I’ve just re-dsicoverd my River Cottage Handbook No 2 – Preserves by  Pam Corbin. I forgot I had this book! One of the first recipes listed is for Green Gooseberry Jam with elderflower and I think I’m going to attempt to make it at the weekend. Our gooseberries are doing well despite the caterpillar attack in May, but with our vigilant picking we managed to eliminate most of the caterpillars after they did their initial damage of eating half of the entire bush!

I think when I first noticed that half of the bush had been eaten, I picked off a few hundred caterpillars – I spent a good two hours doing it! There were so many of them! We then went out every morning and picked off more and more. They kept on coming!

We didn’t have this issue last year as I think the caterpillars feasted on the nettles, [...]
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We had amazing weather last weekend. So we ditched the interior DIY plans and covered ourselves in a layer of protective sun cream and headed out to the garden. We’ve been wanting to get the greenhouse up ever since we moved in several years ago, but it’s just never happened. We even ordered the sand and that’s been sitting in our driveway for the past year or so, making it really difficult to put the bins out – so annoying.

We managed to get 2×3 paving slabs off someone on Freecycle too and these were plonked in the driveway next the sand. With so much DIY to do it’s hard to keep focused sometimes, but the weather made the decision for us this weekend.

This is a shot of the garden from above showing where we’re putting the foundation for the greenhouse. We discovered the foundations that [...]
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We’ve been pretty slow on the renovation front this year and after knocking great big holes in our studio walls in January nothing much happened with regards to installing our wood burning stoves for quite a while. Then Colin laid the hearths last month and last week we got round to getting the holes in the walls plastered up and chimney caps put on and the wood burners fully installed.

So we’ve gone from this….

to this…

Doesn’t it look cute – it’s one of the smallest stoves you can get and it’s perfect for the size of my studio. I just need to finish stripping the wallpaper now, fill in cracks etc and then paint the place white – it’s currently a pale shade of beige [not nice]. Then it’s a matter of stripping off the skirting, laying a new solid oak floor and fixing the electrics before re-instating the skirting [...]
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Last year I made sourdough bread – which is bread made with naturally occurring yeast and it’s a task that takes practice and experimentation until you get the results you want, so I’d heard, but I couldn’t believe my beginners luck. The first batch of loaves came out perfectly. I gave up the bread baking though – I think it was mostly down to the quantities of loaves the recipe produced and when I tried to reduce the ingredients by a third in order to just make one loaf at a time, for some reason the dough refused to rise and my loaves got flatter and flatter until I gave up.

A few weeks ago I created a new sourdough starter [just wholemeal flour and water] and nurtured and fed it every day for a week until it got really frothy and bubbly. It [...]
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We’ve had the worst stormy weather in years this week and Kinghorn got totally battered by rain, wind and sea. The bad weather started last weekend and it just would not stop raining. The winds then picked up and by Monday night the rain was falling horizontally. Taking the dog out for a walk was just awful – but had to be done -pushing ourselves against the wind along the street was quite comical.

I meant to post this last week, but I’ve had a problem with my flickr photo album plugin since I upgraded my flickr account to a pro account – for some reason the plugin just refused to insert images into my posts. I’ve spent all morning uninstalling and reinstalling, deleting my cache and adjusting settings etc and I’ve finally got it to work but not with the original settings. If I include this [...]
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And onto Part 2 of our Christmas Away. We went to Jordan on an organised trip with Explore. It was Colin’s parents idea and what a marvelous idea it was – scorching weather, fabulous company, delicious food, donkeys, camels and overall an amazing destination. Here are some highlights from the trip – not your usual set of holiday snaps, but then I’m not your usual kind of person…

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This is a belated post as I’ve had a horrible start to 2010 and only just picking up the pieces and getting back to my normal routine. It feels odd that I haven’t blogged for so long, but I’ve been ill and so has my computer – I got the dreaded blue screen of death – luckily I found a local IT company who miraculously not only saved all my data and emails which I thought I’d lost, they also brought the computer back to life and made it shiny and new again.

So I’m going back a few months with my next few posts as I’ve only just managed to download a load of images off my camera and want to share them with the world.

We were very lucky last Christmas – seems strange to say the seeing as it was only a few months ago – as we [...]
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Colin is now the same age as me [I'm 6 months ahead of him] and his birthday was a great day.

Early out with the dog this morning and then home to cook birthday boy a lovely special birthday breakfast – french toast with smoked bacon and maple syrup!

Yummy!

Then he got to open his pressies and then we headed up to Cupar with a birthday cake to invigilate his exhibition and meet up with friends to share cake and coffee with.

Headed home for tea and we cooked one of our favourites – buffalo minute steaks and roast potatoes!

Shared a bottle of bubbly and were about to watch one of our favourite films which I’d bought Colin on DVD – The Hairdressers Husband – when I got a really bad pain in my stomach and kealed over – oh dear! I was in excrutiaing pain but eventually let Colin [...]
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Colin’s birthday is fast approaching and one thing I wanted to make him this year was a pair of Joy Division oven gloves. Let me elaborate…

We have both always loved the band Half Man Half Biscuit and one of their songs is entitled “Joy Division Oven Gloves” and is one of our favourites – here’s the track so you can hear it for yourselves:

So I’ve had the idea of making a pair of Joy Division Oven Gloves for ages. At first I hunted for a tea towel that had the ‘Unknown Pleasures’ album cover printed on it, but couldn’t find any such thing. I was hoping that with a tea towel or similar printed fabric I could make the oven gloves myself. But all my searches were pointless – why hasn’t someone come up with a Joy Division tea towel??? So I decided [...]
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A while back I wrote a post about Colin creating a new piece of work for the Cupar Arts Festival based on the pioneering balloon flight by the 18th century Italian balloonist Vincenzo Lunardi. I also wrote about our first experience of hot air ballooning here. Well the past few months have been very hectic and traumatic and tiring and stressful but also amazing.

I feel really lucky to have been involved in this whole process and I’m sure I’ve helped Colin to remain sane as well as help him concentrate on his work by taking on most of the dog walking and cooking and sleeping [he's not been doing much of that lately].

The process is kind of finally over as the Cupar Arts Festival started yesterday, but due to some technical hiccups [...]
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I spent a really lovely weekend in Derby visiting my wee bro Nickerless at his pub Bar One. The last time I was down was when the pub opened and this weekend they were holding a party as the pub was going to be 2! I can’t beleive two years have passed since I was last down! I wish it didn’t take so long to get there by train or car or else I’d be down a lot more often.

I’d spent the previous re-vamping the Bar One website and adding a blog and using wordpress so Nick could update and managae it easily himself as the previous incarnation of the site was far too complicated and convoluted.

The weekend was full of live music, comedy, helium baloons, cake, footballers and alcohol. It was quite weird for me as I’ve not been out socialising for ages [...]
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I went to the park with the dog the other day and it was really windy – I got hit on the head by several conkers and so decided to collect a load. They were just falling to the ground and bursting out of their shells – so lovely to watch!

I collected a whole bag of them – some just as conkers, but some complete that hadn’t opened yet. I brought them home and totally forgot about them until today. I got them out of the bag and most of them have cracked open and look so lovely that I had to take a few snaps…

The plan is to plant them all this week [...]
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