Blog Neglect - House Buying

So the blog has been pretty quiet of late, and the reason for this is that Ian & I bought our first house at the end of May, and have since been fighting with the millions of boxes of stuff we have. We counted over 100, and then we emptied some of these and refilled them, so we estimate we had about 130 boxes to pack and unpack.

House buying is extremely stressful, it involves lots of chasing of solicitors and things and it leaves a rather large hole in ones pocket! But, we now have a pretty large kitchen, and a dishwasher too, so baking should be easier from now on.

We haven't been completely cake free since April though - I have indeed used the new kitchen to make some baked goods but unfortunately neglected to take photos. Ian has been working late a lot, and as I'm his chauffeur, I've been leaving work at 3 and then returning to work at 8 with dinner and making up my hours. Now, getting home at 3 feels much better than 5, so I have been utilising early leaving days by making cake. The first cake I made was a Peach Melba tray bake, recipe here. I altered the recipe slightly as I'm not a fan of almonds, so substituted them for more flour. The cake turned out very moist in places where the fruit exploded, but this was not a bad thing. My team at work made short work of the cake, possibly because they are cake fiends, and also because it was hard to cut the cake into lots of small pieces as it just fell apart so I had to make each square quite large.

New Blog Feature

Where I work, the canteen has recently put up their prices by quite a ridiculous amount, and consequently lots of people are now bringing in packed lunch. If you eat lunch with people every day for a long time, eventually you run out of stories to tell. So instead of trying to think of new conversations (there are only so many times you can try to think of an animal starting with every letter of the alphabet), I have decided to analyse peoples lunches. I've been doing it for a while, but now other people are bringing in packed lunches who didn't before, some slightly weird lunches have been appearing.

So, the new blog feature is on the left hand side - there is room for the top ten weird lunches. So far there aren't many listed, but the way things are going, I imagine there'll be quite a competition for top spot.

For example, today PV produced from his lunch bag a large baguette, an entire boursin, a big wedge of tesco value stilton, a small number of spring onions, a third of a camembert - wrapped in A4 paper, some butter and a tub of raspberries. I'm all for making packed lunch, but I feel it should be somewhat more made than this! PV proceeded to chomp away at various bits of bread and cheese, interspersed with raspberries every now and then, probably just to annoy me as I believe in saving dessert until last. I think the spring onions were a bit too much for him, and we did all agree that perhaps pickled onions would be better next time. As a result, there was some left over, so we thought it was only right to play with the food in the way we were all told not to as children.