Not an exciting shot, because not an exciting day, sometimes you just have to hang around at home and get the chores done. Tomorrow won’t be any more eventful either. At least it gives me the chance to show how the garden has started producing: the leeks, mint, rhubarb, rosemary and kale you see here all went into dinner, in their different ways.
Another one of those exciting Mondays working at home, where I need to crank up the creativity not only to take the photo but also to think of a pithy commentary. Which, today, I can’t. Happy Mondays.
Coming to the end of a long (for me) period of time spent entirely at home. Let’s enjoy the kitchen while I’m still around. This stuff takes an hour to make and costs about three pounds for a year’s supply — and is the best goddamn piccalilli I’ve ever had.
Always a pleasing event of the year. Not many blackberries around yet, but they will come. Plums… for us will, I hope, be just as much in glut as they were two years ago. Believe me, if you live in Hebden Bridge and want cheap plums, give us a couple of weeks, we will be overflowing.
A day working at home. In need of inspiration (for many aspects of my life), let me document the next stage in the cultivation of our habañero plants, first seen on here back in August. A portion of the small but still potent fruit of these has now been strung up to dry; the other half has been turned into a lovely, fresh, spicy paste. Yum. Hopefully more will grow from the same plants, in time.
First day of a welcome five-day break from work. As a gift bought last year (months ago, in fact), Clare booked me on a baking course today run by the very impressive set up at Slattery’s in north Manchester (actually Bury). Got up very early, put in as hard a day’s work as I have in a long time, and came out of it with a lot of very nice cakes and ideas about how to repeat this production process. I tried to document it on camera as well without getting too much in the way or distracted from my own labours. Here Liz, one of my four fellow students, gets her roulade base out of the oven, to soon be filled with strawberries and cream. Yum.
This little beauty fruited while we were in London, and has several siblings on the way. How far they have come, on my bedroom window sill, since they appeared on this blog as babies at the end of August.
Proud parent as I am, I’m still going to eat it, you know. But not whole. Habaneros are very hot.
Hardly the best photo in the world I know, but it encapsulates the day — the annual pre-Christmas family gathering and Mum’s annual chocolate log. It’s my Dad’s hand helping itself to the end piece. Happy Winter Solstice, at least the days stop getting shorter and shorter from today.
It says a lot when you get a photo of my dinner, or rather dinner-to-be, as photo of the day. But on a grey, dull and uneventful December day, this was a splash of colour and form, at least.
She’s certainly going for it as if it might be. Like us, this lady was in the departure lounge of Fiumicino airport, but, I suspect, leaving her home country rather than returning to it.
Being 42 