This morning at breakfast Daisy spotted a tiny tiny little catepillar waddling across our dining table. I could barely see it, and had to move a bit closer.

“There’s another”, she said, pointing at the leaf of our rubber plant.

Sure enough, there was another one craning off the end of the leaf. As we watched, it leapt off and abseiled down towards our table. I was busy musing at the little thing lowering itself down, when Daisy shrieked.

On the ceiling there was a whole colony of them. It looked like a tiny dirt patch from normal level, but getting closer it was a swarm of around 100 of the things. There was another colony further over, and another.

Ewwwww

Under my microscope-like D70, you can see they’re not at all nice. They were about 1-2mm long, and looked barely the width of a hair. We got rid of them with a good sucking of the Dyson.

The demise of the little rascals at the hose of the vacuum cleaner

I know it’s Tuesday, but this happened Sunday. I thought I better catch up with some posts, as I’m getting a bit behind!

If you remember, I baked an apple cake and some biscuits and we headed off with all our picnic equipment to arrive at Kingston Lacy by noon. The morning looked like it might be a cool day, but by the afternoon the sun was beating down and it was hitting 25^oC again.

Kingston Lacy House

Kingston Lacy is a National Trust property that was once owned by the Bankes family whose previous home, Corfe Castle, had been ruined in a raid by the Parliamentary forces in 1646.

If you visit, you can look around the house, or just visit the gardens. I’ve been in the house many times and so with the consent of the friends we were meeting, it was decided we would just visit the gardens.

Awww, baby sheepy

We walked around a mile route that took us past the Japanese garden that they are introducing. Currently it is not a patch on a real japanese garden (like the ones we saw on our trip there last November), but it did look very pretty.

Was a hot day

We sat and ate our picnic (or at least, we ate some of it, as there was rather alot of it!) under the shade of a tree near the entrance to the formal gardens in which picnicing was prohibited.

Sundial in the grounds

We then took a longer walk through the woodlands to the south of the property, which was about 2 miles in length. It was a beautiful day for it, although I caught the sun on my [rather ample] forehead. My knee is almost back to normal now, although it’s a little weak, so by the end my legs were aching.

It was a lovely day, though, and I can certainly recommend the gardens at Kingston Lacy for a nice wander around. They were pretty busy with people, and do cost £4 to get in (extra for the house), but they are great for photography )

I was rather upset to find out today that Richard Whiteley has died at the young age of 61. It seems he died of pneumonia having been admitted to hospital recently.

It’s rather a shame that he died so young. Despite the fact that many people took the mickey out of him, it was clear he was a harmless guy with a funny aptitude for messing up puns. I saw myself in him. I reckon I am going to become what he was, maybe without the jackets, and probably not so successful.

It might be a bit unpopular, but I want to say I thought Richard was great. I think he would have been one of the nicer celebraties to have met.

Thanks to Biscuits I am now a statistic. I’m not sure what the survey’s attempting to find out, but some of the questions are a bit badly worded. Particularly the bit where it chooses links off your webpage. Anyway, I’m a statistic. Take it yourself if you’re a blogger and help some poor PhD candidate get his award!

Well, in My last post I said I needed a sage recipe, so I made one. It’s an alteration from a pretty standard cod and parsley fish cake recipe.

Ingredients

450g potatoes, peeled and diced
300g skinless fish fillet
Small lemon cut into slices
2 tbsp of dried sage
2 tsp of horseradish sauce
salt and pepper

For the coating:

plain flour
1 egg, beaten
75g breadcrumbs

Whizzing the bread (we made with the bread-machine) to make crumbs

First, cook the potatoes until they are soft. Put them in lightly salted water and boil them for 12-15 minutes. Drain them and mash them thoroughly.

Preheat the oven to 190^oC.

Put the fish into a saucepan and cover them with water. Put the lemon slices all over the fish to infuse them with lemon flavour. Bring the saucepan to the boil, reduce the heat and simmer for 5 minutes until the fish is cooked and tender. Drain well and flake the fish.

Add the fish, sage, horseradish sauce and seasoning to the mash and thoroughly mix it all together into a chunky paste.

Divide the mixture into 8.

The potato and fish mixture ready and divided

Line a baking tray with non-stick parchment paper.

Take each part of the fish paste and shape it into your favourite fishcake shape. Dust the cake with flour, dip it into the egg and roll in the breadcrumbs. This is easy to achieve if you have a small production line with the flour, egg and breadcrumbs in bowls next to each other, with the baking tray at the end.

Rolling the cakes in the breadcrumbs

Spray the cakes with low fat cooking spray (although we forgot and it just meant they didn’t brown too much).

Ready for baking

Place in the oven and cook for 20 minutes.

Fish and Chips! Nothing better

When I was out the other day I was trimming our garden back so that it was actually possible to walk around some of the little grass paths. This involved cutting back a sage shrub that was getting a bit assertive in its bid to take over the garden. However, it seemed a shame just to chuck the bits I cut off, so I consulted the wonderful RHS Encyclopedia of Gardening and it told me how to dry the herbs for later use. They gave a number of options, but the quickest (and I’m always up for the quickest way to do chores) was to use the microwave.

First you wash the leaves and pat them down, so they’re no longer wet. Lay them out on a sheet of kitchen paper.

Arrange the leaves on a sheet of kitchen paper

Bung them in the microwave for 2 to 3 minutes. Because of the way microwaves work, this will remove all the moisture from the leaves leaving them crispy and curled up. They will then easily crumble between the fingers.

Crumble the leaves

The book suggests you should keep them in a dark glass jar in a cool, dry place. I’m not sure what’s with the dark-glass bit, but we have loads of really small tupperware-like tubs that are no good for anything else, so we’re using one of those.

A pot of ready to use, dried sage

Now we just need a recipe that uses sage!

Spiced Apple Cake

Here’s the cake I just made. The curry was also very nice )

It’s supposed to be a Saturday – today’s been busier than a regular work day.

Although I got up late (despite an early night) we got straight to work. We headed out to Wimborne to do some shopping. I was pleased that we decided to utilise the local green-grocers rather than to kowtow to the big supermarkets. However, we still needed to utilise Somerfield, as there was some stuff that we needed that only they do. We took a load of old clothes to the Help the Aged charity shop, and we bought our first Christmas present for my sister! Now that’s forethought.

We headed home and scoffed the lunch we treated ourselved to and, after seeing the end of the Federer-Kiefe Wimbledon match, we headed back out to our local gardening supermarket, Haskins. There we bought a bird-seed dispenser that the squirrel won’t be able to chew to bits, as well as buying some organic tomato feed and a hoe.

I used the hoe when we got back home to weed the veggie patch and it’s awesome compared to the rake I was using before. And it only cost £10. I planted out some runner beans that have sprouted, and then cut the grass and trimmed alot of overgrown bushes and trees. Daisy was out helping to weed the lawn.

Tomorrow we are off to meet some people we know off the internet (IRC pals). We’re off to Kingston Lacy house, a National Trust property nearby. We have planned a picnic, although I don’t think the other guys know yet. So when we came in Daisy made some sugar-puff chocolate crunch things, and I started on dinner. Tonight we’re having a chicken and vegetable curry from the Weightwatchers Time To Eat book. Once that was cooking (takes 1 hour) I began on a spiced apple cake from Cakes & Cake Decorating by Angela Nilsen, Sarah Maxwell and Janice Murfitt! The curry will be ready any minute, then I’ll eat that and go bake some biscuits.

I can’t wait to go to bed and have a rest!! At least all this exercise has helped my knee loosen up.

The weather in the UK has been glorious for the past week. However, due to the weather systems we get over here glorious weather always ends with a bang, and I love it when it does.

Last night was no exception. I was out applying the slug nematodes to our vegetable patch last night and was also admiring the clouds in the sky. There was a layer of alto/cirro-stratus (very high blanket cloud) which the Sun was stuggling through to cast a strange pinky-yellow hue over the garden. Underneath the stratus, cumulus clouds were building. This is pretty unusual and usually signifies a storm, which seemed even likelier considering how humid it was.

Soon after I heard a faint rumble.

“Was that thunder?”, I asked Daisy.
“Didn’t hear it.”

I moved round the house and could see a dark ominous cloud sitting on the horizon. The butterflies in my stomach began to flap. I love storms!

Storm building in the south-west.

Later that evening, as we were off to bed, Daisy was locking up the doors and said “woo scary, lightning”. I leapt out of my chair, although I didn’t plan on taking photos unless the storm was producing a decent amount of lightning. I quickly headed out the door, and a cloud-to-cloud fork flickered across the sky. Whoooooooaaa. I had to get my camera and stuff.

I gathered my camera and snapped it onto my tripod, flinging the legs out to their fullest extent, as quickly as I could. I rushed outside and began snapping.

Daisy was a bit frightened for me being out in the storm, but it just gives me a massive buzz. There’s really nothing like it. Particularly when you know you’ve just got a good photo. At least I only have to wait a few seconds to find out, and not a week.

Wrath of the gods.

This actually brings me to make an observation about digital cameras, and their night-time exposure capabilities. At the end of a long exposure (that photo above was 20 seconds) the camera has to read all the charge off the CCD and create a picture from it, and this can take a long time. On my D70 this can take about 15 seconds for a 20 second exposure. This means that if you shoot continuously, you’re only actually capturing pictures about 60% of the time. This can be important in the situation of a lightning storm! I must’ve missed about 3 good photo opportunities because my camera was busy flashing “Job nr” at me, as it compiled the previous picture. The solution this this is to have 2 cameras and while one’s reading the image, the other can be capturing – although that might be a bit over the top )

[Edit 27th June 2005: I've since read that this is due to the noise reduction systems. If you take a 20 second shot, the camera takes another 20 second shot with the shutter closed (effectively a black photo). This shows up any 'hot pixels' on the CCD, which it then subtracts from the original 20 second exposure. It also applied a light median filter to the image. You can get around these by turning the camera off during this second exposure. The camera has already stored the original exposure, so there's no worry about losing your image. I found out this information from Christian Buil's page about D70 astrophotography.]

When it began to rain I went back in (with a little friendly persuasion), but I didn’t want to stop taking photos, so I went into the lounge and took some through the lounge window.

Storm watching, undercover

Eventually I got tired and had to retire to bed, but my heart was still pounding with the adrenalin and it was hard to get to sleep, particularly after I asked Daisy why she was in bed fully dressed, and she said to me, “If the house gets hit and burns down I won’t be outside in the nude.”

Chocolate Chip Peanut Butter Cookies

Tonight, as my leg is getting better enough to walk around on, I decided to celebrate by making some chocolate chip peanut butter cookies. These are super yummy – nice and soft (ideal for those with delicate teeth) and very chocolatey. If you use diet chocolate, diet brown sugar and diet peanut butter you might be able to make them low calorie, but I doubt it.

Ingredients

125g soft margarine
1/4 cup (~60g) of smooth peanut butter
1/4 cup (~60g) of crunchy peanut butter
1 cup of brown sugar
1 egg
1/4 cup of cocoa
1/2 cup of plain flour
3/4 cup of self-raising flour
250g plain chocolate

Method

• Preheat oven to 180^oC.
• Grease 2 baking trays.
• Cream together the margarine, peanut butter and sugar into a large mixing bowl.
• Add the egg and mix well.
• Combine the plain and self-raising flour with the cocoa.
• Chop up the chocolate and mix into the mixture.
• Take teaspoons of the mixture and roll into balls. Place them on the baking trays and press with a fork.
• Bake for 12-15 minutes until they crack on top.
• Leave on the tray for 5 minutes to cool, before placing on a wire rack.