Sad news about the eggs

The healthy eating is back on with a vengeance! That’s certainly true… Jeff and I have been healthy eating for a week now – no crisps, chocolate and no bread, rice or pasta. I weighed myself this morning and it’s certainly working, so I’m hoping another couple of weeks and all my pairs of trousers will fit again :-)

So, what have we been up to this week? Well… It’s been an up and down week, that’s for sure.  I first saw Jeff on the Wednesday and the weather was gorgeous – We had already decided what we were going to eat ‘Almond flaked cod’, which was one of the recipes in one of my BBC Good Food recipe books ‘101 fish and seafood dishes’. We thought we had all the necessary ingredients, however we forgot the fish stock so had to go out and get some.

Cooking took very little time and before long, we had dinner! In all honesty, I don’t think we would make it again as although it was ‘OK’, it wasn’t anything special and Jeff and I thought that the sauce was a little bit overpowering.

After dinner we turned the eggs and candled them – this proved quite emotional as it turns out, 5 out of 10 of them are infertile! I got quite upset at this, especially considering Jeff and I have been turning ‘the Oeuffs’ religiously 3 times a day for the last 12 days! It was quite nerve wracking when wee (Jeff) cracked the first one into a bowl, outside (we did it outside in case the egg was bad and smelt horrible) and we were met with – absolutely nothing! A completely normal egg with absolutely no bloody chick inside! We candled the others and the same thing happened.

So currently we only have 5 eggs in our incubator – We don’t think 3 of them have chicks inside, but we have seen veins and beating hearts in two of them, so we are keeping our fingers crossed for next weekend and hoping that at least 2 of the eggs will hatch. As it’s such a ‘poor show’, Jeff and I are actually going to get another incubator on Sunday night and I’ve already ordered some more eggs so we can have 2 incubators on the go at once! Currently we have black Orpington eggs being incubated, we’re going to add white Orpington eggs to it!

I also saw Jeff on Thursday night this week and whilst I was making home made beef burgers (with mince I had found in his freezer - I made loads of different types, cheese, mixed herbs etc) Jeff surprised me with flowers! It was really sweet of him and completely unexpected. I can't believe we have been 'seeing' each other for over 7 months now... it really does feel very different to last time round.

Unfortunately we’re not seeing each other until Sunday night as I’m seeing my crazy Uncle and Aunt ‘Oooop North’, however as soon as I get to Jeff’s we’re going to head off, pick up the other incubator and start the hatching process all over again :-)

- Molly

Lemoncello and sponge

This is just a quick update from me today as Jeff and I had a comparatively quiet night last night. Poor Jeff has been working really hard recently and has had to travel up to London for client meetings (something he hates, as he hates London). I had hoped to meet him at his house after work yesterday, but unfortunately his meetings overran so he wasn’t home until 6:30pm.

We went shopping, got a nice, yet slightly boring dinner of pasta, pesto, bacon, crème freche and cheese and just chilled. We also turned the eggs (I can’t believe it’s currently day 5!) and marked it off on our egg chart.

The most interesting thing we did yesterday was eat pudding – this was a birthday present from one of my friends, however as I hadn’t managed to see her until a couple of weeks ago, she gave it to me then, despite my birthday being in January. Basically, it was sponge pieces in Lemoncello – the Italian lemon vodka / liquor. She told me that the shop keeper had told her that it was nice with double cream, so at the weekend Jeff and I had bought some double cream in the farm shop, however hadn’t got round to eating it before last night.

They were ... interesting. You could really taste the alcohol and to be honest, I thought it was rather overpowering. Jeff seemed to like them though and had the ones I couldn’t finish. Would we have it again? Probably not, but it was different and it’s always good to try different things. One thing to mention – our sausage rolls went down really well with our respective work colleagues – both sets were demolished before lunch time which I guess is a testament to what good cooks we are :-)

This Saturday Jeff and I are off to London for a classical concert and I think we’re both looking forward to it immensely. It does seem like things are getting a little bit too busy for my liking – insomuch as, I’m not able to just relax and chill, I’m always doing stuff – I guess I only have myself to blame! One nice thing is that Jeff and I have a weekend together in 2 weeks time – that’s the weekend the chicks should hatch! We’re not going to do very much as we have to be near Jeff’s house so I think we’ll use it to cook, bake and generally enjoy each others company.

I can’t believe we’re going to be chicken parents in less than 3 weeks!

- Molly

Jeff and I are going to be parents....

I’ve been a bit remiss in updating our Blog – Jeff and I did actually spend Wednesday night together, however this only stretched to a couple of hours as I had a very busy day on Thursday and had to get back home to sort things out.

Surprisingly, after I got to Jeff’s I couldn’t really do much cleaning as Jeff had got wise to what I was doing and already did the washing – curses! I was foiled! So, after feeding the birds (they really are little, greedy things) I watched ‘Bums, boobs and botox’ on Jeff’s Sky Plus box and waited until he got back home. Poor Jeff is having to put up with me still being stressy at the moment and after keeping a blog – I realise that I’m not the easiest person to be with! This time, I was stressed over the fact that our incubator hadn’t turned up yet.

Jeff and I are going to hatch chickens and I have started another blog about it:

http://mollyandjeff-hatchingchicks.blogspot.com/

We’ve already got both sets of eggs and I had purchased the incubator from Ebay last week. The delivery time said 4-5 days and today was the 5th day. After contacting the seller on Ebay, they replied very quickly and said they had posted it first class on Monday so it should have certainly been here today – I have a feeling it’s got lost in the post….

Anyway, Jeff was trying to tell me that it was only Wednesday and that it would turn up soon enough. I, on the other hand, was worried that if it didn’t turn up by Friday (i.e. today) that we wouldn’t be able to start hatching our eggs on Sunday and they’d be useless. Once again, it’s obvious that Jeff is the laid back one in our relationship and I’m the worrier!

After Jeff had tried to calm me down, we went out to B&Q to try and find a thermometer – Why? Because apparently our eggs should be kept at about 12 degrees and if we kept them in Jeff’s main house, they would be too warm and if we kept them outside, they’d be too cold. So, we decided to keep them in Jeff’s garage and I wanted to know what the temperature was. Thankfully, we managed to find a thermometer very quickly and after we’d bought it, we picked up Waggamama’s takeaway (I know, I know – not the most healthy of things in the world, but at least it wasn’t curry!) and went back to Jeff’s house to eat dinner and chat.

Once dinner was finished (and very nice it was, too!) we put our future children in Jeff’s garage, tilted 45 degrees on some blocks of wood. In the last couple of days, Jeff has been really good and has been changing the tilt twice a day – I guess that’s the kind of thing you look for in a partner you may want to have children with one day… Can they cope with kids on their own and will they be a supportive partner? Well, looks like Jeff is able to cope with the eggs on his own!

Tomorrow we’re off to the BBC Good Food show..

- Molly

7 month itch?

According to my friends, the internet and countless 'Agony Aunts', there are a few 'stages' (for want of a better word) that most couples go through - the first being the '7 month itch', which is apparently when the honeymoon period is over, you stop being on your best behaviour all the time and you both see each other properly - warts and all. Some couples get through it, some, after realising that their partner really wasn't the person they thought they were, split....

As Jeff and I were together for 3.5 years last time, I didn't think we'd go through it - after all, we went through some pretty tough times and stood by each other. After splitting up in October 2009 and not having any contact until November 2010, we've basically been 'together' for the last 7 months and it's been really, really great.

However, the last week has been quite tough going - Jeff is still settling into his job and I've been feeling a bit unloved and unappreciated. This culminated in a midnight text exchange whilst I was on holiday in another country with a friend and followed by a lot of very LONG emails.

Jeff and I don't really text each other, or phone - we're both quite busy people and we've tended to email each other. However, I've found myself waiting longer and longer for Jeff's replies and even though I was able to email Jeff from abroad, send him photographs etc... I didn't hear from him for 2 days.

After our exchange, Jeff apologised - and I realised that he has been going through a lot of stuff at work and that I probably shouldn't be too hard on him, nor too demanding. I suppose it's just setting expectations? If he tells me he's too busy / tired / can't reply for a while, then I'd be OK.... but it was just the not knowing why he wasn't replying to me and it made me feel a bit crap.

Thankfully, I think we managed to sort it out - Jeff even suggested an open air theatre performance in a couple of months which sounds amazing (it's usually me who suggests things as I'm the planner, Jeff's very laid back) and I'm really looking forward to going.

So, I drove round to Jeff's house last night after work - the first time I had seen him since before my holiday. I said I wouldn't turn up until 6:00pm, however managed to get round to his house by 5:20pm, which meant I did some cleaning (much to his annoyance!) before he got there... Jeff had done a Tesco's order a couple of days before and got all the ingredients for the New York Cheesecake that we were going to make (http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/2869/new-york-cheesecake) and after I'd given him the gifts I bought him whilst on holiday and had a bit of a chat, we set to work making the cheesecake.

Unfortunately it soon became apparent that it wasn't a very quick recipe - bake the base for 10 minutes, then do part of the topping, stick in oven, reduce temperature, blah, blah.. etc.. etc. I admit, I did get a bit annoyed as I really just wanted to 'chill' with Jeff and whilst I usually love baking and cooking with him, it did appear that we were slaves in the kitchen and couldn't really relax whilst we were making the bloody cheesecake!

Added to which, we didn't think we had enough ingredients to make 2 - one for my work colleagues and one for his, so we actually drove to the Supermarket nearby and got more cream cheese and sour cream - turns out, we didn't actually need any more, so poor Jeff has 3 tubs of Philadelphia in the fridge and a lot of sour cream!

We managed to sort most of it out by 9:00pm and after stating that I really didn't want to cook anything for dinner, given that we had been in the kitchen for at least 1.5 hours, we decided to order curry. It wasn't too bad - however it was hardly healthy and considering I'm getting my tattoo next week (yes, that's still going ahead, can't WAIT!) I really don't want the tattooist to be tattooing on a big, fat, wobbly thigh. Plus - I really do want Jeff and myself to continue eating healthily and not go back to our old habits of eating crap.

Jeff opened a bottle of wine and we drank that whilst watching a documentary about the Elephant man - Joseph Merrick. We had recorded it on Jeff's Skyplus box a couple of weeks ago and it was very interesting.

We then made the final part of the cheesecake - the topping, which thankfully didn't take too long, before heading off to bed and cuddling - that was probably the nicest part of the evening as I had really missed Jeff in the last week, especially as we had a bit of a 'discussion' a few days before that.

As I've got a friend's wedding this weekend where I'm taking the wedding photographs, we're next seeing each other on Sunday night and next weekend is the BBC Good Food Show in Birmingham which I know we are both really looking forward to. I'm going to try and stop being so stroppy and I'm hoping Jeff will be able to give me a little more reassurance that he's not going to go anywhere......

- Molly

Mac and Cheese and sweet peas

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

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

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