Sunday

. . .and warm Easter greetings to all my friends who read here.  It's jolly cold outside with a very hard frost but lovely and cosy inside.  The sun is shining brightly and the evenings are getting lighter.  I can feel my spirits lifting, thank goodness.

Despite the tiredness yesterday I managed to get quite a lot done.  I went into school (and it was soooooo cold) to get that bit of work done so that's off my conscience.  Beth very kindly took me to Halfords where I bought a new battery for the car and now, thanks to Phil from over the cul de sac, I have a fully functioning car again.  Apart from the dhal, I didn't do much baking, but I intend to make up for that today.  I want to make the chicken balti and the pork korma to go in the freezer for when I have my friend round and, as Alex is staying with me for a few nights, I need to stock up with bread and cake.  I'm going to make the bloomer recipe again but turn it into two smaller bloomers rather than one large one - hopefully that work out fine.  The cake will be a Mary Berry Victoria sponge, of course.  I have plenty of delicious fresh local organic/free range eggs so it should taste a real treat.

Seeing as it is Easter Sunday I have lamb for dinner.  Not a leg to roast seeing as it's just me, but a couple of nice looking lamb steaks.  To go with them I want to attempt to concoct a plum and orange sauce, maybe also with ginger.  I'll let you know how that goes!

All that, combined with my knitting and crochet, not to mention the washing, drying and ironing, will conspire to keep me out of trouble all day.  Or there again, I might just sleep most of the day.  I'm right in the middle of another stoking cold, the mandatory 'teacher's cold' that we all get as soon as the holiday starts.  Thank goodness for modern medication:  ibuprofen is dealing with the aches, cough syrup with the cough and I have plenty of hankies for the snuffles.  And, of course, it is holiday.  No planning and, although I have promised myself I will start on the school reports, it's not going to happen today!  No way!  Or tomorrow, come to that.

Well, I'd better disappear into the kitchen and start the bread dough.  It's a long, slow recipe and I want to be able to get the results into the freezer by this evening.  But first I need to clear the kitchen decks, ready for action (and more mess).

Have a lovely Easter Sunday, wherever you are!

Saturday

Hazel asked me if I could post the recipe for Lentil Dhal.  I was in the middle of doing so in Teacher's Recipes when I realised that the recording of my rambling thoughts around this recipe were more fitted to over here so, Hazel, the recipe is there (click on the link above) and the thoughts are here.

I met Steve on FirstClass.  For the uninitiated, FirstClass was the Open University students' conferencing site.  I loved it - it was a great place where you could get to know fellow distance learning students through a wide variety of study and interest forums, through private and less private chat and through discussions.  It had a mailbox facility which was jolly useful and you could organise and manage the desktop which meant that you didn't have to get lost in the labyrinth of passageways and tunnels that comprised the whole site.  I used to say FC was like the TARDIS - much, much bigger on the inside!  FC was my first experience of conferencing/foruming and all other forum communities tend to be compared with it.

I was often on FC very early each morning and often exchanged messages with other early birds of whom one was Steve.  It was during one of our casual early morning exchanges that he gave me the dhal recipe which, I believe, was one he had created himself.  I met many people that way, a few of whom are now dear friends - Sonja and Judith spring immediately to mind - plus others who remain more casual friends with whom I still chatter at times on Facebook.   When the news came through on FC that Steve had died suddenly overnight, it was a huge shock to all - those who got on with him and those who didn't.  He was sorely missed by many.

 I also met less - er - less likeable characters, some of whom I crossed swords with at times!  There are some amusing memories based around them but these memories, unlike the happier ones, are not for sharing here.

Interesting times, they were.  Great fun.  When you closed FirstClass after each session a little box came up telling you how long you had spent in there in total.  I stopped looking after a while!

The OU closed the site down a few years ago now (too expensive) and the forum area they gave us as a replacement is  (must be polite here) a bit dire!  As a result, a lot of the joy disappeared from the whole thing and what had felt like a vibrant, organic, bustling community now seems slow, dull and isolating, despite valiant, hugely time consuming, frustrating, enormous and very much appreciated efforts by OUSA officers and staff to make it all work for the student body.  If you're reading this, you know who you are - thank you so much.


Time to get back to blog-earth.  Yesterday was a good day.  It had to be really, didn't it?  No school, no long list of Things To Do (that can wait) and time to potter.  I made the bread, I made some soup, I made some Not Cross Buns.  All good fun.

Today I have to go out.  The car battery is dead and needs replacing.  Beth is taking me to Halfords this morning and then Phil from over the cul de sac will put it in for me, blessings be on him!  I really should be able to do this myself and one of these days I will get someone to teach me: it won't be today though because Phil and family are off on holiday tomorrow so he's taking time out of what is going to be a busy day to help out.  Good neighbours indeed.

I also need to pop back into school to finish something off.  I was so tired during the last few days I was making silly mistakes when entering data into Target Tracker so told myself that I would do it on Friday, forgetting completely that Friday was a bank holiday and the library (through which I go to get into the school) remained firmly closed.  So I've got to do it today or I will be In Trouble!

And it worked

Here's the latest Hollywood bloomer.  The right shape, colour and, hopefully, taste.  It tastes pretty good to me anyway!

I also made some hot cross buns but couldn't be bothered to faff around with flour and water paste so I guess they should really be called 'not cross buns'!  They're only just out of the oven so I have no idea whether they taste good or not but they smell OK!

I'm having a lovely day!

Tomato, chicken and lentil soup recipe . . .

. . . just posted in TsRs.

Pondering on menus

While waiting for the bread dough to rise and the tomato and lentil soup to cook (in Thermione, of course), I have been pondering menus.

Nothing too posh, I don't do posh, but how do these sound?  I have cut starters and might have nibbles out.

First menu:
(small portions of . . .)
Creamy lamb masala OR pork and apricot korma
Best ever chicken balti
Lentil dhal
Steamed basmati rice
something bready - naan or the like
cucumber raita

Mango sorbet.


Second menu:
Lasagne
Salads
garlic bread

White chocolate cheesecake.

None of the above is too hard and I have recipes for them all.  There's a few new things but most are tested and trusted recipes.

I was going to do the spiced plums but I'm not sure they would go with the other stuff.

Constructive comments very welcome.

Good Friday

Good morning to you all!  I keep feeling that today is Saturday.  I know this will come as a great surprise to you (after all, I can't have mentioned it, can I???) but did you realise the Easter holiday has started?  Properly started too, because today is NOT Saturday, it's a week day, so it counts as a proper holiday beginning.
Easter is very early this year which is why it's at the start of the break, not snuggled right in the middle.  That's something for which I am profoundly grateful - this last term has been short enough as it is, but two five week half terms would have been daft and it would have made for an extremely long summer term.

Today has been included in the break because it is a bank holiday, of course.  Not that we get a day extra, of course, it has been taken off somewhere else as it usually happens as part of a school break.

Despite this, it feels like a gift.  What happened at Easter is a gift anyway, of course, but to be at home when normally it would be the last day of the term is a gift, an extra delight to be enjoyed to the maximum.  So today I am doing nothing!  Actually, that's not true, I will do plenty but it may be random, it may be incomplete, it may be fragmented, it is likely to be a PJ day.  And I don't care!  I shall do what I want to do, when I want to do it, more or less.

So, I will be having another go at the Hollywood bloomer.  Last week's didn't quite end up looking like the one on the screen and, although it was delicious, I found it more than a tad too salty after the initial 'yum'.  I've been cutting down on salt somewhat and one of the consequences is that I can taste it more.  So the salt gets cut down.  I also don't think I gave it enough rising time.  On re-watching the programme I realised that he said rising would take over two hours and I'm sure I didn't give it that long.  So - bloomer mark 2 is on the list.

Then there's crochet (and watching rubbish telly).  Also I ought to start a bit of knitting too.  Ironing - well, apart from the fact that there's a basketful of the stuff, I quite like ironing during the daytime when I am feeling bright and breezy and energetic.

Next week I have two friends coming round for dinner - a separate times - so need to start the fun of planning what to make.  The first decision is do I make two courses or three, the starter being the optional bit?  I might go a bit curry-ish for one of the meals and do a lasagna for the other.  I know I can make a tasty lasagna.  I'd quite like to do that scrummy spiced plum recipe again for one of the desserts with custard and maybe a chocolate mousse thing for the other.  I'm going to have such fun planning.

Yesterday was another good day.  Not a lot of learning, of course, although we did manage Word Workshop and there was a concert to go to (op play the piano for) and we had a fire drill.  The best one ever too - the children were silent throughout, all of them, from FS to Y6, and we were all out and accounted for in record time.  Very satisfactory!  The concert went fine although I can't say my playing was all that brilliant in places.  However, it was mostly OK and there were no breakdowns, something I always dread.

And now it is holiday!

Gotcha, capcha!

Maybe everyone knew this.  I didn't.  I know I've taken capcha off comments for this blog but many blogs I read still have it and it can be a rare old pain.  Often the visual quality or size of those pesky numbers make them impossible to read and guessing rarely works.

However, I have discovered that you don't need the numbers.  If you enter just the word, it lets you through. It doesn't work the other way round, the numbers alone won't do, but the word alone will.

It has made it easier for me in a very little way and I thought his info may help some of my gentle readers too.