Winning Bank Holiday weekend – Part II

After the brilliant, yet knackering Saturday that Jeff and I spent together, Sunday looked like it wouldn’t live up to as much fun. Originally, we were thinking of travelling down to Brighton, mooching around there and investigating the beach. However, the lovely English weather wasn’t particularly nice and rather than drive a couple of hours, just to wear a coat and jumper along the coast, we decided to take a rain check on that idea.

Instead, we had a bit of a lie in and then headed out to the Winchester Farmers market which has become a bit of a regular activity with us. As we reached the car park, we had a bit of good news – free parking! Hurrah! We usually don’t buy that much stuff – just enough to make lunch with, however we actually bought quite a lot this time around! Absolutely brilliant pork sausages, really nice bison burgers, wonderful tomato and watercress bread and two different types of cheeses – a lovely mature cheddar and one with cumin seeds in it. We also bought a couple of different pickles – a sweet onion marmalade and spicy apple chutney, as well as a vine of plum tomatoes. Jeff and I also indulged in a sausage roll and a lamb and rosemary pie (we were going to share each, however I wasn’t keen on the lamb pie, so stuck mostly to the sausage roll!).

It didn’t take us more than about 45 minutes to get everything we needed – as we had already decided that we were going to bake a lot of things, we also bought a dozen eggs and 600 grams of butter. This meant we wouldn’t have to get as much stuff from the supermarket on the way back.

I drove back from Winchester and on the way back we stopped at one of the local garden centres so we could buy another bag of birdseed. Even though it’s the summer, the greedy birds in Jeff’s garden are still eating quite a lot of seed per week and we found ourselves running out again. With the birdseed in the back of the car, we drove to the supermarket to pick up the rest of the ingredients necessary for the chocolate marble cake (http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/5557/chocolate-marble-cake)  and white chocolate and cranberry biscuits (http://eatlovejump.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/white-chocolate-and-cranberry-biscuits/)  It didn’t take very long (Thank Goodness) to buy everything we needed and with that, we headed back to Jeff’s house via my workplace so that I could pick up my car (As we were at Vinopolis the day before, I drove into town and left my car in the work car park over night – I didn’t want to drive back as we had been drinking).

Once back at Jeff’s house, we started on the cake making straight away – we had decided that we were both going to make a chocolate marble cake for our respective work colleagues. Jeff was in charge of making the white chocolate chips (we had to get normal white chocolate as the supermarket had completely sold out of white chocolate chips) and I was in charge of getting the cake mixture ready. Neither of us had made a marble cake before and to be honest, it wasn’t hard and certainly looked quite effective. I made half the mixture chocolate and Jeff and I took it in turns to dollop it into a cake tin. 45 minutes later and we had a lovely marble cake :-)

We started baking the other cake after the first one had come out of the oven and whilst it was baking, Jeff helped me hoover my car – which is off to the garage tomorrow for a full service. It’s probably just me being weird, however I dislike the idea of taking a dirty car to the garage as I feel that the garage employees will judge me! (I guess it’s as weird as having a cleaner and tidying / cleaning before they arrive!).

The second cake came out really well as well and then we started baking the cookies from an Ottolenghi recipe I have in my cookbook. Jeff helped a little bit, however he was mostly preoccupied trying to get a Playstation 1 emulator installed on his PC as I had mentioned how much I had enjoyed playing ‘Devil Dice’ – which is an old game that I used to play on the PS1 with one of my sisters. Unfortunately, Jeff couldn’t get it to work, despite numerous downloads and fiddling around with things – so, rather than vegetate in front of the TV, we decided to play scrabble! Apparently Jeff played a few board games with his ex last year which made me feel a bit weird – we’ve never really played board games together. However, life goes on and it seemed a bit stupid to not do something just because your partner did it with someone else – plus, I actually won! Jeff isn’t a bad loser and I don’t think I gloated too much.

We then decided to eat, so Jeff fired up the BBQ and we had a really nice meal – the sausages were absolutely gorgeous and combined with the tomato bread, the pickles and chutneys and cheese – we were onto a winner. After stuffing ourselves with lovely food from the Farmers market, we watched some TV in the shape of ‘Lose 30 stone or die’ and ‘Louis Theroux: Miami Mega Jail’ however about half way through Louis Theroux, I suggested we go to bed as not only was I quite tired, it was really hot in the lounge and both Jeff and I were suffering!

Monday morning arrived and unfortunately I had to go home a few hours ago – however, not before we made pancakes for breakfast. Lovely nutella and cherry ones for me, and sausage and cheese ones for Jeff – Absolutely gorgeous and we were both quite contented and full afterwards.

Unfortunately Jeff and I aren’t going to see each other much for a couple of weeks – I’m off on holiday with a friend next weekend and Jeff is working quite hard at work. We’re seeing each other on Wednesday night and hopefully cooking another Ina Garten’s recipe, but that’s it until next week :-(

- Molly

Winning Bank Holiday weekend – Part I

I had been looking forward to this Bank Holiday weekend for ages. As I like ‘organising’ stuff and as Jeff is one of the most laid back men I’ve ever met, I decided to ‘surprise’ Jeff by organising some cool things to do this weekend and I have to admit to feeling pretty smug as it all came together very nicely indeed and we had a really, really enjoyable few days.

I arrived at Jeff’s house on Friday, after work – I was supposed to be going out with some of my work colleagues, however they had cancelled – therefore I didn’t see Jeff until about 6:30pm as he works later than me. I suggested we get pizza in and just watch some TV, have a chilled night. I’ve never ordered domino’s pizza online and I have to admit to being rather impressed – not only did we manage to find a 25% off voucher online, just by Googling ‘Domino’s Voucher’, however once we had placed the order – Domino’s have this online status thing – 1 to 5, with 5 being ‘order placed’ to 5 being ‘delivered’. Whilst we were watching an episode of ‘Monsters inside me’ on the sofa, both of us kept looking to Jeff’s computer to see if the status of our pizza had been updated – it was really quite cool and it only took about 25-30 minutes to be delivered, not bad considering it was a Friday night!

We were up quite early on Saturday and headed into town. I parked my car in my work car park and Jeff and I headed to the train station, however not before we had a ‘Cheeky Starbucks’ for breakfast – Fruit toast and a cup of tea, yummy! (although Jeff doesn’t share my love of tea, so he opted for a hazelnut hot chocolate instead) The weather wasn’t too bad at all, although I didn’t have a coat (my only coat is about 3 sizes too big for me) and it was a bit cold on the train station platform, whilst waiting for the train. Thankfully the train was on time and we managed to get to Waterloo for 11:00am. We got the underground to London Bridge and knew we would have plenty of time to get to Vinopolis (http://www.vinopolis.co.uk/) , which was our first cool ‘thing’ that we were doing on Saturday. As soon as we got off the tube, we found the most amazing market – Borough Market.

As neither Jeff nor myself come from London or have ever lived in London, we’re not really knowledgeable on London life and what goes on, so whilst I had been to Vinopolis before, I had no idea that there was such a massive market very close by. I think both Jeff and I felt a bit disappointed that we had already had something to eat, as by the looks of things, there were amazing things that we could have had to eat – it was like Winchester Farmers market, but better! All exotic types of mushrooms, amazing breads, wonderful olive oils – We were very good and didn’t buy any of it, but only because we knew we would have to carry all the things that we had purchased around, for the entire day – and we really didn’t want to do that!

After walking round the market for a little while, we made our way to Vinopolis and arrived there about 11:50. I had bought the earliest tickets possible and the earliest tour we could take was 12:00. I chose the ‘Vinopolis vineyard tour’, which included 6 standard wine tastings, 3 premium wine tastings and a Bombay Saphire cocktail tasting. We sat on the wooden benches just outside the ‘How to taste wine session’ arena and a nice woman came round to take our little tickets. If you’ve never been to Vinopolis – both Jeff and I would highly recommend it. What happens is, you buy a ‘tour’ which is a self guided tour and you are given a number of paper tickets on a card. You are also given a tasting notebook, which holds up to 45 different wines and a pencil to write all the comments down. You redeem each ticket for a 30 ml ‘shot’ of wine and you can choose from about 150 different bottles. You can choose tours which include rum tastings, whiskey tastings, beer tastings – however as I wasn’t keen on any of those, Jeff and I just stuck to wine and gin :-)

We enjoyed the ‘how to taste wine’ session and even though I had been before, I did actually learn some other interesting things, things that I will hopefully remember – for example, the longer the ‘legs’ on the wine, the sweeter it is. After the session, we went straight to the premium wines as they were directly facing us. I have a bit of a sweet tooth, so stuck to quite sweet wines, whereas Jeff went for a lot of red ‘peppery’ wines. I had a really nice wine ‘Domaine Bottgeyl Les Elements 2009’ which is a French wine that uses Gewurztraminer grapes. It was lovely – sweet, but not too sweet and very, very drinkable. Even Jeff didn’t think it was offensive, and we have very different tastes in wine!

After we had used up all three of our premium wine tickets, we decided that we would ‘upgrade’ (something you can do, if you want to buy extra tickets to various things) and do the Champagne tasting. It was only £5 for 3 tickets, however you don’t get very much. Jeff and I didn’t mind though, as we weren’t really there to get totally drunk and just thought it would be nice to learn a bit more about various wines. The bloke in the Champagne area was brilliant and a total Dude. ‘Vincent’, explained everything – how to tell if the champagne is a vintage, the difference between the various different champagnes. He was polite, interesting and really, really nice. Jeff and I had a really nice chat with him and we didn’t feel rushed at all as for a Saturday, it wasn’t too busy.

We then redeemed all of our standard wines – I found another amazing one from Canada called ‘Framboise’ from Southbrook Farms. It’s a fruit wine that’s made from Raspberries and tastes pretty much like Raspberry jam. It was gorgeous! I let Jeff have my Bombay Sapphire ticket as I’ve never been too keen on gin and it seemed stupid to drink something you know you wouldn’t enjoy.

Jeff and I spent about 2.5 hours in Vinopolis – we could have spent longer in there easily, however, we had a restaurant reservation for 6:00pm at Marco Pierre White’s Steak and ale house (http://www.mpwsteakandalehouse.org) and we wanted to get some lunch beforehand, so we weren’t too drunk! Thankfully, next to Vinopolis is a Waggamama’s so we headed in there for a quick amai udon / ginger chicken udon and then went for a rather long walk from the South Bank to Covent Garden. I think it took us about 50 minutes to get there, which was fine, however when we arrived, Covent garden was literally crawling with football fans.

I’ll be totally honest – neither Jeff nor myself are ‘into’ football in the slightest and therefore we weren’t overly keen at the loud football chants that we kept hearing every 30 seconds. Whilst there weren’t any fights, nor any acts of violence, it was quite intimidating walking through massive crowds of very large, bulky blokes who were quite drunk, shouting loudly. I absolutely love Covent Garden, but not on that Saturday! Jeff and I decided it would be best to leave – we did head for a tube station, but it was so, so busy we realised that it would have taken ages to get a tube, so even though we had travel cards, we opted to get a taxi from Leicester Square and asked the driver to take us to Marco Pierre White’s restaurant. It didn’t take us too long to get there and we went for a coffee as we were a bit early (5:20!).

The actual restaurant was absolutely brilliant. It’s not cheap, not by a long shot, however I personally think it’s worth the money. The staff were really polite, extremely attentive and our food (we had a main and a desert) was cooked to perfection. We both asked for ‘rare’ steaks and that’s exactly what we got. The ‘triple cooked chips’ were brilliant and my sticky toffee pudding was just melt in the mouth’. We left feeling very, very full, but very content!

Jeff and I were absolutely knackered when we headed back on the train and we went to bed soon after we got in. However, we had had a brilliant, brilliant day and crossed two things off our ‘to do list’ :-) The best thing was though, we still had Sunday to go…. Another brilliant day of doing really cool things together…..

- Molly

Sunny Sunday with added lemon

In any relationship, there has to be a lot of compromise – currently poor Jeff is working VERY hard at work and therefore we’re not spending loads of time together. Obviously I was working very hard a couple of weeks ago and was very stressed around that time… so whilst we’re not spending a lot of time together, I’m trying to be supportive and making sure that he’s only worrying about work and not about us.

We saw each other for a few hours today – Jeff worked all of yesterday (Saturday) and Sunday morning, before driving home to see me and is currently back at work and will be working all of next week as well. I met Jeff at his home, having let myself in and after making myself a cup of tea and filling up the bird feeders, I hung up some of his washing before he came through the door. After a couple of disapproving comments from Jeff (He isn’t overly keen on me doing his housework – but not only do I find it cathartic, it means he doesn’t have to worry about it when he’s working hard) he helped me hang stuff up, before we had a chat and then got to work on the most important thing of the day – making lemon drizzle cake.

Yet another recipe we got from the BBC Good Food website and as it was the most popular cake (http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/4942/lemon-drizzle-cake) , we had high hopes. I had already got all the ingredients from the Supermarket yesterday so we didn’t need to go shopping and considering there weren’t very many ingredients to get, it was a very short list anyway.

Jeff and I had decided we were going to make two cakes – one for his work colleagues and one for mine. After the success of the raspberry bakewell cake, I wanted to make something else to see if my work colleagues liked it as much as the other one. Jeff set to work with the lemons, whilst I set to work creaming the butter and sugar together. It didn’t take too long to do – even though we decided to zest twice as many lemons as the recipe said (and it was a good job we did, as it didn’t taste that lemony as it was!) We stuck the first cake in a loaf tin and popped it in the oven whilst we did the second – unfortunately, it was a few minutes before we realised that we had the oven turned on slightly too high… therefore the loaf tin cake turned out slightly more brown than the other one.

As we only had one loaf tin, Jeff suggested we make the next cake in a round dish – no problemo and this is what we did. We had a little mixture left over, so decided to use that in a couple of small cake cases, so we could see what it actually tasted like without cutting into the two big cakes. Whilst they were cooking, we watched an episode of ‘Monsters inside me’ (one of our favourite programmes on TV at the moment) however oddly enough, we didn’t watch any Ina Garten even though we currently have 36 episodes recorded! I think we’re going to have to start watching them at some point soon, else it will get out of control (if it hasn’t already….).

With both cakes done, we made the ‘drizzle’, which was really easy as it was just lemon juice and sugar and drizzled it over both cakes. I think Jeff’s round cake looked better than mine – however I think both will taste nice, although we’re going to have wait until tomorrow for our work colleagues to critique our baking efforts :-)

After our cakes were made (and mine wrapped up in solver foil to put in my car) we actually went to a local pub for a late lunch. I suggested the same pub that we met up in, nearly 6 months ago… the first time we had seen each other in over a year. After we got there, the same table that we sat at, 6 months ago, was actually free, so we sat there, chatted and ordered some food.

It was very nice chatting to Jeff in a pub and the only horrible thing was knowing that in an hour or so, we would have to go. I am thinking that Jeff and I are going to have to do a few pub trips in the summer, however trips where we don’t have to keep clock watching would be good…

All too soon, it was time for Jeff to go back to work, so we said goodbye, had a cuddle in his car (as we both drove to the pub in our respective cars) and we headed off, me, to my house and Jeff to work. We’re seeing each other for a meal on Tuesday night and I’m really looking forward to it. However – not as much as next weekend when we’re going wine tasting AND to a very posh steak restaurant, which is going to be really, really fun and hopefully, very tasty as well :-)

- Molly

Raspberry bakewell cake fun!

Cake making was the order of the day, yesterday! I finished work and drove over to Jeff’s house with all the necessary ingredients to make a rather nice sounding ‘raspberry bakewell cake’. Jeff was in London for some of the day and said he wouldn’t be back until about 7:00pm so this left me a good 1.5 hours to do some tidying and start on the cake (http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/11695/raspberry-bakewell-cake).

In the past few months, Jeff and I have been trying to eat healthily and therefore most of the time we try and cook healthily. However, at the moment, I don’t think we’re really being challenged in the kitchen as all the things we have done have been quite easy (very tasty – but quite easy!). Hence why I suggested to Jeff a little while ago that we do some cakes and puddings – the downside of this is, of course, that they’re not that healthy – however we’ve decided that we’re going to take them into our respective workplaces and give them to our colleagues and NOT eat them all ourselves!

So, after I had made the cake mix, I greased up the tin and popped in half off the mixture – I then put the fresh raspberries onto the top and covered with more of the mixture. I was actually surprised at how thick the mixture was and was actually quite worried that there wasn’t enough! Thankfully there was literally JUST enough to cover the raspberries and after that, I scattered it with flaked almonds and started baking it in the oven.

After that, I was a bit bored and rather than watch some TV, I thought I’d also make some blueberry muffins, using the same recipe that Jeff and I used last week when we made the blueberry cake whilst watching Eurovision. This was all going splendidly (and I was actually following the recipe correctly this time round!) until I realised that I needed milk and there wasn’t any in the fridge. I phoned up Jeff who thankfully picked up his phone and asked him if he could stop off at the ‘Local shop for local people’ to get a pint. He said ‘no problem’ and before long, he was home from work, brandishing 2 pints of semi skimmed – success!

I continued with the muffins whilst Jeff and I chatted about stuff. Jeff is more technical than me and currently I’m trying to learn a lot about networking – Unfortunately I’ve been ‘pushed’ somewhat down the IT Project Management route and am rather worried about getting pigeon holed – especially if you are managing technical people. I mean, how can you manage people if you don’t know if what they are saying is total BS or not? So, Jeff was explaining various aspects of networking to me – some of which I remembered after doing my Computer Science degree a few years ago, but some of it was totally new – Jeff is quite good at explaining stuff and I certainly appreciated it, however the more he talked, a mass feeling of dread came over me – God, things have really moved on in a few years as most of this wasn’t covered at Uni!

After the cake and muffins were ready, we tried a small slice of cake and a muffin. The cake was absolutely brilliant and after we’d tried it – I put silver foil over the rest, ready to take to work the next day and to help us not be tempted to eat any more. We then started dinner, which was salad and kebabs – the kebabs were the ones we had bought from Windsor farm shop at the weekend and they were really, really nice. I’m really glad we grilled them as a LOT of fat dripped off them – even when we had them on our plate they were quite greasy (this was solved by blotting them with some paper).

It was actually quite late by the time all the cakes and muffins had been baked and we’d eaten dinner – so late that we actually only managed to watch one episode of Ina Garten’s ‘Back to basics’, however it was a good episode and I think we’re certainly going to try a couple of the things she cooked on there! A quick shower, some cuddles and we went to bed – Jeff was up early this morning as he had to go to the Post office to collect his P45 form that his old job had JUST sent him (this didn’t overly surprise him as his old company are CRAP at everything).

We’re next seeing each other on Sunday... only for a few hours, however I am sure we will find something fun to do!

- Molly

Eurovision + cake + Farmers market = Great weekend!

The end of this week hopefully marks the end of some other things – the end of work stress being the biggest one. Now that my company has moved offices, I am already finding myself sleeping much better and hopefully this means I am a nicer and less stressy person when I am with Jeff.

Jeff and I have had a pretty awesome weekend. I arrived around his house on Saturday at around midday (before that, I was in Swindon at a very well known tattoo parlous called ‘Skin Graffiti’ asking Mike, one of the lead tattoo guys about getting another tattoo) and was in a great mood due to booking my next tattoo – just over a month to go, I can’t wait! I *had* sent Jeff a Graze box as a present in the post, however the postman doesn’t seem to deliver Jeff’s mail until after midday, so I actually arrived at Jeff’s house before it got delivered which was a bit annoying! We had a little bit of a chat and straight away headed out to Windsor, where we had decided we would get a spot of lunch and do some ‘mooching’.

Getting to Windsor wasn’t a problem at all, however actually driving around Windsor, especially to the car park was a massive issue – the traffic light system seems really awful and due to the number of tourists that were there, every time someone pressed the button to cross the road, the lights instantly changed, even if they had just changed to green, seconds before – cue literally, a massive ‘queue of traffic!’ We had thought that our bad luck had gone when we found a parking space, however we had a little bit more bad luck when all the ‘pay and display’ machines had been changed recently to accept card payments. All well and good, however it would be nice if they actually WORK…. Jeff tried one, waited for ages and then got ‘Card reader not available, TPS call needed’ – er….. okaaaay, so we walked to another machine and after 5 minutes of waiting for the machine to connect to Jeff’s bank etc, it finally gave us a ticket. I know technology should make our lives better, but when it takes you more than DOUBLE the amount of time to pay for a parking ticket…. Does it seem worth it? Especially the amount of money it probably cost to upgrade all the machines.

After finally managing to pay, we headed straight to Waggamamas for some lunch and managed to get a table easily. As per usual, the Waggamama’s staff were great and we thoroughly enjoyed our chilli squid, duck goyoza, amai udon and ginger chicken udon – Yum! After feeling totally stuffed, we had a bit of a wander around town which was very successful as I managed to buy a couple of cropped cardigans which I’ve been looking for, for a while as I have a number of dresses that I’d like to wear this summer, but am not too keen on how the tops of my arms look (even though Jeff says they look fine) so now I have the cardigans, I won’t feel self conscious! I also bought a lovely cardigan from New Look and some ‘good’ vanilla extract from Lakeland plastics which, usually, would hardly have filled me with joy – however, it’s the exact type of vanilla extract that Ina Garten uses and as she is still my cooking guru, if she uses it – we need to use it in the kitchen!

We wandered round a few more shops and then decided to head to Waitrose to get the necessary ingredients so we could cook dinner later on. I had suggested to Jeff I show him how to make schnitzel – something that he was more than happy to learn as he loves the stuff! I’ve never been overly keen on Waitrose, however the Waitrose in Windsor seems exceptionally well stocked and we managed to find most of the ingredients we needed, the only thing we couldn’t find was red cabbage that was able to be microwaved which meant we just bought a red cabbage and decided we’d give it a go ourselves!

We wandered back to the car with all our shopping and headed off to the Windsor farm shop to buy the fresh pork that we needed for the schnitzel – Jeff seems to rather like the Windsor farm shop and I can’t blame him. It seems they have recently had a massive renovation and it looks a lot brighter and a lot more modern – still (unfortunately) quite an expensive place to go, however the meat does taste exceptionally nice so whilst we couldn’t really afford to shop there all the time, it’s certainly a nice treat to buy such good quality meat every once in a while.

We drove home and on the way back, I started to get really tired so Jeff and I chilled on the sofa for an hour or so, as soon as we got in. What did we watch? Well, we certainly didn’t deviate from our ‘normal’ shows, so we watched a couple of Barefoot Contessa: Back to Basic programs, and another episode of ‘Monsters inside me’, which was quite interesting considering that a bloke had 5 maggots living inside his head – lovely, I know!

We started to cook after that, however that was brought to a complete standstill for a few minutes when Jeff’s dishwasher decided to start leaking – I discovered this when I walked round the kitchen and suddenly found my sock was very wet! Hopefully Jeff can call someone out to fix it this week, however until then – he’s got a couple of cups under the dishwasher, so it doesn’t leak all over his floor again.

We cooked the onion, added the cabbage, white wine vinegar and some sugar. It tasted really nice, however we both agreed that the cabbage needed to be cooked for slightly longer next time. However, considering we’d never done it before, we thought we did a rather good job! Jeff liked the schnitzel and as he’s still alive as I’m writing this, my cooking didn’t kill him :-)

Yesterday, the Eurovision song contest was on television so we decided we would watch that. It’s not really that good, however it is amusing, and entertaining. Just before it started, I suggested to Jeff we make a cake, ‘just because’ and we found a recipe for a blueberry cake online where the only ingredient we didn’t have in the cupboard was the fresh blueberries. We quickly drove to the nearest supermarket and bought a couple of punnets before heading back and baking the cake – I didn’t read the recipe completely correctly and we added some of the ingredients in the wrong order, but considering we didn’t do the thing exactly right, it actually turned out really well! It smelt divine and it tasted really, really nice – we had some warm, with ice cream, not exactly healthy, but, well.. sod it… it’s sometimes nice to treat yourself.

We then settled down to watch the rest of the Eurovision song contest and made it until 11:00pm, until I got very, very tired so suggested to Jeff that we went to bed, which we did (as Jeff is so laid back he’s usually very happy to go to bed whenever I’m tired – he never usually gets tired before me).

Sunday morning, I woke Jeff up and after some cuddles in bed, we drove down to Southsea, which is where the Hampshire Farmers market were holding their Sunday market. We hadn’t been to the one in Southsea before and took this opportunity to see if it was better than Winchester. It didn’t take that long to drive to Portsmouth and I was surprised at how pretty and clean the place was. Jeff had been to Portsmouth a lot more recently than me (his ex came from the Isle of Wight) so knew his way around a lot better than me. We parked relatively easily and wandered to the market, which was only a few hundred meters away. We were both pleasantly impressed at how big the market was – not as big as Winchester, but not far off, and one of the good points was, the bloke who sold THE most gorgeous tomato bread was there, so obviously we bought some more lovely bread and also managed to buy some more cheese, meat and apple juice (which was gorgeous). I also bought a sausage roll, which Jeff and I shared – it was the nicest one we had ever tasted, loads of sausage meat and just enough moist pastry – bliss!

We headed back home with our stash of goodies and embarked on the BBQ. Jeff cooked this time as I was feeling a bit cold-ridden (I still don’t know if I’m getting a cold or not, we shall have to see). So I sat on a chair by the door whilst Jeff cooked the meat.

Jeff’s garden is looking absolutely superb – everything is growing loads and our sunflowers, herb pot and lettuce are doing especially well. The strawberries we purchased a few weeks ago are all flowering and even the radishes, which we thought we had killed when we re-potted them, have sprung back into life. I suggested to Jeff that I pull a few radishes up and prepare them (just for him as I’m not fond of radishes) and Jeff thought this was a good idea. Out of the 4 that I pulled up, 2 were rotten and had maggots living inside them, however 2 seemed absolutely fine, so I washed and prepared them and they must have been OK, as Jeff didn’t have a problem eating them – so there we go, we have successful grown AND eaten some radishes. I think we are both hoping that the tomatoes, lettuce and peppers hurry up – I don’t think we’re going to get a lot of strawberries, cherries or blackberries this year, but as it’s the first year that we’re growing them, I think we’re prepared for this.

We had a gorgeous lunch inside, at Jeff’s dining table and a quick cuddle before I headed home. It had been another brilliant weekend and I’m hoping that the time we spent together in the bank holiday weekend (in 2 weeks time) will be just as good. I did tell Jeff what we’re doing as I’m pretty awful at keeping secrets and he now knows that we’re going wine tasting on the Saturday, followed by a rather nice steak restaurant – cool!

We’re next seeing each other on Wednesday night and as we have the food already sorted, we’re going to have to think of other things to do, to keep ourselves entertained :-)

- Molly

Soon the stress will be over

As I get older, it seems to be the case that not everything can ever go right in your life at the same time – last year, I had a brilliant job I was really enjoying, yet Jeff and I had split up and whilst I was ‘getting on’ with my life – going out and enjoying myself with friends as much as I could… it still felt as if something was missing. Jeff said the same thing – even though he lived with his ex-partner last year, he didn’t really enjoy his job and his relationship wasn’t overly happy.

Currently – we both have each other (something we didn’t think would be possible after we broke up in October 2009) however my job is currently exceptionally stressful, which means that I don’t have much energy when I see Jeff and it’s quite upsetting. I know there are studies that say that if you’re stressed, continually thinking about other things and unable to switch off, your libido can suffer, however: just because studies say this, it doesn’t make you feel less guilty when it happens to you. Poor Jeff has been so supportive these last few weeks – not putting any pressure on me AT ALL to have sex or do anything, however I have to admit to feeling quite guilty about not being intimate with him at the moment, especially considering he has been through ‘periods of drought’ when we were dating back in 2009 – I shudder to think how long it was, back then.

However – as per the title of this blog, the stress will hopefully soon be over and I CAN’T WAIT! My job should stop being so stressful and Jeff and I can get on with enjoying ourselves and spending loads of time together. Due to my very long working hours at the moment, Jeff and I only managed to spend Saturday night together and whilst it was very nice to see him – I was so shattered that all we really managed to do is cook (a lovely steak, broccoli with parmesan and pine nuts and sweet potato wedges with garlic) and watch some TV. We did start watching ‘Hookers saved by Jesus’ which is some random program on DMAX about prostitutes in Las Vegas who are trying to come off ‘the game’ by finding God.. however it wasn’t actually that interesting so we decided to go back to watching ‘Supersize vs Superskinny’ instead, which was much more entertaining – however that program would always be entertaining considering the colours and patterns of Dr Christian Jessen’s shirts!

It was lovely cuddling on the sofa – however by 10:00pm I had to call it a night. Jeff was fine with this and we went upstairs, cuddled and he gave me a wonderful massage before we said goodnight. I had to work today and am working all of next week, so I won’t be seeing Jeff until Wednesday – I told him today that I’m cooking him a surprise meal on Wednesday and whilst I didn’t tell him it was because I really appreciate his support over the past few weeks, that’s the real reason… I won’t say what it is, but I shall certainly report back and take some photographs – I just hope it turns out well!

No photographs this time, I’m afraid – However I shall take some photographs of Jeff’s garden soon as everything has grown so much! Our sunflowers are a good few inches tall, our tomato plants are going to need tying to bamboo canes soon and our hanging basket is looking very impressive indeed – even the radishes we nearly killed when we re-potted them, have come back!

Well, here’s to another week!

- Molly

Mid-week catch up with pie!

As I’ve said in previous blogs, I always knew that this would be a very stressful week for me as my company are moving offices and I’m the one who is mostly responsible for it. Whilst Jeff has been incredibly supportive as usual, he has his own things to deal with – after all, he’s only been working for his new company for just over a week and considering I was a very selfish / stressy person towards the end of our relationship, the last thing I want is to ‘emotionally drain’ him again, like a vampire.

So, I went round to Jeff’s house last night (Wednesday) and managed to get there by 5:30pm. I thought that Jeff would be back pretty soon after me, however he didn’t actually get back until about 7:00pm! Not that that’s an issue as I managed to sort various things out in Jeff’s house – namely, feeding the birds, watering all our plants in the garden, hovering his stairs and landing, unloading the dishwasher and also setting to work hovering his lounge as I’m not entirely sure when the last time he did it was – the good thing about Jeff not being home yet, is that he doesn’t try and take the hoover away from me – whenever I try and clean his house, he always says ‘Don’t turn into my Mother’, which I can appreciate, however cleaning is quite cathartic for me and I also like the idea of Jeff living in a clean house, is that such a bad thing?

Before Jeff got back, I also managed to make our dinner – a healthy version of a chicken and ham pie. I got the recipe out of my BBC Good Food magazine and Jeff was kind enough to buy all the ingredients the day before. It wasn’t very hard to make at all, and incorporated filo pasty instead of short crust – hence why it was low fat. Once it was popped in the oven, I went into Jeff’s garden to sit in the sun, before seeing him walk through the door and get a cuddle from him. It’s good to report that his job seems to be going very well and he doesn’t seem to be missing his old company, which, according to him – had a lot of wankers in it and no one really cared.

We sat out in the garden for a little while and Jeff showed me his sunburn – he got it on Monday when he was with a friend. It didn’t look too bad, however Jeff had told me that it had been ‘oozing’ on Tuesday and that he had to put a lot of cream and moisturising lotion on it, ouch! After having a bit of a chat, we went into the kitchen, where I suggested we serve the pie with peas and gravy to make it more interesting. It didn’t take long to do, and before long we had a very tasty chicken and ham pie with peas and gravy – the good thing being, there was enough left over for Jeff to have some the following day.

The rest of the evening went very quickly and we just watched some TV and Jeff kindly rubbed my shoulders which had been hurting due to my going to the gym and moving a lot of heavy office furniture. We watched ‘Monsters inside of me’, which was rather gruesome but also quite fascinating. It was about various parasites living inside people and the side affects they had, along with how the medical staff got rid of it.
Unfortunately 9:00pm came round way too quickly and I left Jeff standing at the door, so that I could get home and sleep – We will be seeing each other on Saturday (unfortunately I am working that day)  for a little while and as I’m staying over I am hoping we can cook, cuddle and just spend more time together.

One nice thing to look forward to is the next bank holiday weekend – I’ve got some VERY cool things planned – however they will have to remain a secret until after we’ve done them, as I know Jeff will be reading the blog and still thinks I can’t keep secrets……

- Molly

Vodka = bad

Jeff and I just can’t seem to ‘chill’, the whole idea of sitting in front of the TV for hours on end is alien to both of us and as per usual we have managed to do an inordinate amount of stuff in less than 24 hours.

I spent most of yesterday in the spa, with a friend and Jeff played various computer games and pottered around. I got to his house for about 6pm and after watching a little bit of TV and watering the plants outside (everything seems to be going really well, still!) we decided to cook – tonight we had 2 more Ina Garten recipes to try: Steakhouse steaks (http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/steakhouse-steaks-recipe/index.html) and sautéed wild mushrooms (http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/sauteed-wild-mushrooms-recipe2/index.html) Jeff had got a pepper grinder with the food processor he purchased a few months ago, so we tried to do what Ina suggested and grind our own pepper – it actually seemed to work quite well and we mixed it with some salt and coated the well-oiled steaks with it.

Usually I really enjoy cooking with Jeff, however this time it wasn’t overly fun and I don’t think Jeff thought it was either. I don’t know if we were both tired, but our timings seemed really out and there wasn’t much banter between us – we just got on and did stuff, then got in each others way.

The steak was way too peppery for me and even Jeff (who loves pepper) said it was slightly too peppery. I am assuming it’s a failure on our part – as I don’t imagine that the wonderful Ina got it wrong and she hasn’t let us down so far (let us not forget the Parkers beef stew or the French apple tarts we did recently which were a resounding success!) The cooking method was brilliant though, and we both agreed that we would certainly cook the steaks in the way she suggested in her recipe. The mushrooms, on the other hand – were absolutely brilliant and tasted wonderful, so it wasn’t a complete disaster.

After dinner we watched random TV and I suggested we have a few drinks – BIG mistake. For some reason 5 shots of vodka got me completely drunk and when I’m drunk, my paranoia seems to get 100 times worse. Jeff said he was going to go to the toilet quickly and I went to look on his computer for the dates to Goodwood, Festival of Speed as we had just been talking about going. I mistakenly clicked on ‘My computer’ as on my laptop – the icon for firefox is where his icon for ‘my computer’ is – however, rather than sensibly shutting the window down, I had this overwhelming urge to try and find a photograph of his ex-girlfriend to see what she looked like.

This took about 30 seconds and after I saw a photograph – I felt sick. Completely my fault and I immediately felt bad about ‘snooping’. Jeff came back and I admitted straight away what I did, asked him to password protect his computer and  got quite upset. Jeff was slightly puzzled as according to him, after his ex and he had split – he had deleted all photographs of her. After a lot of coaxing – I showed Jeff where I had found the photograph, only for Jeff to say that it wasn’t his ex, but his exes friend. Did I feel totally stupid? Yes..

I told Jeff that I could probably find out what she looked like within a minute and after 30 seconds, managed to find his exes Facebook profile, complete with loads of photos. Jeff’s response was ‘See, I told you she was ‘fugly’, However from what I could see – she was neither fat, nor ugly… however I guess that’s the thing – your partner is hardly going to say to you ‘My ex was prettier than you’, or. ‘Yes, she was short and brunette – your polar opposite’. Still, whatever anxiety I am feeling – it’s my own stupid fault and if anyone has any tips on how to stop feeling inadequate, it would be nice to hear them :-)

After the stupid episode, Jeff and I went to bed as he had to be up at 05:00am to take some of his friends to Gatwick airport. He got back by 07:50am and when I got up to go to the toilet, he said hello. He made me a cup of tea in bed and by 09:30, we had already had some fruit, watched a ‘Barefoot Contessa’ episode and headed out the door to Petersfield Farmers Market. We went to Petersfield Farmers Market a few years ago and it had torrentially rained, however hadn’t ben there since. It still wasn’t as big as Winchester but it wasn’t far off and thankfully this time round the sun was shining and the weather was really gorgeous.

We decided we were going to do another BBQ for lunch / dinner and bought lots of really nice meat, including ‘pork, goats cheese patties’ and some watercress sausages which I can’t say I overly enjoyed but hadn’t ever tried them before so they were worth trying! We also bought loads of different cheese – ‘pepper and beer’ and ‘garlic and nettle’ amongst others. After we had wandered around the market for half an hour, we headed back to the car and found a cooking shop on the way. Jeff and I both bought different types of thermometers so that we could tell what temperature the meat was, when we baked it in the oven as well as how hot various liquids were in pans.

On the way back home I suggested to Jeff we stop off in a garden centre and finally buy some herbs and the strawberry plants I had wanted for ages. £20 later and we had 5 different herbs and 6 very healthy strawberry plants heading back with us in the car.

As soon as we got home, Jeff helped me wash my car (which had been utterly filthy for the past few weeks!) and after that, I set about potting up all the new plants whilst Jeff cut the grass. Once all the ‘chores’ were done, we started on the BBQ which was really nice – we ate the meat with a lovely cheese and tomato bread and a lovely focaccia which we bought fresh at the Farmers Market this morning. We also had some nice homemade beetroot chutney which we had bought in Hexham farmers market which was gorgeous!

After food, Jeff and I watched a little bit of TV, however Jeff kept falling asleep and looking really tired – he said he was OK, however after a few minutes it was clear that he wasn’t and really should have gone to bed. I suggested I go home early and Jeff replied ‘If that’s what you want’. To be honest… I didn’t, as was looking forward to spending a few more hours with Jeff – however it was pointless (and a bit cruel) to stay as Jeff was so tired. … So I headed home and Jeff went to bed.

The next couple of weeks are going to be hell at work – so I don’t know what Jeff and I will be doing, or exactly how much time we will be spending together… I just hope we can continue doing fun things together and enjoying each others company.

- Molly