The Weekend

Posted on October 28, 2013 by nicdempsey

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The weekend began with a haircut! I decided to have a little bit more length off than usual and Jane chopped about two inches off my hair, which I was fine about until I got home and had to very firmly remind myself that my hair was shorter not short! No photos of the haircut but I did take a photo of Jane’s ridiculously cute puppy!

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On Saturday, I had a plan, I was going to get my bedroom back to normal, do most of the housework, do the shopping and clean the oven. Then I was going to go and see the godchildren. Easy. Well easy if you don’t have a migraine. I sorted the bedroom out and did some housework, until I just had to give up and go to bed. I surfaced about 6pm hoping it was done, it wasn’t and I went back to bed.

The clocks went back on Sunday morning, so I was a bit confused until I changed all the clocks in the house! I went to the gym and had breakfast.

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The rest of the day was spent getting on with the housework and shopping. I also located my torch in preparation for the “storm of the decade”. In fairness, I think the Met Office might be overstating it a bit, ever since the 1987 storm, they’d rather take flak for overplaying it than underplaying it. I remember the ’87 storm and it honestly didn’t affect us. There were some trees down and a short power cut but we went to school and life continued. Which meant I really wasn’t expecting any issues in London, we are fairly protected.

What did for me though was being woken up at 1am because there was water dripping on my face. Well, the roof is being fixed in a couple of week and this is why! So I moved the bed out of the way which is harder than you’d think, it’s a big bed in a smallish room! Put a bucket under the drip and prayed! This morning it had stopped and I put the bed back placing bucket on top. Hopefully, it’ll be ok, but I didn’t sleep well and it’s fair to say that my flat has not felt like a calm place to be for a number of weeks!

Getting in to work this morning was amazingly easy, I’m kind of wishing for a storm every day if it makes my commute this easy!

What did you get up to this weekend? Any storm related issues?

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Current favourite necklace

Posted on October 26, 2013 by nicdempsey

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Last month, I was wearing this necklace all the time. This month it seems to be this one.

This pedant, Sarah brought back from India. It was just after Stef died and rose quartz (the bigger stone) is supposed to be healing, so she thought it was appropriate. While that’s a little big to ‘new-agey’ for me, I appreciated the thought and it is pretty!

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Weekend Task List

Posted on October 26, 2013 by nicdempsey

There was no real house work to do last week because I hadn’t been at home, this week as I sort the house out in the aftermath of the builder, there is an issue with the window still but it’s outside the house! This hopefully will be the last time I complain about the builder! I feel like I will spend a lot of time on housework and cooking this weekend and that’s ok, ’cause I’m totally up for that!

Kitchen

  • Clean the oven
  • General clean (this means sorting out the recycling and rubbish, mopping the floor and general cleaning)

Cooking

  • Make black bean soup
  • Food prep for the week, breakfasts and lunches
  • Make sourdough
  • Sort out the ‘disaster bread’ recipe so it works

Bathroom

  •  General clean (mop floor, change towels, empty bin, clean bath, sink and toilet)

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Bedroom

  • Move furniture back into room and maybe re-arrange it!
  • General clean (mop floor, change bed, dust, general tidy)

Living Room

  • General clean (sweep floor, dust, tidy sofa, put things away etc)

Hall

  • Hoover
  • Sort cookbook shelves out

General House things

  • Washing
  • Ironing
  • Wash make up brushes
  • Water plants
  • Wash hair brushes
  • Shopping

What’s on your to-do list this weekend?

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Friday Night Cocktail Revisited: Aperol Spritz

Posted on October 25, 2013 by nicdempsey

I haven’t been making anything new, I’m not drinking at all during the week and have been struggling to find time to make and photograph new to the blog cocktails! So I’m going to re-visit some of the old ones!

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We are having amazingly warm weather for October, it’s not quite summer but at 19C I’m pretty sure that we’ve had colder summer days.  Everyone is predicting a really cold winter but the current warm but grey weather has put me in the mood for something brightly coloured and a bit summery.

Time for a bit of Aperol Spritz action.  Since January, I’ve changed how I do it.   a bit and add a slug of freshly squeezed orange juice to it.

So the What list now reads:

3oz prosecco

2 oz aperol

1 oz of orange juice (and yes it does have to be fresh from an orange, not a bottle!)

A dash of soda water (I measured this a couple of times and in my house it’s somewhere between half an oz and an oz)

The How is still the same.

Glass, ice, ingredients, stir gently, drink!

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Friday Links

Posted on October 25, 2013 by nicdempsey

Happy Friday, I hope you are having a good day.  I’m a bit more busy doing the work they pay me for than I’d like to be on a Friday, I like my Fridays at work to be tidying up the work I’ve done during the week and planning and prep for next week and that’s not happening today. Today is more a sprint to the finish with the promise of a haircut at the end, which is good because I’m beginning to look like Cousin It!

Links started off really well and then I got caught up in work and being too tired when I got home to read!

1) A language without numbers

2) Sod off Morrissey. Couldn’t agree more, I can’t stand him and wasn’t keen on the Smiths either.

3) Zoe Williams talking about ‘motherism’. not sure I agree but enjoying the comments.

4) We do seem to live in a world where you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. I wrote this in 2012 when I was feeling quite frustrated at being treated like a second class citizen ’cause I was single and childless.

5) Marginal Losses. Jenny Baker on women and living in a culture of ‘marginal losses’. Full disclosure Jenny is my friend and is also the only women I know who could write so clearly about women, society, church culture AND manage to reference cycling too.

6) I can’t help but think that this is rubbish but some of the comments, nail the whole ‘being a single woman’ experience.

Anything you guys think I should be reading this week?

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Useful but not beautiful

Posted on October 24, 2013 by nicdempsey

William Morris said that you shouldn’t have anything in your home that “you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful”

As a rule for living, I’ve heard worse but as a rule for what you bring into your home, I think it’s one of the best. My house has things in that I think are beautiful. The poison bottles, my bowls, and lots of other things. There are some things that are just useful though.

My draft excluder’s are a case in point. I live a an old house with big gaps between the doors and the floor. Heating is expensive and central heating is really expensive and not terrible efficient. I miss gas fires, Ma has gas fires and her gas bill is much smaller than mine! Anyway, in an attempt to keep the heat in the house I have these.

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They aren’t very pretty, I made them both out of scraps and old things that would have been thrown away. The red one is an old duvet cover stuffed with old jumpers, the second a pashmina sewn around a pillow. They keep the draft out. They aren’t really beautiful and half the year they live in a cupboard, they are quick and dirty solutions to a problem but they are free and they do the job so as far as I’m concerned that’s fine.

What about you? Is there stuff in your house that’s useful but not beautiful? Tell me about it!

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A year ago

Posted on October 23, 2013 by nicdempsey

I posted this recipe for Chocolate Fridge Cake. It was not a disaster.

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And I really want some right now!

 

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Disaster bread

Posted on October 23, 2013 by nicdempsey

On Monday night, I was angry, very very angry.

Anyone who saw my post last week can guess what the issue is. It was the builder, he didn’t show on Monday. This is the frustrating thing about renting, I don’t employ the builder but I’m the one living with his half arsed work ethic. The three day job he started last Monday is still not finished, my bedroom is a mess and I don’t appreciate adding ‘cover bed with dust-sheet’ and ‘move furniture’ to my morning task list. We are now in day 7 of a 3-day job, and the delay is entirely due to the personal issues of the builder. If I had employed him, I would have fired him by now, but I can’t, so I seethe.  The chances of the job being finished by Wednesday are getting more and more remote.

Anyway, enough whining about the flat. on Monday I decided to cheer myself up with some baking. It didn’t go well. I knew what I wanted, an apple-y cinnamon sweet bread. It didn’t happen and I know why, which means, I’m frustrated with myself because I know better and should have warmed the milk to activate the yeast. I am an idiot. Knowing that the rise, or lack thereof, was an issue, I bunged it in the oven anyway and didn’t cook it long enough.

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It really wasn’t good.

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It bits that were cooked actually tasted good, if a bit stodgy, so I’m going to re-visit the recipe on the weekend. Moral of the story, baking when cross and tired, not a good idea.

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Spinach and Mushroom Eggcups

Posted on October 22, 2013 by nicdempsey

During the week, I mostly eat vegetarian food. As I’ve said before, it’s partly budget and it’s partly my choice of trying to buy locally, which means I use the butchers rather than the supermarket, which means that the meat I do eat, is more expensive.

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This change of diet has increased the amount of beans and eggs in my diet. I’ve been trying to avoid substituting cheese for meat as I eat quite enough cheese as it is! I love eggs and eat loads of them, in the morning, they can be poached, scrambled with lentils, and most often, for a weekday breakfast eaten hard boiled or like as eggcups like this although minus the goats cheese. Which means they have meat and processed meat at that.  I think it’s a good idea to keep my diet as unprocessed as possible, so I wanted something that worked as well for quick and easy breakfasts. While I was at it, if I could up the vegetable content, so much the better and this is what I came up with. My idea was a sort of mini frittata and the vegetables that came to mind were mushrooms and spinach.

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I always have mushrooms in my fridge, I mostly eat them raw, either in salads or just by themselves and I always have frozen spinach around as it is really great to add to soups and stews. I also added half of a leftover courgette that was in the fridge but I think that this would work with any sautéed veg you had lying around. I made 10, enough for breakfast every day this week and used 10 eggs, but if you wanted to use some egg whites in place of some of the whole eggs I’m sure that would work too.

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What

10 eggs

10 portions of frozen spinach, defrosted

250g mushrooms, sliced

1/2 a courgette, sliced

olive oil

salt and pepper

How

1. Pre heat oven to 190C. Grease 10 of the cups on a muffin tin and set aside.

2. Heat a tablespoon of olive oil in a pan and sauté the courgette and mushrooms until the liquid is cooked off and they are browned.

3. Divide the cooked mushrooms and courgettes between the 10 muffin cups.

2. Using a muslin cloth, squeeze as much liquid from the defrosted spinach as you can.

3. Put the spinach in a bowl and break the eggs into the same bowl.

4. Beat the eats and spinach together until they are well combined and the spinach is broken up.

5. Pour the egg and spinach mixture into the muffin cups and bake for 20 to 25 minutes, until cooked through (my oven runs hot so don’t worry if it takes a bit longer!)

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The Weekend

Posted on October 21, 2013 by nicdempsey

Hello Monday! How was your weekend?

Mine was lovely, I’m back home, although the bedroom window is no-where near finished, I decided that I’d tough it out at home because it’s not as bad as I thought and I just needed to be home.

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On Friday night, Ma and I were in Watford to babysit Oli. Oli wasn’t happy to see us and refused to leave his childminder’s and cried and cried. Eventually, with Kai and Ma failing to stop the tears, I stepped in, picked him up and walked out of the house with Oli and told him I wouldn’t put him down until he stopped having a tantrum. He stopped having the tantrum pretty quickly but he wasn’t best pleased with me. Fortunately, his Grandma was there to soothe him and we went to Pizza Express for dinner. Ol was great after that, he raced with Grandma and was very keen to make sure that I knew that he was playing with ‘his’ Grandma. We played with his trains and he played games on my phone and went to bed.

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Ma and I stayed at the Travelodge in Watford (just as delightful as it sounds) and in the morning, went to see Oli’s swimming lesson.20131020-202100.jpg

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Oli was great, he’s really getting confident in the water, although not keen on putting his face in the water!

Ma and I went back to hers, picked up my things and came home. We did some shopping and I spend Saturday night enjoying peace and quiet. Ma and I were having a real case of ‘how can I miss you, if you never leave?’

On Sunday, it mostly rained and I mostly stayed indoors reading and sorting myself out for the week at work.

Hopefully, the work in my bedroom will be finished by Wednesday and I’ll stop wanting to strangle the builder. Other than that, I have loads to do at work, a haircut on Friday and a nice quiet week!

What are you guys up to?

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