Jeff and I spent Wednesday evening together and it was lovely – unfortunately I didn’t stay the night as I had to drop my cat off in the cattery on Thursday morning, however we made the most of our time together.
I arrived at Jeff’s house before him as I have said before, I leave work earlier than him and only work a few miles away from where he lives. As soon as I got to Jeff’s house I decided to put some washing on for him, do some cleaning etc. Jeff arrived before I was expecting him and he caught me in his downstairs bathroom cleaning the toilet! His opinion is always ‘You don’t need to clean my house’, however I just like to be busy and useful and if he’s at work, it seems wrong to just sit down and watch TV if I could be doing something to make his life easier. Reading that back, I appreciate it makes me sound like a doormat – however I think the reason I like doing it is because Jeff DOESN’T want me to clean – and I’ve always been a rather stubborn person.... :-)
Jeff’s garden is looking really, really wonderful. Everything is growing and it looks gorgeous. Both the sweet pea pots are out in bloom and Jeff’s tomatoes are growing nicely. Unfortunately the weather hasn’t been overly great recently so we haven’t been able to sit out in Jeff’s garden, on the patio and appreciate all the plants and flowers, but hopefully as Summer is now ‘officially’ here, we will be able to do it soon. I managed to water everything with Jeff’s empty Volvic bottles, before he arrived home (he doesn’t have a watering can) and filled them all up – so Jeff can water things at the weekend without it taking a long time.
As we had watched loads more ‘Barefoot Contessa’ episodes at the weekend, we had identified another recipe that we wanted to try – ‘Mac and cheese’ (http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/mac-and-cheese-recipe2/index.html) It took me ages to work out what ‘Mac’ was – duh! Macaroni of course! I managed to get all the necessary ingredients, Wednesday lunch time so we didn’t have to nip out to a Supermarket when Jeff got back home. We had a bit of a chat first, Jeff was telling me about his job (he is still enjoying it a LOT more than his old one) and I was telling Jeff all about the technical things I was up to (which is making work a lot more enjoyable than what I was doing before).
Then it came to cooking. I was in charge of the pasta and cheese sauce – Jeff was in charge of grating the cheese in the food processor, cutting up the tomatoes and making the bread crumbs. It didn’t take too long before we had everything sorted and stuck the Mac and cheese in the oven to brown for 30 minutes. Honestly – Ina Garten recipes are brilliant, they’re bloody easy to follow and usually you can get all the ingredients in a normal supermarket. The only thing that’s slightly confusing is – the measurements are all American, so you’re left wondering what a ‘quart’ of milk is (unless you are American, then I guess you know!).
30 minutes went by very quickly and we were left with the most AMAZING macaroni cheese we had ever tasted. I dread to think of the calories though.... Thankfully there was quite a lot left over so Jeff can have some tonight and tomorrow.
Whilst we had a lovely night, it came to an end too quickly and Jeff and I won’t see each other for a week as I’m off on holiday with a work friend. They say ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’, but I’m not sure if that’s true!
- Molly
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