Weekend Snapshots

My weekend was mostly spent like this:

...getting increasingly covered in grout whilst trying to tile my bathroom floor. I have learnt that I am quite good at tiling, but really not at all good at snapping tiles to useful sizes. The flat is currently littered with tiny bits of tile as a constant reminder of my failure. 


Depressing. And I've still got grout stuck to my feet.


As endless bathroom-pictures are not very thrilling, instead I'll tell you about Deen City Farm which we walked to last weekend. It's just down the Wandle Trail, between Tooting and Merton, and where we met these rather disgruntled alpacas. They'd just been shorn and so were all knees and elbows, apart from their fluffy hairstyles!

Nick, holding alpaca food instead of fruit for a change.

The same walk also took us through Merton Abbey Mills, an arts and crafts market housed in an old water mill and workshops that were owned by William Morris and Liberty at various points in their history. There's still a working water mill which powers a potters wheel.

The DIY all got a bit much for us on Sunday, so we plotted an escape up to Balham for coffee, cake and a little peer round The Vintage Event  at the Balham Bowls Club. It was all very lovely, but I was feeling a bit too grubby and exhausted to have a proper look through the stalls. However, I felt suitably smug when we walked past a charity shop just after leaving and I spotted this vintage frock in the window, which is now mine for a mere £12.50.

Not sure it will go too well with grout-smeared legs though, so I'm saving it for a more sophisticated weekend...

Tea Towels. Better than CDs.

One of the chaps I work with is in a band. I'm pretty sure it's for the love of it rather than the money and fame, as he shows no sign of giving up his day job. This theory was backed up when he told me that, instead of having CDs to sell after their gigs, they wanted to offer tea-towels. They think, probably quite rightly, that no one really listens to the CDs they buy after a night out, but everyone uses tea-towels.


I liked this idea. (I liked it even more when he said they were also considering a line of home-made jam and mugs.)


Why am I telling you this? Well, they wanted someone to design said tea-towels and he asked me to have a go. They had quite a specific brief... line drawings of each member of the band in a grid sort-of format.


'Oh', I said. 'Like that Blur album?' He looked at me blankly. Blur had clearly been an influence, but it appears a subconscious one. So my design is vaguely Blur-inspired, but with a definite country slant.

And gosh, isn't it nerve-wracking to draw people based on a few photographs of them? I was pretty sure my pictures looked like the photos, but I had no way of knowing whether the photos really looked like the people!


Thankfully, they apparently do. There is further work to be done though... We're upping the 'country' with the addition of some cowboy hats and more text. Watch this space for the final design in the near future!

Rather British Meatballs

I fancied meatballs the other day. What's more, I fancied cheese stuffed meatballs. A quick google suggested they should be stuffed with mozzarella. That sounded great, but I didn't have any and I currently have a Grocery Policy which involves not going to the supermarket until there's nothing left in my cupboards except dry crackers and a shrivelled potato.


I did have some (rather old, in need of shaving) mature cheddar. So I decided to go with it.


In my mind, meatballs generally seem Italian. Or American. Or, of course, IKEA'n. Cheddar is none of these things. So I started thinking about British meatballs. 


(If you ask Wikipedia it suggests the only British meatball is the faggot. Now... I like faggots. But they're a very different kettle of fish. Or offal.)


Anyhoodle, due to the cheese being quite old and strong I felt they needed some fairly robust seasoning. So I embraced the Britishness and added Worcestershire sauce as well.


And they were good. Very good.

Rather British Meatballs


500g beef mince (could be replaced by pork, turkey or (probably) any other mince)
1 egg
3 tbsp breadcrumbs
1 small onion, chopped up as small as possible
1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
Salt and pepper, to taste
Cheddar cheese, cut into 1cm cubes


This is really very easy... Put everything except the cheese into a nice big bowl and mix until it's combined, first with a spoon then with your hands.


Once it's mixed, form into small balls in the palm of your hand and poke a square of cheese into the middle. Squidge the meatball shut around the cheese so it shouldn't be able to melt out.

I made twelve, but that will obviously depend a bit on both the size of your hands and your cheese chunks.


Brown the meatballs quickly in a hot frying pan with a tiny bit of oil to stop them sticking. I like to serve mine with tomato sauce*, in which case I drop them into a pan of sauce and let them float about for fifteen minutes to make sure they're cooked right through. If you're serving them 'dry' make sure they're cooked before the come out of the frying pan!


*My tomato sauce is just softened onions/garlic, a tin of chopped tomatoes, can-full of water, tbsp of vegetable stock powder, grated carrot, and a pinch of sugar left to simmer in a pan for as long as everything else takes to cook.


Serve with pasta or, as I did, a strange colcannon-ish mix of potato and cabbage.

The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that I have, as promised, added an About Me page, and another new one for all my favourite links (the Oh, Look!). I've even now got a fancy contact me button, if you'd like to Tell Me Something. Please feel free to use them and tell me what you think!

Homes and Gardens: The Geffrye Museum

My mother doesn't often venture to London. She and her Gentleman Lover live in a yew-lined idyll in Rutland so why would they?!


This weekend was one of the rare occasions though, and to show them a good time we decided to take them to the Geffrye Museum. It's a 'museum of the home' and one of those fantastic places in London that are free but that no one ever seems to have heard of. Definitely worth a visit.

Housed in beautiful buildings that used to be almshouses, it's a series of 'living rooms' set up as they would have been at different points between 1600 and the present day. Each one includes lots of information about how people would have lived and used the different spaces of their homes.

Contrasting patterns

Elaborate wallpaper

There's also a garden set up in the same way, with different sections inspired by periods from the past.

Grapes in the herb garden

Trimmed hedges (which I thought looked like a big caterpillar)

On certain dates through the year they also do tours of one of the almshouse, which has been restored as it would have looked in the 1780s and 1880s. I think this was my favourite bit... you see almshouse all over London, and throughout the country, and I've always wondered what they look like inside and what it's like to live in one.

I made a pan bagnat (from this recipe) to take as a picnic. I hadn't made one before but it's a useful idea: a loaf hollowed out, stuffed with vegetables and cheese, and then pressed. Perfect portable food as you can make it, slice it, wrap it in cling film and then chuck it in a bag and it's pretty indestructible. It doesn't really matter even if it does get a bit squished!

Picnic modelled by mother

Today's other news: my sunflowers have buds, London isn't entirely filled with thieves and vandals, and this blog is definitely worth a read for a bit of light relief.

Flowery Fascinator (also featuring Colours from My House)

My little sister is at a wedding today, and was struggling on the hat-front. Obviously, I like hats a lot so I immediately offered to help her out. (I even get excited about hats for other people.)

Her frock was a sort of 60s affair, in black, white and mustard yellow, so I decided a big pop-artish flower (based on my recent flower-making workshop) would work. Add a bit of veiling to wedding it up, fix the whole shebang onto a headband and it would be quite the thing.

I was pretty pleased with the final piece, even though it proved that I'm quite incapable of taking not-rubbish pictures of my own head. All of them seem to be mostly the colour of the thing behind them.

So yes, I have aubergine curtains in my sitting room...

And my hallway is very yellow...

(bonus bike in the background!)

I think I'm better at hats than photography.

(And I'm not actually jaundiced...)

In other news, the lovely SW Craft Club mentioned me as their blog of the week via facebook! Greetings if you've found me following their link.

And in other other news, I'm going to be playing around with the layout and hopefully adding a little more content (an About Me page, for starters) in the next few days. All and any comments welcome!

New Baby Berry Breakfast Muffins

This week's foody post was going to be about meatballs. But as it's currently surprisingly seasonably warm, no one wants to think about meatballs. So I'm going to save them for the inevitable monsoons/blizzards/thunder storms we'll probably get next week, and tell you about berry muffins instead.


I had some lovely redcurrants in my vegetable box this week. They looked very pretty and reminded me of being little, as we had lots of currant bushes in the garden at home. They also reminded me that whenever we opened the freezer a few random frozen ones would always tumble out - my mama had a tendency to freeze them but not get around to using them before they managed to escape their container and hide behind the ice cream.

Anyway. They looked wonderful but gosh, they were sharp. Definitely not suitable for eating on their own. I contemplated various fates for them (apart from freezing; they didn't deserve that and the cat gets enough exercise chasing the frozen peas that always tumble from my freezer) but eventually decided on muffins.


This was a two pronged solution as it meant 1) using up the currants and 2) that we could take some as a new baby present to some friends of ours who have recently made a person. Muffins seemed like an appropriate gift as they're quick and easy to eat and, as I added some oats as well as the berries, these had a fair amount of goodness in them. And obviously, sugar. But new parents can generally do with some energy.

New Baby Berry Breakfast Muffins


220g plain flour
10g oats (and another tablespoon for the tops)
3 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
85g brown sugar (plus another tablespoonful for sprinkling)
1 egg
240ml milk
90 ml vegetable oil or melted butter/margarine
100g berries (I'm quite sure that most sorts of berries would work here, even frozen ones if you increase the cooking time a smidge)


Preheat your oven to 200C and prepare your muffin tins with liners or grease.


Sift together the flour, baking powder and salt, then stir in the oats and sugar. Put to one side.


In another large bowl, beat the egg with a fork then stir in the milk and oil. 


Make a well in your dry ingredients and pour the wet into the dry. Stir until just combined - it should still be lumpy but you don't want to be able to see any flour. 


Stir the berries through.


Fill the muffin cups to 3/4 full, then sprinkle over a spoonful of oats and sugar. Bake for 20-25 minutes. You'll know when they're done as they'll be browned and springy.


Eat for breakfast. Or at any other time.


(I made a pan of big ones and another pan of miniature ones, but I think you'd get about 12 normal size ones from this mix.)

A Summery Saturday: Borough Market and Vintage on the South Bank

I don't like over-planning my weekends. They're for relaxing, and too many plans can make me feel all regimented and stressed.


That doesn't mean I don't sometimes end up doing a lot of things, though. Freestyle weekends can still be pretty busy. This Saturday was a prime example...


First, we got up surprisingly early (for a weekend) and cycled to Borough Market. I've always heard it's best before eleven in the morning and I'm afraid to say it's true. Officially worth getting out of bed for. 

(Plus, the exercise and earliness meant we could celebrate our arrival with bacon and egg rolls, before having a wander around the rest of the stalls.)

mushroomushroomushroom

Pile o'meringues

Spectacular tentacular squids

'matoes

A flat peach and a flat nectarine! I didn't know there were flat nectarines too!

Picturesque French things

Shortbread Owls from The Cinnamon Tree Bakery

We then headed over to the Vintage Festival on the South Bank. Tickets for the actual event, in the Royal Festival Hall, were eye-wateringly expensive (to my frugal/stingy mind) but there was a free marketplace full of vintage stalls that was quite enough to keep me amused for a few hours.

Some of the lovely things that caught my eye...

Patchwork Pony

Bunting and cream teas (courtesy of Crowne paint, I think!)

Beautiful hats that I WANTED. From Kate Underdown Millinery and  Lady Go Red

Gorgeous upcycled furniture from Furniture Divas

Bobbins! (I think)

Hat boxes full of delicious vintage-style underwear.

Lots of lovely quilty things from Beyond Fabrics

Pretty frocks from Lowie.

Nick was quite taken with the record players, from Hourglass Vintage Lifestyle in my hometown of Salisbury!

Lots of people dressed up, and with amazing hairstyles

and a helter skelter...

I also had a feeling that my lovely bicycle hasn't been feature enough on this blog. Considering how much time I spend on it, I decided that should be remedied and passed the camera to Nick so he could snap velo and I pretending to look casual.

This has been a rather photo-heavy post... To continue that theme, the very lovely (and wise) Kirst over at the The Leopard Anchor is starting a Crafty Photo Scavenger Hunt and I'm going to join in. Pop over and see her for the rules, but the general gist is that she will set five categories each month and all the participants have to take a photo on each subject. My photography is very much of the pointandshootthenfaffaboutwitheditingsoftwaretomakeitlookbetter variety, but it's always nice to have a new challenge!