2020 – Page 3 – Smtfhw's Travels

Food 2020 – Côte at Home (Lobster and Frites)

Saturday 1st August, 2020 – Côte at Home (Lobster and Frites) As people who usually go out to eat quite a lot, I’ve enjoyed doing my own more adventurous than normal cooking at home, but now and again it’s nice to let someone else do all the heavy lifting. A review in the Guardian in…

Food 2020 – Recipes (Easy Seeded Rye Bread)

Saturday 1st August, 2020 – Easy Seeded Rye Bread by Claus Meyer I’d been hunting around for a good rye loaf recipe, preferably similar to the sort of bread found in Germany, but I could only find sourdough recipes while digging around. We have enough animals in this house without acquiring a sourdough starter as…

Food 2020 – The Great British Chefs Cookbook Club (Falastin by Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley)

July 2020 – Recipes (Rice with Yogurt, Roasted Cauliflower and Fried Garlic; Sfiha; Za’atar Rolls; Batata Bil Filfil; Prawn and Tomato Stew with Coriander Pesto; Red Shakshuka) Another month, another cookbook (I really hope they’re going to choose one I really don’t want to buy one of these months) from the people at The Great…

Home 2020 – The Great House Extension Project (Day 6)

Monday, July 27th 2020 – The Great House Extension Project (Day 6) So, the tree is now gone, Rob, the Structural Engineer, has drawn up the necessary plans for dealing with the remnants (the roots mostly) and Mal the builder has been back for another look at the site now it no longer has a…

Home 2020 – The Great House Extension Project (Days 4 & 5)

Thursday/Friday, July 23rd/24th 2020 – The Great House Extension Project (Days 4 & 5) On Thursday nothing much happened, but on Friday the offending tree went. If I’d left it to Jim (the architect) the gods only know how long we’d have had to wait. I didn’t, because the best man for the job is…

Home 2020 – The Great House Extension Project (Day 3)

Wednesday, July 22nd 2020 – The Great House Extension Project (Day 3) Jim, the architect turned up unexpectedly today and spent some time staring at the tree. He is still of the opinion that the tree could just go and no one will turn a hair. Later on two separate tree surgeons turned up to…

Home 2020 – The Great House Extension Project (Day 2)

Tuesday, July 21st 2020 – The Great House Extension Project (Day 2) No building whatsoever today, and no contact from anyone apart from a brief communication from the architect saying he thought we could “just cut the tree down and worry about it later” and saying that he had asked Rob, our Structural Engineer, to…

Home 2020 – The Great House Extension Project (Day 1)

Monday, July 20th 2020 – The Great House Extension Project (Day 1) Getting building work done is always stressful for the householder, no matter what level of disruption you’re expecting. A couple of years back we started to plan to extend our current house to give ourselves a decent amount of space in the lounge/dining…

Food 2020 – Recipes (Victoria Sponge)

Saturday, 18th July 2020 – Recipes (Victoria Sponge) Cakes are another bete noire of mine, never quite coming out the way I hope. In a fit of optimism, I decided I’d have one more go at what is really quite a basic thing, the Victoria sponge. This has long defeated me, coming out either so…

Food 2020 – Recipes (Traditional Portuguese Duck Rice)

June 2020 – Recipes (Traditional Portuguese Duck Rice) I have long had a fascination with duck rice, having first eaten it in Macau many years ago. Since then I have been trying very hard to recreate it. It’s taken forever to find a recipe that looked even vaguely plausible, with the ones I’ve tried in…