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.