food

 Last week has been gorgeous, weather-wise at least. The one grey day before all of the glorious sunshine, I bought some tulips on an impulse to try to cheer up the flat a bit. They lasted about a week, so I’d say it was a well spent £2.50.

Another sign of spring being here, for me anyway, is how colourful my recent meals have been. First there was my lunch, where raspberries added a great pop of colour to my honey & yoghurt. The teacup and saucer are a bit of an anomaly from what I usually choose colour-wise. But I love them. I think it’s because the cup is a lot more delicate than my usual mugs (which means I can’t haphazardly set down the cup without looking), so it forces me to slow down and actually focus on the beverage in the cup. It’s the kind of cup that I drink from when pretending to be sitting outside on a balcony in sunshine and reading a book. The big sturdy mugs are for curling up on the sofa under a blanket with rain coming down outside. The other splash of colour came in the form of a salade Nicoise, recipe from The Skinny French Kitchen by Harry Eastwood. I love this book, it has so many great recipes in there.

The practice dresses are both almost complete now. Only a few bits of hand-sewing left to do on both. The first one needs some adjusting of the seams right under the bust. And I’m probably going to shorted the sleeves a fair amount. Right now they’re full-length, but considering the rest of the dress, shorter sleeves would work a lot better. The second dress just has a few seams that can’t be sewn by machine. The neckline is currently a round neck and it looks fine. I’m going to wear it once, just to see how I cope with it being that high, then decide whether I want to change it to be slightly lower or leave it as is.

As for knitting, well, it’s slow going on all fronts. I haven’t touched the socks that are meant for my dad in weeks. N&M’s wedding blanket has had a bit of progress. I now just need to knit the border and weave in the ends. Not a quick thing to accomplish. Most of my knitting focus has been on my wedding shawl. Haven’t managed to get to the point where I can start the next section’s chart, but that’s understandable. It’s now over 450 sts per round and the next section won’t start until I’m at over 600 sts. Amazon Prime has been keeping me company while I knit away on it. I keep alternating between episodes of Community, Devious Maids and Nashville. As well as Friends if I feel like I really to concentrate. A whole lotta TV in my life right now. But I am making time to go out running every once in a while, so that balances out my couch potato ways at least a little bit.

The past few days I seem to have taken pictures of only my food. It all started off my lunch/snack on Saturday:

Then came dinner. Baked mac’n’cheese (from scratch) that made my niece ask for the recipe:

On Sunday, I went for a traditional roast in a pub with two of my friends since one of them had never had one. After that meal, we were all basically in a food coma for almost 24 hours. We were actually having a group chat on Facebook saying we were too full to move the few meters that were needed to get whatever it was that we wanted. Even though we ate around 2:30pm, I didn’t eat anything else for the rest of the day. And I wasn’t hungry in the morning either, which was weird. I’m used to basically starving by the time I wake up. That full feeling also lasted pretty much all day Monday.

Which brings me to tonight’s dinner. Homemade meatballs with boiled potatoes and gravy. The meatballs actually held their shape! It’s the first time I managed to get them to do that, which I’m proud of. And as usual, I seem to have made enough for an army (thanks grandma, I’m fairly certain this tendency to cook too much comes from you), so I guess I’ll be freezing the rest of them once they’ve cooled down enough.

I also nipped to the fabric shop near me after work today and got 3m of a really pretty strawberry print on a black background to make another dress. Practice dress #2 will start taking shape later this week.