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
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