Sunday 11 October 2009

Who ate all the pies?

Hey! Me again :) only blogged yesterday but I thought I'd have a go at shorter, regular blogs so here we are. Today was a mixture of cooking and brownie crafting for me. Brian was up early to take Cal off to football (which his team won 2-1!) so I had a lovely lye in while they were out getting cold and soggy. Once I was up I started on cooking a lovely Beef and Ale pie. It's a Jamie Oliver special which we love. We've tried it with a potato topping and a dumpling topping so today we decided to go with a pastry top. I fried off celery, carrot and onion with 4 bay leaves for 10 mins and then added some cubed beef, a table spoon of flour along with a whole bottle of guiness and a tin of chopped tomatoes. Then it all went into the oven for 3 hours. When it was all lovely and cooked I added a puff pastry topping and put it back in the oven for half an hour and here is the end result. It was reeeally yummy :)
While the stew was busy cooking away Brian and me went to the local ASM (Asian Supermarket). It was a brilliant place with so much stuff to look at. They had some chutney's to try. I picked the papaya and lime one and Brian tried chilli and lime. They were both so yummy we got a jar of each. I also bought some diva lamps to show the girls for when they make there own along with some really pretty bangles which I have wrapped up and put into bag I decorated for a game I have planned. Here's a picture of them. Hopefully the girls will like them.
My main plan was to get some Diwali sweets for the girls to try. I looked around the supermarket but couldn't really see any which I thought was weird. Then I noticed a window through to a little shop next door where they had a whole giant deli of sweets! I went round and I really couldn't pick which ones to get as they all looked so nice so the lovely guy let me try lots of them :) You can see in these pictures the diva lamps in the middle with the sweets either side and my decorated prize bag. The other picture shows the sweets which I'm sure we'll enjoy eating :)








I think this blogging daily is working pretty well and doesn't fill my brain up to much with things to remember :) I think today I'll leave you with a nice picture Brian took when we were driving home a while ago of some low cloud in a valley at sunset. Night xxx

Saturday 10 October 2009

Minty's broken doughnuts

Hello again :) over a week since my last blog again. Lots of things have happened since then. I blogged last week the day before my interview. Well the interview went really well and I was offered the job pretty much on the spot and they upped the hours to 4 days a week for me. I just had to get my registration sorted. I hadn't originally planned to nurse again so I hadn't re-registered but the lack of jobs has sent me back into my old job again so my registration has gone off to the GDC and now I just have to wait. There are so many things I want to blog about on here. I think I might have to start doing smaller daily blogs to keep up!

I'll move onto the cooking section of my blog for now. Me and Brian fancied some home made soup last weekend and you can't have homemade soup without warm homemade bread so Brian got to work on the veg soup and I made the bread. I used the bread mix again like we used for the pizza dough. Here you can see my bread before baking and Brian's soup mid-cooking








and here's the end result. Both were very yummy :)








I got the random urge last week to start up some volunteering again, Not really sure where it came from but it seemed like a good idea. I had a look on the do-it website (brilliant site) which gave me the idea for helping out at Brownies. I loved Brownies and Guides when I was younger and I love the idea behind it of involving kids in the community and giving them positive roll models. I sent off an email to the area's district leader saying that I'd like to help out ideally on a tuesday or wednesday (Brian's college nights) and I got a phone call the next day. She was really happy I had rung as it turned out she had just heard that a Brownie group in Stalybridge had just let her know it was closing down and it also happens to run on a tuesday night! She was planning on having me go along with another one of her guiders until I was happy to run it. So tuesday night arrived and I went along to the meeting not knowing what to expect. There turned out to be 11 girls in the 7th Stalybridge Brownie group and they are all so lovely. It's currently beeing run by two lovely ladies who have been running it for many years but who are finding they just don't have the time free to commit to it any more. I really loved the evening and they bought some lovely flowers for me which you can see here. They got me the roses and Brian got me the white flowers along with Terry's chocolate orange with popping candy (how amazing!) for getting my job.I have had loads of fun planning things for the Brownies to do next tuesday. It will be diwali next saturday so I have been thinking of games and activities based around that so I'll let you know how it goes.

My next story this week is all about my beloved car minty. I was spending Monday and Tueday at the dental practice observing their way of doing things and on the Tuesday morning I was driving to the practise when there was a horrible clunk under my car and then a nasty scrapping sound. I worked out what the problem was straight away and luckly managed to dragged minty and all his bits back to the house. This picture shows what I found when I got there.Poor old minty :( We also thought there was a hole in the exhaust so we decided to get it all sorted. Brian's friend James works in a tire and exhaust garage and he said we could bring it down so my lovely, manly fiance went and tied my exhaust up with some wire and while he was doing that he found the culprit. Minty had a dodgy doughnut! There are two of these things holding the exhaust up. I'm pretty sure you can work out why mine fell off from this pic.The exhaust fell off again half way to hyde so lovely Brian got out and tied it up again on the road side (isn't he great). James got minty up on the ramp when we got there and gave him two new doughnuts and gave me some spares :) he also had a look at the hole and welded it up for me
and now Minty is better than ever and he didn't charge us a penny! What a lovely man :) James told us there was a quiz on that night at his pub so we decided to pop down there to buy him a pint for doing the work on minty (even though he ended up buying us one in the end!). We weren't intending on staying for the quiz but we sat on a table with a team and really started getting into it and ended up joining in and eventually we won! It was a great quiz night with loads of games like 'what's in the box' and 'quingo' (my favourite) and we ended up getting home after midnight. Thinks its on every thursday so we might be going back again :)

I'm off to plan a bit more for Brownies now so once again I'll leave you with a lovely picture from up North. This weeks is a very local one from Stalybridge itself. I took it standing on the bridge by the post office. It's the river Tame which gives Tameside it's name and I think is very lovely :) bye for now xx