Monday 3rd September

 We didn't get around  to trying the slow cooker crumble yesterday, but I served some up after lunch today. To my horror,  when I took it out of the fridge I discovered that the crumble appeared to have set like concrete. Nononono.... I levered some chunks out with a stout knife with the images of our neighbour across the road using a pneumatic drill to break up his concrete drive last year running like a video replay through my head.

I persevered, putting each bowl of crumble into the microwave in turn to heat up. Oh my lucky stars - the topping softened up, and with custard poured over it was pretty good.

We've half left over for tomorrow too.

When I was looking for recipes yesterday I found this one somewhere; take two cans apple pie filling, and one packet of cake mix... needless to say I didn't read further. I think it was an American recipe.

It reminds me of an article I read in Woman or Woman's Own or similar, back in the late 70s when I was a newly-wed. It was about a man bringing up his family on his own, and his two home-made recipes were a pie filling and crumble mix apple crumble, and a tinned minced beef, frozen peas and Smash potato cottage pie. The rest of the article involved teaching him how to make crumbles and cottage pies from scratch, and also an excellent boiled fruit cake which I still make today. I must look out the recipe. 

I'm doing daily sketches in September, at least that's the plan.

I've done a couple of inky efforts,

The first one is black ink and water,  the second is watercolour and blue ink fountain pen because I could find the one with black ink.

Today I've done very rough pictures about changing the duvet cover. When I was much younger I used to end up wrangling the duvet into the corners from inside the cover...

I suppose the conventional way is to lay the duvet cover out on the bed, grab the corners of the duvet and encourage them up to the head end.

I prefer having the duvet cover inside out, with the head of the duvet cover touching the head of the duvet. I reach inside the cover until I can grab the corner of the duvet through the fabric, and pull it through, so that the cover magically ends up the right side with the duvet inside.

All the methods are much easier with two people working together. (Except, maybe, the first)

I tried making apple crisps in the air fryer today. It was fairly successful; core an apple and slice it thinly an eighth of an inch thick, spread the pieces in the basket (you can layer them). Cook at 150C for 16 mins, shaking the basket every five mins. My slices definitely dried, but were mostly still soft. They were delicious though. I meant to photograph them but I ate them before I remembered.