Hello everyone

Well it has been an up and down few days. This blog entry is going to focus on some of the positives, namely writing and cooking.  Last week I spent some time on my online writing course and was pleased with what I produced.  This course is for ten weeks with https://www.conted.ox.ac.uk/courses/online/ and is very interesting.  It aims to take the mystery out of creative writing.  So far none of the writing exercises have been too scary but I feel like I’ve been learning.  Although I’ve got ideas for two books I’ve got to come up with another suggestion for this course.  The first assignment requires me to write the first 500 words of the book – no pressure!!!  So I will be spending the next two or three weeks developing ideas.  I also need to spend more time on the course because I didn’t complete all of the exercises last week. Note to self – I must be a more dedicated student.

I also started to do some cooking again for the first time in quite a while. I made my first ever Hollandaise sauce.  I know that I should be modest but it tasted absolutely delicious and preparing it was so therapeutic.  I’ve posted a photo of the finished sauce along with a photo of Susie – my partner suggested that there should be Susie photo on every new blog posting as this site is named after her :).

I also had fun developing my own stuffed mushroom recipe. First I combined hard goats cheese with chopped rosemary (which I’d never used before when cooking).  I “squidged” this into small mushrooms and topped with breadcrumbs which had been lightly mixed with olive oil. I cooked them at 200 degrees for about 20 minutes and they tasted fab.  Together with the hollandaise sauce and stuffed mushrooms we had griddled asparagus and mushroom and garlic crispbakes which I had bought from Tesco.

We had another fun meat free meal on Saturday.  My version of vegetable tempura.  Iwhisked together plain flour, two eggs and enough lager to make a nice smooth batter. I then added a chopped pepper, aubergine and mushrooms and mixed it all together.  I dropped tablespoons of the mixture into the fryer and made several batches which were topped with soy sauce and mayo.  A lovely meal to eat on the settee whilst watching Saturday night tv.  It was the first time that I had made it and it was a big hit with the other half.

I’ve just realised that this blog entry is rather long so I will update you at a later stage about my very last minute trip to London………..