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| Love seeing the moon during the day. |
Time for a little catch up. I’m happy to report that the
high strength vitamin D tablets that I started taking last month seem to be
helping with a lot of the seasonal misery that I get at this time of year. Also
the first half of the month was very mild, albeit a bit wet and windy. As
predicted a big named storm took the last of the leaves from the big sycamore
in the garden. The temperature has dropped like a stone lately now though, and
ice and frost are a regular morning feature.
Right, I have had several goes at writing this now and I’m
sick of trying to make it sound good and deleting and rewriting so it’s going
to be a bit stream of consciousness instead. Brace yourselves. I’ll try not to
go too far off piste but I’m making no promises.
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| Before we lost the leaves |
The one thing that I do like about this time of year is the
comfort food, mine is usually chicken based because it’s not quite as expensive
as other meats. Chicken and chorizo with chickpeas and chicken and barley with
root veg are current favourites. Though having a pile of veg to use up before
shopping prompted a massive tray of roasted vegetables which was delicious. If
you’ve not tried roasting Brussels sprouts before I can totally recommend it.
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| Chicken and chorizo in the slow cooker, chicken and barley in my bowl. |
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| Veg for roasting. |
Also on the pile to be used were a bunch of apples. I like
an apple but just lately every one I’ve had has had a really tough, thick skin
and they’ve been really unpleasant to get through; it’s put me off wanting
them. I don’t like to waste things though and the birds can only eat so many
apples so I decided to core, peel and chop them up into a crumble. I added
cinnamon and mace to the apples and coconut and oats to the crumble topping and
it was glorious. I didn’t add any sugar to the topping and only a tiny bit to
the apples so it wasn’t over-sweet either.
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| Apples to crumble. |
I’ve been looking for a good flapjack (British oat-based
confection, not the U.S. kind) recipe to use for breakfasts; I struggle with
breakfast as my stomach often rebels at the thought of it but I definitely need
something in a morning. Most flapjacks are really high in sugar so they’re not that
good for every day and I wondered about breakfast bars which is a phrase which
popped into my head from nowhere. Quick search on BBC food and I came across
Nigella’s breakfast bars recipe. Actually she has two but the second one is
when she was going through that weird phase after the Saatchi divorce and
subsequent court case and needed to present a clean face to the world. The
first recipe is on her website and also in Nigella Express and that is the one
I used.
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| Breakfast bars, rippling with healthy things. |
They were the easiest thing in the world to make, though
trying to find shredded coconut in the U.K. is not easy and I had to get it
from an Amazon seller which rankles but at least it was a seller and not Amazon
proper (I’m telling myself this so I don’t feel too bad for using Amazon). It’s
a really customisable recipe too so I can just chuck in whatever dried fruits,
nuts and seeds I have to hand. Most importantly, they are really good.
I have cut out two garments to sew, the first is a pair of
velour pyjama pants to wear as lounge pants, I think I mentioned I might do
that in a previous post. I have also cut out a kind of dress/tunic thing from
some striped fabric that I bought to make pants from but it turned out that the
stripes ran the wrong way for pants (unless dressing like an old timey convict
is your thing) and it’s been languishing ever since. The only problem I may
have is that the neck band is cut against the grain (for stretch I guess) and I
didn’t have quite enough width left so I’ve had to cut it in two pieces. Fingers
crossed that it will be fine.
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| Cutting out stripey fabric makes your eyes go googly. |
My knitting is growing slowly, I keep getting distracted and
also moss stitch is a pain in the bumbum over an entire garment. It’s an odd
way to knit a jumper, going from wrist to middle, front and back in one piece
but not technically difficult. I bet I struggle with the second half though,
like second sock syndrome but bigger.
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| I am actually further on that this and have all the stitches for the back and front on now. |
Speaking of knitting I have another couple of old Rowan
magazines, I am properly obsessed with them. I have an idea for a kind of
challenge to knit only Rowan patterns for next year. I’ve queued up a bunch of
patterns from my various books on Ravelry to pick from. The only problem is
going to be yarn substitutions because most of the yarns used in the older
books have been discontinued. That’s a problem for future me though.
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| Behold my newest obsession. I love them, the patterns, the styling, everything. |
Though the sun going down at 4pm is still a little upsetting
it does produce some spectacular sunsets, when it’s not grey and miserable
anyway, the dawn isn’t too bad either on a cold and clear day. Also as at the
time of writing the Solstice is only four weeks away! We’ll soon be at the top
of the hill and even though it will still be dark at teatime the knowledge that
the days are slowly drawing out again will keep me going for the rest of the
winter.
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| The sky is on fire! |
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| This looks like a painting and it's from my back door. |
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| First light. |
I’ll leave you with a few pictures of November which
hopefully aren’t too dreary.
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| This looks a bit odd, took it from inside the car. (I was in The Range's car park and didn't want to look like a weirdo) |
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| Sweeping leaves is a never-ending job le sigh. Also, that fuchsia is still flowering. |
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| Speaking of still flowering, what is this geranium doing? It's November for crying out loud. |
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| Flowering at the right time though is my Christmas cactus, it's going mad this year. |
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| I think this is a copper beech leaf. I don't have a copper beech and neither do my neighbours. Sure is pretty though. |
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| Barely a leaf left. |
I think my next post might expand on my Rowan knitting plans
(over-ambitious though they may be).
