Old News

I know everyone is doing it and has been doing it for a while and I'm so behind the times with this, but I finally had a go at trying newspaper nails and I love it. I followed this French tutorial that's been around for a while. I simply applied a base coat with grey nail polish and waited for it to dry. Then I dipped each nail in vodka and pressed a piece of newspaper on it - the key is to apply quite a bit of pressure onto the wet nail and the to gently peel of the paper. Once dry apply a coat of clear nail varnish et voilà you've got newspaper nails. So simple, yet so effective. I just love it.

 

Coffee Meringue Kisses

It was Jamie's mum's Birthday on Saturday and Jamie made her some yummy coffee meringue kisses.

Using eggs from our hens he made these scrumptious coffee flavoured meringues, ...

... filled them with whipped cream and and then drizzled melted dark chocolate over them.

Oh, I wish he'd make delicious treats like those more often for us.

Meandering in Winter Wonderland

When I woke up this morning and looked out of the window the world outside had transformed into a winter wonderland. While my bantam hens preferred to stay inside their coop, Jerry, the little cockerel tried to find out what the white stuff tasted like. I think he quite liked it as he had more after his first beak full. Matilda the hen and Zoltan the cat wrapped up warm in their little sweaters watching me make snowballs and snowmen.

Imbolc up-date

Things got a little late for my Imbolc post, as a matter of fact my post actually missed Imbolc by 9 minutes because I couldn't decide what picture to post. So in the end it was just a picture and nothing else, hence me giving you an up-date today. Little Brigid in her tiny bed from yesterday's photo was based on a lovely for tutorial "walnut babies" by A little slice of Life. Instead of doing a "baby" shape though, I cut the felt in a slightly more triangular shape that resembled a dress and instead of the little pointed hat I made head scarf. My stitches weren't very delicate and neat, but given the scale of the project I was quite happy with the end result.

I also picked some pretty snowdrops from my garden to brighten up the house - along with many candles of course.

To celebrate I had traditionally pale dishes like leek and potato soup, rice pudding and a nice glass of white wine.

Happy Imbolc )o(

Big Garden Birdwatch

This year we took part in the Big Garden Birdwatch, which took part this weekend just gone.

I made some fatballs and seed stuffed coconut halves the night before in order to lure lots of birds into our garden.

It was a bright and sunny Sunday morning with plenty of of little birdies twittering and chirping happily. With several fully stocked bird feeders in my garden, I was sure this would be a success.

However, by the time we were ready to count (the highest number of species seen at any one time), the weather had turned very grey and gloomy and it was raining. We usually have lots of birds including some of the rarer species around, but given the weather yesterday the turnout was very poor.

Here are our rather disappointing results from yesterday afternoon:

Pigeon anyone?

Last night when I came home from work I saw a pigeon sitting on our drive and it wouldn't move out of the way for my car, so I parked and went to take a look at it. With that it started flapping its wings and jumped out of the way, but didn't manage to fly away properly. Of course my cats noticed it straight away and tried to get it. So I chased the cats away and picked up the pigeon. It didn't look injured or poorly, I thought it was maybe just exhausted - or sad as I found the wings of another one in our garden, clearly attacked by the cats or something else. 

To protect the bird from the cats and to give it a place to rest over night I put it in my old chicken coop, that I no longer use - I didn't want the pigeon to go in with my chickens in case it had a disease. I gave it some mixed corn and water to help it get its strength back. When we went to let it out this morning the pigeon was walking around the coop exploring, but didn't want to go, it didn't even make an attempt to leave.

Here's some pictures of it:

  Pretty cute, don't you think?

It didn't have a ring, so I don't know if it belongs to anyone. Do you recon it's an ordinary wood pigeon? Any idea what type of pigeon it is?

What shall I do with it now? Keep it where it is (away from the cats) and give it food and water every day until it decides it's ready to go? Shall I pick it up and lift it up high to see if that encourages it to fly off? Am I stuck with a pet pigeon now?

Yummy Yoghurt

These last few days I've been experimenting with dairy in an attempt to make yoghurt. Thanks to this post over at Zoe Bakes it's been quite a success. At first I thought half a gallon of yoghurt would be way to much, but I followed the instructions and quantities anyway ... and finished eating the lot within two days! Straight away I made another batch using half a cup of yoghurt from my first batch as a starter. The first lot was made from full fat milk and the second one from semi skimmed. I can't wait to start my next batch with skimmed milk, making it a virtually fat free yoghurt. As Jamie has just started decorating our kitchen, I will have to fit my yoghurt production schedule around all that, meaning I have to wait, which isn't easy now that I know how good homemade yoghurt tastes. I tried making yoghurt before, but the recipes I used previously weren't very precise about temperatures and timings, so they didn't turn out this well.

Here are some pictures of my yoghurt in the making

and here some photos of the end result.

I left some of it quite thin so I could pour it over my cereals and also so I could mix it with herbs as a tasty salad dressing. Some of it I drained through a cheese cloth until it reached a thick Greek style yoghurt texture. I also left a part of it in the cheese cloth for a bit longer, which resulted in a lovely soft cheese, kinda like Philadelphia. I had a little bit of it spread on a slice of toasted homemade bread, sprinkled with some freshly ground pepper - sooo tasty. Then I mixed some with well drained tinned salmon for a sandwich filler and mixed another part of the cheese with homemade lemon curd for a yummy cheese cake topping, but more on all that another time.

How to look a total Fool

The company I work for recently moved office and for some bizarre reason there is a mirror mosaic elephant in our entrance hall, which is pretty cool especially when it's sunny as it then has the effect of a giant disco ball. Anyway I had this stupid idea to wear an elephant mask and convinced one of my colleagues to wear a tiger mask, so we could pose with the elephant. Much to everyone else's amusement this is what it looked like:

I think people are seriously questioning our sanity, but hey, we had fun.

Is it Spring yet?

Guess what I discovered in my garden on Sunday? My forsythia started flowering! I mean it's mid January - what is going on?

As the weather was quite nice and mild, we went for a walk on the beach. Yes, a walk on the beach in mid January.

Just as we were about to go home, I found this pretty shell, a type I didn't even know lived in this part of the world. Nice, huh?