Thursday, October 29, 2009

I Like This

When I say..."I am a Christian"
I'm not shouting "I'm clean livin'.
"I'm whispering "I was lost,
Now I'm found and forgiven."

When I say..."I am a Christian"
I don't speak of this with pride.
I'm confessing that I stumble
And need Christ to be my guide.

When I say..."I am a Christian"
I'm not trying to be strong.
I'm professing that I'm weak
And need His strength to carry on.

When I say..."I am a Christian"
I'm not bragging of success.
I'm admitting I have failed
And need God to clean my mess.

When I say..."I am a Christian"
I'm not claiming to be perfect,
My flaws are far too visible
But God believes I am worth it.

When I say..."I am a Christian"
I still feel the sting of pain.
I have my share of heartaches
So I call upon His name.

When I say..."I am a Christian"
I'm not holier than thou,
I'm just a simple sinner
Who received God's good grace, somehow!

by Maya Angelou

Sunday, October 25, 2009

All For One And One For All

Here we are! The Three Musketeers! We're sticking together and looking after each other. Ok, really it is me looking after these two munchkins but I do appreciate their company.
Do you have any idea how difficult it is to take a picture of the three of us together? Pretty much impossible!

Phemie, who is normally the most docile creature in the world, decided that this would be the time that she would run riot. She went crazy!When Phembo was looking, Hattie wasn't! (How cute and fat does Phemie look in this??!)There were even times when none of us were looking at the camera! I'm not totally sure how that happened as I was taking the picture!Eventually Hattie gave up on me..........and Phemie literally started climbing the walls.
Oh, how I love them!

Saturday, October 24, 2009

All That For A Few Veggies, Bread and Milk?

I went grocery shopping this afternoon. I was in desperate need of bread, milk and food for tea this evening and tomorrow. I finished the bread and the milk went off yesterday so I really should have done this shop last night but it all seemed like too much effort and it was raining..... After my experience today I really should have gone last night. It might have been so much simpler!
It was still raining when I left to go to Sainsbury's. Urgh. I don't mind rain that much. I didn't wear a coat and I didn't use an umbrella. I'm that hardcore. Actually, what that means is that I got wet especially because the car park was so busy and so I had to park at the other end of the car park from the Sainsbury's entrance. Urgh.

I picked up my basket and duly filled it, as you do, with lots of healthy goodies (Is it weird to crave turnip?), bread, milk etc etc. I then realised that my purse was sitting at home on the breakfast room table.... at least that was where I hoped it was!

That meant that I had to ditch my shopping at customer services and bomb it home, pick up my purse and pay for my shopping....... Eeesh! By that point it had stopped raining. Plus 1! Whoop! Getting out of the car park at Sainsbury's is fun and games at the best of times.... today I wanted to scream. Loudly. It was made even worse by one particular idiotic pedestrian. One car tried to pull out behind me but was crossing the opposing lane. I couldn't pull any further forward at that point to let them in properly. Not wanting traffic to be disrupted further, when the car in front of me moved I naturally moved forward. Unfortunately, that meant that I was still halfway over the zebra crossing. Shall I repeat that? HALFWAY across the zebra crossing! HALFWAY! A stupid pedestrian decided that it would be a good thing to do to hit the back of my car multiple times.
Mr Idiotic Pedestrian, did I inconvenience you? Was the other half of the pedestrian crossing not good enough for you? Was it that difficult to manoeuver yourself around the back of my car? In what circumstance did you ever think that it was appropriate to even place your hands on my car, let alone with force?

Yup, that just made my day. To make matters even worse, or to make my mood even worse, the sun that was shining was making it near impossible to see as I was driving home. Wet roads + bright sunshine = horrendous driving conditions.

Thankfully my purse was sitting on my breakfast room table. So, it was back to Sainsbury's for me. I managed to pay for my shopping and FINALLY I could take my precious veggies, bread, milk and select other items home. Hurrah!
Incidentally, this may be one of my best ever purchases. I have a few of these fold-away bags but none as big as this.

It fitted all of these groceries in....... OK, fine, I also bought Sainsbury's Sour Cream and Chive flavour crunchy snack mix but I had to wait a while for my camera's battery to recharge to take the photos that you are viewing and, well, why wait to start snacking?! I haven't finished it though..... yet. Just so you know!

Mind you, after fitting all of these groceries in the bag it was so heavy that even my car started beeping at me because the passenger didn't have their seatbelt fastened..... Um, yeah, that was a bag of groceries....And to make it even better it folds up all teeny tiny. Marvelous!

I don't plan to brave Sainsbury's again soon.......

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

89 Years Old

My Grandpa turned 89 on Saturday!There weren't quite 89 candles on the cake though....
Happy Birthday, Grandpa!

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Lessons Learned

Yesterday at Beamish I learnt something very interesting.
You can take the boy out of the farm.......
But you can never take the farm out of the boy!

Thursday, October 08, 2009

Continuing The Theme

I decided to make bread. I mean, my baking spree had been going so well and there was a bread recipe in Good Food Magazine so, why not? I don't have a bread maker and I couldn't tell you where the mixer is let alone if it has an attachment, so I had to do it all by hand, kneading and all.

In all honesty, I didn't think that it would work out at one point. I thought I was back to my cooking disasters.
Granted, it looks like an old potato on the outside but inside it is wonderful.....
I must admit that I just couldn't wait until I had a reason to try the Hummingbird Red Velvet Recipe and the verdict is..... WOW! They turned out so much better than the oily ones that I made last week. Hurrah!

Tuesday, October 06, 2009

I Got My Bake Back, Baby!

I've always loved baking. I'm pretty sure that it comes from my Mum who is the baking queen. I love creating all the sweet treats... biscuits, brownies, cakes etc etc.
But when I was in America I totally lost my bake. I mean, seriously. I was terrible. My disasters included burning Place and Bake cookies, ruining Aunt Chrissy's 'Best Oatmeal Cookies in the World' and making inedible cookies for a school bake sale. Oh man, I was awful!

Now that I'm back in Darlington I seem to have gotten my bake back! Hurrah! It mostly started by the need for me to have a Red Velvet Cupcake. I hadn't had my usual Saturday NYC treat since I left NY.... obviously! So, I decided to just go right ahead and make my own. I found a recipe on someone's blog - it was originally a Paula Deen recipe. The cupcakes turned out tasty but slightly too oily. Even Sarah got a cupcake for her 21st on Thursday.But, the bug had bitten me.......

I decided to buy a new recipe book - The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook. Oh, how I wish we had one of their stores up here. Even the front page of their website makes me drool! I mostly bought the book because a) the pics are good enough to eat and b) they have a recipe in it for Red Velvet Cupcakes that uses butter rather than oil. Seeing as we still had some cupcakes left from my previous baking session I decided to try something different and went for these Marshmallow Cupcakes. I think my favourite bit of these cupcakes was making a hollow in each cake for melted marshmallow. Eating all those little circles - delicious! I found the actual finished cupcakes a little too sweet.
I had a good excuse to make some more cupcakes as we had a memorial service at church and I'd promised that I would make something for the tea afterwards. That time I made vanilla cupcakes with vanilla frosting. Sounds a little dull but I made the frosting yellow and decorated them liberally with sprinkles of various kinds! No pictures of these ones but they tasted gooooooooooood! I will definitely be using this as my 'staple' cupcake recipe. No other recipe will do.
We have a fellowship tea at church on Sunday so I have another excuse to bake. I'm thinking that I'll try the Hummingbird Red Velvet recipe..... but there are a lot of others in the book that I'd love to try. I wish there were more people in this house so that I could justify baking lots and lots but I'd be afraid that there would be a lot of wasted cupcakes and that would be a travesty.

Thursday, October 01, 2009

Links

I just updated the links on the right hand side of this page. I deleted some and added some more.
My current favourite website is Cake Wrecks. It is absolutely stinking hilarious! If you need a good giggle, a general cheering-up-ment, are bored out of your skull or something then give this website a quick visit. Just keep in mind that all the 'Wrecks' are done by 'professionals'. Mad!

So much fun!