04.50 pm
Well, today’s been quite “productive”, as my mother would have said! Alas, the tomato plants have all been removed… however we did manage to salvage one more good, small tomato! It’s not quite ripe yet, but it’ll only take about a day to get it ripe enough to eat. Julian harvested (“harvested” – isn’t that a nice word! 🙂 ) a beautiful bowl full of green beans from the main veggie bed, and a fistful of fresh spring onions from the second veggie bed. We were going to use the lovely little green capsicum that he picked yesterday in our lunch today, but I’ve had a better idea. We’ll get some baby bocconcini, slice up some tomato and the capsicum, plenty of salt and pepper, a couple of torn up basil leaves (unfortunately our basil plant has all but gone to seed, but I think there are still enough edible leaves on it for one “last hurrah” ) and make a little salad, to have with our dinner tomorrow night! It’s so nice having a veggie garden at long last – and everything we get from it is organic! Alright, so the baby bocconcini in the salad won’t be “organic”, but I know how to make cheese (it’s very, very easy! Can you still get junket tablets?) and we can jolly-well make our own! Well, not our own bocconcini – they’re supposed to be made with buffalo milk, and we don’t have a buffalo – yet! 😉 But we can make our own cottage-type cheese with organic milk – which I suppose we could then roll into little balls, and pretend that they were baby bocconcini! 😉 We also planted the little kumquat bush this afternoon – we’ll get some slow-release citrus plant food tomorrow, to give it a bit of a boost – I fear it’s been languishing somewhat, parked out on the back deck for so long 😦 but it should perk up (I hope!) We’ve put it in the middle, between the two veggie beds, where it’ll get plenty of sunshine, and being under our noses, so to speak, it shouldn’t miss out of getting watered regularly. When it develops its first crop of kumquats, I’m going to make marmalade! 🙂
And I made a cake today! 🙂 I was so torn – I didn’t know whether to make the sultana version, adding “about a small fistful” of sultanas to the cake mixture, or to make the citrus version, by mixing the zest of one orange into the mixture, and adding a generous “trail” of mixed peel through the centre of the cake. I ended up making the easier of the two, and added some sultanas to the mixture – only it wasn’t just sultanas! When we were buying all the stuff for my cake(s) I was loath to buy a whole, great big packet of sultanas, so I got Julian to get me down an 8-pack of those “school lunch snack” sultanas, in the little boxes. When we got them home, we discovered that they weren’t just sultanas – Julian had grabbed a pack of sultanas, and dried apple “bits” by mistake! Oh well – what’s the difference? You put apple in some cakes too, so I just tossed in two little packets of sultana and apple bits (of course I discarded the little cardboard boxes first!) We’ll have some of that for our dessert tonight – and I’m very curious to know how the sultanas and apple bits turned out! I’d read, many times, that to stop fruit from sinking to the bottom of a cake, the best thing to do was dredge and dust off the dried fruit through a bit of flour before adding it to the cake mixture – so I thought I’d try that – I didn’t want all the sultanas and apple bits sinking to the bottom of the cake! Well, I didn’t have to dredge the fruit through the flour, I simply added them to the sifted flour and mixed them through a bit – this particular cake is nearly all made in the food processor, which you then pour in, and mix into your bowl of sifted flour (on this occasion, with the sultanas and apple bits in it!) so I’m curious as to where the sultanas ended up – all through the cake, or all up the top of the cake (because the bottom of the cake tin becomes the top of the cake when it’s turned out to cool, so if the fruit was going to sink to the bottom while it was cooking, that bottom would become the top when you turned it out onto the cake rack!)
I also managed to get Arisnoë up to level 94 – I haven’t had to do Commander Vorka yet – someone evidently tripped over a cable at Blizzard this morning, and I had to log out – the lag was so bad that the game was unplayable 
Still, Wynterthyme did get her Dailies done, and she did finish off all her Mount Training, at long last! So now we (Mouselet and Wynterthyme) have to take their six different types of Mount, and defeat all the nasties, before getting the Achievement (and I think Title!) of “Stable Master”! It’s supposed to turn out to be (Julian did the math!) or add up to be – six times six – six Mounts, one after the other, against each nasty, or 36 battles altogether… And yes, there are six different Mounts, and each one has to battle each nasty – that makes sense, and I understand that – but there are more than six nasties – there’s about 12 of them – so does each of your six Mounts have to battle the same nasties, or can they pick and choose which nasty they’ll face, as long as they battle six of them? It’s very confusing… Anyway, we’ll look into that tonight, ot tomorrow…
Food stuffz: Last night we had chicken sausages for dinner, with half a store-bought tomato, snow peas, and chips. I had the last piece of Julian’s cake and a Dark Cacoa Chia Pod for dessert – I miss my fresh fruit! 😦 And for lunch, I had a sandwich made from the Baker’s Delight whole-meal bread, with corned silverside, low-fat cheese, and tomato relish – which was extremely nice! Tonight we’re having steak, half a store-bought tomato, the green beans that Julian picked this afternoon, and probably chips… and for dessert, I’ll have a piece of my cake, possibly with a bit of low-fat cream (I haven’t decided yet!) and another of those delicious Dark Cacao Chia Pods. We’d like to plant some broad beans this autumn – I must look up “broad beans” in relation to Warfarin though – there are so many things that I should avoid as much as possible – like leafy greens – though if I’m consistent, and eat them on a regualr basis (that is, don’t have heaps of say, Brussels sprouts one day, and then not have any more for a couple of weeks, and then eat another huge plateful of them) the regular blood tests will manage my INR levels. However, I don’t really want to eat broad beans every day while they’re in season! More research will be needed as to what we plant next…
Weigh-in this morning. Yup, still bobbing around like a good little cork in the weight-and-sea! I went from 63.3kg to 63.2kg this morning – that does make a full week, vacillating somewhere between 63.1kg and 63.5kg – so I suppose I must be what laughingly passes for “stable” at the moment – but who knows what my silly body is likely to do next week! 😉 Especially if I do decide to have some low-fat cream with my cake! 😮
And that brings me to tomorrow – Friday! Hopefully I might even get Arisnoë up to level 95! Wouldn’t that be good! However, I have no idea what’s happening tomorrow – I know Julian’s going to be going out to look at some things for my favourite youngest daughter – but hopefully that won’t take too long. I haven’t decided whether I’ll trot along or not – because I’m also working on yet another new desktop wallpaper-y thingy, as I’m not really happy with the one I’ve just finished. It sounded like a good idea when I first thought of it, but the actuality didn’t match with the concept, so I’m trying something different. Anyway, dinner’s nearly ready, and that’s really about it from me for tonight! Don’t forget to call in again tomorrow night and see if my weight is still bobbing aimlessly around, or whether it’s decided to do something different, for a change. I’ll be able to catch you all up on what’s going down the Drainor – oops! sorry, in Draenor, and what my sultana Babka was like! 🙂 Until then though, do please at least attempt to bee good, remember that you will never be like the ‘Little Engine That Could’ if you sit around on your caboose, and don’t forget to look after yourselves, to always drive carefully, and to keep cool – or warm – depending on how high the central heating has been set… but above all, please don’t forget to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂
My Word! 