Birthday bash

In the last few days we have had my birthday and my son's too. So we got together at the weekend and had a family "do". There were only 14 of us as two people couldn't make it. I do enjoy it when the whole family get together. Once upon a time there were just two of us and now the family has grown. They all seem to enjoy getting together too, which makes me really happy.

We tend to go for simple meals because that means less time in the kitchen for those who are cooking. This time we had baked potato with cheese and baked beans and salad followed by an apple and blackberry crumble made in my biggest roasting tin and served with  ice cream or custard. It is not fancy food but everybody had something they liked eating and we all enjoyed the company : )

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More jam

I've made some more jam. I got my hands on some sloes and wanted to do something other than sloe gin with them. There is a section of hedge along the perimeter of the allotments which catches the sun all day long and there was about a pound weight of big black golf balls (huge blackberries) just waiting to be picked. So I did. I added in some windfall apples  just to make sure it set. I've made jelly with sloes before but not jam. This jam has a wonderful flavour and I really like it. It is sharp in the way that marmalade is sharp but sweet at the same time. I cooked the sloes first and sieved them to remove the stones. I wondered if it would be too much of a faff but when I tasted the jam I decided it was definitely worthwhile.

So I have updated my Preserving Year post to include this jam. We have some grapes on our vine and they are nearly ready to pick to make some grape jelly. We don't always get enough grapes to be worth doing anything with them but this is a year when hopefully I will get about 5lbs of jelly.

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Scary story

This morning I did not feel at my best, so as I did not have to be anywhere, I stayed later in bed with my book. My husband was going to the allotment and was packing his stuff up to go and I carried on with my book.  Suddenly one of cats leapt on to my bed and plonked a rat on my lap. A live rat. It really made me jump! After freezing for a moment, I jumped out of bed and ran for the bathroom bin which I emptied on the floor and ran back to the bed and clapped the bin upside down on top of the rat - and held it there while I phoned for reinforcements. Fortunately my husband had not got very far and he came back and helped to capture it and took it up the far end of the garden. Hopefully it will die peacefully there, unmolested by cats. I am not keen on rats, to put it mildly, but after a fright like that, it probably won't survive.

My cat is probably feeling aggrieved that I didn't appreciate my nice present quite as much as he had expected : )

Lovely lunch

I've mentioned before that I had joined the Orchard programme at Tesco. Well the current activity is to do with pairing a nice meal with a good bottle of wine. They gave me a voucher which meant I got a substantial reduction on a lovely joint of pork. My husband cooked the meal and the pork was cooked to perfection with crispy crackling. We had roast potatoes (homegrown) and roast parsnips and onions and green beans (homegrown) with apple sauce (homegrown) and we had a bottle of Jacob's Creek chardonnay with it. Just beautiful!

The Orchard programmes would like me to review the activity, hence my post. I really enjoyed the meal and the chardonnay went really well with the meal Definitely a five star meal. Thank you Tesco! (and my husband for cooking such a good meal)

Busy, busy

This has been such a busy month. My son has moved house and there was work to be done on the new house as nothing had been done for a long time - probably 30 years or so.  I also got to look after grandchildren a lot because it is much easier to pack up a house without them "helping". My husband seems to have spent every waking moment in the new house in the last month. Anyway, moving day was last weekend and the whole family turned out to help. We borrowed a (clean!) animal trailer from our farmer friend and moved all the furniture in that. And the smaller things went by car. This week we seem to have slept a lot...

We also had a short visit to Cambridge again as my husband had a meeting to go to. We have another coming up this month and another in November too. It is a lovely place and I enjoy pottering there.

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