Jeff meets my Mum!

Today was quite a monumental day in some ways – Even though Jeff and I were together for 3.5 years, he had never met my parents (various reasons) and after we got back in contact last November he said it was the one thing he was most hurt over – So… if we are to have any chance of making this work, we both need to change certain things that we did last time and in my case, this means being more open with Jeff and integrating him into my life more. I stayed over Jeff’s house last night (Saturday) and we were going to cook something easy, however I suggested wandering into town and going to Waggamamas – Jeff thought this was an excellent idea and we left straight away. Waggamamas as per usual was excellent and even though it was a Saturday night the service was pretty snappy. I had my usual ‘amai udon’ with wholewheat noodles and chilli squid, however Jeff tried a chicken chilli mein which he said grew on him, along with some gyoza – yummy!

We got back, watched more random TV that I had recorded on Jeff’s sky plus box and had a relatively early night – come 7:30am the next morning I was already awake, so woke Jeff up and we toddled off to a Starbucks half way between where my Mum was and Jeff’s house. Hmmm, Starbucks fruit bread is divine! I’m currently rather obsessed with the stuff and Jeff seems to be quite sold on it as well. We then headed over to meet my Mum at 10:00am which seemed to go well. It was only a quick meeting as my Mum was actually working, but she said Jeff seemed ‘awfully polite’ which can’t be a bad thing!

As it was still quite early, Jeff and I decided to drive back and found a small farmers market in the middle of one of the towns – we only bought a few things, but it was nice to get out of the car and explore another fun market.

We decided we were going to bake something else (we still need to try and think of a desert to cook for Jeff’s parents when we visit them at Easter) so I looked up recipe’s on the BBC good food website whilst Jeff drove back home. We decided on ‘sticky toffee pudding’ a low fat version, of course and got all the necessary ingredients in Tesco’s

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/3070/guiltfree-sticky-toffee-puds

It took absolutely AGES to find the maple syrup, you’d think it would be in the same isle as the jams and golden syrup wouldn’t you?  But nope, it’s actually in the ‘Long life milk’ section – God knows why, most strange.

With everything bought, we headed back home and chilled for a couple of hours – we were just about to start baking when we realised that the recipe called for a food processing – something that Jeff doesn’t own so off we went in the car again to Argos to buy a food processor. After the success I have had with my slow cooked recipes, Jeff decided to also buy a relatively cheap slow cooker so that should keep us busy for a few months! It was torrential rain so we literally ran back to the car and I sat with both big boxes on my lap as Jeff drove home.

We started cooking straight away and it was a pretty simple recipe to do, however the consistency of the mixture looked really runny, therefore I decided to put some extra flour in it. It did take a rather long time to cook in the oven and we had to check it 3 times to make sure it was cooked properly – result? Nice, however it didn’t really taste of toffee and it was rather heavy. Jeff and I managed to polish one off each, so yeah, not a total disaster! We’re going to try and make them again with less flour and try and make them taste more like toffee – Second attempt will be on Wednesday when we also slow cook the gammon joint we bought from the Farmers market today :-)

As usual it was a lovely day spent with Jeff and it’s a shame we can’t win the lottery and do this kind of thing all the time. Sadly ‘real life’ beckons us, so until Jeff or I pick the winning numbers we’ll just have to continue as we are – can’t complain though, 2011 seems to be a much better year than 2010!

- Molly

More healthy cooking

I say ‘healthy’, it wasn’t totally healthy but for puddings / sweet things they certainly weren’t bad!

I popped round to see Jeff after work and we had already agreed on what we were going to do tonight – cook! I had suggested that we try out a couple of new recipes, Jeff agreed and as he wasn’t working until tomorrow night, he went out this morning to get the ingredients necessary – lemon drizzle cake and ‘chocolate pear crisp’ here we go!

We started cooking as soon as I arrived and for once I didn’t want an obligatory cup of tea (I drank way too much Pepsi Max today at work) so that meant we could focus completely on baking and not on my copious tea drinking abilities! First was lemon drizzle cake which was a recipe I had found on the BBC Good Food website – my firm favourite for this kind of thing. Well, the recipe was ‘lemon AND violet’ but we decided not to bother with the poncy violets (Jeff did have a look, couldn’t find them and we thought ‘sod it’ anyway, it’s not as if you can’t eat cake without some silly decoration.

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/3066/lemon-and-violet-drizzle-cake

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/5132/chocolate-pear-crisp

Anyway, even though it looked like the mixture was too little for the baking tray, it turned out to be exactly the right amount! We only had to bake it for about 25 minutes as opposed to the 30-40 the recipe said and hey presto! We had a rather nice smelling cake! Jeff made up the icing and we just chucked it over the cake whilst still in the baking tray. After letting it cool for a little while we tried some – it was absolutely gorgeous! Whilst I would have loved to have eaten the whole thing, we were quite good and after eating a few little squares the rest went into a couple of tubs for Jeff to take to work tomorrow night for his work colleagues – I imagine the cake is only ‘healthy’ if you have a couple of small squares, not if you eat the entire thing!

Next was the chocolate pear crisp and whilst Jeff managed to get most of the ingredients, he couldn’t find the pear liquor – bummer. However, being resourceful as always, I suggested we chuck some Amaretto in one of them instead after all, it’s still alcohol, right?

We decided we would do one WITH Amaretto and one without and whilst I was busy cutting up the lemon cake, Jeff was busy whipping the egg white for the ‘crisp’ part of the recipe. We folded everything together, put the topping on and in it went to the oven! What was the result? Well... not bad at all actually! I have to admit, the one with alcohol did taste a lot better and I know that Jeff thought the same – not as good as the lemon cake in my opinion, but certainly not bad. I think we are planning on making another lemon cake to take to Jeff’s parents when we visit them at Easter.

After the new cooking exploits, we had a nice dinner and settled down to watch a couple of hours of trashy TV which I had recorded on Jeff’s sky plus box before I had to head home – it’s a short week at work for me which is quite nice but sadly I’m not spending the time off work with Jeff, the next time I see him will be Sunday, when we’re having a jaunt to see my Mother and hopefully do some more cooking :-)

 -Molly

Cooking for Jeff's parents

I think Jeff and I could quite happily do a grown up 'dinner party' after last night!

I phoned Jeff at 12:30 yesterday afternoon to say I was going to be 30 minutes early to his house as I managed to escape from a prior engagement early. Jeff was cool about this but said he wasn't at home, he was still running around, trying to get all the ingredients for tonight's meal and unfortunately one of the Farm shops we usually go to shut at midday on Sundays so he had to head to another one! I said no problem at all and that I'd pop over his and wait for him.

Obviously when I got to Jeff's house and let myself in, I couldn't just sit there, so when I looked outside and saw the bird feeders were empty (no blame apportioned to Jeff here as he'd been working and therefore was knackered) I decided I would fill them all up which took a few minutes and hopefully meant the birds wouldn't go hungry for a few days. After that I decided I'd wash my car - great idea in theory, stupid idea in practice when I realised all I was doing was smearing the dirt around with a sponge and making it look worse than when I started - whoops :-S Whoever said that women were good at cleaning was talking out their arse.

So, Jeff arrived back home and said he had most things but still needed to get a few bits and bobs at the supermarket so I jumped in the car and we headed off. It took about 40 minutes to go round the supermarket as we kept thinking of other things we probably needed to buy for tonight, however after we had run up each isle about 10 times, bought extra plates, new small plates (for starters and deserts) we called it quits.

After getting back to Jeff's, Jeff kindly helped me clean my car 'properly' and got his hosepipe out (oo-er missus!) which helped a lot - it also meant we could water the tulips and the sweet peas which are still currently in Jeff's garage. As we only planted them a week ago, there isn't anything interesting to report, but as soon as there is, I shall be taking photographs and updating anyone who is interested on the 'Tulips and Sweet Peas from Amsterdam'!

We then decided to slightly tidy Jeff's house and prepare as much food as possible before Jeff's parents arrived. For starters we were going to do the lamb flatbreads with pine nuts and a salad - all of this was prepared beforehand which took about 10 minutes and then we could just put it in the oven when we wanted to start cooking. For main, we did the 'pan fried venison' with blackberry sauce. We did a sweet potato mash and green beans for the vegetables and didn't need to prepare any of this beforehand as it took about 15 minutes to cook in total. Pudding was the 'Ginger puddings' and we had bought some lovely vanilla custard to go with them. These took about 50 minutes to steam / cook in the oven, so Jeff and I made them up, put them in ramekins and just waited until we were cooking the main dish to put them into the oven.

His parents loved the food - even his Mother who is a very petite lady and doesn't eat very much managed to eat everything! Well, she ate the three courses, she couldn't manage the cheese board which we created after pudding (but Jeff's Dad and Jeff had a go at it!).

I headed off about 9pm which meant I could get back home, sort things out for work and not be too tired. It was lovely seeing Jeff's parents as they're lovely people and very friendly, however it was slightly weird as, of course, I hadn't seen them since we split up last time and obviously we didn't talk about that - but thoughts did keep popping up in my head such as 'I wonder if they think we're going to split up again?' or 'I wonder how much they know about last time?' Ahh well. We said we would cook for them again when we go and visit them over Easter and they seemed quite happy to let us :-)

Jeff's parents also decided to buy Jeff a lot of meat at their local butchers so I have a feeling Jeff and I will be cooking some of it on Wednesday night, when we next see each other - God knows what we will cook, but whatever it is, I will be sure to take photographs of it!

- Molly

Philharmonia Orchestra

The last time Jeff and I were together, we went to quite a few classical music concerts. I think the year we have been apart has shown us that it can be quite hard to find young(ish) people who like classical music as whilst I had been to a few concerts last year, it certainly wasn’t as many as when I was with Jeff – Jeff admitted that he hadn’t been to any since we split as it wasn’t the type of thing his new partner, nor his friends were interested in.

Jeff managed to get a couple of hours off work at the end of his shift and met me outside Waggamamas for some food before we went for a drink and then off to the concert. Jeff hadn’t been to Waggamamas for ages so actually had to look at the menu to see what he wanted to order! (Myself, on the other hand knew what I wanted before I even set foot in the place as it has been a staple food stuff in my healthy eating regime for months).

The food, as always was lovely and the service was superb – Jeff even had room for pudding. It seems that Waggamamas have changed their menu slightly so had a new desert ‘Japanese Cherry Cheesecake’. I declined to get one, however obviously stole a mouthful of Jeff’s desert to say I had tried it – it was gorgeous! However the rest was his.

We went for a drink afterwards in ‘Giraffe’ and as both of us were driving after the concert back to our respective homes, we decided on non-alcoholic cocktails ‘Oceans breeze’ – They tasted absolutely foul. I likened it to the taste in your mouth after you have thrown up. I don’t think it was because there was too much banana in it (although I think that was Jeff’s opinion) they just didn’t taste very nice at all.

We got to the concert hall and once again, we were some of the youngest people there. There was a school trip, however, therefore about 20-30 kids looking like 1980’s New Romantic type, with Amy Winehouse hairstyles so we certainly weren’t the youngest.

The Philharmonia orchestra were very, very good – exceptionally skilful. Sadly I have now figured out that I’m not overly keen on Weber or Schumann – too many strings, not enough brass or piano, therefore actually found the first half of the concert quite boring. We listened to Weber Overture: Oberon and Schumann Symphony no. 3 (Rhenish) – neither of which excited me. If you had played any of the pieces to me today, less than 24 hours later, I doubt I would be able to recognise which ones I had listened to last night. The second half of the concert was ‘Beethoven’s Piano concerto No. 5’ which was much better. Jean-Efflam Bavouzet was the Dude on the piano and was exceptionally good, however not as good (in my opinion) as Ludivico Einaudi who will always be one of my favourite classical pianists and who I really hope has another UK tour date soon as currently he’s not due to come to England any time soon.

It was a lovely evening as it was spent with Jeff, and in the second half of the concert he had his arm around me and we just cuddled whilst listening to the fantastic piano music. The next time I am seeing him is Sunday which will be....interesting as his parents are coming to visit him and I haven’t seen them in about two years – I hadn’t seen them for about 9 months – 1 year before we split and I’m rather nervous about it.

We’re cooking a 3 course dinner for them (Our decisions as we like cooking) at Jeff’s house and whilst they are lovely, lovely people (makes a change from the usual ‘Mother in law from Hell’ stories, I guess!) it will be quite weird to see them again and be like, ‘Oh Hi! Haven’t seen you since your son dumped me!’ – Jeff assures me it won’t be weird, but he can’t control what goes on in my head (Good job too!)

So, watch out for the update of Molly meeting Jeff’s parents – second time lucky! :-)

- Molly

Valentines Day challenge

Even when Jeff and I were together before, we never really celebrated Valentine’s day. I have always thought it was too commercialised and rather than forcing your loved one to do something romantic and nice on a certain day of the year, wouldn’t it be nicer to be surprised on a random day of the year? That way you know it’s because your partner wanted to put effort in, rather than being forced to by society?

Anyway – As Jeff and I had just got back in contact and we’re still not ‘a couple’ as such and just seeing how things go, I suggested we have a laugh and do the ‘Valentine’s day challenge’ – Try to find the most tacky, awful Valentine’s day gifts possible for less than £7.49. Why £7.49? as it’s the random figure I suggested to Jeff at the weekend!

Jeff was up for it, as was I – So we set about buying things for each other last week and the results are below.

In the red corner was myself... coming in at a wonderful £7.07

Bottle of wine                 £1.49
Teddy Bear                    £0.99
Chocolates                     £1.00
10 x red roses                £1.00
Key to my heart             £1.00
Heart shaped balloons    £1.00
Valentines card              £0.59
                                     £7.07

Whereas Jeff spent £7.46 and got the wonderful array of top quality Valentines gifts below!

We both got balloons for each other, however I whereas I thought my wonderful 0.59p card was a real token of how much I loved Jeff, he had to win points for the lovely ‘heart shaped frying pan’ which he bought – a bargain at £1, apparently? We both laughed and had the receipts to prove we hadn’t gone ‘over budget’ – Not bad for less than £15 combined!

It was a nice evening and we also cooked another new dish together – ‘lemon and cumin koftas’ which turned out rather well. We made extra so that Jeff could take some to work the next day. ‘Nice’ gifts, combined with nice food and nice TV made a very nice night indeed.

Tonight we’re off to a classical music concert and I can’t wait – we’re going to get some dinner beforehand and then go to our second classical concert since we got back in contact.

-Molly

Jeff's Birthday (By Jeff)

Birthday!

Finally I have found the time to do a blog post. Normally, this is Molly's domain - she's a much better writer than me, I find, and this kind of thing takes me a lot longer to do. However, I shall try my best. If you get bored at least there are some pictures!

The morning came and I awoke after a surprisingly pleasant night's sleep - but up I had to get as I had a busy day ahead of me, as Molly was coming over after work, and I had volunteered to find the centre piece of my birthday meal - Vension steak.

After trying our usual farm shop and finding it closed (on Mondays! Who knew?) I tried another butcher, who recommended another farm shop, and when I went there they cut some steaks freshly for me.

The recipe had said that I needed to get ones that were thick, so I got them about an inch thick... which is quite a good deal thicker than I was expecting, but as it happened we ended up with a kilogram of venison meat for less than a tenner - not bad value really, especially as it was very tender and very fresh.

On arriving back home, I noticed that my travels around the local area had taken up the vast majority of the afternoon and I only had a few minutes before Molly arrived after her day at work, so set about tidying and making the house sensible (not too lived in, if you know what I mean).

A knock at the door. There she was, somewhat radiant and glowing with a massive grin on her face - certainly something I always enjoy seeing - complete with a big bag of presents!

Excited? Me? Yes, I was. But my excitement pales into insignificance versus the excitement of Molly when she's buying presents for or giving presents out to other people, and this time I was on the receiving end.

As well as a very, very cool personalised moonpig card, I received The Jeremy Clarkson collection on DVD (cool), two low fat GoodFood recipe books (brilliant!), the Collins book fo British Birds (to help us identifying the birdies in the garden), a spanner keyring, a Haynes manual-style VW Golf GTi mug (I'm a VW fan, and the mug is awesome), a lovely new ProCook cook's knife, very sharp, and the best of all a mini single-egg non-stick frying pan, which is the most awesome and cute looking pan I've ever seen. Excellent!

Certainly a very good haul, and I thanked Molly for all her effort with wrapping and buying the presents.
And so to the kitchen to prepare our meal. Molly had discovered a particularly nice fruity gravy (it probably had a posh name, but that's what I think of it as) complete with blackberries, and so while the venison steaks were in the pan being lightly fried, we set about making that and cooking asparagus, cauliflower and broccoli.

The meal was incredibly delicious and the venison so tender - one of the things that I have found that since we've found each other again, the amount of cooking we're doing has really blown me away. I love cooking with Mol, and while we've had successes and failures, we always enjoy the process, as well as the results (when they turn out well!).

Following our meal, we decided it would be a good thing to have a nice relaxing evening, so kicked back and watched some particularly awful TV (as I understand it, we were watching The Biggest Loser USA - Molly has a er, fascination of watching what I deem to be "chav TV", but I don't mind really, it beats soap operas). Sadly Molly had to go home before work the next day, so as she headed off into the night I was very sad to see her go, but at the same time wondering just when my next fried egg was going to be so I could use the incredibly cool mini-pan she'd bought me.

-Jeff

Amazingly busy weekend

Do you ever have weekends where you just really don’t want them to be over? More so than usual? This is certainly one of them as Jeff and I had a really great couple of days and sadly it’s going to be months before we can spend another weekend together.

It started off really well when Jeff emailed me on Friday night, from work, saying he had actually got his time off authorised – this meant he could go home a few hours early and I could pop over early on Saturday morning so we could get cracking on all the ‘cool’ stuff we had planned to do! I drove over to his for 11:00am and we got straight into the car and headed off to a local butchers which I had been told about by a work colleague. What made this butchers different, is that they sold ‘unusual’ meat such as ostrich, alligator, kangaroo etc. I thought it might be quite fun for us to try and cook something different so I ordered 2 kangaroo and 2 ostrich steaks earlier on in the week and said I would pick them up on Saturday.

As Jeff usually drives, I offered to drive us there which was great in theory, but we got rather lost and I ended up driving up rather windy roads, doubling back on myself more than once and don’t mind admitting that I was close to giving up! We did eventually find the butchers but it certainly wasn’t easy! One of the nicest things about the place was we had to drive down this windy track and there were loads of wild quails in the grass – they looked very cute and whilst I was born and raised in the countryside, I had never seen wild quails before, not sure why, I guess they just didn’t like the county I lived in!

With the meat bought, we headed back to Jeff’s house and popped the kangaroo steaks in the freezer and started to defrost the ostrich steaks so we could start cooking them a few hours later. We then swapped cars and Jeff and I headed off to Hampton Court. As it’s ‘low season’ Hampton Court stops selling tickets at 3:30pm, so we wanted to get there as early as possible to give us chance to look around the place properly. I had been there before, but Jeff hadn’t, so it was nice to do something together but it also felt nice doing something that Jeff hadn’t done with anyone else before.

Hampton Court was, as always, very beautiful – the gardens especially. We had a lovely few hours walking around the place and holding hands through the gardens before ending up in the small café for a very well deserved cup of tea! On the way back we had decided to go food shopping to get all the ingredients for our recipes that we were planning on trying that night and poor Jeff ended up £50 poorer! (I am planning on contributing to the next few shops so I don’t sponge off him, I am very paranoid about that!).

Whilst being very knackered when we got back to Jeff’s, somehow we ended up in the kitchen and got straight on with marinating the ostrich and cooking a couple of ‘low fat’ puddings that caught my eye in my food magazine (I tear out the recipes I like the sound of and keep them in a binder). We made low fat ginger puddings with light ice cream and berry parfaits. I think we were both bloody impressed with the ginger puddings – they were brilliant and tasted gorgeous. We decided that with a little less ginger and perhaps a lighter mix, they’d be perfect. Sadly the berry parfaits didn’t turn out as well and whilst they looked rather attractive, the sauce was too tart and the recipe said you needed a ripe banana to mash up and mix into the mixture – we didn’t feel it tasted that nice and so we probably won’t be doing that one again.

The ostrich on the other hand – total success! Well, it probably would have tasted nicer if we hadn’t been drinking vodka and Ameretto and had got slightly drunk, forgot about the grilling ostrich and then remembered 10 minutes later so it was ever so slightly burnt, but hey – we called it ‘well done’ and it tasted quite fruity – we’d certainly eat it again and are planning on buying some more, soon. We served it with vegetables and were quite chuffed that we had done something different.

The rest of Saturday night was spent watching films and pre-recorded TV and generally enjoying being with each other.

Sunday morning – lie in? Of course not! Jeff and I got up and made ‘Almond puff pancakes’ which I thought looked really nice – Jeff used the mini frying pan I had bought him for his birthday and we made a really nice stack of them. We chose this recipe as it was low carb (0.9g per pancake) and low fat (89 calories per pancake) however, I thought they tasted vile so refused to eat more than one mouthful. Jeff didn’t mind them so ate his and then mine, but as they contained ground almond the texture was really strange and not what I was expecting.

After the breakfast disaster we headed to a nearby Farmers market and despite the rain, had a really nice time buying some different meats and random things – blueberry jam, a whole crab (which we are planning on dressing at some point – it’s currently in Jeff’s freezer) a haunch of venison and some parmesan cheese. We also bought some venison and pork meatballs which we had for lunch when we got back – they were lovely!

On the way back we went to the garden centre to buy some compost so that Jeff and I could plant the tulip bulbs that we bought in Amsterdam a couple of weeks ago. Jeff also bought a couple more bird feeders as he’s found that the birds in his garden are so greedy, they empty his feeders within a couple of days and if he’s working a shift it can be tricky to refill them quickly which means the birds don’t get fed for a while!

We potted our tulips in Jeff’s garage and also planted the sweet peas we had bought in Amsterdam flower market. I suggested to Jeff we make some pyramids with some garden canes so the peas have something to climb up and we could pop them on his patio in the back garden – I think they will smell gorgeous, especially in the summer when we have BBQ’s on summer evenings and smell the sweet peas!

Unfortunately I had to leave shortly after our garden adventure and driving away was pretty crap – Jeff and I did so much this weekend and I enjoyed every minute of it. Thankfully we’ve got loads of fun things planned in the weeks to come and I guess it makes me realise more so than before, how lucky I am that we’ve got back in contact and it’s as if we’ve both been given a ‘second chance’ with each other.

-Molly

Catching a few hours

Due to both Jeff and I having a lot of friends and family 'stuff' to do, plus Jeff working shifts and myself working a normal 9-5 job, 5 days a week, it can sometimes be hard to fit in seeing each other. It's a lot easier now, considering I'm not working 150 miles away from home, but it's still a bit crap that we can't spend as much time together as we would like.

Thankfully we saw each other on Friday night - I wandered round there after work and we went to a local pub for a drink (I drove for once - very novel!) we had a chat about our days - Jeff was off shift on Friday and I had had one HELL of a week! I was very glad it was over. We then headed back to his house and cooked - as we're both still healthy eating, I had suggested a mixed grill as there's virtually no carbs in it. Jeff bought all the meat earlier on in the day from the Farm shop nearby (methinks he's got the 'Farm shop bug as before he got back in contact with me... he didn't really go to any!) and we managed to make a rather massive meaty meal!

It was rather nice indeed! We then watched more crappy TV - 'US Biggest Loser' and 'My Husband is Gay' before heading upstairs and going to bed. Sadly I had to get up early as I was seeing friends, so had to drive back Saturday morning. I didn't sleep very well as the radiator was still on so got a massive headache! I woke Jeff up at 7:00am and we cuddled, talked and listened to all the birds chirping outside his window - he's got loads of different species living near him - I think I counted about 20 different tweets!

It's Jeff's birthday tomorrow night and I'm popping round after work - I've got him a massive bag of presents and I can't wait to give them to him :-)

- Molly