Hi, these aren’t in my garden, but I spotted them on our walk today. Nice, aren’t they?
These are stunning too.
One of the highlights of yesterday’s walk with my friend Erica was this solitary daffodil in Clewer Park. Sometimes less is more. This one daffodil caught our eye, standing proud and full of cheeky character.
As usual, my free time seems to revolve around my two passions of nature and food. We’ve had a couple of particularly tasty home cooked meals this week from BBC Good Food magazine. My Mum likes to buy me a magazine subscription of my choice each year for Christmas, which is a great gift, and this year I chose BBC Good Food magazine. The magazine is a lot more trendy than I remember it from before. Some of the foods are quite alternative, but I am still managing to find some yummy recipes, and perhaps it is good for me to be pushed outside my comfort zone food wise a bit. The biggest challenge is usually that my regular diner, David, is a bit restrictive in his food choices, but he has got better in recent years in terms of trying new things, especially if I say they’re good for him.
We’ve both recently decided that we like chia seeds. They have loads of health benefits including lots of fibre and are easy to eat as they’re very small and don’t really taste of much at all. I had some today at lunchtime sprinkled on my yoghurt and blueberries. I’ve also tossed some into soup such as fish chowder. They just add a nice little crunchiness. I bought a pack of these from Ocado for £1.50.
By far the best meal of our week was this chicken and ham stew with mustardy dumplings from BBC Good Food magazine. So good. 😋 This picture was taken before the last 10 minutes in the oven with the lid off to crisp up the dumplings a bit..
This is what it looked like in the prep stage.
Carrots, leeks, onion, garlic.
Adding the chicken and ham.
Having a good simmer with the thyme, stock and cider…
The good news is we have a large amount of this stew leftover which is now in the freezer, so looking forward to enjoying this one again. I’m too lazy to label the pots in my freezer, but I also quite like the surprise of fishing out unidentified leftover home cooked food. I know it’s always something we’ve really enjoyed first time around if I’ve bothered to put it in the freezer.
Last night we had a sausage pasta bake from the same magazine. This was also very good, containing a rich tomatoey Ragu type sauce with some chilli flakes, also a white sauce with Parmesan, and dotted with mozzarella. We both agreed it was good, but it didn’t beat the casserole and dumplings!
All ready to gobble up..
So, the Easter eggs are coming out tomorrow… yippee!! Can’t wait. My friend Sarah says she’s hoping for peanuts instead…?!.? Peanuts? 😂Each to his/her own. I’m sticking with chocolate. How about you? Xx
The Windsor Waffle 