Tag Archives: kalettes

A Weekend of …er…nothing much

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Got home just after 6am (after dropping Julia off at work, not after a night on the tiles!) and after a few Amazon reviews, a trawl of the internet for birthday presents (I have no idea, she won’t give me a clue and the day is looming), looking at the blogs of a couple of my new followers and a diversion into Avro Lancasters, I now find it’s 9am. Where does the time go?

Yesterday started with breakfast, dropping Julia off at work, taking stuff to the charity shop and going to a meeting. I’m helping someone launch a range of Jamaican seasoning, and this involved having another breakfast to test the recipe for his new omlette. It includes chilli, and has a definite wake-you-up quality.

Home for lunch. This was a cup of tea and a mournful look at the fridge as I decided that two breakfasts meant no lunch. I am dieting, and not enjoying the experience.

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Nice cup of tea

In the afternoon I compiled a list of Farmers’Markets in a 40 mile radius and may, possibly, have drifted off for a few minutes due to the sheer thrill of listing. The defining features of Farmers’ Markets seem to be that the website must be out of date and the contact details unavailable.

Then I picked Julia up from work, shopped, moaned about the price of things, fitted a cover to the car windscreen to ward off frost, made tea and toasted crumpets. It’s autumn after all, and you need to keep yourself warm and cheerful.

We re-heated a beef casserole I’d prepared earlier in the week and served it with red cabbage and kalettes. I like kalettes, they don’t take much cooking. they taste good and they are bursting with goodness, or so the website claims.

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Picture of kalettes from last year. I do have a beef casserole photo but it shows brussels, not kalettes, and potatoes, which I’m no longer eating.

After that I blogged, watched poor quality TV (including Strictly Come Dancing), suggested that we should go to tango lessons (I’ve always fancied myself as a smouldering Latin tango dancer, despite all the evidence to the contrary – lack of rhythm, two left feet and suspiciously Anglo-Saxon colouring),  made more tea, ate a supermarket panna cotta that was crammed with sugar and additives, downloaded Kindle books and, finally, went to bed.

There was, as you can probably guess from my anti-frost precautions, no frost.

I hate it when that happens.

And that brings us back to the top of the post. It’s 10 am now and an hour has gone into writing, and re-writing, a post about where my time goes.

After looking for a couple of stock photos to illustrate this post I’ve decided to do another post about my favourite photos, but first I’ll probably do one about Armistice day.

After that I’ll heat up the beef casserole for lunch and cook most of the food for next week.

Then I’ll wash up.

I do hope all this excitement doesn’t wear me out.

 

 

Simple Pleasures

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Sitting here on a gloomy grey day I idly wondered if winter  in England could get any worse. At that point an advert for the RSPCA came on TV. Pictures of neglected dogs don’t half bring the mood down.

At least it’s stopped raining, and every day that passes is a day nearer spring. I like spring.

However, it isn’t spring so I’ll have to make the most of what I have.

The best bit of the day, best bit of the week in fact, was being able to go back to bed after dropping Julia off at work. Any of you who are around a foot taller than your partner will know what I mean. Normally you find the duvet wrestled away from you by a small, compact and determined person who insists on sleeping half way down the bed. When you are on your own you can cover your shoulders and tuck the duvet right up to your ears.

It’s a simple pleasure. but the best ones often are, aren’t they?

Same goes for he Welsh Rabbit I made when we got home. It’s only cheese, milk and mustard on toast but there’s nothing better once you get the curtains closed and the fire on. We even had The Persuaders on TV to add to the atmosphere of cheesiness.

It’s one of the 50 new recipes for 2017. I know it doesn’t seem much of a recipe, but after years of making simple cheese on toast I thought I ought to make the effort to do something a bit better. Somehow it seems a lot nicer than ordinary cheese on toast.

I’m trying a new Cottage Pie recipe tonight, inspired by Jackie’s Post House Pie on Derrick J Knight’s blog. I happened to have leftover veg from the hot beef stew and pork with oven-baked vegetables I’d cooked this week, so it seemed too good to miss.

Winter and comfort food could have been made for each other.

We just ate the pie, with peas and kalettes. I’m definitely getting my five a day. With the leftover veg, it’s a very tasty pie, though the presence of chillies does introduce an element of chance into the eating process.

No pictures. When there’s a choice between eating and photography…

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas

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Yes, we’ve cleared the board of the autumn display and put up some more Christmas decorations. We’ve signed a few Christmas cards the group are sending to other groups they belong to, hat making is under way and we all sniffed the Christmas cake this afternoon – it’s smelling good.

We put the Christmas tree up again. It looks like they had a private party at the weekend and knocked it over. No harm done but annoying all the same, particularly as they left a messy table and a strange smell in the air.

You may note that the tree is decorated with the remains of the saltdough animals we have been using for school visits – waste not, want not.

Apart from that I attended to the bird feeders, as noted in the previous post, wrote a post on kalettes for the other blog, put a goat back in the barn and lurked outside getting cold as I waited to photograph more birds. I came close to photographing a male bullfinch, but it was too quick for me. Apart from that there was little excitement until the table collapsed, flinging tea and telephones to the floor.

Hat making the Quercus way
Our tree, with saltdough decorations
Paper flowers

As we tried to clear the mess from the floor we were accompanied by wailing about phones. My reply (“That’s why we tell you not to bring phones and electrical equipment to the farm.”) didn’t go down too well. On the other hand, when you’re up to your ankles in tea and glitter you don’t want to know about phones, or hear the eternal “It wasn’t my fault.”.

Initially we were left with a mass of glitter in the joints between the floorboards but we managed to clear it out eventually. Well, Julia did. I lost interest and carried on writing about kalettes.

Great things kalettes, a proper old-fashioned cross between Brussels sprouts and kale (that is important as these days people tend to think any cross is a Frankenstein genetic modification job). It doesn’t need peeling,cooks quickly, tastes mild, is crammed full of goodness and looks decorative on the plate.

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Kalettes – new superfood or Emperor’s new greens?