Rain Rain Go Away

Well it's Tuesday morning, it's been raining hard for the last 32 hours, it's still raining and I discovered yesterday that I have a leak in my roof which is coming in through the bathroom ceiling. It's so bad I have had to put a bowl underneath it to catch the drips! I have no idea what I'm going to do apart from keeping everything crossed that the rain will stop, but I'm sure that something will come to me.

On a more positive note, I harvested my first apple yesterday. In fact I picked two and made an apple crumble with them, they were delicious :-)

My tomatoes on the other hand are looking very sorry for themselves. Most of them haven't ripened and I'm not sure what I should do with them. I don't know if they will ripen by themselves if I pick them and put them on a windowsill or whether I should be looking up a recipe for green tomato chutney. Any thoughts??

I'm not ready for Autumn, it's caught me completely on the hop. I haven't done my final lawn mowing of the year, I haven't collected any sticks or fallen logs for the fire, which I start doing at the end of August before the weather turns nasty, I haven't bought any coal for the fire and I haven't started filling up the freezer for the Winter in case of snow. I know the last one sounds a bit odd but I live at the bottom of a valley and have been snowed in a couple of times before so I always like to make sure I have enough food for both myself and all the animals to last if it happens again. I feel as if I need to rush and start getting ready for Winter and I seem to have an overwhelming urge to start baking and cooking and stocking up ........ weird!!

Anyway, today I am going to start to rectify the situation, I'm going to bake lots of bread, some pies and casseroles and a couple of cakes and I'm going to start filling up the freezer. I'm also going to go through the cupboards and see what I'm short of and make a shopping list for payday so I can go and stock up. I might even look into something like Approved Food. I have heard good things about the bargains you can get from there and I might see if it's worth placing an order. It would be interesting to hear if any of you have used Approved Food and have any useful tips?? 

Growing Mushrooms and a Birthday

A Couple of weeks ago, it was my youngest daughter's 21st birthday ........ how old does that make me feel!! Ancient I can tell you. My daughter, being the efficient person that she is had sent me a recipe for a cake that she wanted me to make for her birthday, it was a three layer Victoria sponge with a strawberry butter cream icing. The icing was delicious and led to a massive sugar rush as I was icing the cake because I couldn't resist eating the leftover stuff that was in the bowl! The icing is made using strawberry milkshake powder mixed into the butter cream and is really lovely. Topped off with some home made cake bunting and some shimmery princess baubles and she was delighted with her birthday cake.

Sorry about the fuzzy picture, my camera battery was dead so I used my iPad and I think the lens was a bit grubby, despite me giving it a good wipe because, earlier that day, I was trying to get a picture of one of my dogs and every time I went near him with the iPad he licked it!  :-)

For Easter, along with some delicious choccie eggs I got a cute little mushroom growing kit and this week I finally got around to getting it started although, I couldn't resist showing you a picture of the Easter eggs, you see the feather and the straw ....... it's edible! It's made from rice paper and you can eat it, how cute is that :-)

Anyway, I got the mushroom kit planted and now I have a box of soil mixed with mushroom compost hidden in the airing cupboard and I'm keeping my fingers crossed for some lovely mushrooms. 

I also have some progress to report on my tomato plants. I have some teeny tiny tomatoes on them. I love watching things grow and produce food, it never fails to make me smile.

You can just about make out the tomatoes in the picture above. They are about the size of peas but they are growing really fast and it's now time to start feeding them. It's a pity it's not warm enough yet to put them outside but the weather has been awful. Wet and windy and not very warm at all so, for now, they are on my kitchen windowsill being cossetted and kept warm and yesterday, I bought one of those plastic mini greenhouse thingies from the supermarket, a bargain at £6. It's specifically for tomatoes, although, when I bought it I didn't realise how big it actually is. It's 1.5m tall which is almost as tall than I am!! A bit of a shock when I put it together this morning but, once it stops raining, I will take it outside and find somewhere sheltered to put it and then as soon as I have potted on the tomato plants into bigger pots, they can go and live outside in their own special greenhouse. Oh to have a proper greenhouse but, hopefully, not long now until I can afford one so, fingers crossed :-)