I’ve been mooching around Meet Up. for a while looking at the various and most wonderful courses that are around London.  The photography ones in particular always catch my eye, so when one of the photography groups said they were organising the last night photography workshop of the season I jumped at the chance, having wanted to learn just how light trails are photographed.

It was a lot of fun and I picked up some great techniques and next time I’ll be on my own so will be able to jostle for a better spot.

But until then, may I present my light trails…

We haven’t been eating much bread of late, so I haven’t been baking  and on the rare occasion that a Sunday morning bacon sandwich has been called for hubby has popped to the shop for a loaf of something wrapped in plastic and sliced – Oh the horror!  But even though that commercial bread has entered my home, its not leaving without doing it proper justice.

So eyeing up the ends of a brown loaf that had been sat there for a couple of days and the start of a white loaf that I knew we would never get through, three bananas that were just about to expire from the exhaustion of looking pretty and half a pot of economy marmalade jam bought at Christmas for glazing the ham an idea started to form.

Crusts included I used four slices of brown and four slices of white, heavily buttered and spread with the marmalade and then spread with crushed up banana on top of the marmalade and cut into triangles.

Arranged browns then whites triangles in an oven proof dish  (or tried to, I made an error half way through!) next beat six medium eggs, added 2 ounces of sugar and then added milk and made up to the 1.5 pt mark on the jug and then slowly trickled that over the luscious triangles to allow the bread to soak up the milk.  You may need more it depends on the size of your dish.  And allowed it to soak for ten minutes.

Popped it into a hot oven for half an hour…

And it became a thing of beauty.

It was very yummy, the tang of the marmalade, the comfort of the custard mingling with the banana and the crispy bits on top without any of those dead fly currants  you normally get.

Six to eight portions, price depends on eggs and marmalade used, economy version comes in at approx £2.30, eight portions equals 29p a portion.  Not bad considering most of those ingredients were heading for the bin.

Hubby was tootling back from the shops at the end of last week when his car was smacked across the nose by a chap who hadn’t realised the road bends and had decided to go straight on.  So the last few days have been spent nursing a hubby with whiplash and making sure he got to the hospital to be checked out and nursing a hubby who understandably was having a few emotional moments and then starting the arduous and quite frankly unbearable task of looking around for another car.   We had a nice little Mercedes estate which to all intents and purposes was probably worthless, the book price is just a few hundred quid, but this was a lovely little runner.  It had a low mileage built like a tank diesel engine and very few rust spots and everything worked!  Well it did, we are waiting to hear, but suspect the insurance company will right it off as being too expensive to fix.

Which leaves us out of pocket and looking for another car in London.  Urgh, its horrible, travelling just a few miles takes hours, its not like lovely Warwickshire where you can tootle along and not even think about it, you get on that North Circular and  your done for.  Wish us luck whilst we veer widely from a brand new Dacia to a Mercedes which when looked at leaves one grumpy at the flowery questionable description that we are still clutching in our grubby hands whilst talking to a shady operator who is telling us black is white and who has no awareness of our knowledge base.

I think this iconic image needs a little explanation.

For more than one hundred years horse drawn or mechanical vehicles have entered and left ‘Savoy Court’ on the right-hand side of the road, due to the construction of the court and is the only road in the UK where this is the case.   An Act of Parliament was passed in 1902  allowing carriages and cars to enter Savoy Court on the right.  This allows the ladies who traditionally would sit behind the driver to exit their cars or carriages with a flourish, their driver having leapt from their seat as soon as the vehicle had stopped to open the door and allow the lady to exit the car and enter the building unscathed by muddy puddles, splashes from other cars or run aground by wild horses.

I do so enjoy our half days at the Zoo, as the weather warms we will spend longer, but for now just after lunch until 5.30 seems plenty.  This is just a few photos of day 2.  I love the African Wild Dogs with a passion and have a whole series of photos to look through, I’m losing light, the ISO is ramped right up, the aperture is wide open just to get the speed. 

Hubby and I enjoyed our first trip of the year to the Zoo.  It was bitterly cold and the light was fading fast and I had completely forgotten how to photograph moving animals… Here is the best of the bunch.  The Lions are new, just getting used to their enclosure, there was one spot where you could take a sneaky peak.

Isn’t that veg box from Riverford  a thing of beauty.

One of the perks of having someone to cook for means I can increase the variety of foods in my diet, but mostly I can increase the vegetables.  This is the bumper sized box, will we get through this in a week? I think we will, we did the last one.  It certainly makes you concentrate on what your going to eat for lunch, what vegetables you can squeeze in, which is no bad thing. Hubby had got the beetroot on the boil for his lunch before I’d put all the veg away! – he does like his beetroot.

I think I am very lucky to have been bought up in an age where it was normal to cook from scratch, but I only made this by the skin of my teeth.  My Mother bought her first freezer in the late seventies, her cooking style changed dramatically and I was left high and dry not liking the produce produced by Iceland the freezer centre, –  crispy pancake or potato croquette anybody?, No, don’t blame you.  But fortunately my Dad clung to his beef and vegetable stews and roast dinners and my Nan’s lamb stews with the globules of yellow fat floating on top were just heavenly, well they were to me.

My Nan was quite daring, I remember watching her cook a curry using garlic and fresh ginger and the smells that came wafting from that simple curry she made were just lovely. I must get my adventurous love of cooking and vegetable growing from her and Grandad.

I hope I have managed to pass on my love of vegetables and cooking, certainly son no.2 is an accomplished cook and seems to enjoy his time in the kitchen cooking huge pans of curry or stews. The tales that come from son no.1 recently seem encouraging, he’s venturing forth with cous cous and pasta styled vegetable dishes. I hope my love of cooking wafts through their senses and in their dreams of home cooked meals enjoyed, inspiring them, teaching them and enabling them to create culinary masterpieces of their very own.