Baking - But not out of the box!

One of the many, few,  er, probably one of two neglected  tasks we have undertaken during lock down has been a long overdue overhaul of the pull out larder n the kitchen. Amazing how much space you can create in something that is overfull. when you get rid of stuff that is well out of date, bought to cater to someone else and no longer needed, etc etc. Not to mention organising the shelves in a sensible manner. The italics are for the OH who displayed a distressing inability at the time of the tidy-up to see the logic of putting all the tins on the same shelf.

Anyway we discovered various things we had forgotten we had and it seemed sensible to use them up somehow. To this end we have had several trifles, both orange and strawberry, we have had a rhubarb crumble and yesterday, determined to use up a tin of peaches I had no recollection of ever buying and no idea what I could have bought it for, I made a peach upside down cake.

Et voila

I don;t normally post pictures of my baking unless it's the baking box which I like to keep a record of but I took a picture of this because I was really quite pleased with how the peach pattern turned out. Regular readers who know my lack of decorating/finishing off skills will I am sure understand and forgive this small vanity. 

It is delicious by the way and will last us most of the week. 

Dazzling Prospects

Yesterday our First Minister unveiled Scotland's four phase plan for coming out of Covid 19 lockdown. I've got quite comfortable how I am to be honest but I do realise that it's not all about me, also that the things I've enjoyed about lockdown can be carried through into what people will insist on calling the 'new normal'. 

In any case even I found my spirits lightened by two things announced for Phase 1 which, all other things being equal, start in the next couple of weeks. The first is the re-opening of recycling centres. The back hall of our house is currently a mountain range of cardboard making access to the back door and the coal bunker pretty difficult. At the best of times we seem to accumulate large amounts of cardboard; when you've had six or seven weeks when you can't get it out of the house, the pile threatens to spiral out of control. I know the first few day of the re-opening will be chaos, with long queues and rapidly filled skips but the thought of being able to get rid of the cardboard very soon is heartening. Who would ever have thought that being told the tip would be open soon would qualify as some of the best news you have heard in months! 

The second is is being able to drive to have exercise. Being unable to do this never made any sense to me in an Orkney context as, apart from anything else, we have to drive 15 miles to the supermarket. I may have mentioned here just once or twice  (!!) how sick I was of walking along the road in front of our house so the thought of being able to drive somewhere else to walk is really liberating. It will be wonderful to have a change of scene, and will also give me something to blog about other than knitting, reading and jigsaw puzzles.  

100 Books to Read Poster Number 11

Since I don't want to re-read the books from the poster that I actually own all at once (mainly because I don't want to go on a massive C19 novel reading jag) sourcing new books to read from the poster is quite difficult. I could of course just buy a kindle version of them all but then it would be a waste to buy books I turned out not to like. And, let's face it, the strike out rate is likely to be quite high. 

The Borrowbox app is great, and I've had a few enjoyable reads and listens,  but it's not really big on the sort of book that features on a 100 Books to Read poster. I was therefore highly delighted to find one, although rather dismayed by which one it was. 

I assumed I would hate it, basically because I assumed, largely from having seen the film they made of it * that it would be embarrassingly silly and a bit crass. Which just goes to show what a fool you can make of yourself when making assumptions, because I loved it. It was warm and touching and very very funny, and even though I don't think I cracked a single smile during the film, I smiled a lot when I listened to the book and even laughed out loud several times. 

* like Lawrence of Arabia, although I have seen all the film I have never seen it from beginning to end. I have seen bits of it on several occasions and all the bits  add up to having seen it all, just not all at once. 

Anyway you'll all be desperate now to know the name of this gem and it was 

Honestly, no-one more surprised than me! 

Lockdown: Some Books Wot I have Read (2) Crime

Crime fiction has for so long been my non-study staple that I am rather dismayed to find that so much of what I have read in this genre recently has proved a disappointment.

Luckily The Long Call by Ann Cleeves was an exception to the disappointment rule. I opened this with some trepidation. Cleeves has two long standing series; one is set in the north east of England and features a detective called Vera Stanhope, and generally speaking I don't enjoy them much. The other is set in Shetland and features a detective with the unlikely name of Jimmy Perez and generally those I do enjoy. So she and I were playing a score draw when up she came with a new series set in Devon and I didn't know whether it would be a hit or a miss. In the event it was a hit. This opener for the series was clever, involving, and had a sympathetic lead detective, back in Devon after some time away. I was listening to something yesterday where someone said 'All fictional detectives have to have a thing don't they?', and the main character here has two things; he is gay, and he has been ostracised from the extreme Christian sect in which he was bought up. The ostracism stems from his loudly proclaimed loss of faith, which is what came first, but I daresay he would have been ostracised for being gay as well. Unless they had tried to 'cure him', which I understand is favoured in some quarters. Anyway I am looking forward to the next in the series and hoping that I will enjoy that just as much. 

I read Kate Atkinson's Case Histories years ago and was left feeling fairly 'meh' about it, but have since heard people rave so much about Jackson Brodie novels, that I took the opportunity of having it available from our library on Borrowbox to re read it, having convinced myself in the interim that I must be missing something. Well if so, I still am. So many loose ends, so many unpleasant people. Not my cup of tea. In fact I don't think I have enjoyed anything of Atkinson's since Behind the Scenes at The Museum, but as I have read very few that's not intended as a ringing dismissal. 

Finally The Girl in the Woods by Patricia MacDonald is the current Saturday Slaughters choice and we are, much excitement, going to try out a virtual meeting via Skype to discuss it in a week's time. This got off to a very very slow start and I almost gave up on it, but I persevered and in the end quite enjoyed it. About two thirds of the way through the plot took a rather sudden swerve and I was sitting there saying 'What? Where did that come from?' but in fact it was very neatly tied in to what had seemed to be the main plot and I was impressed. MacDonald is no great writer, stylistically, but I have encountered a lot worse recently, and at least she reads as though English is her first language. I don't know that I would rush to read anything else by her, but if I were marooned somewhere and the choice was another book by her or say, a copy of Tatler I'd go with the book. 

More small knitting projects

So here are the two things I finished over the weekend. First up the mitts to go with the hat and cowl previously displayed

In theory I had enough of the multi-coloured wool to do the mitts in it completely. but it didn't look like I had enough when I cast the first one on so I chickened out and did the hand sections in a toning dark blue. I think they look really good. I wore the complete set yesterday when out for my walk since it is still very cold here and it was cosy warm. 

Secondly a doll dress made from the leftovers from my Herbst socks

I finished knitting this ages ago and it has been kicking about ever since waiting for me to sew it up and put on the buttons. When people ask me why I like to knit socks I never say 'because they don't need sewing up or buttons' but I suspect there might be a lot of that in there!

I am working on two bigger knitting projects as well (monogamy, except in marriage, never having been my strong suit); details will doubtless trickle trough to the blog in due course.  

And here is today's ....

This is what our weather looked like when I got  up this morning.

Mo chreach! as they say in places where they talk Gaelic, and wish to express dismay.

I wouldn't mind so much if it wasn't mid-May!

And here is yesteday's post ....

...which I was too poorly to actually write yesterday.

I had a very constructive weekend and was very proud of myself for finishing all the following:

one physical book
one audiobook
one e-book
one jigsaw puzzle
two small knitting projects (and I made a lot of progress on two others)

(Photos/reports of all these to come over the next few days)

In addition to this I did two lots of washing and drying and finally unpacked a huge box of china which we bought about a year ago and which has since languished in the box in my craft room, basically because unpacking it meant facing the problem of where to put it and neither of us was really up to that. We ran it through the dishwasher and we've been using it, but the old stuff (wedding presents, so almost 40 years old) is now hanging around on a stretch of kitchen bench which isn't really spare. We're not quite sure what to do with it. You would think that after 40 years there wouldn't be very much of it left but as far as I recall we have chipped one medium sized plate and broken one lid from a vegetable dish. My thrifty soul rather recoils from the fact that we bought the new (to us)  stuff, but we got it in a charity shop and it was a bargain. And beautiful.