I love you too, Makool....!

I have never posted about clothes before but I couldn't leave the day go without telling you what I found!! I was drifting around the ether world and suddenly it was there, Makool Loves You, and every single thing on their adorable website could have been made for me!!!
I know a certain person over on another blog who would swoon for these mittens.... You know who you are!! ;-)


Oh and if anyone, lets say, was to love me so much they just had to buy me this Bicycle locket... I'd be ever so pleased...

Eh... hello?

I don't know if its ever happened to you, but our internet was down all weekend and to be honest I didn't handle it very well.  I felt claustrophobic, which was not the reaction I would have imagined.  What shocked me most was the disablement we felt, I would have said we use it as a hobby tool but when it was gone we realised just how much we use it.  

What happened was that something with very sharp teeth and a bout of loneliness chewed through our telephone wire... so when we discovered this had happened I sat down at the computer to find out what time the electrical store near us shut at... Doh! We'd have to ring them, whats the number... Doh! We drove down there but they were shut.  This happened all weekend, I also got text messages from people - did you get my email? Nooooooo! 

And I couldn't blog of course - the whole experience was like being locked into a room.  Isn't it funny how something you think you could do without turns out to be one of the most valuable tools you own?

...Anybody there?

Okay I am finally back, and I must apologise for saying I'd be back sooner... but the weather here has been so amazing I just couldn't tear my body out of the horizontal "sunningmeself" position!

We had such a weekend, choc full with barbeques which I will share with you shortly and the weekend carried over, its really only just ended as we went to the beach for the whole day monday and slipped down for a couple of hours more today!

Would you blame us? Look at that sky...

Beef and Balsamic

The rain that poured down yesterday was gone today, and the sun was belting down from a clear blue sky.  It was a day where the sunroof is open, along with all the windows and you still wish you had a fan - as they say in the U.K. "Belter!"

It made us hungry for our 6 week holiday which is coming up in July... we can't wait much longer for Italian skies, and the mediterranean sea lapping at our feet.  We cannot wait much longer for the flavours and colours of the gelateria, the tiny little pastry shops and the local restaurants welcoming us in "come let us feed you all" they say!

Bills favorite meal ever was in a restaurant about five minutes from our families home in Italy, where they served him over eight courses of fresh local simple food, the penultimate dish being steak.  Nothing else but a steak, in typical Italian form, not even with a garnish, just on its own with a light cheesy balsamicy dressing. 

We really try to eat only organic meat, and it means we don't eat meat every day, but it also means the meat we do eat is always tasty as hell and without conscience.  Most beef is free range, but the chemicals and additives in the cattle food plus the high level of antibiotics... well it just makes me uneasy... 

So today, with a few shillings in my pocket, I went to buy some beef.  

Spurned on by pictures of Nicole of Art and Aioli's steak and salad, I filled my basket with fresh greens and blood reds.

I tried to recapture the italian dressing tonight, but I used 2 tbsp white balsamic vinegar to the same of olive oil and added a crushed clove of garlic, a good handful of fine ground parmesan cheese and a tsp of mayo.  It tasted great!

Eating beef with such a light dressing allows the meat to take centre stage, and served with a fresh salad its perfect for evenings in the sunshine.  After the last few days of miserable grey skies and dousing rain, it was a welcome sun that greeted us this morning, and a meal recommended all the way from California fit right on in..

I heart...

...the modern world!

When my daughter was about 4 she asked Santa for an ice cream maker, God knows where she got the idea, but of course he came, he delivered and there it was.  

"Can we make ice cream now?" She asked, running into me with a tub of Ben and Jerrys from our freezer.

 

"No, no, Lovey" I hushed, " You don't put ice cream into an ice cream maker, you need to make the ice cream from scratch"

A couple of weeks later my mother rang me in a flap, Mary had gone down for a visit, and was given some money and when asked what she wanted to buy she kept saying to my mother that she wanted to buy 'scratch'.  My mother couldn't for the life of her figure out what the child was after.  I told her to tell Mary we would get some later.

So we did, later that day we bought 'scratch'... eggs, cream, honey, vanilla essence and sugar, and we made ice cream.  It was good but not long after that machine took up residence in our attic where it has resided ever since, our kitchen being too small to store everything - sacrifices must be made! 

Most days I buy scratch... the chances of me using preprepared sauces have halved since finding what can only be descibed as catgut in a jar of pesto, not that the chances were high in the first place.  I always bought pesto, I don't know why because home made is always nicer.  There are very few things that are not as good homemade as the shop bought version.  Well, funnily enough, except for ice cream... have you tasted 'Ben and Jerrys' Oat Cookie Chunk??

I have the time of course, I'm not working, I don't think I could do most of it if I was.  However I find it just as easy to melt a bit of butter and add flour, milk and cheese as I do to stir a powder into milk.  

The question is "Would I love cooking as much as I do, if there wasn't the safety net of "oh i don't feel like cooking lets get a chinese/run over to the shop there and grab a roasted chicken/take that lasagne out of the freezer"??

Would I love cooking if there wasn't such an amazing variety of produce for sale?

Would I love cooking if food was lasting only a day because there was no fridge to put it in?

I doubt it.  That is why I love the modern world, because on days like yesterday when I had a bad cold, and Joe wasn't too well either, I could relax on the couch while Bill ran across to the shop and brought home a big Steak and Kidney pie, peas and chips. 

Eating my convienient dinner I remarked how this pie wasn't a patch on the one we make here, and everyone agreed.  I must get that recipe out one of these days, I said.  

To be or not to be...

Its always the way isn't it? Something you could do blindfolded decides to take you down a peg or two.

"Oh I'll make the dessert" I said when my mom asked us down my dads anniversary dinner on Sunday, "I'll make the most amazing cheesecake" I beamed. I'll make it the morning of the dinner I thought confidently, its such an impressive dish!

Oh does pride come before a fall...

I did everything right, in the right order, with the right ingredients...

Whizzed a mix of digestives and shortbread biscuits in the processor and added melted butter, then pressed it into a thick base in my tin.

Then I melted the chocolate, as I always do, in a bain marie, and added the cream and the cream cheese. Then I plopped half the mix in on top of the biscuit. I chopped strawberries in the processor and spread them on the top.

Then I did the same with a smaller amount of milk chocolate and poured that on.

Then the strawberries again, and the rest of the white chocolate mix.

I popped it in the fridge and left it for 5 hours.

Then I took it out, happily pushed it up out of the tin on its loose bottom, and it happily plopped all over me and the counter.

It didn't set.

Why? I'm not sure, I have a vague suspicion that I got distracted by my own fabulousness in the kitchen and I may have added 200mls of cream to the milk chocolate instead of the 100mls that it should have been, and the milk chocolate mix not setting ruined the rest of it as it was in the middle.

Anyway as it turned out (after plenty of squalling and taking of the lords name in vain) all was not lost, I reseurrected most of it into dessert glasses, a botch job that no one noticed as anythign but meant to be like that. I added more cream and some ice cream and it came out as a moussey cheescakey in a glass affair.

It was enjoyed by all, except maybe for me who would have been better with a slice of humble pie!

You never know until you...

There is an unwritten, unspoken rule in this family. If something you have never eaten before is offered to you - try it. You can choose never to eat it again, but only as an educated choice.



I cringe when I hear children shouting "I don't like it" when faced with something new, and parents need to promote food as an exciting part of life, something to enjoy, something to seek out... I knew a girl a couple of years back who only ate a combination of chicken, rice, pasta potatoes and tomato sauce. I reeled when she told me she had never tried anything else. The result of her mother allowing her to be fussy, without any reason. I begged this girl to just try something else but she refused. Her loss. Imagine a life without steak, mushrooms, imagine never eating onions, no garlic, no curries!



So Mary has grown up in a house where all types of food is passed around, try this, try that. She has an educated opinion on what she likes or doesn't and that is okay with me, she doesn't like raw onions, and isn't too pushed on blue cheese but loves blue cheese sauce.

And she absolutely hates leeks.

Oh and snails... as you can see from the pictures...