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sweet nothings...

christmas decorations!

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We put our little christmas tree up tonight! The christmas lights were turned on in Edinburgh town centre this evening, we were going to see this happen, but because it started raining and was cold and dark, we decided to just go home and put our own tree up instead, the street lights can wait for another night :smile:

Cheesy christmas music was played in the background as we wrestled with assembling the various fiddly parts of the tree, and hung as many decorations as we could each before they all ran out (it was done very quickly!)

This year we have much nicer decorations on the tree than when we were in Salisbury, we even have solid lindt chocolate decorations! Some lights were put up around the kitchen window too :smile:









rainbow

I saw this beautiful and perfect rainbow outside my kitchen window this morning :smile: It stretched from the big school building in the distance, to the cricket field right outside my flat!



pie lover heaven

My boyfriend ordered a batch of twelve pies from the 'pie minister' shop down in Bristol/Oxford, and after much excited anticipation they finally arrived today. He staggered down the hill from work this afternoon, clutching his precious box of meat pies to his chest with a big happy grin on his face :smile:

They have now been lovingly installed in the freezer, filling up an entire drawer :rolleyes: Tonight dinner was pie and mashed potato...I had a vegetarian mushroom one, he had his favourite minty lamb one. I can't understand why he insists on plonking his pie on top of the mash and drowning it in gravy though, I much prefer it just the way it is! Much less messy!

I'm not normally much of a pie person, but I make an exception for this lovely wild mushroom and asparagus one. It reminds me of my occasional day trips to Oxford when I lived down in Salisbury! Nostalgic pie :smile:




this is actually how they serve the pies in the pie minister restaurants!

giant conker

I found this funky sculpture in a park today and rushed over to take pictures, it turned out to be an advert for a camera with a fancy zoom lens, but I still thought it was great :smile:



my new fingerless gloves :)

I have been wearing last year's gloves until now, they were all full of holes and with half the fingers hanging off. I finally found a pair I liked today though! A magnificent purple and red striped pair with bright orange fingers :smile: I fell in love with them immediately, and pounced upon them with a squeal, despite the strange 'finger flap' fashion that I have ben stubbornly refusing to give in to until now!
I thought this fashion was just a bit silly, and that when they were covering my fingers mitten-style I felt like I was wearing socks on my hands. But these ones were extra woolly, and just so colourful and lovely I couldn't resist :smile:




christmas decorations! :)

Me and my bf went shopping today and found ourselves buying xmas decorations :smile: Last year we had a packet of the cheapest plastic baubles we could find in the local supermarket, our little tree looked a bit sorry for itself! http://my.opera.com/kirstycat/blog/christmas-tree

This year we have some good quality, old fashioned looking, pretty ones from a big department store :smile: I love my knitted baubles! :love:


baked fish and rosemary potatoes

Tonight my mum invited me and my boyfriend over for dinner. She made us lovely baked trout with rosemary sliced potatoes, roasted cherry tomatoes, with horseradish sauce and salsa verde. It was great :up: We even got chocolate cake for pudding :smile:

That's my (hungry) boyfriend's hand sneaking into the top of the picture :smile: My voice is in the background of most of my foody pictures saying "wait! not yet! just a minute! I just want to take one more picture!" :lol:




winter sunshine

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I went for a walk this morning through Inverleith Park and the Botanical gardens. There was a lovely christmasy smell of pine trees everwhere today :smile: I love crisp sunny winter days, so much better to me than the hot sticky ones of summer!

I love the clear nothern light we have here in the winter too, all the colours look so much brighter and everything looks so sharp and in focus. I even love how the sun is starting to set at 3pm again now.
It makes the little bit of sunshine that there is earlier in the day that bit more precious, and makes me get out of bed early on days off to go for morning walks!





I found this cat sunbathing under a tree in the botanics :smile: If I were an animal I would be this cat!

tomato baked fish

I made baked fish for our dinner tonight :smile: I couldn't find the recipe for a spanish one I have made before, so I made a Jamie Oliver one instead, throwing in a few extra ingredients.

I made a nice tomato, onion, garlic and basil sauce first. I used lots of fresh basil, and added some mushrooms and a courgette I found in the fridge. Then I put my bits of fish on top of the sauce in an oven dish, sprinkled it with some black olives and capers, and baked it for 15 mins at 220'C.
While it was cooking I made some mashed potato, and some peas to make it look pretty :smile:





It was really good! :up:

Norwegian chocolate advert :)



halloween

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Last night I had a little halloween dinner party for four :smile: I chose what to make, went food shopping, prepared all the ingredients, roasted my butternut squash and set the table with all the candles I could find. My very helpful and apparently multi-talented boyfriend bought and carved a little pumpkin for my table's halloween centre piece (pretty magnificent specimen of a pumpkin it was too, especially for a first attempt!) Pumpkins certainly look a lot easier to carve than a turnip, which is what I used to use when I was a kid! I can see now why they are used so much in America!

When my friends arrived though, all I really wanted to do was sit with them and catch up on all their news, so my boyfriend gallantly volunteered to make my butternut squash and feta risotto for me! (it was his own recipe I was using though, so he would make it so much better than me :wink:) It was so sweet of him to do that for me though and I was very grateful :love: I didn't even make my own pudding! :rolleyes:
I bought a ready made apple pie and a tub of really nice ice cream from a fancy supermarket instead!

I really enjoyed the meal though, and it was great to see my friends again, and to finally show them round my first flat :smile: Next time I have a dinner party though, I am going to choose something which I can make in advance and just shove in the oven before my guests arrive! :wink: That way I can join in with the fun and gossip, instead of spending all my time cooking in the kitchen!







pizza night!

My mum invited me and my bf round for dinner last night, she made these lovely pizzas for us :happy:
There was an onion one, a mushroom one, and a margherita :heart: my favourites! :D


roasted garlic and mushroom pasta

I made this lovely spicy garlicky mushroomy creamy pasta tonight for my boyfriend, as he has been all bunged up with a cold today, and I thought a bit of garlic would do him good. Also, it might help to prevent me from catching it too!!

I used two whole roasted bulbs of garlic, so I don't think there will be any vampires coming near our flat anytime soon! I have a lemon and nutmeg rice pudding cooking at the moment too, for a late night comfort pudding :happy:






rice pudding! :smile:


dog gardener

Every time I sit down at my kitchen window with a cup of tea, I always seem to see this man zooming around on his little red lawnmower, looking after the grass on the cricket pitch. He always has his dog with him though, and it makes me smile to watch as the dog happily trots up and down the field, following the lawnmower, jumping around and wagging it's tail :smile: I miss living with a dog! I miss the mess and chaos, laughing at the funny things they do everyday, the fluff and hairs all over my clothes, the sharing of everything I eat, the comforting doggy smells and hairy cuddles...


feeding the xmas cake!

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Tonight was the first brandy-feeding night of last week's xmas cake! :hat:
http://my.opera.com/kirstycat/blog/2009/10/15/christmas-cake
It only gets a tbsp once a week, so we took turns to feed it with half a tbsp each :smile:



breaded fish with rosemary oven chips and ketchup



mushroom and potato risotto (with rosemary and parsley)


really really nice! :up: I liked this one a lot!

afternoon tea at my favourite tea house :)

Today I went back to the cute little cafe I went to this time last month http://my.opera.com/kirstycat/blog/2009/09/23/little-tea-party-celebration , this time with my mum :smile: We had a big pot of tea, with a sweet knitted bee tea cosy on the teapot :love: My mum had butterscotch coffee cake, I couldn't resist getting the lovely chocolate cake I had the last time. I could only manage half the slice again though! I took the other half home in a little bag for my boyfriend :smile:



early diwali

On Thursday night my mum threw an Indian diwali 'festival of lights' party :hat: The real diwali doesn't actually start until the weekend, but me and my boyfriend both had a day off, and seeing as we're only wanting an excuse for a big curry, it was decided that it would be moved forward a couple of days (a bit like having a christmas celebration on the 23rd of December!)

I have never seen such a magificent curry, there were so many lovely things! I only had some of the vegetarian curries, but even with just those there was more choice than I could ever dream of in my wildest foody dreams! :love: We filled the room with all the candles and tealights we could find (twenty eight altogether!)

Here is a list of all the lovely things my mum made: (most of my pictures were a bit blurry due to the low light of the candles!) I can't remember the proper names of most of the things, so I will describe what they are made of instead :smile:
cobra beer!!
popadums and mango chutney
naan
fluffy basmati rice
grated carrot with black mustard seeds
yogurt with cucumber
chopped raw onions and tomatoes
sweetcorn curry
my favourite coconut lentil daal
wild mushroom curry
potato and aubergine curry
(lamb curry)
(beef curry)
(chicken curry)
pistachio and almond kulfi for pudding :smile:





It was great! :D :up:

Thursday afternoon pre-curry walk in the botanics :)