Weekend variety show

It's been a fabby long Easter weekend. We've frankly been incredibly lazy, not at all the usual weekend of doing house jobs, garden jobs, pottering around inside the house jobs - total laziness rules. Long sleeps in, breakfast in bed every morning, lots of lounging around, lots of family and friends visiting, pretty damned brilliant all round really. 

With laziness comes lots of television, films, and books. In no particular order this is what has been playing in the big flatscreen in the corner:

Brighton Rock
The updated version with Helen Mirren and John Hurt. This is one of my favourite books and the original film version with Richard Attenborough as Pinkie is up there as one of the finest ever so I was a bit nervous about this but it was pretty good. Mods! Rockers! Flick-knives! Threatening mobs! What more do you need from a weekend movie?!

The September Issue
I planned to watch this on my own as was pretty sure that Wavey wouldn't like it, it being fashion and all. Initial mockery was soon replaced with complete and utter interest and we were both thoroughly absorbed. Such an interesting film. And to see Anna Wintour smile and laugh was a bit of a shocker! I'm sure we enjoyed it for different reasons but an all round winner. 

Vicky Christina Barcelona
Second viewing of this and still loved it. Gorgeous scenery, beautiful sunny skies, beautiful people, Penelope Cruz being utterly bonkers, full of sass and hilarious. And definitely want to go to Barcelona now. 

On the tv:
Much of the usual that we have going on, a whole lot of series recorded, we're forever catching up. Watched the first of season 3 Made in Chelsea, still awful, still cringe-y, still hi-bloomin-larious. Keep it coming! Watched the last in the series of Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, pretty much the same as above, awful, cringe-y, hi-larious, and a wee bit eeek-ey. Not my choice but Easter is a huge footy weekend so we must have watched Match of the Day at least 70 times...

Book-wise I'm still reading Warm Bodies which is about a zombie in love with a real live person. Don't mock it til you've tried it, it's a really good book!

In other news we finally got around to sorting out our cds and admitted that we didn't listen to a massive pile of them. We've sold them on a website and made £28! Which is not too shabby and will go straight into the holiday saving fund, wooooo! A whole other heap are going to the charidee shop, and the ones we have left now fill 2 biggish drawers and have actually been put in A-Z order. I know, I know, I shake my own head at the geekiness of it but I tell you, since we've done that the stereo has been on constantly as you know where to find stuff straight away! 

Weekends are truly the best! Next weekend I'm off up to Scotland with Fizz so stay tuned for the tales :D  

A wardrobe classic

Little black jacket 

If you could afford one, how would you wear your's?

Baking the 21st century way

Call me a traditionalist but I am strictly a gal who bakes and makes using books. I love looking through the books with all their glossy pictures, I love reading the introductions and hints and tips and little stories that are part of the author's story. I like the feel of books and looking at them on my kitchen book shelf. 

Today I broke with tradition and baked using my laptop:

 It got a bit messy. And a lot frustrating as the laptop was taking up precious worktop space and my awareness of needing to keep it away from flying ingredients was making me hyper clumsy. Only a few splatters hit the screen...hopefully I got all the ingredients in the right order and the chocolate simnel cake to eat over the long Easter weekend will be as delicious as it looks in the photo. Only baking time will tell. 

There has to be a way of incorporating the laptop into your cooking though. I'm sure lots of people use the internet for recipes etc - do you print them out and then use them? Do you keep the laptop in another room and have an able kitchen assistant to call out the ingredients and instructions? I have a really teeny kitchen, there's no space for a table for the laptop to live safely away from flying ingredients. How does everyone else do this 21st century baking and making? Feel free to share...

This is an emergency...

Our boiler has broken. The day before the weather is supposed to turn back to freezing. An engineer came out to look at it today and it turns out our boiler is "at risk" due to some dodgy pipework that points in the wrong direction, oo-er missus. Oh and it's so old and the engineer was so concerned he rang the company to check that it didn't contain asbestos. As you do. Yikes, cripes and an eek and eep for good measure. So basically we're in limbo land. They won't do a permanent fix until the dodgy pipes (oo-er missus, you know the drill) are fixed, there's a leak inside of it which is causing the water to drip onto the electrical circuit which is what's causing all the electrics in the house to trip everytime the boiler starts...add to that the nightmare complication of who has time off when in order to be here for the engineer to come out...all in all, it sucks. Bad timing. The boiler broke the day after I moved in originally and we had no heating for days. Is it me? Am I the jinx? Or is our ancient, possibly needing to be condemned boiler to blame? Why do we have to have a boiler emergency right now? 

I tells ya, 2012 sucks arse so far. If it's not one thing it's something else entirely. I feel like we take one step forward and about 27 back. Or to use my ma's analogy, we keep on falling waaaaaaay down the biggest snake on the board of Snakes and Ladders. I think it's about time we were due a break. I don't know how I expect this to come about, but I do, and soonish rather than laterish please. Come on 2012, show me that you're better than this! Show me the non-arse, show it to me baby! 

You say tomay-to, I say tom-arto

It's hard to believe from all the recipe books I have that I've never before had an American one. And it's challenging me. I'm all down with measuring things in cups, but when the recipe calls for strange things like garbanzo beans I'm totally stumped. One google search later and I find out this actually means chickpeas. And today I had to add cornstarch which we call cornflour. There is a little glossary in the back but the author missed out the garbanzo beans translation, perhaps she thought that was the name everywhere? 

For all the confusing terms though there are some really yummy recipes in there. Tonight we had cherry tomato and feta cheese clafoutis with a lovely colourful salad. Essentially it was a french version of a quiche but without the pie crust. It was very very tasty and made even better by sprinkling with herbs out of our garden. Followed by rhubarb crumble and custard made with rhubarb from the garden. Yummo! 

Oh how I love food. I could talk about it all day long...

New bag

Check out my new bag. Ain't it gojus?

 

A whole new way to shop!

It's entirely possible that I'm waaaaay behind the times but I have just discovered this whole snazzy get cashback while you shop thing and I love it! Before I buy absolutely anything online now the first thing I do is log in and see if there's a voucher or a code or how much cashback I might be able to get. And it amazes me that a lot of the places I buy from are already offering this to savvy buyers. I'm telling you it's the future! There's a smug part of me that thinks, well I might be spending x amount of pounds on some very expensive shampoo (what can I say, I'm an expensive beauty products type of gal) but if I buy through this website I'll get 5% cashback. It might not seem like much but if I take into account all the internet shopping I do throughout the year I'm sure it will soon clock up. 

I love it so much I'm going around telling everyone about it and now I'm blogging about it as well. You must all become savvy people that buy. Let's revolutionise shopping! Cos we all do it, sometimes out of necessity but often just because we absolutely love it. And we should be smart about it because money is in short supply these days and needs to be stretched as far as it can go...she says having just spent x amount on shampoo...nyeh, I spend a lot of money on my hair, it's my thang, don't shoot me for it. 

That's it really. Shopping is the best.