weekend bits and bobs

This book arrived in the post this morning – Pattern, by Orla Kiely. It’s gorgeous, inside and out. I’ve been dying to get my hands on it and it is just as beautiful as I’d hoped. I’ve earmarked a sunny corner in the garden for later, and I’m going to sit down with a jug of iced tea (recipe here) and daydream about the look of our next house.

I’m thinking lots of bold prints and maybe some 1950s style wallpaper somewhere – I might have to take a few rolls of this one from the Little Greene Paint Company with me. I love it.

Better go and get cleaning – we’ve got viewings on the house even though it’s half term and most people are in holiday mode, so fingers crossed. Have a lovely weekend!

Ruby Ferguson

Ooh, I love Ruby Ferguson. There’s something about her Jill books (you can find them here at Jane Badger Books if you need a fix). They’re gorgeously horsey and full of delicious food, and my obsessive reading of Ruby’s Jill books as a child is probably why I have a slight problem with remembering I don’t live in 1959.

Roz from Nail Your Novel (fab book, recommended by lovely Deerbaby) pointed out I’d missed Ruby from my comfort reading list. I think actually I could write a comfort reading list once a month, and never stop. I have shelves and shelves of books which are like old friends to me. Going to take photos of my vintage Penguin paperbacks soon so you can either scream in boredom or say ooh, how lovely.

Anyway, back to Ruby. Look what arrived today:

My friend Sara, who is lovely, sent me this as a cheering up present. It’s Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary a romance which was one of the favourites of The Queen Mother, who admired it so much that she invited Ruby Ferguson to tea at Buckingham Palace (I’ve been there, too).

It’s so beautiful.

Persephone Books are the vintage Penguin paperbacks of the future, I think. I want a whole shelf of them.

And look what else (I love it when the postman brings nice things, especially because our lovely postman always has a chat with me and the dog when he delivers them):

Tiny red crochet bunting, made from embroidery thread, which is hanging in our sitting room and looking very pretty. All the way from Wyoming, where lovely Jennifer lives. Her blog The Prairie Girl is here, and it is just beautiful.

I’m off to have a cup of tea now, and try out Ruby Ferguson for grown-ups.

Have a lovely weekend.

fab feb

Feb is fab.

It’s my daughter’s birthday month, although the idea that my little baby is going to be eleven is rather scary.
It’s Valentine’s Day, which means flowers, which is always a good thing.
It’s half term, which means all my chicks in the nest for a week.
And by the end of the month spring will be on the way, just in time.

look – the blueberry bush is budding

a ladybird is curled up in a dead nettle (that’s why clearing the garden is a bad idea – lazy gardening is the best kind)

Bella is curled up on my crochet blanket, the left handed crochet blanket I started in July and finished in (ahem) December.

And there are tulips on the windowledge which brighten up the dullest of February days.

a tale from the village

Once upon a time there was a girl with four children and about a million animals. She was very tired because her husband had disappeared to New York to do, er, whatever-it-is-he-does (even he can’t describe his job) and looking after four children was rather wearing. So instead of going to bed she stayed up playing on the internet and drooling over plant websites. And then, because she was one of those irritating people who gets excited about Christmas in September, she decided to start a wish list.

Read More»

the joy of jam and jelly

I went out and collected a ton of blackberries for jam,
came home and consulted Delia.
When I thought for one terrifying minute that the jam and jelly pages of my book had fallen out, I realised when I said before that Delia Smith taught me everything I know I really wasn’t joking. Her book is my culinary talisman.
Poor Delia, the goddess of cooking, looks like this:

I’d like to think she’d be pleased about that. The best cookbooks have floury pages, sticky with sauce, and covered in grease spots. Having had a quick check through for quantities, I washed all the berries (a mixture of sloes, rosehips, blackberries, elderberries and apples from a friend’s tree)

and spent a very lovely afternoon boiling and sterilising and funneling and getting all sticky and jammy.

Jam making is one of the reasons I love autumn: people think it’s impossibly difficult and needs loads of equipment, but it’s really easy, and if you go and forage for blackberries and all the other yummy hedgerow fruit at this time of year, you can make as much as you want for the cost of the sugar. I don’t have posh equipment – jam pans cost about £50, so I just use a big stock pot from IKEA, and my jelly straining bag thingy was about £8 in a cookshop. And the gorgeous jam pots I’ve always coveted that you see above were our bargain in Netto in La Tremblade – I got them for a quarter of the price we pay for them over here.

Talking of bargains, I got the new Nigella through the post the other day – Kitchen: Recipes from the Heart of the Home. Nigella’s looking a bit pristine in comparison to Delia:

I suspect that won’t last long though. My copy of Nigella Christmas is looking a bit frazzled. But right now I’m enjoying it over a cup of coffee in the sitting room. The lovely thing about Nigella’s cookery books is that she writes so beautifully that I always read them cover to cover as a book first. This is Nigella’s image-rich, definitive book on cookery, an companion to her lovely, wordy (and in my case also rather tattered) How to Eat. But she still doesn’t tell you how to cook jam from scratch, like Delia. Tsk.