Bonfire Night Pix..

 

xx

A Good Pick

Sorry t0 share this with the world, but sometimes, isn’t it really wonderful to pick your nose? That glorious feeling of seek and destroy, finding a good splodge and removing it from your nostril – excellent.

My friend Rachel (the cakey bakey one) totally agrees with me, and anyone who says they don’t enjoy picking their nose is LYING!

Fireworks

Halloween and fireworks night are always over way too quickly in my mind. I like to prolong the autumnal celebrations to hold off the fear of Christmas for as long as possible. But now there’s nothing stopping Christmas hype taking over the world…

We (our household – that’s me, Joe and Nathan) decided earlier on in the week that we should hold a celebratory fireworks extravaganza on bonfire night (Nov 5th for you non-brits), with a bonfire and all. I woke up Saturday morning to find half a torso in our living room! Turns out Joe and Nathan had decided to burn their old clothes in the form of a guy. So over the course of the morning, amongst other things, I watched Joe and Nath construct the rest of guy, including using a cauliflower for a head…

Our mate Guy

After which we revelled in puns such as “Well, it looks like he has cauliflower ear”, and “I think he’s turning into a bit of a vegetable” – (hahaha we’re really funny aren’t we).

I really like entertaining and I jumped at the opportunity to make food for everyone, so I invited my friend Bec (the arty one) over to help prepare the dishes. And this was our bonfire night menu:

Salt and pepper roasted jacket potatoes with cream cheese and chive topping, sweet chilli sausages, and curried red lentil & sweet potato soup. So that was the main course…. Then came the real treat – dessert! I’d decided to go for something fireworky and childish, so the whole dessert was designed around popping candy! I made milk and white chocolate bark with toffee popcorn and popping candy, all broken into smores – it was delish! We’d also dipped some marshmallows in the leftover white and milk chocolate and then the popping candy as a kind of appetiser if you will. (We also made a backup plate of bark without the popping candy, but I consumed it today)…

I’ll treat you to the recipe for the soup and the bark:

Curried red lentil and sweet potato soup:

Curried red lentil and sweet potato soup

1 white onion
1 sweet potato
2 carrots
half a red chilli
a knob of fresh ginger
2 cloves garlic
1 tsp turmeric
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 tsp garam masala
1 tsp cinnamon
a few cardamom pods
a good slug of red lentils
boiling water
salt & pepper
1 lime
a bunch of fresh coriander

1. Boil the lentils in a good amount of water for approx. 20 mins.
2. While you’re doing this, chop the onion, potato, carrots, chilli, ginger and garlic and fry them in a little oil for approx. 5-10 mins.
3. Add the dry spices to the frying pan and fry for a further 10 mins until the onions are translucent but not browned.
4. Add the fried items (but not the cardamom pods) to the red lentils (which should have doubled in size), make sure you scrape all the dry spices from the pan into the lentils.
5. Boil the whole lot together for approx. 20-30mins until all the veg are squidgy.
6. Puree (or pulverize as I prefer to say) with a hand blender until really smo0th.
7. Then reheat and add salt, pepper, coriander and lime juice until spiced to satisfaction.
8. Serve in mugs with plastic spoons! – That’s how we did it

Popping bark:

Popping bark

2 packets milk chocolate
2 packets white chocolate
1 bag toffee popcorn
lots of popping candy (I don’t know how you’d buy it where you are, but I went to our local sweet shop – Mr Simms – and bought 4 packets each a different flavour)

1. Chop up the milk chocolate and put in a bowl – heat on high in the microwave, taking out every 30 secs to stir, until fully melted. Do the same with the white chocolate in a separate bowl.
2. Meanwhile grease up a baking tray or some sort of flexible flat surface with either butter or oil. You could probably use flat baking parchment as well.
3. Liberally spread the milk and white chocolate onto the tray making a flat surface, retaining some for drizzling over the top.
4. Drop the toffee popcorn and popping candy into the chocolate surface, retaining some popping candy for topping.
5. Drizzle over more milk and white chocolate.
6. Top with more popping candy.
7. Leave to solidify (I put ours in the fridge) for a few hours.
8. When solid, attempt to remove the bark from the tray (you might have to heat the base of the tray by sticking it over the hob for a bit – don’t do this if you used baking parchment)!
9. Break it up into smores (I used a kitchen knife).
10. Serve!

Back to fireworks…

After food we all mooched into the back garden to burn Guy. I’d actually become quite attached to Guy throughout the day, it seemed a shame to burn him…

Guy's hot stuff!

We then moved onto fireworks. Joe (the firestarter) was in charge of the display, which was pretty bloomin’ good!

Baby you're a firework...

Then there were sparklers – there had to be really, it wouldn’t be complete without them!

Sparklers

And that pretty much was the end of the entertainment – then came beer.

All in all, a great bonfire night for all… except Guy.

I’ll do another post with all our bonfire night pics on… watch this space…

Last week’s temping

Was actually really good, glad it happened, wanna be doing more of that… It only lasted 3 days though, I think I worked too quickly.

Interview

So I had my interview with the BVA on Tuesday, but I don’t think I got it. They were meant to call me back on Friday and they didn’t. In the cold dark miserable world of job-seeking, I don’t think that’s normally taken as a god sign…

Next week

I might get a part-time job in a shop, we’ll see…

I leave you with…

…the fact that I just made oat biscuits – yeah! xx

A package awaits…

I’ve just had a surprise package delivered here for my friend Vicky, I’m pretty sure it’s nail varnish, oh God how I want to open it!…

This is the same frustrating feeling I used to get when Avon orders were delivered to my house. It literally used to take all my will power to not open them and use them myself!

Spicy sweetcorn soup

I made spicy sweetcorn soup earlier, really tasty, although I think it would be even nicer with a swirl of natural yoghurt or creme fresh, and some coriander sprinkled on top. Anywho, here’s the recipe (ends up making about 3 bowlfulls of soup):

Ingredients

1 average leek
4 shallots
2 cloves garlic
half red chilli (seeds removed or left in depending on how hot you like it)
1 large potato
a small knob of fresh ginger
1 carrot
1 stick celery
a large amount of sweetcorn (I used frozen but any kind will have the same effect, it’s probably nicest fresh off the cob)
1 cube veg stock
salt & pepper
tsp veg oil
boiling water

Method

1. Heat the oil in a large pan, then fry all the vegetables, the chilli, garlic and ginger for around 5 minutes to soften them.
2. Crumble in the veg stock cube and add enough boiling water from a kettle to cover all the veg in the pan.
3. Bring to the boil, then simmer for 20 minutes.
4. Take off the heat and pulverize (I couldn’t think of a better word for this bit) using a hand blender.
5. Reheat and add salt and pepper to taste.
6. Administer the soup into bowls (I managed to fill 3)
7. Consume!

As I said above, I think it would be even nicer if it was even creamier, with some natural yoghurt or creme fresh, and a touch of coriander wouldn’t go amiss. But it’s a tasty soup all the same.

After much searching, I have found my camera – hoorah! Here is a picture of the fabled soup (there’s only 2 bowls because the third met its end in my belly…)

Spicy Sweetcorn Soup

As you can see it’s a delightful sunshine yellow colour – great for slurping. Please feel free to share this recipe with friends, family, colleagues, even enemies, hell, it might even stop them from hating you!

Temporary assignments and other interviews

After a drought lasting several weeks, I suddenly seem to be inundated with calls about work, temping, permanent positions, etc etc. Good news people!

On Tuesday I was invited to attend an interview in London for a digital marketing role – all good stuff, except the interview only took about 10 minutes and I’d travelled all the way to London! I hope something comes of it, otherwise I will be ANGRY!!

Yesterday I received a call from a temp agency in Witham who asked me to attend an interview this morning – great! I got back from Witham at 10am today, I think this is a positive step people.

Then I checked my emails and I’ve been invited to an interview for a role of Marketing Officer at BVA in London! This will take place at 12:45pm on Tuesday 1st November – eep! Better brush up on the old interview skills and such…

So when I said inundated above there, I really did just mean 3 things… I really must stop exaggerating…

Empowerment

You know when you’ve been waiting for something and you don’t know what that thing is, but when it comes you realise and it makes a huge difference even though to someone else it’s totally insignificant? Well yesterday I had one of those things. I can’t really explain what it was, it was just really important and it signified a turning point in my life (wow this is getting deep)!

I suddenly felt like it was time I started doing something for myself. Like it was ok to start taking care of what I need for a change. I have to say, I’m a typical woman, I tend to care about other people over myself, sometimes to the detriment of myself, which is really bad because that never helps anyone. But yesterday I decided no more! So now I am on a mission to just have plain good old-fashioned fun for me and no one else! The only problem is I don’t have any money to have fun with. Rats.

Free fun

OK my mission over the next week, should I choose to accept it, is to research things that are fun and free or only require a very small cost.

Wish me luck!

Mess

This place is really messy – check it out:

Really Messy!

Man I hate cleaning and tidying up xx