Thursday’s Waffle

There is fresh air in my garden, for the first time in days. Inside the house is still quite sweaty and muggy. At least work in the office should be a bit more pleasant and productive tomorrow.

I wonder what you’ve all been up to? Having fun I hope. I had fun last night out drinking white wine spritzers with my friends after work, having a quick dinner with David in the garden and then drinking more chilled white wine and soda (oops) outside while watching the bats darting about overhead. I was feeling a little jaded this morning and got up pretty late.

Meanwhile Mr Sunflower goes from strength to strength…

Some of the tomatoes are very yummy..

Although sadly some of the tomatoes opposite these look a bit diseased 🙁.

Today being a slow day at home, it was back to the slow cookbook to make Coq au vin (more wine oh dear!). This is the marinade I made this morning.

The chicken legs got soaked in this for a few hours in the fridge while we did other things including going out for lunch at Ferny Grove Farm. Ferny Grove Farm serves the best sausages in their café and has the best view…

We sat outside eating enormous sausage and fried egg sandwiches 😋, brown bread for me, white for David. Good for soaking up last night’s wine.

When we came home I prepared the rest of the Coq au vin recipe and it’s been on the high setting in the slow cooker for the last 2-3 hours. The mushrooms go in for the last 15 minutes. It smells great.

I don’t think I told you about the Madhur Jaffrey prawn curry I cooked last week. That was really good. David said last night he still keeps thinking about it. This was from one of my newly gifted cookbooks, Madhur Jaffrey’s “Flavours of India”.

The sauce was really thick and textured and contained a lot of puréed red onions. David said it was nothing like any prawn curry we’ve had in any Indian restaurant before. I agree it was different, but good different!

I think I could just gobble up a plateful of this now. I will definitely make this again.

Other news from The Waffle household is we’ve been making progress with the great rat saga..

After visits from the pest control man and then Thames Water we now have proof it is definitely rats that have been coming into our cavity wall (behind the downstairs shower) via the drains at the front of the house. Thames Water put a special camera on a cable down and immediately saw a rat family: two adults and two young ones. There is bait down the drain, stronger than before. And we have now bought a special rat flap door. I suppose it’s a bit like a cat flap! The rats will be able to go one way but not the other, so won’t be able to keep accessing the pipe to our house… or gnaw their way into my stationery cupboard in my downstairs office which they had done before. They had ripped up all my brown paper and envelopes into shreds, for their nest no doubt. I don’t blame them, they’re just being rats and surviving, but they’ve got to go as they are damaging our property… and not paying any rent at all! How cheeky!

We invested in a stainless steel rat door as the cheaper plastic ones apparently they can sometimes gnaw through. Someone is hopefully going to fit this next week. In the mean time we listen out for scratching at night, and I remain wary of the downstairs toilet imagining they may swim up the same at any moment as I understand they are experts at holding their breath and have been known to do so … yikes 😬!

Anyway, after a bit of expense we are making some progress in this matter. Hopefully they will be gone for good. Bye 4 now. Have a lovely weekend everyone xxx