Once again, February whizzed by, and it was well into March before I even had a chance to look back on the month that was. It became much warmer towards the end of the month -- real Summer weather! I decided this month to focus more on things I want to do, things I won't have a chance to do once I'm working again, and not worry about whether they' ( Read more... )

The apricots from our tree seemed to come early this year -- they were ready for picking on New Year's Eve. This picture shows about 80% of the harvest. We kept a few back to use in cocktails and eating fresh.


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Last weekend, I did one of the things on my Springtime Mori by making a Spring-themed salad for lunch. I didn't use a recipe, but was inspired by what I saw at the supermarket. The first thing I saw were some adorable button mushrooms, which I put in whole. What a shame it would be to cut them up!


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I had some sliced mushrooms that needed using up yesterday, so I made myself this dish, from a recipe I saw on My Subarashii Lolidays, a Portuguese language blog that I recently started reading. I haven't developed a sudden ability to read any other languages unfortunately -- if I see a blog I like but it isn't in English, I just use Google ( Read more... )

I made jam for the first time today. We had a good harvest from our plum tree this year, way too much to eat as we pick. Something had to be done! This is just under half of the total harvest. (I made stewed plums for the freezer with the rest.)


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On the weekend I baked a recipe from my friend Emilie's blog: a Pear, Ginger and Treacle Cake. The version I made only had one small difference from the original -- I forgot to buy ginger so I used 2 tablespoons of minced ginger instead of the fresh. It was beautifully moist, and the pear balanced out the heat of the ginger nicely. This is ( Read more... )

With Winter having settled in properly in the last few weeks, I've had a strange urge to buy a pumpkin and do things with it .. but more on that later. Just yesterday, I found out about the Mori Girl Challenge. One of the lovely girls in the International Mori Girl facebook group has devised a 31-day challenge, or more a set of challenges, called ( Read more... )

N.B.: Photo credits for all of the photos in this post go to Husband,
who took them using his iPad.

The Eurovision Song Contest has been a source of excitement in my house every May as far back as I can remember. Husband loves it as much as I do, and every year our festivities have become more and more elaborate. As has the Contest itself, ( Read more... )

Last weekend was a long weekend. Husband and I had already decided to do some cooking; we just didn't know what. Before I knew it, he was whipping up a marble cake! The chocolate portion is chocolate-flavoured (uh huh) and the pink portion strawberry-flavoured. He divided the batter into two jugs.


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It was Saturday afternoon, it was a quiet, rainy day at home. Husband was industriously playing away on his Xbox, and we were getting a little peckish, so I decided to make Okonomiyaki. The great thing about Okonomiyaki is that you can add whatever you like to them. Even the name reflects this: okonomi means "what you like". So as long as you have ( Read more... )