Thursday 23rd February- keeping on top of things...

Crockpottery

We've had  crockpot soup several times this week. 

Mixed soup; I saved extra liquid from a couple of casseroles and mixed them together, adding a handful of dried Chinese noodles and some extra water. That was pretty good!

Vegetable soup version 1; random vegetables cooked up together with stock, tomato puree etc

Vegetable soup version 2; as above, but made up to the required quantity with more random vegetables and some water

Mixed soup version 2 will be on the menu in due course as I have just decanted four portions of chicken curry from the crockpot, and the leftover juice will become the basis of another soup in a day or so!

Cross-Country-Collaboration

We have both posted February's stitchery to each other today. I think mine has missed the last collection of the day from our local postbox, but should be on its way early tomorrow morning.

Altered Book

The Lent Course, 'of Mice and Marshwiggles' started yesterday, (on account of Lent beginning yesterday, of course!)

Here are my pages in my altered book for Day 1 and Day 2

At the moment the topic is 'Turning' - in Prince Caspian, the children have to turn from the wrong path to the less promising, but right path. Lucy, the youngest, is the only one who can see Aslan at this stage, and has to persuade the others to turn back. This will require some apologies for not following the right path...  

I thought I might try some blackout poetry; this page is in the introduction to the play, and it was easy to find words about wrongdoing and guilt.  

The Four Quartets by T S Eliot

This is what I call a 'really slow read', but I am finding it engrossing. I have the commentary open at the same time. I read a stanza, read the commentary and then re read. It is completely engrossing.

Tuesday 21st February - an unbelievable day

Why am I describing today as unbelievable?

To start with I came downstairs very early for me - just past 8 am. I vowed to myself I would NOT HAVE ANOTHER COFFEE until after I had written up and sent off the emails from yesterday evening's lessons. It's the only way to persuade myself to get on with them - at the moment those lessons, especially the last one, feel like quite hard work; remember this?

We've moved her lesson to Monday evening now... she's nowhere near as flopped as this, and neither am I, thank heavens. It's the 'learning a new piece of music' phase - many people, including me, find this hard graft. Last time we started a new piece, 'yeah, it's okay, I suppose' became 'this is my new favourite piece' the following week, so fingers crossed this yesterday's piece...

I've also 'decluttered' four book of jazzy piece, posting them off to be used as more interesting sight-reading material than the 'Right at Sight', 'Improve your sight reading' type tutorials. Hands up is you LOVED sightreading new music when you were younger. What, hardly anyone? I am SO not surprised!

I've posted what I neded to post to another friend, and handed over two beginner crochet books for another friend's daughter - hooray! Stuff getting done!

Then, I cooked a lovely couple of pieces of salmon for lunch... in the CROCKPOT! wowsers! I thought fish could not be done in the crockpot, but this is what you do;

Line the base with greaseproof paper in order to be able to lift out the fish.

Put your flavourings in first - a slice or so of lemon, a little onion (I had some spring onions that I thought would do), herbs, sliced up garlic clove, that sort of thing. 

Then put in your fish, preferably in a single layer. Mine were fillets, so I cut then in half, arranged the thick pieces side by side, and then put in the thinner pieces slightly draped over each other.

Add your cooking liquid to nearly cover the fish - water, or water and white wine, or vegetable stock, or vegetable stock and dry cider in my case, with more lemon juice, and leave it alone for either one hour on high, or two hours on low. Check by flaking apart with two forks to make sure it is cooked through.

Oh yessss! That recipe is a keeper!

While it was doing its stuff, I opened my Hobbycraft delivery from yeterday, and made a Spring reath for outside.

 It is the vine wreath from before, and a 'spring flowers wreath' tied on with fine string. I'm going for the 'casual' look.

After lunch it was 'modge podge' time - a bottle of this was also in the parcel. It's a paper glue that lots of the junk journalers use, so I thought I would give it a go.

Here's my front cover; as I plan to use this throughout Lent I thought this was an appropriate picture. 

Here's an experiment with collage, using four different squares of origami paper, near the end of the book. My word, but it quickly becomes a messy process...

And finally, a hurried preparation of two pages at the front, because I will be needing one of them for tomorrow! 

I suspect some flowers may be added to those little Japanese vases on Thursday... 

And now it is time to heat some soup for our supper, before we watch Richard Osman's House of Games...

Why is it that sometimes I am a whirlwind of activity and energy, and on other days even watching tv seems like a Big Ask.... very weird.

   

Friday 17th February - altered recipe, altered book, altered space

 Spaces; 

since lockdown, nearly three years ago, we have no 'inside' visitors, so our living space has slowly become adapted to our personal, selfish needs. THE settee has become MY settee. (W always called it a settee when I was a child, I can't imagine myself calling it a sofa).

It was only a 2-seater, and now it is a single seater, for the other side looks like this;

Heaped at the back, half on the arm and half on the back of my settee is a crochet blanket for the evening. Underneath us a row books I dip into from tome to time. My sewing tin is on top, and a shoebox of notebooks,  pens and oddments to finish.

My knitting basket is close at hand with the blue sock-knitting bag and mitre squares blanket on top. If we were to have visitors they would have to find another place to sit!

Recipes

I have the crockpot full of the 'Bored of Lunch' recipe for sausages and potatoes. Except I have left out the potatoes as the crockpot was too full, even by my miscalculations. I also left out the red wine (we haven't got any) and most of the beef stock (the pot was still rather full).

I took the potatoes, tossed them in oil salt and pepper, and treated them to 20 minutes at 180 in the airfryer. They came out looking, and tasting, fried. No surprise there, thinking about it. I tasted one to be sure. I can reheat them when we have the sausage casserole tomorrow for lunch.

Books

It has been brought to my notice that there is a whole world of people making junk journals from old books. Having watched YouTubes on how to go about this, I had decided that this was 'nah, far too fussy  for me'.

I made a collage yesterday afternoon, as a sort of mockery of what I saw on youtube, and because I was too tired to do anything sensible;

And, oh my, it came out rather well. The mouse is in a pocket; pockets are a Big Feature of junk journals.

 Then I followed a link to 'altered books'. Similar concept, but you reuse the pages that are already in the book, instead of replacing them 

I can tell you that my copy of 'The Crucible' by Arthur Miller, from English lessons when I was in the Middle Fifth at school (year 10 these days) will never ever be the same again.