It's a hard life.....

......and it just keeps getting harder.....

I do hope you're having a more restful weekend than me :o)

xxx

p.s. I'm NOT being lazy - Mr Moog is indoors watching the footie and I just cannot cope with the noise of the vuvuzelas!!

A little cookery and hookery

First off, I need to fulfill an obligation. Having promised to write a review on my blog in return for a free box of Abel and Cole organic fruit and veg, I feel it's only fair that I do so.

As I said previously, I have wanted to try an organic box scheme for ages. I was really pleased with the selection in the A&C box and the contents lasted us for several lovely meals. I think our favourites were the sweet carrots and new potatoes. In my opinion, the broad beans were delicious - not an opinion shared by the children but then that doesn't surprise me, as I wouldn't go near a broad bean until I was at least 20!

The lettuce was very tasty and crunchy - and any less crunchy bits were enjoyed by the chickens.

The watermelon went down a treat, as did the apples. I wasn't so impressed with the bananas, which didn't seem to last very well, and soon went black. However, not one of them went to waste, as they were turned into banana cake and banana custard ice cream.

I think the thing that struck me most of all, is how determined I was not to waste any of the fruit and veg at all. Every little bit got used up and I also made much more imaginative meals than usual.

It's so easy to get stuck in a rut of buying the same veg every single week from the supermarket, or even the farm shop. Having the choices made for you, really does encourage you to be a bit more creative and lot less wasteful.

So, will I be placing an order? Most definately, but possibly not until autumn as we'll be living off the homegrown veg for the next few months. This week we have mostly been eating mange tout :)

Now then, now then....onto something pretty.

Baking for the cake stall at Saturday's school fair.



I really enjoyed the school fair this year. Could have something to do with the fact that I was right next to the Pimms stall?

In lieu of anything sewey, I have been very busy with the hook this week. I find crochet extremely therapeutic when I'm feeling slightly wound up....let's just say, my Dad is still in hospital, my brother's family have swine flu and Dad is not helping my brother by helping himself!

So, over four evenings last week, I made a little hooky cushion - edged in cream, because I started making this knowing I had only one ball of the turquoise and the yarn shop no longer stock that colour.



Once that was done, the hook was in full flow, so I made a few pretty squares for hooky cushion #2.



I've just got the back to finish on this one ....but seem to have become distracted by some gorgeous rainbow sock knitting....

There are plans afoot for a full day of sewing this week - and about time too!

I'm now going to water my poor parched veg patch - phew, it's been hot today - 26 degrees inside the house ....no laughing you southern hemisphere types!!!

I know some people who are too hot when it hits 20 degrees :)

Hope you have a lovely week, whatever the weather xxx

Things that make me go mmmmm...

.....finishing the latest socks in my favourite yarn...

......topping up the sockyarn stash (from here)

....and discovering a new (to me) yarn shop on my way home from work....

.....fun baking with the littlies...complete with lurid lemon flavoured icing.....

....spending time brightening up the garden....

....noticing promising signs among my veg plants....

....a much improved view outside my kitchen door....

....and finally - and best of all - sewing has happened....

....fulfilling a longstanding promise to the lady who runs our Stampin' Up parties.....

....to make her a tool-pouch using one of her (or rather my - 'cos I couldn't resist buying it!) gorgeous stamps for a stitchery......

....it's almost like getting back to normal....

....mmmm.....

xxxx

A bit of fun and some romance

I've just read this great meme on Natasha's blog and had to play! I think a few of us could do with a laugh right now - why not have a go too?

I have to say, Natasha's names were much more exotic than mine :-)

Your Real Name: Lesley

Witness Protection Name:(mother and fathers middle names) Patricia John.

Secret Spy Name: (your first name spelled backwards) Yelsel

Nascar Name: (first name of your mother's dad, father's dad) Frederick John

Detective Name:(favorite color, favorite animal) Turquoise Otter ( ??).

Soap Opera Name:(middle name, county where you were born) Jane West Midlands (classy!).

Super Hero Name: (2nd fav color, fav drink, add "THE" to the beginning) The Pink Chardonnay.

Fly Name:(first 2 letters of 1st name, last 2 letters of your last name) Lece (er, what is a fly name?)

Street Name:(fav ice cream flavor, fav cookie) Ginger Lemon Puff (ha haaa!).

Rock Star: (current pet, current street) Meg Rosoman (liking that one!)

Porn Name: (1st pet, street you grew up on) Gretel Wheeler (mmmm...)

Your Gansta Name:(first 3 letters of real name plus izzle) Lesizzle (ooh scary gangsta!)

Your Goth Name:(black, and the name of one of your pets) Black Lightning (oh yeah!!)

Stripper Name: (name of your fav perfume/cologne, fav. candy) Ghost Minstrels (!!)

Ahem....think I like my rock star name best!

In other news, I received this gorgeous parcel of sparkly loveliness yesterday.

Emmapebble and I decided to do an unoffical swapsee. She got warm wrists and to look like Steptoe, while I got these divine jewels, to match the beautiful bracelet she gave to me at our big bloggy meet up last year - great swap Emma.....well, we never said it was going to be fair!!!

Now onto the romantic goings on in Moogshouse.

As you may have noticed, yesterday was St Valentine's Day and the shops were full of cute cuddly toys, beautiful red roses and romantically packaged yummy chocolates.

Being a practical sort of a man, Moogsdad wasn't going to fritter away his hard earned pounds on such trifles.

Oh noooo....he went one (or several) better than that.

He bought me this:

In his defence, yer honour, he had just suffered a week of me bleating about needing a new compost bin to put my vegi peelings in...and a week of dinners involving as little vegetable matter as possible, so that I didn't have to throw the peelings in the bin!

Of course, I couldn't let such a loving gesture go by unacknowledged could I?

By way of a suitably romantic reciprocation, I totally indulged him and bought him this:

We really know how to spoil each other :-)

Before I go - look who we found, playing in the Action Man fort, during our big garden clear up yesterday.....

.....yay, it's Glastonbury Barbie!!!

One more thing - please go and visit Maria - she's hosting a great quilting project for the Bushfires Appeal.

Love xxxx

Miscellaneous doings

As promised, we did some papermaking.

Using the leftover paper pulp from Thursday's school session, we took ourselves outside and got busy.


1. First prepare your pulp. Soak ripped up newspaper for at least 24 hours in a bucket of water, then blitz it with an electric hand blender (this will ruin your blender BTW!). 2. Take your papermaking frame (cobbled together from a couple of cheapo Ikea frames and some spare netting). 3. Dip the frame down into a bowl of paper pulp and give it a wiggle. 4. Lift out and remove spare pulp from around the frame. 5. Quickly tip the frame over onto a J-cloth on a tray. 6. Using a piece of board press down firmly on the frame to squeeze out the water. 7. Lay your paper out to dry .8. You will have far more paper pulp than you ever thought possible so strain the rest through a teatowel and squeeze out all the water 9. Make yourself some models with the rest - these should take about 15 years to dry!!



Now for some 'normal' stuff.

The Raiders' of the Box parcel arrived in Moogshouse this week - I was sooo excited!! The box is starting to look very well travelled :)

I did some choosing and spent ages agonising over what to take out and what to put in!

Trashy, I took the butter muslin! What was the question?

Postie also delivered this gorgeous Little Girl from Jodie. Isn't she lovely?

She's my next sewing project, once I've sent Michaela's blanket on it's way :)

Thank you so much Jodie - I love her and can't wait to see what she says!

Moving on to the weather now.

Did you imagine for a moment there that autumn had arrived?

Yup, me too!


Apparently not.

This weekend has been one of the sunniest and warmest this year.

To celebrate, we have all ventured out into the garden.


Some of us even managed a spot of sunbathing!



Now then folks. Y'know that sometimes even the best ideas have their issues?

Well here's a thing.....I don't like to think of myself as a quitter. I do tend to get very excited about things and get maybe a little too obsessed...and then burn out.

.....(embarrassed cough)......I've decided to draw the Geek League to a close sooner than initially planned. Mainly 'cos I want to get back to my normal bloggy wittering and maybe do some sewing rather than spend hours on the 'puter looking for geeky stuff. I'm also waaaay behind on reading all your lovely blogs.

Therefore, the League will conclude on 30th September rather than 31st October. Yippeee!!!

That way we can all get back to 'normal' and leave the geekery to others.........like him:


Note : I have not mentioned anything about the Geek League to Monster. I was therefore very surprised when he brought these toy glasses downstairs yesterday and commenced to wrap them with Sellotape.
I asked him what he was doing.
'Making myself some Geek glasses, Mum!'

Don't know where he gets it from!!!!

xxxx

Slaving over a hot stove

The Pickle Factory is in full swing once again chez Moog.

First off, I returned from Mother-in-law's on Sunday with a 5lb bag of frozen plums from her friend's garden - free :)

A trip to the forest on Monday yielded a couple of pounds of blackberries - free :)


Together these freebies yielded 10 jars of jam and just cost me about £2.50 for the sugar.


This morning the Moog woke me (but oddly not Moogsdad who carried on snoring!) at 5.40am with a bout of woofage.

After a cuppa and half an hour with a good book I wandered into the garden.

The slugs have been making free with my tomatoes so drastic action was required.

All the dangly down tomatoes - mostly green ones - that were most in danger of sluggery were picked and well washed.

Result - 3lbs green tomatoes - almost free (cost of a few teeny plug plants) :)

A third of them were reasonable and are now on the windowsill ripening. The other two thirds were duly chopped and turned into 8 jars of green tomato chutney.


Having gotten my pickling mojo I then moved on to a 50p marrow from the farm shop - which yielded 5 1/2 jars of yummy Marrow and Ginger chutney.

You will notice the rather motley selection of jars I used. I have been so tempted to buy some of the pretty jars available from this ebay shop but talked myself out of it in the interests of being green!!

In amongst the pickling action a wee bit of baking got done too - one to eat and one to freeze.

With all this lovely inspiration that I bought home from the library yesterday I daresay there will be plenty more kitchen fun to be had.

I also picked this up at the Works yesterday for a fiver and am looking forward to trying out some of the yumminess within.

I can feel the first hint of autumn in the air and I'm looking forward to the change of seasons....not that we'll notice it after the awful summer we've had!!

I love autumn. We get the forest back after the summer hoards have gone. Long walks with the Moog are in order...and hopefully some foraging for some more free food....I have a yearning to make sloe gin...can't imagine why.....

The chickens have gone into full production too.

For the first time yesterday all four girls laid - Minx was so excited that she managed to drop one of the eggs!

Here's today's offering :)

Bless their fluffy little drawers :)



I found these two chaps whilst tomato harvesting:

'Quick...hide...or she'll turn you into chutney!!!'

xxxx

Homegrown goodness

Usually, when we get home from a holiday, the cupboards are pretty bare Chez Moog.

This time it's different.

Deliciously different.

Thanks to my little veg plot and our lovely feathered friends we have come home to this little lot:

The chickens and Moog were superbly well taken care of while we were away, by our lovely neighbours - even though Moogsdad left it until three days before we went to ask them! (This was the one job I asked him to do...or rather nagged him to do for a month!!)

We came home to a very happy Moog and four chirpy chickens who had laid a magnificent 28 eggs while we were away. A dozen were given to our chicken-sitters, leaving us with a lovely lunch today and more besides :)

I can't get over how wonderful it is to have home-grown veg and home-laid eggs. In fact, plans are afoot to grow even more next year. I anticipate a winter of cosy evenings with my gardening books.

As if that home-grown goodness wasn't enough to come home to, I also got a lovely blog award - twice!!

A huge thank you to Louise and Jane for my lovely award :)

There are rules to this award and the main one is to pass the award onto seven of my favourite bloggers. Having perused Jane and Louise's blogs it seems they've nominated just about everyone I would have...and if I miss anyone out they'll no doubt be covered by the other awardees!!

So - as per usual - I will say 'here have an award' to anyone who reads my blog and thank you for making blogland such a great place to be :)

xxxx

So far so great

The holidays - all two days of them - have been great so far.

We've unearthed our first homegrowns spuds (var. Edzel Blue). They were yummy and had so much flavour. They also turned potato-coloured once cooked.



The paddling/not quite swimming pool has been in almost constant use....


.....and the Lego is out :)


I asked Monster to tell me about the little scene he'd made. Apparently, it is Indiana Jones escaping from the Nancies.

Wot?

The Nancies?

'Who are the Nancies?' I asked.

Eyes rolling from Monster here at his mother's stupidity.

'The baddy Germans of course!!'

'Ahem, that'll be the Nazis then Monster.....you may not want to go round calling them Nancies'


And here is the chicken news:

Jazzy chicken is still on this mortal coil. News from the farm is that she is still in a little pen receiving TLC from Farmer Brian :)

Advice: Do not wear open toed sandals in the chicken run. Having your toes chased after and pecked is not fun!!!

Hope you have a fab weekend. We have the outlaws here, which is why I'm up at silly o'clock blogging as it's the only chance I'll get! Also, if I so much as look at the computer when the kids are home, they start nagging to have a go ....on my computer?!!!

xxxxxxxxxxxx

A bimbling about sort of a day

My blog posts these days seem to be a bit....well...a bit y'know...a bit boring really.

I'm not saying that so that you'll all go 'Ooo no no Mrs Moogsmum, not boring at all' in your best Frankie Howerd voices.

It's just I seem to be lacking in the chuckle department. I may try and remedy that before this post is out.....depending on what I stumble across on the interwebs.

In the meantime, how about some plum jam?


Rather tough-skinned, under-ripe, transcontinental plums half price from the Co-op.

Transformed by a miracle of culinary magic into the runniest but yummiest six and a half rather disparate jars of deep ruby red jam. I used jam sugar and everything and boiled it for longer than the recipe told me and still it is runny - Locket said I should call it Plum Compote and be done with it!



Maybe I should distract you further with a very last minute bit of craftiness that occurred this afternoon.

Minx has had an unexpected but very welcome invitation to a birthday party tomorrow and this gave me the perfect excuse to ignore the ironing (again!) and have a lovely couple of hours playing with fabric.

This is for a seven year old girl - I hope she likes turquoisy blue and red.



I seem to have developed a bit of a thing for this colour combo as a result of the school quilt and can see me having to make a big quilty something in these colours soon........which isn't ideal as my fabric stash is somewhat lacking in both these colours and will cause me to have to buy lots more fabric ;)

Oh dear.

What a shame.

Never mind :)

So, where were we?

Oh, yeh - in need of funny stuff.

Still working on it.

How about a slow worm that Monster discovered in the garden this afternoon?

Look away now if you have an aversion to slithery snakelike critters.

It's our resident slug murderer 'legless lizard' Sidney Slowworm. You can tell it's Monster pointing at him on account of the rows of cabbages growing under his disgusting finger nails!


Moogsdad - being a helpful sort of chap - not only took the photos (with MY best camera - ack!!) but carefully laid a £1 coin alongside Sid so you could get an idea of scale.

That sort of meticulous attention to detail is what you get when you marry a scientist :)

Oooh - I know what'll make you chuckle.

Moogsdad nipped out to the shops this afternoon for chicken shed disinfectant and came back with that and a big fat book about Tanks - of the military persuasion. He is now utterly engrossed in this fascinating tome and will, I daresay, be regailing me with hitherto unknown to me facts about armoured military vehicles.

This - dear blog reader - is why we don't have to spend a fortune on babysitters on a Saturday night - 'cos we reeeeally know how to enjoy ourselves!

Ok - here it is - I asked You Tube for some funny stuff :

1
2
3
4

3 and 4 were my favourites...what's yours?


Bye then.......

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx