Sarahmade

My blog is over five years old. I was just reading the posts from April 2004 and things really haven’t changed much.

I am going to make these lovely eggs but I need ideas for things I can use as the pattern. I will use leaves etc like the picture here but I’d like to try other things. So far I have thought of cutting letters and shapes from acetate…but what else?

Photos of our holiday in Normandy can be seen here.

More to follow. You won’t believe what I had to eat. I just couldn’t do it.

As an update to my earlier post I have just realised how large Tom and Gemma’s allotment is. 30ft x 80ft. Wow.

I think our growing space is about 1ft x 10ft.

We will probably get one meal out of ours.

As we live in London we have to make use of every available cm of the space we rent. We don’t have a garden but we do have seven window boxes and are currently deciding how get the most out of them by growing a little bit of food. I wonder how much rent we are paying per window box? I wonder if we will be growing the most expensive fruit and veg we have ever had…although no…Borough Market exists for that.

So to compliment Tom Smith (who had a birthday yesterday – happy birthday!) and Gemma and their ambitious plans for their new allotment I would like to present our plans on a smaller scale. Tom and Gemma have acquired a greenhouse…we have two Tupperware bottoms, one on top of the other. Tom and Gemma have a shed…we don’t have a shed. That’s where is ends actually. But I bet they haven’t got their bed directly next to their strawberry patch.

Warning: don’t sneeze near your plans or your plants fly away.

The good thing about the last post was that when writing a shopping list just now I was able to look on my blog and see if I needed to buy eggs. Perhaps I should take a photo of the contents of my cupboards every morning to remind me what I have.

It’s not about the chocolate but when you get such lovely chocolate as this it’s worth a mention.

From La Fee Cabosse in Dinan, France, via mum and dad. And you can see bigger pictures in Sarah Snaps.

It’s 11.15am on 7 April. Deliaonline still isn’t available. What if I wanted to make a special Easter cake? I just don’t know what I would do.

We just enjoyed a Roman holiday and you can enjoy the photos in my gallery.

I hope this won’t be the end of the much loved littledelia head.

I wonder if I can eat cake for every meal today. There is enough left over but I don’t think I will survive, or sleep. None of us could sleep last night due to the amount of cake consumed in the afternoon.

On Saturday night Tom and I turned my kitchen into a pasta factory.

We turned this:

into this:

It took ages and we barely made enough for two but it tasted quite nice. A lesson if you are making pasta is to make big pasta shapes like lasagne for example and if you are making small filled pasta shapes for a dinner party for eight allow at least 4 days.

Pancakes with sugar and lemon (made with handy egg and powdered milk)

Eggs, ham and holiday cheese

Boiled eggs eaten with a shared tea spoon

Pasta with pepper relish

Paella

Sausage and bean casserole (my favourite)

Steak, pots and salad

Ferry picnic: Tine cream cheese, Kaptaein crackers and smoked salmon

Hey I am in Norway. look

ø æ å

We are camping and cycling but today is a day off cyling so we are just hanging out. We were supposed to be going on a trip to a big rock which was 4 hours walk but we thought we were getting a bit too keen with all this physical activity so we stayed in bed reading. It was also raining all night and a bit cloudy. It has been super hot the whole time which allowed us to enjoy white sandy beaches on the North sea. We even went swimming at one point but we had to leave because Tom lost all feeling in his legs. It was the sort of temperature you imagine the North sea to be.

The ferry over was great and we took advantage of the breakfast buffet. Then a train to our first place to stay near Egersund. Campsites in Norway have kitchens and our first campsite had a really really nice kitchen. ooh and it had a massive communal tipi for everyone to use but becuase Norway is generally really empty we were the only ones using it. We had a nice dinner in the tipi.

So now we are in Stavenger and we went the the Norwegian Petroleum museum and the Canning factory which is all about the sardine canning trade in norway. The petroleum museum is all about oil rigs and the oil trade in Norway. They were both very interesting and very interactive. I went down an escape shute and pretended to escape from an oil rig and I packed rubber sardines into tins.

Now we are going to go back to the campsite and cook jambalaya. You just wait till you see what we have been cooking. Donæt worry i have taken pictures of every meal. This mornign we had pancakes and maple syrup.

Oh and sorry no one will be getting postcards as they are 1 pound each and thatæs just too much to pay for a postcard.

The camping season started well and served as a good practice for cycling the North Sea Cycle route in Norway.

Despite there being a very high percentage of rain in Norway I am hoping it doesn’t rain too much as with my rain covers on my panniers my bike looks like a fairground ride. My front pannier covers are bright yellow, my back ones green and if I take my handlebar bag that has a red cover. So fairground ride or traffic light. Oh and I did I mention I also have red flashing lights?

The campsite was great. We were the only campers. It was a small organic farm in Broughton with a small farm shop to match.

We camped in a field next to some chickens…some jumping chickens. Did you know chickens jumped? They were very free range and ranged in a field with bushes. The bushes obviously held some delights for the chickens because they would crouch down and then lauch themselves like cats at the bush and try and catch something. Even when we weren’t watching them we would be accompanied with the soundtrack of jumping chickens. They were also surrounded by an electric fence – as Tom found out when he tried to take a picture of the chickens and got a little shock. Unfortunately the chickens don’t seem to have very good memories and seeing a chicken get a little shock (probably quite a big shock to a chicken) is a little disturbing.

Our bathroom was in a little glade and included a tap and an outdoor solar powered shower. Unfortunatly because there wasn’t really any solar power to be captured this weekend the shower was a bit cold and a bit drafty. Nice power shower action though. The privy (that what the farmer called it) was a little wooden hut at the end of the field with a lovely view of the farm. As there were no other people around many a sit on the privy was enjoyed with the door open looking at the view.

As a practice camping cooking weekend it was very successful. Friday night Tom cooked carbonara – very good for camping due to the minimum preparation required. Saturday night was lovely steak from the butcher in Stockbridge, John Rob’s. He employs 11 butchers and it certainly was crowded. Then we had salad made from lettuce from the farm we were staying on, tomato, olives and feta. Finished off with pan roasted jersey royals. All cooked in our new pans, with the aid of our home made stove wind break. It matches the utensil case.

Breakfast this morning was sausage and eggs. Sausage from John Rob’s and eggs from the chickens in the adjacent field. We asked the chickens to look away while we ate but they seemed to be happy just jumping around.

When is the official British Strawberry season? Am I allowed to eat them yet? Well too late I already have and they were delicious. I made a promise to myself to make strawberry jam at least every 2 weeks to keep me going through the winter. That challenge starts today.

The craft challenge is going well though projects may have changed slightly. The sewing machine is coming out today. Blimey – while making jam? How sickening.

Yesterday I realised why I hate the smell of wild garlic. It’s because it has an underlying aroma of rubber bands and I hate rubber bands.

I have been thinking about marmite lately, in fact I can’t stop thinking about it. On the train yesterday I realised I had been thinking about it for a good 5 minutes.

Last time I was in Brighton I thought I would give it a go for breakfast and it didn’t repulse me but I didn’t really get it. Ever since then though it has sort of caught me and I find myself going into shops and looking at it. I went into a shop with 4 different sizes of jars and I liked the smallest one but I haven’t found it since. I can only see the second jar up which is too much. So I just go and stare at the jars but don’t buy it.