usually aren't very successful. Some of it may be my fault and some of it may be down to the fact that the book is written in "American" .  I don't mean that unkindly, but there are certain things that we don't have over in the UK, or the equivalent is not necessarily the same  as that available in the US.

What mine looked like!

To start with Light Corn Syrup is not easily obtainable, and although Golden Syrup works, it does impart it's own flavour to the finished item, espcially as marshmallows are quite a delicate flavour in their plain vanilla state.   The other thing I had a problem with was the gelatine....now this may be my problem, but the recipe stated 4 1/2 teaspoons of powdered gelatine, mixed with 1/2 cup (125ml) of water.  Now the sachets I had contained 4 1/2 teaspoons but the packet said that a sachet would set 570ml of liquid.

Aaah...I've just re-read the packet and it does say to dissolve the sachet in 120ml of water, so I misunderstood and added extra water because I thought it would be too thick or set too quickly....Oops!

So apologies, the only real problem is the Light Corn Syrup, which probably is available by mail order if necessary. That probably accounts for the fact that I couldn't beat it to what was described as the right consistency, and once left to set, it was still quite sticky in the middle and considerably gooey-er than I expeected them  to be.  Definitely have to try again  now!  I did get quite frustrated with the whipping time, as it didn't seem to be going well.  The book describes a freestanding mixer with 10 speeds, and I only have a hand mixer with 3 speeds, so after almost 15 minutes you can imagine how my shoulders were aching!  All in all not as difficult as I anticipated, and probably a lot  easier if I'd got that gelatine thing right! They tasted great though and I took some round to a friend to be guinea pig, and she and her brother said that they tasted brilliant!



Marshmallow Madness!

Thanks to the lovely Sylvie over at A Pot Of Tea and A Biscuit I am now the proud owner of the brand spanking new book Marshmallow Madness! Which I was lucky enough to win in her recent give away.



It arrived today, and at first look it's absolutely scrummy, but then marshmallows are scrummyness personified.  I've never made marshmallows before, although I've attempted (with some success )  to make Turkish Delight and Halva.  Well the Halva was better than the Turkish Delight which was a bit rubbery although the flavour was good. I suspect as with most things that practise makes perfect!

So I will be dashing to the shops on the Weekend to see if I can find Light Corn Syrup.  I probably won't find it but after a bit of Googling I think Golden Syrup should be an acceptable substitute.  Will let you know the outcome in due course (with pictures if it's successful!)

Nostalgia Strikes Again...

I've  no idea what the woman next to me on the bus was eating but the smell of it reminded me of...and I'm probably showing my age now...

I haven't had them for years (do they even still make them?).  I don't really buy sweeties, except for the occasional chocolate fix. But as soon as I smelt that they popped into my head. They were about the only mint I would eat when I was younger.  I didn't really like peppermints very much....still don't actually.  But Murray Mints had a gentle creamy flavour which I did like very much. Sad thing that I am I also remember the advertising jingle....but I won't torture you with singing it!

And the winner of the best service award this year is....

Edible Glitter
I placed an order with them yesterday just before 4pm, and had an email about 20 minutes later to say that my order had been despatched.  I'm reading it and saying "Really?" to myself.  But lo and behold at 7.20am this morning there was the postie banging at the door with the delivery!  So, a big thank you to Edible Glitter for being so efficient....and heres some pics of what I ordered....excuse if they are not very good, I took them very quickly this morning (made myself late for work too!)

There were these lovely vintage style doilies, and matching fairy cake case....

A selection of decorations...

 Aren't these slightly startled chickens great....

And some pretty little flowers...

Guess what I'll be doing this weekend.....

Proverb of the day....

Never rely on the people at the bus stop before you to stick their hand out and stop the bus! We nearly missed it!

This is because I knew these two were waiting for the bus (there's only 1 at that stop) I knew it was coming down the road because they were standing in my line of sight and said it was coming and they were obviously preparing for it. Then, just as it looked like it was going to go past without stopping (which it will, and there wouldn't be another one for 20 minutes) one of them squeaked and started waving at it. Now normally I would have stuck my hand up anyway, but this time I just let them get on with it...lesson learned!

Fond memory....

Someone in a meeting at work the other day said something that brought back a fond memory of my Grandma although she's been gone many years now. She was a typical Grandma (especially a Jewish Grandma!) in that she always wanted to feed you. So you would turn up to visit and the conversation would go like this...

Hi Grandma
Hello Bubeleh, do you want something to eat?
No thanks, Grandma, I had lunch a little while ago.
Have some chicken soup?
No thanks, Grandma
Have a sandwich
No thanks, Grandma, I just had lunch
How about some spaghetti and meatballs? (Grandad was Italian in case you thought that wasn't very Jewish!)
No thanks Grandma, I'm fine
Do you want a cup of tea?
Ok, I'll have a cup of tea
Do you want some cake?
No thanks Grandma
How about a biscuit?
No thanks Grandma.....I'm sure you're getting the picture. Eventually I would usually give in to something just to stop the conversation and get on to other topics!

God Bless, Grandma Sadie...may she rest in peace!

I kid you not....

I've just seen a guy on the bus reading the dictionary! Really...like it was a paperback novel...definitely not just looking up a word!

Some people.....

Just a quick note to have a moan....I (a middle aged woman, with a bad back by the way!) have just unloaded boxes of copy paper from a trolly while watched by a young man who was waiting to borrow it!