Race For Life, Sunday 13th June

Race For Life- cancer research UK fundraising

If you'd like to sponsor me to do the Race For ife on 13th June in Stirling, then please go to this link. Any contribution, no matter how small, will make a difference.
http://www.raceforlifesponsorme.org/emmafrance73

My baking obsession continues…

Since I discovered how easy it was to make bread I got the confidence to try other recipes – particularly sweet ones….! I have made chocolate muffins, spicy cocoa cookies with maple syrup, chewy molasses ginger cookies (to die for), oatcakes with cumin seeds and chilli, focaccia bread with olives, and pizza dough (plain and wholemeal)!

My brother-in-law keeps jokingly referring to ‘nest-building’ and ‘hormones’ by way of explanation (I will get my own back, don’t worry), but seriously, I am not sure why I am feeling this urge to bake. I wondered if it was partly a creative outlet or if it’s more about relaxation since when I am following a recipe I have to focus on what I am doing so I tend not to dwell on other things like work!

Speedy chocolate muffins

Veggie pizza with wholemeal dough

Spicy cocoa cookies - suitable for vegans!

The problem is, I am making so much yummy stuff that we are eating rather a lot! Particularly the cookies are more-ish. I got the recipe from a US blogger http://honestfare.com so I’ve had to adapt them, e.g. because they use ‘cups’ as a measure, or look up some of the ingredients that are hard to get or unheard of over here (turbinado sugar, for example, was new to me - the closet UK equivalent is Demerara sugar, if you’re interested). I had trouble finding blackstrap molasses in Stirling and discovered that black treacle is more or less the same thing – I hadn’t realised! I like the fact that if you don’t fancy one of the ingredients you can just leave it out or substitute it (like the cloves I left out of the chewy cookies, and the cumin seeds I added to the oatcakes rather than fennel seeds).

Oatcakes with cumin and chilli



Focaccia with olives and sea salt

Chewy molasses ginger cookies- they are a bit flat and rectangular because they spread more than anticipated in the oven and I had to cut them into cookies! Next time they'll be round - I still have half the dough in the freezer!

I’ve found some good recipes on the BBC website and now am sticking to that, the blog and known names like Delia having picked up a nasty computer virus from one of the amateur recipe sites I had visited. I am going to start looking for some more savoury recipes to try to avoid the ‘muffin top’ look from too many cakes!

Spring is here

It suddenly occurred to me the other day that it’s 3 years since we moved to Stirling – it seems to have gone by so quickly. It’s about as long as we lived in Bishop’s Stortford which was our longest-lived address as a couple.

I’ve been keeping myself busy and finally went on my first hill walk of 2010. I gave myself a gentle reintroduction and chose a fairly short walk up a hill I know quite well – Ben Ledi near Callander. Even so, my thigh muscles hurt for 2 to 3 days afterwards particularly going up or down stairs! I went with a friend from the university - Staffan who is originally from Sweden and who works for the British Trust for Ornithology (birds!) - who offered to drive.

The weather was good till half an hour before we finished the walk and when we arrived back at the car we were met by 2 very wet and drunken Glaswegians who asked for directions to the nearest pub! Somehow Staffan didn’t notice their drunkenness until after he’d offered them a lift into Callander! They claimed to be on a charity walk – carrying a black bin bag full of Budweiser - and said they had spent hours going round in circles looking for Callander but that every signpost they saw said it was 7 miles away! Anyway, they were well-behaved and even insisted on giving us a tenner for us to get a drink! Having deposited said drunken Scots in the town, we ended our day in the Laid Inn pub where I had my usual tea and shortbread!

A few pics of what we've been up to recently and of some local landmarks.

Our street

View from Mine Woods towards Dunblane and Highlands

Spring daffodils just coming out mid-April, Kings Park, Stirling


Brave, hungry duck, Stirling Uni campus

On Easter Sunday we had a wee Easter party with friends and family – everyone brought something to eat or drink and we had some really lovely cakes. I used the opportunity to bake some bread- a wholemeal loaf and a soda bread loaf. I wasn’t expecting my nephews to eat it as they tend to like what they know but one of them loved it so I’ve given my sister the recipe! Sonia baked her Catalan cake- the ‘Mona,’ Antoine from Brittany baked a lovely orange cake, jenny (part Scottish, part Argentinean, raised in Venezuela!) make empanadas – like pasties.

Easter party, our place


View of Stirling castle & distant mountains

Michael and I have been out for a few bike rides and walks around the local area – we can walk to nearby Bridge of Allan in about 30 minutes so we’ve done that a few times and we cycled a different route through the Mine Woods between there and Dunblane – we saw 2 of the red kites hunting over the fields and a male pheasant foraging in the bushes. We had a lovely sunny day last weekend and we walked to Kings Park where the daffodils have finally come out after the cold spell and snow we had recently. Spring has come late in Scotland!

Our new local - the Birds & the Bees pub

Domestic goddess...?

Baking!

Proud of my first ever attempt to bake bread! A small wholemeal loaf

For some reason, I have been overcome with a sudden urge to bake. I have rarely, if ever, baked in my life (apart from in 'home economics' at school)! I saw an episode of the Hairy Bakers last year where they made bread by hand and cooked it in the oven rather than in a bread maker. It looked so easy but at the time we didn’t have a kitchen conducive to baking (small, ill-equipped with few work surfaces). Since we moved and have a decent kitchen, I decided to bake. I looked up the Hairy recipe, bought the ingredients and some mixing bowls and made bread!

The recipe is as simple as they come but I swapped white flour for wholemeal - http://www.goodtoknow.co.uk/recipes/150713/Bread-dough
I wasn’t sure why I needed to let it rest twice for 30-40 minutes so I only let it rest once and the bread did taste a bit too yeasty. The second attempt I let it rest twice and I think the result was better. It’s really easy and tasty -the most time-consuming part is waiting for it to ‘prove’.

This was my second attempt - nice & tasty!

I also followed their olive bread recipe twice but it wasn’t a success, although Michael said it tasted good and we ate it! There’s no yeast in the recipe and it was too hard and flat with a wet, oily middle. http://www.goodtoknow.co.uk/recipes/148511/Mixed-olive-bread

Rather 'unleavened'-looking olive bread. Sounded delicious but didn't quite work.

The only other ‘baking’ has been to make chocolate crispy cakes for Easter! I found some miniature mini eggs in the supermarket which are ideal to put in the centre to make wee nests! I'm hoping the nephews will like them! I did look up a very indulgent recipe for a dark chocolate tart that I might make one day….

The joys of moving house

House moves are never pleasant, stress-free experiences. This one was no exception. We had booked a transit van with a local company from 9am-1pm for a bargain £20. We were due to sign the new tenancy agreement and pick up our new house keys at 9am from the letting agent in the centre of Stirling. Knowing that if we move our car from the street in front of our house, someone will nick our parking space, we decide to walk to pick up the van.

Thinking that it will only take 10 minutes to complete the paperwork, Michael decides he’ll wait for me before picking up the van. Nice as she is, oh my god, that woman in the letting agents’ can talk! I really don’t need to know how many picture hooks we can put up in each room. I already know that we can’t be evicted if the landlord defaults on his mortgage. I don’t need or want to know who has previously lived in the house. Thirty minutes later I am still in Clyde property, the van rental company has phoned to ask where we are because they have had the engine running to defrost the van for over 20 minutes. Michael has had to go and get the van without me.

Then the letting agent tells me that she doesn’t have any sets of keys to our new house…. One of their employees has gone to the house to make final changes to the inventory (which, it turned out, was still completely out of date despite his last minute trip) and taken ALL the keys with him. Doh. At this point I doubt if we’ll move house that day. Thankfully she suggests that the inventory checker will drop by our old place to give us the keys while we are loading our van - luckily he manages to get that bit right!

Although we’ve only booked the van for 4 hours and are late picking it up, the van company kindly say we can have it for an extra half hour. Just as well. Because of a burst water pipe, the road between our old place and our new place has roadworks reducing it to a single lane controlled by temporary traffic lights. This means that a 5 to 10 minute journey becomes twice as long – as we only have 4 hours to move everything this is no small annoyance…. We also have to pick up our new, flat-pack bed from a local shop – we had wanted to get it first thing in the morning but they don’t open till 10am. When we get there, expecting to carry the bed through the shop and out to the carpark, instead the staff ask us to go round to the back of the shop – which is not as simple as it sounds and involves driving around a faceless industrial estate. This is around 11am. We have taken one van load to the new house already. I am already knackered.

Finally, we decide we can make only 2 trips in the van within our time limit and we move all the big items that can’t be transported in the car – mostly boxes and some small pieces of furniture plus bikes and a very large TV. The bags of clothes and the plants have to go by car – we have run out of time.

We spend the rest of the day sorting out our new place which is like a palace in comparison to the old, one-bedroom bungalow. My plans to return to the bungalow to start the cleaning are abandoned as we realise that we are too tired to tackle any more big jobs separately. So, we jointly put together the new bed – a solid Scandinavian pine one - put our comfy mattress on it and make up the bed. That’s the best bit of house-moving advice I’ve had - make up your bed first so that when you are too exhausted to do anything else you don’t have to try and find your duvet, the cover, a pillow or put together a new bed!

Front of new house

Around 7pm I pop into nearby Bridge of Allan to the very good chippy (Allan Water Café & take away) and get us each a huge portion of fish and chips. We eat, then by 9pm we are in bed exhausted. We have misplaced one of our car keys and I have a restless night worrying that I have dropped it in the street during the move. The next day Michael finds it in his pocket!

Thursday morning comes. I struggle to find the requisite crockery and cutlery to make a bowl of porridge. At 10am we return to the bungalow to de-mould, scrub and polish. Michael fights with the greasy oven. I battle with mould and mildew. By 5pm we have finished. We had already done some of the bigger jobs such as dug and weeded the garden, cleaned the windows and curtains, the fridge-freezer and microwave. It is much cleaner than when we moved in. We have even repaired things that were broken when we arrived, such as drawers and lampshades. I reckon it took a total of over 20 hours to clean the place, not including the gardening. We are determined to get our full deposit back!

It feels like I am broken. I run a bath and soak- I think this is my first bath in over 2 years. Bliss! The bungalow’s boiler couldn’t heat the water to fill a bath. Another early night - in bed by 8pm. We sleep badly as the heating comes on in the night and roasts us.

Friday, I am back at work. Saturday, we sort out a few boxes. Sunday, I run Michael to Glasgow airport to catch his flight to Bristol so he can go to his Nan’s funeral in Somerset on Tuesday. The flight is cancelled due to ‘pilot sickness’ so he stays at my parents’ and catches a flight the next day instead. I am so tired that I don’t feel safe on the road - the drive home to Stirling takes almost 2 hours instead of one because of roadworks and heavy traffic.

Now we have been in our new place for just over 2 weeks, although Michael was down south for one of those weeks. We have mastered the central heating controls, emptied most of our boxes, settled in the cat, and cleaned what hadn’t been cleaned properly (how galling after the time we spent cleaning the bungalow…). I have even had a few friends over for pancakes. I feel quite at home here. I think we’re going to enjoy living here.

Charlie making himself at home

Latest news

Well, one of my new year’s wishes has come true- we are moving house! We were lucky enough to find a bigger place that will accept pets – probably because it’s unfurnished. Anyway, it is bigger with 3 bedrooms and a garage so we won’t know what to do with ourselves with all that space and will probably lose one another in all the rooms! We have been used to using 1 room as office, living room and dining room in our current place.

Sadly, Michael’s grandmother died last week. She was 89, which is pretty impressive, but had been unwell for quite a long time. It is an odd and sad coincidence that the last time we moved from Hertfordshire up here to Stirling, just a couple of weeks before the move Michael’s Grandad died. Michael is upset but seems to be coping. He has some happy memories of the times they spent together which is all you can ask for.

Other things that have been happening are that I have got a new contract at Stirling uni working on 2 new projects- nice to work on something new. I am back to cycling to work now the snow and ice has gone (although ti did snow on the way home today). Two weeks of taking the bus was more than enough and I was glad to get back on my own two wheels. This week one day as I cycled through the fields I saw a small herd of 5 roe deer grazing, then as I got near to the university a buzzard swooped down into a field about 10 feet away from me – both times I stopped to watch as it’s not often you get a good close look at these lovely wild animals. The bus can’t compete!

White Christmas

Christmas dinner at my mum and dad's house

Left to right: Dad, Mum, Michael, Sarah, Gordon, Kate. Some of us wearing traditional paper crowns out of the crackers

The boys' table - David, Danny, Ruben

Having after dinner coffee

Stirling in the snow and ice - a few pics that Michael took near our house.

The icy River Forth & snow-covered Dumyat hill

Freezing fog and icy trees with Wallace Monument in background

Sunset

Hogmanay party at Stirling Castle Esplanade - minus 6 celsius