Martha's Marvellous Munchies

If I put it on here it commits me to actually doing it, doesn't it?  OK then. Deep breath At the risk of making my blog look like a thesaurus, I have come up with a word for each day of Advent, and the plan is to write something every day to go with that word.  I'm hoping not to go too Thought-for-the-day-ish, with a neat little moral wrapped up in sparkly paper, but if I can come up with something that makes me think, and maybe hits the spot for a few other people, I'll consider it a job well done.  And if not, well, it's only 25 days and you can all come back after Christmas! Lent and Advent are the two big periods of preparation in the Church calendar, for Easter and Christmas respectively.  Their value for me right now is that they are nicely delineated chunks of time.  I may not be able to keep up something new indefinitely, but surely I can manage it for less than a month, right?  And that month might just be enough to change me a little bit fo...

We've moved house!  Just in case you were wondering why I hadn't blogged for over a month.  I can assure you that nothing hugely exciting has happened in the intervening period; we have mostly been putting things into boxes and taking them out again, and wandering vaguely round the new house trying to work out where to put it all.  The new place is substantially bigger than the rented house we were squashed into for 9 months, though, so we are appreciating the space.  Now it's at least halfway towards being a home, and a certain small person has a big birthday tomorrow (do you realise how many toys are marked "Unsuitable for children under 36 months"?  It's like the legal drinking age for toddlers!) we had to... make a cake and throw a party! When we asked Toby what he wanted for his birthday, his one stipulation was "a birthday chocolate cake".  Further enquiry confirmed that it had to have Smarties on it.  When your mum used to be a professional ...

Everyone has been remarking on what a good summer Britain has enjoyed this year.  A stark contrast to last year, when, apparently, it rained non-stop apart from about three nice days.  If it had done that this year I think we would actually have been on a plane back to Texas by now!  As it was, we got to enjoy an English summer at its best - and that includes seizing the opportunity to eat outdoors. At least one of my Texan friends had never heard of a disposable barbeque (which of course would be called a grill over there).  In general Americans are masters of disposable everything , so this may be surprising.  But no park there is complete without a couple of grills and a picnic bench, so I guess if you have somehow failed to purchase a gigantic three-canister supercharged gas grill - or indeed installed an entire outdoor kitchen in your back yard - this is what you resort to.  As we did on several occasions. But anyway, back on this side of the pond,...

Those first few years of your child's life, you take a pushchair everywhere, and it starts to seem impossible that they'll ever walk more than six steps, at any pace faster than a snail's crawl, in any direction resembling the one you wish to go in.  You look longingly at little paths snaking through woodland or striking up through grassy fields, and stick solidly to flat tarmac surfaces instead.  And then, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, they become mobile!  You throw caution to the wind and venture out without a pushchair , and you don't end up carrying toddler and all his stuff for three-quarters of the journey.  Life has new and exciting horizons! Of course it helps if you still don't expect to get too far, and you have somewhere interesting to go.  A recent walk near the local village of Ticknall had pretty much everything a kid could want - and adults too!  We parked in the village car park, set off and promptly bumped into an old tramway, complete...

OK, I don't know if the East Midlands is secretly the cherry-growing capital of the UK, or if it's just been a good year for them, or what, but there have been a lot of cherries around.  I only ever remembering seeing the little ornamental ones before, more stone than fruit, but these are the real deal. It started when we went to the little playground down the road, and I noticed this tree with big black juicy cherries, right by the swings.  So next time we went, I lugged a ladder along and picked a boxful.  Wouldn't you know it, that was the one day that a guy from the council came along to pick up the litter and empty bins.  I wasn't actually on the ladder at that point, so he looked at the ladder a couple times, and he looked at me, and I'm thinking, "Hey, if you don't say anything, I'm not saying anything."  He didn't say anything.  I made those cherries into cherry sauce and we ate it with ice cream.  Yum. Then we happened ...