The Royal Wedding...

So the day finally arrives and everyone is talking about ‘Wills and Kate’ and all my female work colleagues seem obsessed with her wedding dress….. However, neither Jeff or I are particularly ‘in’ to the Royal Family and whilst I can’t say we wish them ill…. Neither of us really wanted to watch the wedding of the century, so we decided to go out for the day instead!

Thursday night saw us create ANOTHER new dish and try another one from the BBC Good Food magazine… ‘Fish and broccoli pie’, which didn’t turn out too badly at all. I don’t think it was as nice as the lamb kleftiko we made yesterday, but it only took an hour and was much more healthy – Hurrah! Apparently it’s healthier than normal fish pies as it doesn’t contain either salmon or butter. It kind of reminded me of a ‘Weight Watchers’ fish pie, however the sauce was a lot nicer in ours… and you actually knew which fish you were eating.

Friday morning we actually had a bit of a lie in and didn’t get up until after 8:00am – Jeff popped in the shower, whilst I sneakily made him an omelette out of all the things that were left in his fridge – pepper, onion, cheese and tomato – he seemed to like it and if he didn’t, he did a good job of hiding it as he finished the lot! I stuck to my yogurt, berries and honey. We left the house at about 09:30 and headed straight for ‘Studley Grange Butterfly world’ which took about 1.5 hours to drive to. The roads seemed pretty quiet – I guess everyone was at home, watching the Royal Wedding! Both Jeff and I had been to the place before, however not for a couple of years and it had really changed since then! There were now two butterfly houses and they now had otters, very beautiful, weird pheasants (Golden Pheasants) and other animals. I took my Canon 7D and as usual, Jeff was lovely and offered to hold my camera bag AND my handbag – There goes a man who is confident in his sexuality!

My 100mm f2.8 macro lens did a fantastic job – I hadn’t used it for absolutely ages and I really feel I took some better photographs than I ever have before. Ok, so they’re still not ‘amazing’, however – that’s what practice is for and considering I am very stressed at work at the moment, it’s been great to go out with Jeff to all these fun places and take photographs of animals and insects. ( http://www.studleygrange.co.uk/butterflyworld/ )

We actually spent nearly 2 hours in the Butterfly world before heading back to Jeff’s house via the supermarket so we could get a disposable BBQ and some food for lunch. We also decided to stop at one of the usual farm shops we frequent so we could pick up some really nice meat to do on the BBQ. Healthy eating meant we didn’t buy too much!

We started the BBQ as soon as we got back and it tasted absolutely brilliantly. We used up the last of the onion and gherkin relish that we bought in Northumberland and even though we went to the website, it seems they don’t deliver which is a shame – that being said, it means we have another excuse to go back to Hexham soon!

After the BBQ we did actually watch some of the Royal Wedding highlights and to be fair to Jeff, I should point out that it was me who wanted to watch them, not him. Even though I really don’t care about the Royal family, I know that everyone is going to be talking about it for a long time to come, and I guess I don’t want to be left out or appear ignorant over something that’s taken the nation by storm! We didn’t watch too much though, and after that we decided to watch a documentary that we had recorded called ‘Monster lobster’ which was both funny but also quite interesting – I felt quite sorry for the lobsters that had lost their claws and legs. I had to leave a few hours after that as I was meeting a friend later, therefore I suggested we take one last car ride to another supermarket to buy some compost as we really needed to re-pot the peppers. We managed to buy compost and get out of the supermarket in quite a quick time and as soon as we got back, we set to work reporting things.

Jeff’s garden is looking amazing – everything is growing and it’s really nice to see that all the hard work we put into planting things and sowing seeds has paid off. After we had re-potted the peppers, Jeff suggested we also re-pot the radishes which have needed to be re-potted for ages. Unfortunately, some of the radishes had been eaten by something – but we did have quite a few healthy ones left, so we stuck them in bigger pots and are hoping they will be ready to eat quite soon!


- Molly