Monday was a difficult day.
The rain rained, the wind blew, people were annoying and I was tired and grumpy. I sat down to write about something but couldn’t think of anything useful to say.
In 13 weeks time, I’m going to Amble again. I’ve decided that it’s my second favourite place in England, the first being London and the third Broadstairs. So I decided I would post some pictures that of those places in the sunshine, because it will cheer me up. Tomorrow I shall be more cheerful…
Welcome to Monday. How was your weekend? I had another quiet weekend, however, I’ve been an organising demon, I’ve cleared out lots of messy areas in the house, been a good daughter and am ready for what the week has to throw at me..
Friday Night Pizza and non alcoholic drinks….by this point if I’m at home on a Friday, you know this is gonna be the routine..
On Saturday, I woke up headachey and if it had been any other month I would have assumed that I’d drunk too much wine the night before, however, this could not have been the case ’cause of dry January so who knows why, stuff happens! After a conversation with Ma about the glories of her new kitchen and another with Christelle just catching up, I started on the housework and fell down a cleaning wormhole, where I started and kept seeing things to sort out. Apart from the usual routine, the bedroom window needed some serious cleaning to combat the war on mould I’m waging on the flat, it’s an old house and the windows at the back of the house are double glazed but installed into wooden frames which is not best. The white kitchen cupboard finally has doorknobs! I’ve been meaning to do that since October!
I did some serious sorting in my bedroom, I started by getting all the detritus on the surfaces either in their proper place or in the bin, then started sorting out drawers. There’s more stuff to work out and keeping things tidy is a never ending task but the bedroom looks much calmer and in order now! And yes, that is a pile of books waiting to be read!
On Sunday morning, I got up and after breakfast,
I went to Surbiton to admire Ma’s kitchen, before that though there was blue sky from the train, it feels like ages since we’ve had a sunny day. Ok it was windy but I’ll take what I can get.
The kitchen is amazing and looks so much bigger, it’s also a great relief not to be attacked by kitchen doors falling on my head when I try to open them! Ma and I took a walk to the supermarket to fill her giant new fridge freezer! Then Christelle came over and we moved the old fridge out of Ma’s living room where it’s been living for the last couple of weeks and into position for being picked up in the week. Then we all headed into Kingston to buy a new kettle, toaster and bin for the new kitchen. Floating around John Lewis looking at kettles and stuff is a nice relaxing time for me. I like shopping that doesn’t involve changing rooms! However, Christelle and Ma are not so keen and we went to lunch and then walked down by the river to pick up the car Ma had booked.
Ma took me home and I spent 2 hours (yep I timed it!) setting myself up for the week ahead, so I cooked lentils and roasted vegetables for this week’s packed lunches, made applesauce, baked cookies, make jelly, did the ironing and put the washing away, did all the washing up and the weekend’s final load of washing. Finally, I made sure that I was ready for the morning. Then feeling quite pleased with myself, I spent the last hour before bed, drinking tea, reading and listening to Russell Davis.
So a good and productive weekend, perhaps a little dull but I’m not sorry about that!
My favourite Isley Brothers song..
Hello and welcome to the last weekend of January. I am so ready for this month to be done with, January feels like the longest month of the year. After last week, when I was getting it done but being a brat about it, I’ve worked on having a better attitude. Part of that has been about reminding myself about all I’ve got going for me. It’s been pretty cold around here, ok it’s been -28 C in some parts of Canada and here it’s hovered about -1 or 2 C so not very cold but it’s been cold enough that I’ve been glad to have a home and central heating that I can afford to run and yes money has been and will continue to be a bit tight around here but not so tight that I worry about the roof over my head. My decisions are about whether I can afford a haircut this month or nice handcream vs. a cheaper one, not a choice between heating the flat or food. There are a lot of people, in the UK, that I know, making those choices at the moment. At the beginning of the month I set some goals to help me plan and build, the type of life I want to have. It’s not easy for me to do, but it is a luxury that lots of people just don’t have. Reminding my inner brat of that this week, has made life much easier.
1. Drinking. There 31 days in January and aside from the New Year’s Day champagne, I’m not going to drink in any of them.
26/26 – 26 days down, five more to go and there is a manhattan in my future. There have been days, Wednesday night for example, when the trains were difficult and it took me 2 hours to get home, where normally, I would have said ‘sod it G&T time, I deserve it’. That didn’t happen, getting out of the habit of rewarding myself for a hard time with alcohol is a good thing I think.
2. Food. I will take a packed lunch to work every day and I will eat 5 portions of fruit and vegetables a day.
Lunches 16/16 – It should actually say 17 times out of 16 because I made lunch every day and didn’t eat it on Tuesday.
Five a day 26/26 – Not really sure how I managed 5 a day this week, it felt like I wasn’t eating enough vegetables, but I counted it up and there it was, I’m pleased that I’m doing this without thinking about it!
3. Coffee. I’ll drink it three days a week for January (probably Friday, Saturday and Sunday!). The other 4 days of the week I’ll drink herbal tea!
15/15 – On Thursday morning, I realised that I was really looking forward to coffee on Friday morning. I like redbush and lemon and ginger tea but not as much I enjoy the coffee on my coffee days.
4. The messy cupboard. By the end of January it will be tidy. It will have new shelves, I will be able to find things in it!
1/1 – Done. It’s still tidy and it was so easy to set up the bed for Ma on Saturday night and it’s generally so much easier to get to everything, that I’m finding it much easier to do things like the ironing and that hoovering because I don’t have the 5 minute struggle to get to the tools I need!
5. Sleep hygiene. Sunday to Thursday sleep rules are. No computers after 9pm. In bed and ready for sleep at 10pm.
16/17 – I had a slip and on Thursday the lights didn’t go out until 10.30, which I completely blame on the book I was reading, I got totally wrapped up in it and just had to finish. Generally, this week was not a good week for sleep, which is normal for this time of the month and also the reason for the migraine on Tuesday. Those things are great reminders for me of why it’s important to set these habits, it wasn’t a good week for sleep but I got back to sleep quicker and the migraine was shorter (when in that kind of pain 7 hours rather than 24 is like a gift from God!). Also I’m always a bit more sensitive to bright screens after a migraine, so shutting the computer down is easier!
6. Self Care. I will moisturise every day, I will remove hair weekly and I will look after my feet!
26/26 – I’ve finally used up the bottle of moisturiser that’s been sitting next to the bath since sometime last year, my skin is so soft I almost want to stroke me!
So one slip this week but the first in the month. I feel really good about this. I know that these are all pretty simple goals but I’m so pleased with myself for sticking to them so far and I want to give as much focus to them in the next five days as I did at the beginning of the month to finish well!
Yesterday, I gave you 4 non-alcoholic drinks from the archives. Today I wanted to give you something that works both ways for drinkers or non drinkers and something that feels a little special. I saw this a while ago and filed it away for the summer, I love hibiscus and bissap so didn’t need any persuading that this would work. I am also really missing the ritual involved in drinking and decided to drink this from a flute which made it feel a bit more special.
Once you have the basic syrup, you could top it up with fizzy water or tonic (as here), fizzy apple juice might work too. On the alcoholic side there’s champagne, fizz or maybe sparking cider would work.
Ginger Hibiscus Syrup (adapted from The Kitchn)
What
4 and half cups of water
1 cup dried hibiscus flowers
2 inch piece of ginger, thinly sliced
1 cup of sugar
4 cups ginger ale
How
1) Rinse the hibiscus flowers throughly.
2) Put hibiscus, water and ginger in a saucepan and bring to the boil. Turn down the heat and simmer for 20 minutes.
3) Turn the heat off, stir in the sugar and leave to cool.
4) Strain (I strain through a muslin cloth), add the ginger ale and chill.
5) To serve, half fill a glass with the syrup and top up with fizzy water or sparkling wine.
Happy Friday..bit of a mixed bag this week and not all the links are from the Guardian…
1) Redundant. I’ve been here and remember it well. Go read this..
Then trading started, and all I remember is being shouted at by angry people who couldn’t use their gift cards. If you know anything about companies who go into administration you will know that gift cards immediately become invalid. It is not the choice of the staff. Let me say that again. IT IS NOT THE CHOICE OF THE STAFF YOU ARE SHOUTING AT. If you are the kind of person who would get angry about that, then think about this. You have just lost your £10 gift card. The person you are screaming at has just lost their livelihood.
2) Eating well is hard work when you’re poor. Wise words.
It’s not just about the cost of your food budget. It’s about the value of your food budget. So yes, you could pootle off to your local butcher (if they still exist) for some beef shin that costs about £2 for 2 people, but how much is the added cost of cooking it? A couple of hours in the oven all adds up when money is tight and that budget meal eats in your resources elsewhere. Sometimes that’s doable. You can do a bag of baked spuds at the same time and if you’re on quarterly bills there’s time to put cash aside before the Big Six put the costs up again. But if you’re on a prepayment meter for the electricity and you need to wash your hair and the kids’ school uniforms before the money runs out, then microwaving some hot dogs seems like a much better idea.
3)How to write a recipe. I’m just not enough of a perfectionist!
First came an overarching muffin philosophy: Muffins are not cake. “I have a lot of opinions about breakfast baked goods. And I feel like although muffins are pretty much cake that we pretend is okay to eat for breakfast, I insist that this good is on the breakfast side of the line, I feel like it should have breakfast ingredients in it and it should be lower in sugar and … it shouldn’t be as buttery as a cake.”
4) The snow is not responsible for a recession.
Supporters of government economic policy, which includes the large majority of City economists, have begun to suggest that the recent snowfall may cause an unprecedented “triple-dip” recession. The problem with this idea is that GDP in the final quarter of 2012 will also have been very weak and may have contracted. That was long before the weather disruption.
5) Has anti abortion campaigning lead to a rise in single parent families? Interesting.
In Red Families v. Blue Families, we pointed out the irony that blue states, despite their relatively progressive politics, have lower divorce and teen birthrates than red states. In fact the college-educated middle class, partly by postponing having children, had managed to better embody the traditional ideal: that is, a greater percentage of children being raised in two-parent families.
6) Girl drinks. I’m not a fan of super sweet drinks but this is quite interesting.
If the Pink Lady were a piece of household hardware, she would be a floral-print hammer—
7) Photos of fire fighters in Chicago where it’s really cold!
This Monday was ‘Blue Monday’ which is apparently the day we all crack with our resolutions and go wild eating and drinking everything we’ve said that we wouldn’t at the beginning of the month.
To help me stay on track, I’ve been searching for inspiration from other times when I gave up booze and I’m surprised how many non-alcoholic Friday Night Cocktails there were (although in fairness a lot of them are all about gingery things). To help you stay or get back on track, here are 4 non-alcoholic drinks that taste great and are good for you…
2) The Apple Grapefruit Mint combo in this post.
3) Bissap
As I pointed out last week, it’s hard to be enthusiastic about food when you’re tired and it’s cold. One of the reasons that menu planning works for me, is that it means I do a lot of prep work on the weekend, so when I get home from work, the effort in getting dinner ready and in my stomach is minimal. Cottage pie is exactly the kind of food I’m thinking about here. All I need to do is put in in the oven, cook some peas and dinner is ready. It’s a home made ready meal.
However, January is also the time when everyone’s thoughts turn to healthy eating so I wanted cottage pie but I wanted to feel better about eating cottage pie. I’ve been eating a lot of cauliflower recently and mashed cauliflower is great when you want the feeling and texture of mashed potatoes but not the calories that mashed potatoes involve. Cauliflower mash is also a place were I use frozen vegetables. Anyone else snobby about frozen vegetables? I used to be, I didn’t like what freezing did to the texture of the vegetables and for anything that you’re planning to eat as nature intended, with the honourable exception of green beans and peas, I still still prefer fresh. However, with anything that I’m planning to mash or soup or stew frozen vegetables are fine. They are normally cheaper (£1.30 for a head of cauliflower and the same price for 1kg of frozen cauliflower) and you don’t have the same issues with them going bad.
This is another recipe that isn’t a recipe. Take some meat sauce, spread it in the bottom of a pie dish (I used my dinky little one person dish!), boil some cauliflower in stock and puree it in a food processor, spread on top of meat sauce, add cheese. When you’re ready, bake in oven for 25 ish minutes and dinner is done.
As I mentioned, we had a bit of snow over the weekend. So I went to the park to take pictures. So here are far too many pictures of the snow!
Work for me stopped on Thursday, on Friday I spent the day indoors waiting for the BT to arrive and install a new phone line. He did come but it didn’t go smoothly and by 6pm, I had no phone line and cabin fever. However, it was too late to go and admire London looking white and pretty.
However, I decided to be thankful that I hadn’t cancelled the other line until Feb and consoled myself with Friday Night Pizza and Father Brown on iPlayer, much to my surprise, I’m really enjoying Father Brown, though it’s the least realistic setting for a Catholic Church in 1950’s England that I can imagine. Though expecting reality from series about a crime solving Catholic priest is really a fools game!
Saturday morning started stupidly early so I could be really for BT part two and this time the engineer got the line working. Once I’d sorted out the phone, I got on with housework and shopping and planning dinner for my poor kitchen deprived mother, she’s spent the week ‘cooking’ in the living room!
Ma arrived on Saturday night and we ate dinner (roast chicken, mash, brussel sprouts and roasted cauliflower), watched The History Boys and listened to Brain of Britain. It was very rock and roll…
On Sunday morning, we woke up to find that it was snowing again. After breakfast, Ma went off and I spent the morning lying about reading. It was still snowing at 3pm when I ventured out for a walk in the park.
That was the weekend and provided that the trains don’t collapse tomorrow morning (we are totally rubbish at dealing at with snow in England!), it’s back to work..
