Sunday 23rd March - what did I do today?

 Did I do anything today?

It depends on what counts as doing.

Zoom Church with my lovely on-line church in Leicestershire, and 'coffee after church' zoom with my lovely home church  community afterwards. I find that a great way to participate in a church service (livestream is not the same) and join in after church coffee tine as well.

Does Reading count?

I finished a book that I started yesterday. It's a 'cosy' detective story set in a village in Quebec, over Christmas and New Year. I heard Annie Gray, one of the panellists on the BBC radio programme 'the Kitchen Cabinet' talking about it, because she loves the idea of the village with the perfect bakery, bistro, community spirit, and the descriptions of the food they all eat...

So when it appeared on the list of books for 99 pence on Kindle it didn't take long to decide to give it a punt.

It's book 2 in the series, and I enjoyed it enough to want to read the others, but I'll probably wait until they are on offer rather than pay the full price.

I'd previously read another cosy mystery that popped up on a 99p Kindle deals list;

It's a very similar concept; small village community, all very food centred, this time set in Perigord, France. I won't be looking for the rest of the series though... too much food (yes, really!) and having the recipes casually incorporated into the conversations began to feel like padding out the story after a while.

Plus pages and pages of history, mostly about the different groups of the French Resistance during the final stages of world war 2 which after a while became completely confusing. Dare I say I started skim reading to get back to the plot?

What about a bit of Art?

I'm going to fall behind on the collage course if I don't crack on with it tomorrow! I can always jot down the last tasks at the end of the course if it looks like I might not complete everything by the final deadline. It's not as though it's for an exam!

I did a little, but nothing worth sharing. It's all at the 'exploratory' stage. 

Cooking?

I made a vegetable sauce for pasta. No, to be a bit more accurate I assembled a sauce;

Half a packet of frozen mixed grilled Mediterranean vegetables, a fair quantity of frozen diced onions, a teaspoon of garlic paste, a beef stock cube, a tin of finely chopped ftomatoes and half the tin of boiling water were all loaded into the crockpot, along with a good shake of mixed herbs and some pepper. I left it to do its stuff on high for two hours. It tasted alright! Some of the vegetable pieces were a bit chunky, so I chopped at it with the kitchen scissors until I was happy.

Half for the freezer and half for supper with pasta and grated cheese.

Scissors are an excellent kitchen utensil. When I served up spaghetti I used to push the plates close together, serve up, and then snip round the edges of the plates to deal with straggly strands.

Or for sandwiches, especially smoked salmon, or sliced meat; they are so much easier to cut into quarters with scissors.

My mother taught me to chop herbs by putting them in a sturdy glass, and snipping them with the scissors held vertically. 

Well that was the day...

Music

It's heading towards bedtime after a very gentle, peaceful, Sunday. 

I have a cd called Lullabies and Goodbyes by the London Quartet, also called Cantabile. I this the current line up of members is different, but this comes from when it was four men, singing so very, very beautifully...

Here is Hushabye Mountain from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.