Gathering

On Saturday night Alfie howled and howled and howled, so Mr B (who is infinitely more giving than me) let him sleep in our room. Alfie is a very needy boy. Needy for his master that is. They're the best of mates and are always glued to one another. I think the problem was the change of routine you see. Mr put him to bed not me as he's used to. I'd fallen asleep so I wasn't much help in the role of tucking dogs up in their beddy byes. Well I paid the price for that one. Hardly any sleep later while Alfie scratched, snored, licked his feet with loud sucky gulps and generally made a god awful noise I broke. At 4am I couldn't take it any more, so I threw him out and then I slept like a baby until 9am.

We were dog tired (ho ho) on Sunday.  Restoring was needed. I cooked up a hearty butternut squash soup and then we headed off for fresh air hunting and gathering from the hedgerows. 

The Bun's chose to cycle while we walked holding hands, chatting and keeping an eye on that naughty dog of ours. A few late blackberries were scoffed along the way and then we got to our favourite place for finding sloes.

Bikes were thrown down and off the Bun's raced to play in the tree covered ditches. Alfie Blue went with them and then seconds later Miss Rosey brought him out as she said he was frightened in there and kept shaking. Not a brave boy this weekend is he.

We were mighty disappointed to see there were no sloes at all. Perhaps they've just not grown this year, we didn't have any greengages on our tree either. I had a sulk as I love waiting for that delicious gin to ferment and then just before christmas drinking up jewel coloured sloe gins with lemonade. Just one makes me feel quite giddy, goodness knows what two would do. Anyways I'm not going to find out this year am I.

Instead we turned out attention to the rosehips. As we've never made Rosehip Syrup before we thought we might as well have a go at this instead.

This morning I realised I didn't have enough sugar or bottles to start my syrup production line so I'll save that for an evening after work. Instead I got going on our evening meal as I'm fed up that we get in so late these days and then end up eating any old thing.

I started off with a hazlenut meringue as this uses up four egg whites and the leek and dolcelatte tart I was going to make needs four yolks. Good excuse to make something sweet and luverly. I was going to make this yesterday, but couldn't be bothered.

Now we're down to just two eggs as our three daft hens have started laying their eggs somewhere other than where I can find them. A whole week without eggs means a whole 21 eggs we've missed out on. I've become so dependent on our hens to provide and end up planning meals around how many eggs we have. No more baking for a while I guess.

Before I pop off I thought I really should say hello to new followers of this here blog. Thanks for reading and my apologies for not finding the time to say hello. I'm now aware that I have an hour and a half before being on the road for two hours doing school runs and I've a weeks teaching to plan, beds to make, phone calls about bills and so on so off I go.