Jubilee Update

So the Jubilee weekend is upon us and life has been all go.

The Terminator has a lovely case of Jubilee chicken pox. The ducks and chickens are producing eggs at a prodigous rate. So far I’ve cooked a BBQ outside on the coals. A pork and aubergine curry accompanied with cauliflower and beetroot curry and home made naan bread. A beef pot roast and home made vanilla ice cream, but not together. That would be horrible.

The A-Bomb prepared a little Jubilee tea party in the living room. The weather took away thoughts of holding it outside. Which included tea cakes, rose infused tea, strawberries and scones.

These were all nice variations on life as normal. But we have also started off a 10 litre batch of elderflower champange. It’s been a long time since we did any home brewing so this is a nice return and hopefully the product will be up to scratch.

There has been a lot of preparation work taking place to get the house tidier and unpack further following our move. We’re hoping to get some substantial jobs done this year including air con in the bedroms and a complete re-wire of the house.

We have some new arrivals in the form of 3.. no! 4.. no! 5 guinea pigs. Which apprently don’t hunt and eat rabbits to my great dissapointment. Other solutions for the rabbit menace may be needed.

I have a new toy, a lovely red tractor and I’ve enjoyed taking it out to mow the paddock. It’s only small 16 hp 3 cyclinder with a flail mower. But it’s easy to use and does the job in keeping the paddock in check until I can get around to making a wildflower meadow out of much of it.

I’ll try and follow some of these up with dedicated posts in the near future.

Cooking With Monsters – Sausages

A cuumberland style spiralled sausage

I haven’t done any interesting cooking with the monsters for a while, so I decided they might enjoy having a go at some breakfast sausages. I’ve had mixed success in the past with sausages. Despite having all the right butchery equipment I’ve never quite got the consistency or taste quite right. So never one to shirk a challenge I doubled down by including the monsters in the process.

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Cooking WithThe Monsters – Courgette and Goats Cheese Soup

A chopping board with knives courgettes and some chopped garlic

As previously mentioned I occasionally have the bright idea to involve my darling children, A-Bomb and the Terminator, in cooking a meal. So this week I thought I’d try courgette and goat cheese soup. This recipe is from a cookbook The River Cottage Year by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. It’s a really nice cookbook, Although there are only a few I use from it. The recipes are themed on an annual cycle split by month, this recipe is from August.

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Cooking with the Monsters: Lasagne

A beautiful dish of homemade lasagne.

So occasionally I feel sufficiently foolhardy that I think cooking with my children is a good idea and this weekend was one of those occasions.

Over the years EmmCee and I have tried lots of different forms of cooking but it’s been a few years since we last made fresh pasta so we thought that might be a fun activity with A-Bomb and the Terminator. So this weekend we decided to include the kids in making lasagne from scratch.

Now given that I wanted this to take less than 12 hours I decided to make the ragu and bechamel sauces myself and only include the kids in the pasta making and assembly.

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