Store Stumping

Hello, pookies!

Well, it's most of the way through autumn and, for me, that means store stumping! Or, in other animal-fiction-based terms, I'm filling the log all the way to the top.
Basically, I'm making lots of delicious food for freezing.

So this weekend, I've been cooking. Oh yes.
(It's a shame you can't see my grin right now, because I am totally enjoying this.)

So!
I've made pasta - specifically, raviolis stuffed with Double Gloucester and ham - from scratch, using my fancy-pants pasta roller (which is actually a complete pain in the arse, but it's still easier than trying to make ravioli-thin pasta by hand).

I've made garlic cheesy buttery breadsticks. They were pretty good, but not garlicky enough for us, so for the second batch, I finely diced four cloves of garlic and chucked them in with the butter, rather than relying on garlic powder. Yum! I'm also planning to make the sweet kind with sugar and cinnamon. The garlic ones go very well with the two batches of the best bolognaise sauce ever that I made.

I've made honey granola . It was pretty much the easiest thing ever to make, and it tastes amazing. I put some blueberries in some of it, for Matt to take to work as a snack.


I've made enchilada lasagne.

We had it for lunch, and there's still plenty left for us to take to work tomorrow.

I've made sausage patties. Basically, I had a pack of cheap sausages about to go out of date, so I squeezed the sausage meat out of the skins, then mixed it up with some chopped spring onion and dried garlic powder. I split the mixture into two, then added smoked paprika to one half and chilli flakes and dried parmesan to the other. Then I split it into patties (two of each type) and grilled them. They go deliciously in a roll with some garlic sauce.

And I've made dark chocolate ganache truffles. Matt, being a very helpful sous chef, got to roll them in the grated white chocolate.

Although the sauce is already in the freezer, it's nice to see all your hard work come together, isn't it?

Holiday 2009, Part 2

How rubbish am I? I completely forgot to post the second set of holiday pictures. So here they are, just a few months late...

On the last day in Criccieth, it was, of course, gorgeous weather. We went up to the castle and along the bay. So. Pretty.




Don't blink. Blink and you're dead. Don't turn your back. Don't look away. And don't blink. Good luck.



We have always had pictures taken at this spot in the castle, ever since Huw was tiny. So that's about 20 years worth of photos. There used to be a little cannon in front of this wall, but we couldn't fit on it these days anyway. And yeah, it was quite windy that day.


This is Clem. He lives with my gran. He lost his one true love this last year (RIP, Tiddles) but he's doing quite well, still.

This was at the shark exhibition at the museum in Kettering.

Part three of my "Matt, Huw and Kirsty Murdering Each Other" series.

Boo!

Dave is revelling in having non-buzzed hair for the first time in years. This picture makes me laugh.

Playing on a lovely day. The assault course pictures were taken just before Matt broke his finger.







There were some awesome cloud formations.

'Hilarious' graffiti.


The big re-enactment we went to.