At this time of year, cooking apples seem to be pretty cheap and plentiful, and I’ve always enjoyed a baked apple for dessert. But I really can’t be bothered to wait for the oven to heat up and then bake an apple from scratch, especially not mid-week when my energy and patience are typically pretty […]
In the end, I didn’t do anything to the jigsaw on Monday. Instead, I spent the day embroidering a horse’s backside! The story started years ago, when Chris and I were on holiday in Normandy and visited Bayeux. We naturally went to see the Bayeux Tapestry, and I was very taken with a kit I […]
When Chris was alive, he made a big thing of cooking pancakes and maple syrup for our breakfast every Sunday morning. I think it harked back to when we got married in Upstate New York, where pancakes & maple syrup (and/or waffles and maple syrup) loomed large at every breakfast, and our whole wedding party […]
When my sister and her boyfriend were here last weekend, and despite the burst water main making life very difficult, I made a big effort for Saturday night dinner, which is traditionally the best meal of the week in my family. It seemed to go down well – we all had thirds, and J went […]
I spent this morning through to about 2pm at Eastnor Pottery again, practising my throwing technique. I wasn’t making anything to keep this time, but rather throwing pot after (nominally identical) pot, and cutting each one in half once I’d thrown it to check the thickness of the base and sidewalls. I tried to keep […]
Christopher’s Flickr photo-sharing site is the only one of his social media accounts I haven’t closed, mostly because I get very few nuisance emails from it. I haven’t kept up his subscription to the premium service, and it’s getting increasingly out-of-date, but it’s still there. This week he (or rather, I) got a rare email […]
I’ve had some requests for the recipe for pomegranate lamb, which I cooked before Christmas. Now that I’m back home, and within reach of my cookbooks, here it is. The recipe is taken from The Book of North African Cooking by Lesley Mackley which seems to be out of print but available secondhand from Amazon […]
After completely abdicating on the cooking front on Friday, and having left-over Chinese takeaway for Saturday lunch, I thought I’d better make an effort for Saturday dinner. That always used to be our big meal of the week, when Christopher cooked something special which required more effort than mId-week. It’s a tradition I’ve tried to […]
Three years ago (Is that all? It seems longer) Christopher and I went on a study tour to Split in Croatia with the Kent Archaeological Field School, and had a really good time exploring the stunning Roman remains there. On the last night of the holiday, as is traditional on such trips, the whole group […]
Ever since we first got together, I’ve become something of a closet potter. It was all Christopher’s doing originally – he’d always wanted to understand how to throw a pot on a wheel. So for one of our first holidays together he booked us a week on a pottery course down in Cornwall. The idea […]
