Cooking

 Coffeeshop at church is getting more and more customers these days, which is great but I need to bake more to keep up with demand. There are two ladies who come in regularly to help. One cooks one recipe each week and the other cooks two recipes. That leaves me doing everything else. I don't mind really but just occasionally I would like a week off. We have not been away at all since lockdown began in March 2020 and we are beginning to feel that we would like a few days away. It is daunting when you have to cook in bulk and pretty well guarantee that everything you make will both look and taste great. So few people seem to bake these days and the quantity required does put people off volunteering.

On Monday I baked the bare minimum of cakes etc so that I could spend the rest of the day making lasagne. We serve homemade soup, baked potatoes and a hot "special" at lunchtime. the specials rotate between cottage pie, lasagne, cheese and tomato pasta. cheesy veg pasta and pizza. We were low on lasagne in the freezer so I made more. I made 74 portions in the end but the killer is that it is all packaged into two portion foil trays to put into the freezer. The foil trays all have rounded corners but lasagne sheets all have nice sharp, square corners which all need snapped off so that the lasagne sheets fit in the trays. For the topping, I use my friend's yoghurt and egg mixture which tastes lovely and freezes well. It took me nine hours to make everything on Monday and would have taken longer if my nice husband had not done all the washing up for me and also chopped the veg that I put into the lasagne sauce.  I didn't need any rocking when I finally got to bed : )

New Year woes and good things

 Christmas and the New Year feel like a long time ago now. We were meant to go to our elder daughter's for New Year's Day but the day before, small grandson had turned all spotty with chicken pox. He has now kindly passed this along to his dad who had escaped it as a child. Poor man! Our son's family has two members down with Covid but they are now on the road to recovery. The other family members seem to be escaping. Isn't it hard when you have a house full of people and bedrooms shared and then some go down with Covid. My son is sleeping on the bed settee which is not built for tall people like him.

Not to be left out of the sympathy stakes, I have had a heavy cold, my husband has had a funny bug and I have hurt my knee somehow and am hobbling around with a borrowed stick and feeling like a very old lady. What a family! I am discovering that it is not easy to walk around a supermarket with a stick because it keeps slipping on the tiled floors. I keep having to try to make the stick land on the joints between the tiles otherwise it doesn't provide any support at all. I have been trying not to walk too far and to rest my knee but I have had to go to a supermarket three times this year. One time, I called into Asda in the evening on the way to somewhere else and happened to be there when they brought out a trolley full of final reductions. Everything was reduced to 10p or 20p and I definitely came out of the shop with a smile on my face and a bag full of bread, broccoli, sausages, ham and yoghurts. And I spent a whopping £1.30 too : ) Fortunately there was just enough space in the freezer to put some of it away for the following week. It certainly cut the housekeeping bill for a couple of weeks.

Happy New Year!

 Wishing you all a happy and definitely healthier new year : )

We have had a peaceful week since Christmas. We had a lovely day at our daughter's on Christmas day with her family and other "older" relatives. (Our other daughter and our son got together so that the children were with each other.) My daughter's family are vegetarian and she had cooked a fabulous nut roast with brazil nuts and cranberries and various sorts of vegetables which were very posh and very very tasty. After we came home in the evening, my husband said that it was so good that he had not actually missed having meat. That is incredibly high praise!!

We went to our son's on Boxing Day and had a fun afternoon with our grandchildren. I do enjoy seeing them : ). We were supposed to go to our older daughter's yesterday for New Year's Day but smallest grandson went down with chicken pox on Friday so obviously the visit didn't happen. Apparently his nursery school has been quite literally decimated by chicken pox so this was a problem waiting to happen. Daughter is supposed to be going back to work this week so we are waiting to see what happens.

We have had a lovely break from coffeeshop duties but they are starting tomorrow again. I shall have to spend three days this week on coffeeshop instead of the usual two so I will be tired by the end of this coming week. However, I shall look back with pleasure on this week just ended as we have had a lovely rest and done practically nothing : )