Hope

 Hello!  Spring is on its way, the blossom is appearing on the cherry and plums trees!  To me blossom always lifts my heart after the winter blues, and what a winter has it been.  I have to admit that I have been down not quite depressed but pretty close to it.  Outside of the world situation with covid and political unrest rearing its ugly head everywhere, my family have had some losses and though expected it hits you hard.  But all you can do is pick yourself up and carry on, life is for living. 

 

I have been playing about with my watercolours a lot lately and the above was done from a branch of plum blossom.  I was not happy with it and decided to play around with it in photoshop, can you see the photo of my great grandparents? I am very pleased with it.  I am thinking of printing it out and sending it to my brothers and sister.

 

Spring doesn't start officially till September, so I know that we still will get frosts for a bit yet, but it was so nice not to have the heating on and have the washing dry in one day! This past week I have been out in the garden tidying and preparing some ground for the sowing of broad beans and peas.

 

Like many of us I struggle with my weight and today I broke my self imposed ban on baked goods,  I made pumpkin scones!  So delish.  Had them with pumpkin soup for lunch.

 

 

 Pumpkin Scones

• 50g softened butter
• 1 cup mashed pumpkin
• 1 tsp. dried coriander and1 tsp. cumin or ½ tsp. curry powder
• 2 tbsp. chopped coriander or parsley
• 1 ½ tsps. Salt
• 2 tsps. Baking Powder
• 2 ½ - 3 cups s/r flour (depends on the water content of your pumpkin) 

Cream butter and spices together. Whisk in all other ingredients except the flour. Fold in flour with a knife.  You may need to add more flour or a little milk depending on how watery the pumpkin is. Turn out on to a floured surface and lightly knead, just until the ingredients come together. Make a roundish shape circle with the dough, and roughly divide or use round cutters to cut out rounds.  Place on a floured baking tray and bake at 210C for about 10 - 15 minutes.  They last longer than ordinary scones and in fact taste better the next day.  For keeping longer than 2 days I would freeze.

( I have used mashed sweet potato and even parsnip!  All delicious) If you don’t like spice leave it out however they do need the herbs).

 

Have a blessed week everyone and see you soon.

Day 8 and Day 9

Hello, I am rather late with Day 8 as it is midday of Day 9!  So this post will cover both days.

Yesterday, I practically spent in the garden, tidied the herb bed and then gravitated to the vegetable beds as is my wont.  I am more of a vegetable growing person by nature, but I have to say I enjoyed my flower garden this year.

I mostly cleared the pumpkin patch - 5 pumpkins and 6 squashes.  I was growing to pull up the zucchini plants but noticed that they each had some fruit, the recent rain must have quick started them, so they got an stay of execution.
Then on to the sweet corn patch, I needed a bit of elbow grease to dig those up, the roots went way down.  By then I was hungry, but too tired to cook a meal from scratch so here was the opportunity to do a convenience meal, my version.

 A real quickie, Barbecue Bean cottage pie.  The basis is the mash potatoes and the beans. I added some sweetcorn that needed to be used,  simply put the beans and any vegetable you desire into a baking dish, top with mash potato and if desired sprinkle some grated cheese on  top.  Bake for 1/2 hour or so in a moderate oven. And voila.....

 I used instant mash as I am trying to conserve my potatoes as I am not wanting to go out during the lockdown.  I had half for lunch and the other half I froze.  In the afternoon I cleared the tomatoes and the cauliflowers and the broccoli that were manky looking.  By then I was really tired and came inside and did some reading during which I fell asleep. After a supper of soup and bread I watched TV but my eyes kept closing so I went to bed rather early.

Today I woke up a 5am!  All  that sleep yesterday.  After a cup of tea I decided to do the house work - laundry, vacuum cleaning and cleaning out the bathroom.   By then it was time for breakfast,  I was quite hungry so had scrambled eggs on toast.  Then another nap!  I see I am going to have to have some kind of schedule as I can see my daily pattern will disintegrate.  I can easily fall into a pattern of insomnia and that when my RA  flares.  So I will that tonight. 

For the rest of the afternoon I played around in PAINTER ESSENTIALS   and made this little meme for you all, you are welcome to copy and paste it to your files and send it to others or use on your blogs.