Doing 'stuff'...

It was a warm and sunny day and this fills me with enthusiasm to do 'stuff' so this morning I was on a mission to make The Bobster his favourite spicy lemon pickle which, to be fair, takes about 5 minutes to prepare and twenty minutes to cook in the microwave and then about an hour to clean the bloody glass jug as the pickle sticks like shit to a blanket!!  The recipe is on the food page to this blog if you want to try it although I bung everything into a glass jar and cook it in the microwave rather than cooking the lemons first.

This is the yield from the recipe and the big jar is for Bobby.  I said to John that it should last him a while and John said if he put the lid on it would last him even longer (John always seems to screw lids on so tight no-one else can remove them)  Anyway we are seeing Di and Rob tomorrow so I shall give it to him then.  It will have been a week since we were all together for Valentine's night when apparently Rob had a dodgy cheese and onion crisp which made him feel a little fragile the following day.

OK so you might be wondering why I have a photograph of a dishwasher tablet when we don't have a dishwasher but I use them to soak kitchenware where food has baked on and today I read a 'life hack' on tintyweb that I thought I would try.  This involved using a dry dishwasher tablet to scour clean the glass door of your cooker and bugger me it works a treat - you just 'polish' the glass door with the tablet and all the baked on stuff is removed - I will now need John to take the door to pieces so that I can do the inside of the glass.

I had taken some of my own fishcakes out of the freezer for supper tonight and a bag of pork mince and decided to turn that into a meatloaf which we could have over the weekend at some point.  We used to buy a fabulous pork and apple meatloaf from Morrisons when we were living in Yeovil and we used to get fabulous pork and apple sausages from Tescos so I am hopeful that this pork and apple meatloaf will be equally as good and it has freed up some space in the freezer which I am trying to run down before refilling.

It was a beautiful afternoon and I was finally going to get to Giolou to meet Mina and to have a cuddle with her new puppy Lottie who arrived just after Christmas and who we met for the first time at the barbeque we had at Mina's Dad's (who flies back to the UK today).  It is a beautiful drive over to the Kennels although the state of the road is quite scary in places where water has come off the fields and washed it away.  The Bobster would have had a squeaky bum in places had he been travelling there in his beloved RAV!

Little Lottie is not so little any more - she is leggy and quite tall and a completely different body shape to her very much loved predecessor Molly.  She is cute and cuddly and rarely sits still so I had great difficulty capturing her on camera.  This was a lucky shot but I think Mina was bribing her with a treat or something!!!  It was glorious sitting in Mina's lounge with the sun pouring in and those glorious views across the valley - the only trouble was that it was too easy to forget that the wind still has quite a ferocious bite to it and as the house sits like a pimple on the top of a hill the wind whips around it.

On my way home it was just lovely to be taking in my surroundings.  It is a day like today that reminds me how beautiful this corner of the island can be and as I pulled up the 'Egyptian's Road' I got my first sighting of one of the early flowering orchids which we have on the island - this is Himantoglossum Robertianum and is a large species - quite common here and looks a bit like a Hyacinth so many people don't realise that it is an orchid.  There are plenty which can be seen in the fields around Droushia - my favourite of which is Orchis Italica which is commonly called the 'Naked Man' Orchid - can you see why?????