love in a lunchbox

I had the idea yesterday to fill up the little ladies lunchbox with a veritable feast of valentine inspired treats. 

Of course it was about 2am ish the night before that I had this idea and so had to make do with whatever I could find in the cupboards. I cut her sandwiches into hearts. Lucked out with a packet of mini Jammy Dodgers and found some decidedly heart shaped strawberries. 

As I was excitedly scribbling a little valentines card for her I pondered at what age things like this go from adorably sweet to mildly embarrassing. 

When will me doing things like this become an eyerolling irritation for her and invoke the teasing of her peers? 

After much thought I decided probably not until she is about 23.

Have a loved up weekend x

lemony snippets

Just before Christmas, Mr H gave me a lemon tree for our 5 year wedding anniversary.

Just after Christmas I thought I might have killed said lemon tree

I moved it around the house trying to find the perfect little corner for it to flourish in blissful lemony harmony.

It ended up in a prime spot by the back doors, a veritable sun trap.

But then I got a bid giddy with a surprising bit of sunshine in January, and thinking we were headed for spring {delusional} I moved the tree outside onto the deck.

When the temperatures dropped and the so very wintry snow flurries began, I quickly carried it back indoors. To the cosy warmth.

However, the very next day ALL the leaves fell off, tumbling to the floor like a bit of a dead thing.

Ooops.

So anyway, after much panicking, a bit of better late than never watering and a few gentle whisperings of encouragement to the last remaining and clinging on for dear life leaves and buds, I can confirm that our little lemon tree is back from the brink with a bountiful bursting of new greener than green leaves and a veritable bouquet of new blossoms.

We've quite enjoyed following the progress each morning, me and the little lady. Counting the flowers and newly uncurled baby leaves. Our little lemon tree is positively flourishing

Ok, not that flourishing! 

We are certainly not at the point of enjoying our own lemons, as it were.

But feeling in a bit of a springy lemony sort of mood and with a friend round for dinner on saturday night. I whipped up some lemon posset and served in some cute flower tea cups bought years ago from Laura Ashley.

This is sooooooo lemony and creamy { and I halved the recipe as it was just the two of us } that I'd be inclined to reduce the lemon juice quantity next time. And just a few spoonfuls of this dessert is more than enough. 

I dusted with icing sugar and served with raspberries and wafer curl biscuits.

easy like sunday...monday...tuesday... morning

....or whatever day it is??!

Hoorah for bank holiday weekend confusion....!

There hasn’t been much of the ‘easy' about anything recently.

But, long, tiring story short - we are home! Finally.

With the painters, the builders, the tweakers, the fixers, the decking guy, the endless delivery men....and so on, you get the drift....

Anyhoo. Some friends visited at the weekend and one of them asked if we had actually relaxed and enjoyed the new {old} house yet. And it dawned on me that the answer was disappointingly, ‘No, not really’.

There are still boxes to unpack, rooms to titivate, pictures to put up...and not to mention the looooong list of soft furnishings and upholstery bits I want to have a go at. But anyway, we’ll get there.

Moan over, being back home is bliss. 

The amount of extra space we have is totally fab and the new kitchen is better than I could have ever imagined and my new workroom ??... {squeals with delight!!!} definitely more on that later ....umm...when I have put everything away and done the most mega of sorty sorts that ever there was {am slightly alarmed with the amount of fabric and haberdashery bits I have eccrued over the years}. 

I can’t wait to finally have everything put in its place then I can flounce around in a very Martha way, cooking up lovely things and daintily stitching and making pretty pretties ......because obviously, with two small children, I have so much free time.....{ sigh.....}

And so, whenever there is chance of a few minutes of bakey goodness wafting about the spankily new kitchen, well, then it makes me do a little happy dance and all feels right with the world 

{my world }. 

Pear Pastries {original recipe, Nigel Slater}

1. Using a sheet of ready made puff pastry 2. roll out the pastry on a lightly floured surface until fairly thin { a few mm } 3. Using a pastry cutter or small bowl or glass, cut out discs of pastry { I used 98mm cutter }Place onto a lined baking tray and 4. using a smaller cutter make a circle indent onto the top of the disc. 5. prick the centre circle with a fork { this stops it rising }. Thinly slice pear/apple or any fruit really, and place on top of the centre circle. You could perhaps do this in a decorative or pretty way, if perhaps you don’t have a hungry cat winding round your ankles or a baby grizzling with teething pains....Any how, it all tastes the same really....

6. Melt a large knob of butter and stir in 1 tsp vanilla bean paste or a large pinch of ground cinnamon { optional } and using a pastry brush, 7. brush the melted butter mixture over the edges of pastry and across the top of the fruit. Sprinkle a spoonful of caster sugar over the top. 8. Bake in a preheated oven at 220º C for about 10- 15 minutes or until golden brown and puffed up. Allow to cool slightly then dust excitedly with icing sugar.

With the left over bits of pastry - roll them into long sausage shapes then twist, brush with melted butter and cinnamon, dust with a sprinkling of sugar and bake with the other pastries to make really yummy cinnamon twists. Miss Ella ate the lot!

Just a bit yum, really.

I haven’t made these for ages and had quite forgotten how super easy they are to conjure up!

Note to self - always keep a pack of ready made puff pastry in the freezer ready for any morning where a moment of Supermama illusion making is needed.

✴ green living

I'm loving the green that surrounds us. Everything is thriving from the fabulous sunshine and although the garden is lacking in colourful blooms {must do better next year...} I'm learning to love the green and the leafy.

Jasmine leaves in a tiny glass bottle and small ribbon-tied bunches of ferns are making my heart sing this week. 

The botanical greeneries and crisp white linen make me think of an Edwardian parlour, I'm not sure why but there it is. 

So gloriously glorious and springy are the green and white hues, a perfectly elegant and cheap way to decorate a room and so very weddingy too! 

There I go again, obsessed with all things weddingy....

All things green....

ferns and jasmine from a shady nook in the garden,

transferware sauce boat from a nearby charity shop and a gift from a thoughtful friend 

{thank you Miss S.}

Burleigh chinese style bowls {x 2} in pale green 'Asiatic Pheasants' pattern, local charity shop £3

home grown and home made pea shoot and walnut pesto, recipe here.

{I used old baby food jars, which are a perfect size for pesto and improvised jampot covers with fairy cake cases!}

More Flea Market Finds here

Also, still time to enter my giveaway I will draw winners next week.

Sorry if you have had trouble commenting, blogger was a bit disturbed last week and I fear I have a lost some comments in the process. Hopefully now normal service is resumed {because wasn't it a pain?!!!}

✴ happy monday {on a tuesday}

Did you have a lovely Easter? Ours was very quiet but delightful nonetheless. 

There was much pottering to be had, a bit of stitching, a fair amount of baking, a grand egg hunt {or two} and an aching excess of weed pulling and seed planting. I am aching...! What a workout!

I planted celeriac, tomato plants, radish, spring onions, cucumber, lettuce {lollo rosso and iceberg} and an abundance of salad leaves.

I harvested {yay!!} a bountiful bouquet of swiss chard that was planted last year and hasn't been tended to, weed controlled or even thought about since last harvested and is still growing strong having survived  winter and deep, deep snow... It was delicious {washed, chopped, sauteed with olive oil, chopped garlic, lemon juice, toasted pine nuts and a knob of butter! Easy as!}. I also took the first cuttings from the pea shoots planted a couple of weeks ago {easy, easy, easy....how to here} and added them to a salad, and I'm eyeing up my flourishing rhubarb and reckoning it maybe time to cut...having waited so patiently and resisted cutting in it's first year {Oh, the torment}.

And the best thing....knowing we get to do it all again next weekend with another 4 day lie in!!! {well, not so with a toddler, but you know what I mean!}.

Happy 3 day week all! x 

✴ weekend crumbling

{tea lights in vintage brioche tins and lace doily}

You know when someone is a little bit poorly by looking into their eyes, glazed over, perhaps a little pink and with a droopy lidded tiredness that sums up the overall feeling of being run down. I saw this on the little lady over the past few days {a lot better now but for a bit of a cough} and I saw this in my own eyes in the bathroom mirror last night.....Eughhh...lurgy has at last got me. It was inevitable but nonetheless annoying and totally unwelcome.

{brioche tins, wire basket, 1920's ash butter bats and rolling pin and embroidered tablecloth}

Not helped that I was solo parenting all of yesterday and last night and had planned to prepare a lavish dinner for a dear friend who had a special valentine birthday. When cooking for friends I usually plan the menu for days, pouring over the cookbooks and cookery magazines  but yesterday, struggling with a general feeling of Hhhmmppffff  I ended up completely and utterly making it up as I went along, and actually it worked a treat... to the point that I wish I'd paid a bit more attention to what I was throwing into the cookpot {or tagine..} so I can recreate the tasty dish which magically appeared on the table last night! Chicken and squash tagine followed by rhubarb and strawberry crumble. Yum. I think I just about got away with it! Or maybe I was feeling so poorly that anything would have tasted sublime and warmed the cockles?!

 {vintage lace and trims currently being used for headdresses and accessories}

{a bundle of french linen pieces and assortment of cross-stitch monograms}

Although I' haven't been blogging as much as I'd like to recently I have been shopping, oh yes. Thrifty vintage shopping, my absolute fave! With recent visits to Kempton, Kingston and Farnham I have gathered quite a few lovely things. I'll show you just a small selection now and hope to get round to photographing everything else soon.

{glass dome with blue and white china dish and 6 small cocktail glasses}

Anyway I think it's time for more honey and lemon to soothe my croaky throat. Or perhaps a hot toddy?!
Tonight I'm making a completely-made-up-as-you-go-along* sausage stew and blackberry and pear crumble. A gloomy dark and damp day such as this {where are you spring???} deserves a warm and cosy evening of stodgy comfort food and something good to watch on the tellybox {where are you Lark Rise???}.

* although completely-made-up-as-you-go-along several times before so practically a bona fide recipe.

Taking part with Flea Market Finds

✴ frozen dinners

We have just about finished eating the homegrown produce from last year that I squirreled away in the freezer. It's so great to be eating runner beans in January that were harvested last August! 

This year I managed to successfully freeze courgettes, runner beans, turnips and blackberries {picked abundantly from nearby woodland walks}. The small and pretty purple skinned turnips harvested in October were a delight as 'tatties and neeps' for a new years dinner. 

I blanched most things before freezing and more information on that can be found here. 

The blackberries I just washed then laid them out onto trays to open freeze in the freezer before then popping them into freezer bags. Open freezing them first helps avoid them sticking together in the bag.

Berries freeze brilliantly. I often buy raspberries when on offer in the supermarket and freeze the excess. They work very well in muffin, cake and pancake batters, just add them to the mix while still frozen and bake as as usual. I have one last bag of blackberries in the freezer which I think will make a lovely sunday crumble to shut out the cold and miserable rain that seems to be darkening our days at the moment. Bbbrrrr......

✿ Choux, Choux...

On Saturday night we had friends around for dinner. This was so lovely and such a rare occasion since having Ella, and, more importantly I had a brand spanking new cookbook ("Mastering...") which was crying out to have buttery finger prints and sauce drippings smeared all over it!!!

The night before I whipped up these choux puffs. Well, actually I'd attempted them the week before but it had been an utter disaster - the mixture too runny, a lack of piping bag meant huge dollops spread all over the baking sheet which meant big doughy puffs, not at all anything like the crispy light puffiness of profiteroles which is what I'd been imagining!

Luckily this time was different and immediately I knew I was on the right track when the mixture was the exact smooth buttery consistancy as described in the book. Hooray! As it was 1am and I'm not that into kitchen disasters in the wee small hours...!!!!

After only 20 minutes in the oven I tentatively opened the door to reveal a tray of golden crispy profiterole puffs! So delighted!!!

It was really hard not to eat them all up straight away.....Mmmmm the smell of freshly baked puffs wafting through the kitchen in the middle of the night was too yum! I'm surprised it didn't wake guzzle guts Ella up!!

Recipe here 

✺ Donna's Dough

This is Donna Hay's Recipe for pizza dough which

can be found, along with several suggestions for yummy

toppings, in this months 'Donna Hay Magazine'.

I made this on friday night and then put the
rolled out (with no rolling pin had to use
an old wine bottle!) dough bases into the freezer.

It was incredibly easy to make as well as
very soothing and satisfying to kneed the dough!!

                                                                        Recipe here 

❀❀❀❀❀❀❀❀❀❀❀❀❀❀❀❀❀❀❀❀

On saturday I removed one of the bases and, while still frozen, topped it with tomato paste, freshly chopped tomatoes, grated mozzarella, parmesan and chedder cheese, a sprinkling of dried mixed herbs, a drizzle of olive oil and seasoning and popped into the preheated oven at 220º on an oiled heated baking tray. 

About 15 minutes later I removed the cooked pizza from the oven, scattered chopped fresh basil on the top and sliced and devoured the absolutely gorgeous (if I say so myself!) pizza, just as Mr H arrived home from a morning meeting...damn, had to share.....!!

Oh and I also managed to get a copy of 'MtAoFC' at the shopping centre in Robina, so watch this space...

Beach Berry Muffins

At the weekend I made some muffins which is the first bit of baking I have done while here in Oz, which will explain the slap dash approach due to lack of recipes and equipment!!

At home I usually make them to a recipe from the New Vegetarian cookbook and have in the past adapted the recipe using all sorts of different fruit, veg, cheese and nuts to make a variety of scrummy muffins.

There really are no rules with muffins which is why I love making them so much and they are soooo easy to do!

Beach - Bung everything altogether & chomp happily!!!!

Top tips...

Don't mix the batter too well. A lumpy mixture makes for better muffins. 
Keep frozen berries in the freezer ready for impromptu muffin making - no need to defrost just bung them straight into the mix!

Yummy varieties...

Tangerine and Dried Cranberry

Pear and Gorgonzola and Walnut

Apple and Cinnamon

Blueberry and Raspberry

Here  is the method I used although having no kitchen scales meant it was all a bit 'made up'!!

Although Mr H thought they were lovely!!

Fairy Cakes

I made some fairy cakes last night, like you do. Actually it was finding several boxes of eggs in the fridge that were slowly reaching their expiry date that prompted the mad evening bake-off!

Also Mr H was working late, really late, and the cats were investigating the night in the garden and there was nothing on telly.

I love baking though and Mr H loves eating cakes so it works well!

This is Nigella's recipe for Fairy Cakes. It's very easy and takes literally minutes to make the mix.

Unfortunately at this new house we have a rather rubbish oven and I have to turn the tins round to get an even bake... so much for fan assisted!

Recipe here 

Really Easy Leek & Potato Soup

Ingredients

4/5 large white potatoes (700g) skin on or off depending on preference, diced

2/3 large leeks (300g), sliced

Knob of butter (25g)

Vegetable stock (900ml)


I actually very rarely measure the ingredients I just chop up whatever I have and bung it all in a pan! However the above measurements are a good guideline.

Firstly, melt the butter in a pan over a medium heat.
Add the potatoes and saute gently, stirring often to avoid sticking and burning.
After a few minutes add the sliced leeks to the pan and continue to saute the potatoes and
leeks.
Cover the pan and stir often. Do this for 10 minutes or so, until the potatoes have become soft.
Add the vegetable stock. Bring to the boil then simmer for 10/15 minutes.
Ladle into a bowl, grind some pepper on top and scoff with some crusty bread.
Yum!