Wednesday 27th July - how to eat tomatoes

 The tomatoes in my garden are ripening fast now. But they have fairly tough skins and sharp pointy ends which tend to overshadow the pleasure of wandering out into the garden, picking a few tomatoes and eating them as you look around.

Today I discovered that if you pinch off the pointy end they become much more pleasant to eat. I have tested this out on at least half a dozen and it worked every time.

We have had a kind of tomato gloop as an additional vegetable several times - I just skin a handful of tomatoes and rassle them around in a pan with a bit of butter or olive oil - chilli oil even - and a few torn up spinach leaves. Not enough of any particular vegetable to make a portion, but combined they become a sort of Mediterranean style sauce. I might start off by sweating some finely chopped shallots or onion in the oil first, possible a bit of garlic. It all just depends. The one courgette I harvested got incorporated once.

I added 600 steps to my step counter doing some concentrated work on a Mozart piano sonata this afternoon. I shall be going through it with a student tomorrow morning and thought I ought to put in a bit of work. It is a bit of an incentive to bump up my step count, although it does feel a bit like cheating. But only a little tiny bit. It felt like hard work at the time.

Drawings;

I tend to fill a double page spread in the book - four days-worth - and then colour them in at the end. 

Thursday 21st July - a bit of a 'this, that and the other' day. Gosh, was that a whole week ago? 

I didn't know what to draw on Friday, but then I remembered the gooseberry jam from a few days earlier. 

 

Saturday was the day of the Apricot Jam Disaster. It is good jam, though; I had some on sourdough toast this morning.

 

End of the month, and I decided on Sunday, at last, what to do for the postcard project, and made a start on it. 

It is quite a lot further on now. I'm about halfway through, but I have a problem with how to do one area  so am still thinking about that. The design will be inside that circle, but I have been careful not to include and details in the drawing!