Halloween!!

Happy Halloween everyone!

I don't usually really celebrate Halloween but when I was a kid we always used to make a pumpkin - I would draw the scary face on a piece of paper and my Dad would transfer the image to the pumpkin itself and (as long as I was ok with the way that it looked!) carve it for me.

This year me and my husband and I thought we'd carry on this tradition, now we are in a house in an area where we dare put a pumpkin out and where we might get actual trick or treaters instead of just people having a fantastic excuse to egg the windows.

He drew and carved his first:

And then I drew mine out on the pumpkin (I have got a bit braver than doing it on a piece of paper over the years) but still let my husband carve it for me - it gave me an excuse to get rid of him for a few minutes while I was making the Shepherd Pie in the kitchen on Saturday and to stop him interfering with it!

We also made a sign to go in our front window this evening and had quite a few trick or treaters come to visit:

They were mostly little kids that came with their buckets to fill with sweets and all had made a really good effort to dress up so it was nice to share in the atmosphere of the evening a little.

PS. Sorry this post isn't particularly crafty and there's no Henlow around - he's sat in his mansion at the minute chilling out and looking confused at why we have been leaping up to go and answer the door every few minutes and he's not getting to see any of our visitors and get some fuss.

Great British Bake Off

This year we decided that it would be fun to hold our own Great British Bake off at home for our friends. Each week whichever of our friends could make it would come up with some form of baked goods and present them at our house on a Tuesday night. We would all sit down, drink tea and watch the Bake Off together. All sounds far too civilised really - some weeks we would stuff our faces with about 6 or 7 different cakes and feel slightly ill afterwards. There were a few weeks when there were only a few of us around too and then we'd end up with 2 huge cakes to share between us (some did then get taken to work for pack-up for the next few days after that!)

I promised all of my friends at the beginning of the Bake Off that after we had all finished I would type up everyone's recipes and provide them each with a Bake Off book. This is what I have been working on today - I have typed up most of the recipes (apart from a few that I am waiting for people to send me and some that I need to remember where we got our recipes from...) so hopefully this will be finished soon and ready t give to people.

I have also made a pro to-type for the front covers of the books. It is made from mount board (like you would put around the edge of photos if you cut a hole in the middle) and I have stuck different wrapping papers to the front to make the Union Jack flag. I am going to cover it with sticky-backed plastic before hole punching it and attaching to the pages of the book:

I will provide more pictures when I have done a few more and have finished the insides - I think that will be an extremely photo-heavy post as a warning in advance. Hopefully I should get this all done in the next few weeks.

I'm now going to go and make the most of the extra hour that we have today and sit, watch a film and carry on with my crochet. See you soon!

Cooking and I have finished my first ball of yarn :-)

I started writing this blog post yesterday afternoon before my friends came round for dinner but never got the chance to finish it. I'll start with what I wrote yesterday. I have been told that there were a few spacing issues with the photos on the mobile version of the website on my last post so I hope that this one will work better - practice and experimenting makes perfect right?

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I feel like I have had quite a productive day today - I have finished my first ever ball of yarn and made a cottage pie ready for my friends coming around tonight.

I have done a few more rows on the table runner for Christmas which has meant that I have actually got to the end of the ball of cotton that I was using. I have only ever made small things before - knitted scarves etc and never actually needed to use more than one ball of anything so this is a first for me and I am really far more excited about this than I should be! It doesn't look much bigger really but here it is:

I have also been allowed to cook in our kitchen for the first time since we moved in in February! This is not really a bad thing as I am not so good with the whole cooking when you get home from work kinda thing - I can't just make up food to cook. I do love cooking but only from recipes and this normally means spending a couple of hours preparing things and cooking them.

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Ok so my friends turned up about this far through writing this - I made all of the meaty mixture for a cottage pie earlier on and then my husband mashed the potatoes and put them on top. Here is my filling:

And of course Henlow had to have a few leftovers:

then my husband added the mash to the top:

It was lovely if I do say so myself.

The recipe was a good food one that I have had for years but it is one of those old faithful ones that I keep in the cupboard for those cold winter days (I doubled the mixture for these ones so that I could make 2 and we could freeze the other for another day). My husband typed this up for me so there are a few additions that you can leave out if you are making it! You'll see...

Best Ever Shepherds Pie

Preperation: 25 Mins,

Cooking time 1 hour 20 mins

Serves 4 STRAIGHTFORWARD!

1 tbso vegetable oil

2 Onions, chopped

450g lean minced lamb or beef

2tsp plain flour

2 carrots peeled and finely chopped

2tbso tomato puree

2tbsp Worcestershire sauce

½ tsp each dried thyme and rosemary

300ml beef or vegetable stock

1kg floury potatoes

10z butter

5tbsp milk

1.     Heat the oil in a large pan, add the onions and fry for 7 minutes until softened and lightly browned. Stir in the meat and fry until it is crumbly and evenly browned. Stir in the flour.

2.     Stir in the carrots and the tomato puree, Worcestershire sauce, herbs and stock. Season well, then bring to the boil, cover and simmer for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. Have a cup of tea and give Adam a kiss. If the mixture appears dry, add a little water

3.     Meanwhile, peel and chip the potatoes and cook them in a large pan of boiling salted water until tender. Drain well, return the potatoes to the pan, cover and leave them to steam. Then dry in the heat (with the lid off) for 5 minutes. Preheat the oven to 200c/gas 6/fan oven 180c.

4.     Remove the lid and get Adam to mash the potatoes until they are as smooth as him. Ask Adam to mash in the butter and to add plenty of salt and pepper and the milk until he has a smooth consistency (again as smooth as Adam is…)

5.     Tip the mixture into a ovenproof dish. Put spoonfuls of mash over the cool meaty mix, then smooth it over with a fork, sealing (arf arf arf) in the filling.

6.     Bake for 30 – 35 minutes until the top of the pie is golden.

I can only apologise for him! It is a very good recipe though. I hope you give it a go - please let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions for improvement.

Today is all set to be another crafty day - I love not having much to do at a weekend! - so watch this space for another post later.

1st blog post

Oooh! This is exciting - my very first ever blog post. I'm not the best with all of this technology malarky so this is all very new to me.

Maybe I should start with what's been going on recently and what is happening at the mo:

Last night Henlow had a bath so he went from muddy tortoise



Having a nice soak in a bath

Quick scrub

To nice and cosy and dry

The main project I have on the go at the moment is to make a Christmas table runner for our coffee table. I am crocheting it and really enjoying it at the mo. I only learnt to crochet at one of the fabulous classes that Eleanor at Knit Nottingham (www.knitnottingham.co.uk) runs so for my first ever crochet project, I don't think it's going too bad. I had to get one of my friends to start me off and do the first few rows but now I've got into it, it's coming along quite nicely.