Meatballs, flowers and peas

So, the big news this week is that Jeff has officially resigned! He’s spent over 6 years in his current job and will finally be able to (hopefully) work with nice people and not very ineffective management. He’ll also be on ‘normal’ 9-5 days, 5 days a week, as opposed to a 4 day-day shift, and a 4-day night shift..  His last day will be in a few weeks, just before we go to visit his parents in Northumberland!

Friday couldn’t come soon enough and as soon as my working day was over I headed over to Jeff’s and found him out in the garden, cleaning his gas BBQ in preparation for the summer. The weather has been absolutely gorgeous this week, hitting highs of 18 degrees (hell, that’s quite hot for the UK at this time of the year) and as well as Jeff looking very attractive as ever, his garden was also looking really nice – his tree, that all the birds sit on, is in full bloom and our sweet peas and tulips seem to be doing incredibly well, as well – I’m terrified that the slugs are going to come and eat the peas, but so far, so good. Also, the cherry tree that Jeff bought last week seems to be doing incredibly well – that is to say, the thing hasn’t died yet which I consider a good thing :-)

I wrote a blog last weekend – less than a week ago, saying that we had bought some more seeds (tomato, pepper and radish) and had planted them in pots, in compost, outside. Well, in less than a week we already have tomato plants! We can see two of them already so I imagine it won’t be long before we see more and will prick them out and stick them in bigger pots in a few weeks and then stick them outside.

We decided after our success with Ina Garten’s chicken chilli recipe, that we’d try another one that we saw on one of her TV shows and tonight we tried her ‘real meatballs and pasta’ recipe – the only changes we made were to use venison mince instead of veal, use wholewheat pasta instead of white and not add any salt (as good a cook as Ina seems to be, we are slightly taken aback at how much salt she uses in things… ).

The entire cooking process really didn’t take much time at all – rather than fry the meatballs in oil, we grilled them, making them more healthy – we still popped them in the tomato sauce and let the cook through for quite a long time, and we still used Parmesan, not just for the taste, but because we thought it would look nice when we took a photograph :-) The verdict? Absolutely bloody lovely, however we thought the sauce was ever-so-slightly bland, so we’re thinking of chopping up some basil and sticking it in the sauce or adding some pepper – we’re still going to be resisting sticking shedloads of salt into our food, but each to their own!

After dinner, Jeff and I decamped to Jeff’s lounge, where we went straight for his Sky plus box and watched more ‘Barefoot Contessa’ so we could try and find a new recipe to cook. I think we have decided to do Ina’s ‘Mustard fish’ which looks quite healthy and will be made healthier by 1) not adding any salt and 2) not adding as much butter – stay tuned for how this one turns out!

Tomorrow marks the beginning of the ‘surprise weekend’, where Jeff has no idea what I have got planned…. As he hasn’t written a blog for a while, he’s promised to update our blog and write about our weekend together, so I am sure it will be a literary masterpiece and well written as always! I’m really excited about this weekend – the main reason is that I find it really hard to keep secrets and so far, Jeff really doesn’t know what he’s going to be doing! (Unlike the Amsterdam holiday we had a few months ago and I managed to blurt it out a couple of weeks before we went, whoops!)

So, roll on the weekend!

- Molly