Birthday!

Coincidentally I've taken the week off work, and it just happened to have my birthday in it! The OH has had a week off too, and we have been catching up on stuff at home, having a new wall built and things like that.

My birthday itself was cool, we went out for a meal the night before, as I had knitting group the evening of my birthday (you know, priorities).

We had a trip to the garden centre to buy spiky plants to plant along a boundary wall. This is me with the spikiest holly I have ever seen, it's called "Ilex Ferox" for good reason. Although it's English name is the rather cute "Silver Hedgehog Holly". It's to go with the (female) holly we've already got as this one is male.

And birthday presents! The OH bought me the slow cooking recipe book as I've had it out of the library for about 3 months now. And I asked for the other recipe book, the Dairy book of home cookery (as delivered by the milkman), as I used to use the previous edition of it, which belonged to my Mum, all the time.

My great aunts sent me the Archers Addicts map of Ambridge, which used to belong to my Gran, so it's come full circle now. I'm finding it very useful for the back story for some of the characters as I've been listening for about six years.

And a skein of Manos Wool Clasica and some homemade bath teabags from my brother and SIL (although I suspect she made them as I can't imagine my brother doing that!).

And, of course, lots of cards from friends around the world - thank you!

I've spent some time this week sorting out photos and catching up with blog reading. So there might be some more posts from me fairly soon.

Pictures of things in saucepans

The OH thought the post about knitting was a bit boring (mainly because it was just about knitting, all of which he'd already seen being created) so I thought I'd go one better and write a post about things in saucepans.

I've been taking advantage of having some time off work - 13 whole days, what bliss, time to actually DO things - to do some batch cooking and fill the freezer up ready for when we both go back to work and all of our time vanishes again.
This is vegetable stock to use up leftover vegetables from Christmas (yes, normally I would just use an Oxo cube).

And beef casserole (from Clever cooking for one or two which I highly recommend as an alternative to all those recipe books that assume you're cooking for hordes of people or have lengthy ingredients lists. It has a good chapter on making stuff for the freezer). Quinoa bake (not for the freezer, two portions for me, using Anne's algorithm) and mincemeat, cranberry and almond Eve's pudding (from a Waitrose recipe card) to use up more Christmas leftovers.

Then I did tuna pasta sauce (from the Good housekeeping cookery book), ordinary tomato pasta sauce (from Jamie Oliver's The naked chef) and smoky chicken hotpot (from Clever cooking...)

Sick of pictures of saucepans and my hob yet?!
Last one coming up:
Ratatouille and ham pasta bake, yet again from Clever cooking... Oh, but those aren't saucepans.

And I have got more knitting done too - we watched a bit of the first series of Cold Feet (I LOVE that series so much) which the OH gave me for my birthday, so I got more knitting done then. As well as listening to the Archers 60th anniversary programme and trying to cope with the trauma...

I finished the cabled baby tank top off, and have now started a plain one. It isn't really as wonky as it appears in the picture!

And that's it for now. Having produced 4 posts over Christmas normal blog service will now resume as I return to work tomorrow! I don't find the actual blogging part takes up much time, but the sorting out of pictures does - I end up with loads stored on my camera and downloading them, organising them into their category folders (I am a librarian, after all), smallifying them (I use Microsoft Office Picture Manager to make the file sizes smaller so they upload faster and take up less storage space) etc seems to take up ages so I never get any further or end up with pictures intended for a blog post but extremely out of date.