Sunday blues

Sunday nights are certainly not my favourite time of the week. You've got that horrible 'back to work dread' and you know that in a few hours you've more than likely got 5 days of work before any more time off.

Jeff and I had a brilliant Saturday night and Sunday morning. As I mentioned in my last post, I popped over to Jeff's house before he got back from his shift, let myself in his house and started cooking. What he didn't know, was that not only was I going to cook him a low GI shepherd's pie and stuffed baked apples, but I had decided I was going to cook a massive saucepan full of meat paella so he had something to take to work for the next few days - I thought it was a nice way of saying 'Thank you' for the effort he went to with the chocolate covered apricots.

I arrived at his house 2 hours before he was due home. Plenty of time, no? God no! I was trying to do all 3 dishes at once and managed to burn myself on his grill whilst grilling sausages. His fire alarm kept going off in the hall, so I had to keep the kitchen door shut, which was OK on one hand, but on the other, it didn't half make the kitchen hot! So I was there, cooking, sweat literally running down my back, trying to make sure everything was sorted for 20:00 when Jeff was due back. I finished the paella first and popped it into 4 tubs so Jeff could literally take it to work with him, it takes a little while to make and was originally a vegetarian recipe in one of my BBC Good Food recipe books - However I added bacon, sausages and chorizo. It uses smoked paprika which is gorgeous and a very large pinch of saffron which really does give it a nice flavour.

Next! Right... once the paella was sorted, I finished off the Shepherds pie – As I’m following a low GI diet I made the mashed potato from a mixture of ‘normal’ potato and sweet potato – it looked fine and was still easy to spread. I stuck it in the oven and ran upstairs to have a very quick shower, after all, what woman wants the man she loves to see her hot and sweaty? (Ok, bad choice of words, but you know what I mean!).

Once I had made myself slightly more presentable, I started on the stuffed baked apples – I had never done this recipe before, so followed what the recipe said more than usual. Breadcrumbs, orange zest, cinnamon, raisins, brown sugar and a little butter. I mixed it around, stuck it all in a cored Bramley apple and then stuck some water and the juice of the orange in the bottom….

Jeff came home at the time he said and dinner was pretty much ready! I was rather chuffed he seemed to really like the Shepherds pie and the baked apple was pretty successful as well, even though it nearly exploded in the skin. We had bought some low fat ice-cream on Friday night so had a scoop of that – I’m not sure what the difference is, as it tasted like ‘normal’ ice-cream to us!

It was a lovely night and we sat on the sofa, cuddled and watched some more weird documentaries that I had recorded on Jeff’s Sky plus a few days ago. Nice food plus great company meant the time went way too quickly.

This morning Jeff didn’t have to get up really early to go to work as he managed to get today off – We had a lazy morning in bed, made some breakfast and I filled up his bird feeders in the garden as all the greedy blue tits had managed to eat all the seed – he only filled it up a couple of days ago, if that! After that, we went for a small jaunt to a recycling bank so Jeff could get rid of all his Christmas bottles that had been accumulating in his kitchen and then sat on the sofa, drinking tea and watching the birds eat the newly placed seed on Jeff’s bird feeder.

One thing that did put an ever-so-slight ‘downer’ on the weekend was a video I watched of Jeff’s holiday last year that was made by a friend. He was with his ex at the time and I had tried very hard not to find out what she looked like – it’s never nice to compare yourself and as I’m not overly keen on my looks (whether that’s right or wrong, I don’t know) I thought I could do without seeing the woman he was dating after splitting up with me. Jeff said he had looked through the video and she didn’t feature but unfortunately he had missed one scene with her in it – Hmm, cue rather big stomach ache and sick feeling! I suppose it just made the whole thing more ‘real’, I mean – If I don’t know what she looks like, what her surname is etc, I can’t search for her on Facebook, see what she’s like etc – It wasn’t nice seeing her and whilst Jeff would probably never admit it in a million years, she certainly didn’t look like the ‘ugly’ person he made her out to be!

We had a chat about it and Jeff was very understanding, especially considering he had nothing to justify and nothing to apologise for – just me being worried for nothing, apparently. I know things like that are going to upset me, however I’m hoping it doesn’t happen again – at least for a while.

Sadly I had a personal training session this afternoon, so I had to head off at lunch time, however I think we’re both really looking forward to seeing each other on Wednesday already and on the 27^th of January we fly out to Amsterdam – our first ‘proper’ holiday since we got back in contact, Hurrah!

- Molly