A bit of home-grown and home-made.

Oh! Look at me! Back on blogger, two days in a row. This might have something to do with Hubby having commandeered the telly to watch "The Legend of '81"- a documentary about Ian Botham (yawn).

Just look at my veggie patch, there. It has a life of it's own. At the bottom of our garden is an awesome looking field of sweetcorn and in spite of never seeing a farmer, it is all growing in nice neat rows with not a weed in sight. Now, I'm not the most conscientious of gardeners but I do try my best to potter among the veg and flowers, trying to keep things tidy in between school runs, cooking, shopping, teaching, washing... etc etc. I only have to turn my back for 5 mins and all sorts of things crop up/ die/ get eaten before I can stop it. However, some mysterious 'weeds' have grown up among the lettuces bearing pretty purple flowers. I have no idea what they are but I have left them alone for aesthetic value.
But this post is about what I have been up to in the kitchen this week, really. I have been combining our homegrown veg with leftovers to make up this weeks meals as follows:

Sunday: Roast chicken dinner (including my mothers cabbage from her veg patch) (I saved the left over chicken carcass)

Monday: Boiled bacon and parsley sauce with tatties and supermarket veg. (I saved the remains of the bacon joint and some of the cooking water which included onions and celery).

Tuesday: Chicken and bacon pie with broad beans from my veg patch (made with leftover chicken and bacon and parsley sauce adding extra cream in a dish with leek and topped with puff pastry and more of Mum's cabbage).

Wednesday: Summer potage! A soup made from chicken stock that I made from the old carcass plus some of the bacon cooking water I had also saved. Then I added pearl barley, chopped chicken and bacon, more broad beans and lettuce from the veg patch and then I sent Hubby out to get a tin of chopped tomatoes to put in also.

Now, I was in the supermarket a few days ago and found a massive punnet of blueberries being sold as seconds for just 39p! They were fresh. I think, maybe, a few packets had split so they had been done up again like this. So, apart from putting some au naturel in the kids' lunchboxes, I made these blueberry muffins with them. The kids had the little ones for snack after school today. The big ones are for breakfast tomorrow. They are fantastic. The pics are a bit blurry (sorry) but can you see how the blueberries are juicily oozing out of these muffins? Num, num!

So here is today's dinner, the summer soup served with baguette and a selection of cheeses. I wasn't really looking forward to it at first, but it was delicious. I was almost tempted to open my Mum's bottle of homemade plum wine, but then thought "no. It's only Wednesday!" But then Hubby walked in with the tin of tomatoes... and a bottle of rose wine. 'Nuff said. Hubby and I were chatting about how much we both used to dislike pearl barley when we were children. But all our kids love it and we seem to like it now, too. Funny, that!
Look at those happy faces!

Tomorrow: sausage, mash 'n beans.

A bit more decorating.

Some of our wallpaper needed tidying up a bit.

Here are the walls after Hubby stripped off the old wallpaper.

And here is the new wallpaper. It is very similar to the old one, I know. I saw it in a magazine (I shouldn't keep looking at these magazines!). It's from B&Q. When I got to the shop, I wasn't sure about how it looked on the roll, but I decided to take a chance with it, after all, it's for quite a small area. But once put up I think it looks very pretty.

I repainted the fireplace, too, with my posh paint!

Sweet!

Today I took the kids to see our soon to be new member of the family... a gorgeous, ginger kitten. We are all very excited. One of Honor's friends from church has a cat who had four kittens and we are having one of them. At the moment, they have all been named after Harry Potter characters and ours is called Ron, but I think we are agreed that when he comes here, his name will be Hugo.

A maths update

Here, Honor is working on pie chart fractions with plasticine.
And we've been using these rainbow fraction circles quite a bit lately.
Here, she is adding fractions with different denominators.

We used the fraction circles to visually demonstrate how to convert the fractions so that they have the same denominators.

Lazy Blogger Award

If there were such an award, I'd win it. I have a fair bit of blogging, catching up to do. This post is just about our latest kitchen update. Hubby had to get the ceiling repaired after a leak left a big hole. So we decided to add a new cupboard, worktop, sink and these metro tiles that I got with my Tesco Clubcard vouchers. I've hung a couple of hearts made from buttons, too, which I think are very nice. I'd like to say that I made them myself, but I didn't. They are from Obidosh. I've painted the kitchen grey! A bit different for me, but I think it looks nice, broken up with all my paraphernalia!

Little House outdoors.

With the warmer months here at last, the children spend more time playing outside. I've put a lot of their toys out in the gazebo along with a rug from the living room which has seen better days. Hope loves playing out here during the day, but so do the other two when they come home from school and I've set up a few 'home corner' props for their role play, like these scales and pebbles collected from the beach.
This old wash stand used to have plants in. Now it is being used to wash the doll's clothes...
before being hung up on the washing line.
Honor and Hope are building a fire to boil the kettle...

and now it is time for baby to go to bed...
and parents to chill!

Just checking in to say that we recently had a lovely holiday on the Norfolk Broads and will update the blog soon when I get the photos sorted.