Where is the sun? That is my first question. I’m looking out at a grey sky, highlighting the forthcoming grey day, with slight irritation. The fact that I’m going to be buried in the kitchen all day anyway seems of little consequence. I find a bit of sunlight in the morning really makes the day start in the right way, and as this one so far has involved traffic jams, early morning phone calls and barking dogs, it’s not shaping up to be the best day ever – by any margin.
So what have I been doing? Well not writing this blog, that’s one thing. I’ve been paying much attention to my garden, beans, tomato’s sunflowers, flowers in general – until the attack of the killer slugs, which I can no longer treat with bright blue, very bad for the environment, slug pellets. So the attack it seems is to continue, despite the wool, and the beer traps. The lack of sun though is taking its toll on growing speeds, a late frost caught all of the first Dahlia plants, so the replacements are on catch up, and the beans since being planted out are looking a bit weedy… Not so green fingered this year me thinks…
Apart from the garden and the kitchen which is my second home at the moment, not much has changed. Mr Jones has a new BBQ, which he has used once, a new coffee machine, which he has also used once, and a fish finder that he can’t work at all. He’s seemingly unimpressed with the developments of technology and procrastination should have been his given second name, because an innovation to him is about as helpful as a full stop, judging by the amount of time he takes to actually benefit from someone else’s ingenuity. Take the mobile phone for example. It only took him the best part of twenty years to be able to call someone on one, and now I expect we will wait another twenty years for him to actually answer his phone when it rings…
Talking about the kitchen, Ollie and I have been very busy this week, not only cooking, but creating a few new things, duck liver pate, caramelised red onion marmalade, some stables like gumbo, chilli and crab cakes, but we also managed a chocolate and banana cake and a flapjack rhubarb crumble. So if you haven’t been in all week – you have missed out! And if you are reading this now, on Friday the 13th – then the pate will be out in the grumpy corner at 5pm.
Right I must go, I’ve got about an hour before kitchen duty and I need to talk lovingly to my beans before that…