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Showing posts from May, 2010

Growing things

For those of you who are interested in my attempts at balcony gardening, I thought I'd update you a little. For those who aren't, don't skip this post. You may find something else of interest. Apart from the ever-present herbs, tomatoes and cayenne peppers are on the go this year. The peppers are really on the go - we went away for a week and came back to find them twice the size as when we left. Now they're producing fruit which is growing at a similarly rapid rate, though none has ripened to red yet. I realised I should have given you some kind of scale, so I just went out and measured. They're about 22 cm long, or 8 1/2 inches for you non-metric types. I may have to find out how to dry peppers if they all ripen at once. A couple of tomato plants are looking pretty healthy and beginning to flower. A few died; one, apparently, by being eaten whole by a bird, a trouble I've never had before. I had two seedlings left so used those as replacements, b

Graham's birthday

Graham notched up another year last week, so we went out for a curry. Any excuse. Actually that was the day before his birthday, as on the actual day I had an invitation to a ladies' night, so I deserted my poor husband in favour of having my feet massaged. Well, painted toenails are very sexy - it was all for him really, you see! I fitted in the wifely bit earlier in the day by making a birthday cake and Cornish pasties for dinner. This is the cake and Graham before consumption: And this is the result of applying one to the other: If anyone is interested, it was the Konditor & Cook chocolate biscuit cake from the Green & Blacks cookbook - one of those where you melt lots of chocolate, stir in lots of yummy bits and throw it in the fridge to set. Very easy to make, and unfortunately even easier to eat!

Frontier Day

The weather is warming up and outdoor events and festivals are mushrooming. We moseyed on up to the Stockyards to find out what Frontier Day was all about and plunged into a melee of Civil War soldiers, Indian dancers and longhorn cattle. I was somewhat puzzled by the preponderance of Civil War re-enactors, and at first just put it down to the fact that this is a very popular period to recreate. In my head the frontier movement west across America happened way before the Civil War. Then, thinking about it later, I realised there wasn't so much of a time gap after all. The original army stockade at Fort Worth wasn't built till 1849, and the Civil War started a mere 12 years later in 1861. Recorded history is compressed into a pretty short space around here. That still didn't explain why most of the soldiers were dressed in Union blue, here in this most southern of states. Probably the northerners just had better uniforms. One guy kindly lent me his cap and gu

St. George's Day

Well, St. Patrick's Day is a pretty big thing over here, as everyone with a smidgen of Irish ancestry (and plenty of people without) suddenly discover their roots and use it as an excuse to dress up and drink lots of green beer. So we came back from a night on the town watching a Storm Trooper swill Guinness and guys in kilts wear silly hats and thought, "Hey! Why should the Irish have all the fun?" So off we went to buy some silly hats... oh no, sorry, wrong story! So we decided to throw a St. George's Day party. First things first: the food. Can't have a party without food. The advantage of living in a foreign country is that your average English foods are greeted as exotic rarities. The disadvantage is that you can't just go to the supermarket and bulk-buy sausage rolls. You have to start a sausage roll production line. Sausage roll making is actually pretty fun! Ditto for the scones, flapjack, coronation chicken and cheese twists. We did