Wednesday 16 March

Much as I have enjoyed doing the Simple Woman's Daybook, I've felt for a few weeks it's time for a change. I may return to it at some point, but for now I'm not enjoying it as much as I should do. After all, blog writing should be fun, right?
For an online group I've been a member of for several years, we kept a diary for a week. We all said we had such ordinary lives and we do, but when you keep a diary, you notice that actually, something interesting happens almost every day.
I really enjoyed writing that journal, and thought I'd try to post here more often with just little snippets of everyday life. We'll see how it goes!

The weekend was all about food...

Cheese fondue with cheese that B. brought back from his ski trip in France in February


Served with a crunchy rocket salad, inspired by reading Nigel Slater's The Kitchen Diaries, my new favourite cookbook. He writes well, he makes me laugh, he has very simple recipes, I love the photos. I got it from the library but I suspect I won't be able to resist temptation and soon head over to Amazon to get my own copy!

And rhubarb pie for afters. My rhubarb plant has survived years of neglect, in fact, it seems to thrive on neglect and would get huge if a certain almost 9 year old didn't like rhubarb quite so much and didn't regularly come into the kitchen with armfuls of rhubarb stems! The pie here had the first rhubarb of the season and is made with a layer of almond paste on top of sweet pastry.

I've been preoccupied with cooking with leftovers and fruit that's about to hit the compost bin. I noticed that I throw away far too much - often a case of eating something else than what I had planned, or only needing a small amount of something and ending up with the rest in the fridge, not knowing what to do with it. Last Sunday I made hummus with an opened can of chickpeas, which I've had for lunch a couple of times this week, we have homemade yoghurt in the fridge, and I've been baking rolls with a mediterranean flavour (tomatoes and olives):

It took a lot of willpower not to touch them when they first came out of the oven - the whole house smelt of freshly baked bread and nothing more mouth-watering than that...

I had an unexpected few hours with almost 12 year old I. on Saturday. They were with J. all weekend but I happened to be home on Saturday and I thought she'd enjoy coming to town with me rather than go to the pool to watch N. during his swimming lesson. It was only a few hours but it was lovely to have some time together and as a treat we had a coffee at Thornton's cafe.

The weekend was for getting back to the building project too. The brickwork was finished last Friday and the brickie had left quite a lot of mess behind. So we had a good tidy-up around and B. has now got started on the woodwork. It's been a few months since we stacked all the bricks out and there was virtually no progress over the winter, so it feels good to get going again.



Have been busy knitting and crocheting too.

This is the hideous, sorry, colourful colour combination that I. requested for her birthday. It actually hurts my eyes working on it. I thought 4 squares would be enough but it doesn't quite cover the cushion pad, so now I have to make 9. I made a calculation error and thought I had to do 6. You can see why I didn't take Maths beyond age 16, can't you? As it's a surprise, I can only work on it when she's not around, which makes for slow progress.
I also finally started on Cairn and am really enjoying that - my favourite project out of all of them right now and the one with the least priority... isn't that always the case?
I'm having a battle of wills with a dishcloth for my monthly swap. I was halfway through the first one with a lovely lace pattern, but it just didn't grab me. Started on a brickwork pattern, loved it, but the edges are very messy. Started again and the edges are still untidy. Argh! I'm giving it one more go with a different border, hoping it will look right...

Something that made me happy this week:
On Mondays we do our weekly shop, then have a coffee at Costa before we drive to the pool for a swim. We normally have 45 minutes or so till the pool opens, and this week I'd treated the kids to a magazine. They both sat there happily reading, while I was happily knitting. We didn't really talk, we were just busy relaxing. Lovely.