Macaroons!

The OH bakes occasionally, when the mood takes him and I let him near the baking oven. He'd been muttering for a while about trying some macaroons and last week he finally got  around to making some. 

Herewith the photographic evidence

They were a bit of  a disappointment to him to be honest. When he added the hot sugar syrup to his beaten egg whites all the air came out of them. So the mixture ended up difficult to pipe and they came out as quite large but flat discs rather than the super little puffed up circles they are meant to be.  

Like the OH and myself, they improved with age, and tasted nicely of almond. They weren't macaroons, but they were things not totally unlike macaroons, and I daresay he will have another go one of these days. 

And maybe we will order some real ones from Betty's of Harrogate for my birthday, if we remember. 

Lock Down Knitting: A Big Thing

So last year I signed up for the 2019 Debbie Abrahams Mystery Blanket because it started in February and I thought my Ph. D. would be all done and dusted by then and a long term creative project would be just what the doctor ordered and there would be no problem keeping up with the monthly  instalments, because after all what else would I have to do? . Well I think we all know how that went. With all the bells and whistles the Ph. D. was not finished in fact until  August by which time I was well behind with the blanket and deep into family stuff, and once that was all over then there was the Christmas knitting, and trips away and all manner of stuff. 

So why then did I sign up for the 2020 Mystery Blanket? Well for all the reasons really that I signed up for the one in 2019. I wanted to know if, all other things being equal, I could actually keep up and finish the blanket within the allotted time. 

And so far so good. I have managed the squares for March April and May all in their correct months, and have done two of the five squares for June which, given that it's only 6th today, I feel is good progress for this month.

I have photos of the March and April squares. 

And as there are 12 there must be a couple of May ones in there as well. Obviously it's a Sand and Sea theme. I'm hoping I can keep up and get this finished on schedule in November at which point I will go back to the 2019 one and finish it. Well that's the plan. 

There is no part of any plan that includes me signing up for 2021!

Horticulture Notes (2)

Sometime last year the local shop had a few cacti for sale. It was a bit of a random thing, they don't normally stock them, and they didn't look like the healthiest specimens in the world but the OH bought one to see if he could do anything with it and has been nurturing it ever since. 

I have not been nurturing it as I am famously impervious to the charm of house plants and look upon them as window sill clutterers and mess makers (dropped leaves and water over spill etc). It's one of the many ways in which we differ.  

Anyway on Tuesday when he was watering the cacti he said 'I think that cactus I bought at the local shop might be about to flower you know!' and I said something soothing and congratulatory in reply without looking up from a tricky piece of knitting and promptly forgot all about it. 

Until the next day when he happened to glance at the window sill and said 'Oh Wow' and 'It flowered' and various other excited things and, lo and behold, it had. It had produced a large and very beautiful flower. 

A Bit of a Moan about Cardboard.

Remember the other day when I got all excited about the Phase 1 lock down easing, and one of the things I was most excited about was the re-opening of the local recycling centre. This was mainly because the prospect of ridding ourselves of the accumulated cardboard was sending me quite giddy. 

Pictures of the cardboard mountain.... not only a fire hazard but making access to the back door very difficult too.

Well Orkney Islands Council duly announced some recycling centre re-opening. They re-opened two, both in Kirkwall, and both for garden rubbish only. Oh, very well done OIC. Not. 

I was cross. I think cross might be understating my reaction slightly. In fact I was so cross that I insisted we topped up our normal rubbish bin with cardboard, not that there was room for much since rubbish collections were among the first things to be cut and are therefore less frequent than normal. I didn't feel at all guilty - see comments above re fire hazard. I know lots of people never bother to take their cardboard to the tip, just add it to their normal bin and that's what we'll continue to do until it's all gone or the council re-open our local tip and let us take the cardboard there again, whichever comes first. Just at present it feels like hell might freeze over before either of those other two things happen, but I'm sure that's just my annoyance talking there! 

Another Two Bite the Dust!

Calming activity continues to meet up with the great declutter as I do a few more jigsaws. My need to do them has abated over the last few days which I take to be a good sign of decreased anxiety levels but two recently completed ones are bound for the library/charity shop, when they re-open and start accepting donations. 

First up is this one

which turned out to be one of those puzzles that it's really fun to do the first time only

Next up is this one which I've had for years but this was only the second time I've done it.

It's a lovely picture when it's finished but my word, it's a difficult one to do. A major problem is the similarity of so much of the design, and closely related to that pieces of the same size and shape which look as though they are in the correct place but actually aren't. Frustration city. 

And this one following I am still in two minds about

It's very pretty but sorting out the pieces is a total pain, since so many of the colours are so close. So it may get a reprieve. Or it may not. 

Horticulture Notes (1)

Earlier in the year there was a post about the OH's coffee plant which was displaying lots of blossom and producing fruit as well. It has done this in the past, well last year, but there wasn't a lot of fruit and he just left it alone. This year we've moved tings along. (That's a royal we, by the way. Generally I don't do plant/garden stuff)

So a few days ago he harvested the fruit. It's called cherries apparently.

The next stage is to get the beans out.

You can apparently do all sorts of exciting things with the discarded outer layer, including eating it raw. He tried. I don't think he would recommend it, but possibly it's just an acquired taste.  

And then you dry the beans.

He tells me that he's now on to the next stage which is dehusking the dried beans and it will apparently take 'forever'. I'll keep you posted. 

Free at Last! Free at Last!

Well not totally free, but allowed to get ourselves elsewhere in the car to get our daily exercise. It is one day short of seven weeks since we stopped ourselves going to Burwick for one of our favourite walks, having learned that police  in Orkney were cracking down on people driving elsewhere to take walks. Yesterday the First Minister lifted that restriction from today and I listened very carefully to what she said to see if there was a distance restriction on how far you could travel. She specifically said that they had decided not to put a distance limitation on it, which was excellent news and despite gloomy prognostications from the weather forecasters, today was beautiful. So we jumped in the car and went off to Burwick.

I took photos, even though I have dozens of pictures from when we've done that walk before and we saw flowers on the flax plants and lots of birds foot trefoil. We saw and heard skylarks and oyster catchers and eider ducks and in fact the only two things we expected and  didn't see much of were people and seals. We saw one man in the distance and passed another man who we actually know. The seals were not in evidence at all. This is odd as Burwick is usually a god place to see them and I have lots of photos of wide expanses of blue sea with small black dots, which really are seal heads, in them to prove it. Just not today.

We went a bit further than we usually do on this walk simply for the joy of being able to do it and enjoy a different view, and some sunshine, and my only regret really was that, given it was quite breezy I hadn't  taken an elastic thing to put my hair in.This is now long enough that we have managed to move on from bunches to a very short ponytail. Which is progress of a sort. 

Here's a selection of the pictures, many showing that normal tendency of all photos of Orkney to major on 'big sky'.