OMG DUDE! AN APPLE STORE!!!

We have come to Belfast to the opening of the new Apple Store in Victoria Square. How hot it is! 

I have been interviewed TWICE on camera so far and congratulated on the iLove tee shirt I am wearing. 

How lovely Apple Fans are :D 

What a Pickle

"So, how did your cooking go the other night?" I hear you all cry.

Wellllll. . . the cake took ages to make but was reallly well worth it - even when I noticed the baking powder sitting on the table UNUSED as I took the cake out of the oven. OOOPS. Sure, it didn't poison us.

Then, after the eggs were pickled I realised that WHOLE Mixed Spice isn't really the same thing as GROUND Mixed Spice and the resulting liquid was a tad - well - yuk looking. Still tasted the same though. You learn from your mistakes don't ya?

Oh - and another thing - it is best to read all the recipes before you follow just one. Seemingly it is harder to peel a cooked fresh egg and if you are pickling it is recommended you use older eggs - even from a couple of weeks ago. There is no way our eggs would stay around long enough for that malarkey!

I made another Apple Cake last night and realised why the baking powder had been left out of the first one. IT ISN'T IN THE RECIPE! It is listed in the ingredients but there are no specific instructions to put it in the bowl! How rude is that? It's a good job it wasn't something vitally important in the 6 steps to cake perfection. Dude, what if they had forgotten to tell me to put it in the oven! I could still be sitting there waiting for it to cook!

In egg-production news - David rang me at work to tell me there were four eggs waiting for us and one was HUGE. He weighed it for me and he was right, it is the biggest one we have had yet at 83g - the next largest is in the mid 70s. It looks humongous beside the wee 49g ones Lacey lays but we have no idea who laid it. It could be a double yolk-er from one of the normal girls or a new lay-er who is going to produce much bigger eggs. Am dying to see what is waiting for us over the next few days.

Eggciting huh?

Sell By Dates . . .

I have taken the head staggers and decided to bake this afternoon. We have apples and we have eggs. So I have decided to make an apple pie - or similar - and finally make some pickled eggs which has been on my to-do list since before we got the chooks.

I have all my baking ingredients in a plastic box in a cupboard. It is easy to keep them all in one place so flour doesn't spill all over the place. . .

So, I need flour and possibly cinnamon. I went to the box and brought out a couple of packets of spices, coconut, herbs etc. It seemed to all be in reverse chronological order. One lot of stuff was dated "Dec 2003", the next "April 2003", and the next "Sept 2002". EEEEK! Is it THAT long since I baked?

The worst was "Aug 2001". Needless to say it all went in the bin. I am not at all squeamish about sell by dates - after all - how does the product know what the month is - but I draw the line at it being FIVE YEARS out of date!

On the other hand - look at the Baking Powder please. The date on it is "Jun 03 2094". I am wondering what happens on June the 4th 2094 - does it suddenly combust?

Oh. Perhaps it means "June 2003". . . Aw well - it LOOKS ok. Ish.

Slly People

There have been a couple of things said in this household over the past week or so which made me roll my eyes.

The first one was when Iain and I were in B&Q looking at the turf and trying to work out how much it would cost to instantly turf our new lawn area rather than get top soil and a couple of boxes of grass seed and wait for nature to take its course. We could see the rolled up turf and the price of it and Iain was trying to work out how many we would require. . . say the turf was about 2 feet wide by 4 feet long. . .

Iain then blurted out "Oh this is ridiculous! How can they give a 'square yard' price for this when any fool can see that the product isn't SQAURE? It is RECTANGULAR!'

I spent quite a while watching his face to see if he was cracking a joke. Nope. He had been deadly serious.

When you hear that, you will realise that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree when you hear David's silly thing then.

It was the day of the Hadron Collider switch on. It had been in the news all day and when David got home from school he had obviously heard all about it and the scaremongering that had gone on around it too.

David: Oh - did you hear about the big machine?
Me: *raises eyebrow*
David: Seemingly today it was going to make the world stop
Me: Really?
David: Did that work then?
Me: BLINK

It took him a weeeee minute to become embarrassed. . . .

Sigh. See what I have to work with?

Brrrrrrr. . .

Over on the chook forum we have been discussing the price of heating oil and have a semi-jokey competition on-going to see who will be the last to turn on their heating this year. We may very well be the winners as Iain has muttered something along the lines of "It's not going on until Hell freezes over" so it will either be us - or the girl who recently moved to New Zealand who wins. Watch this space.

We had stopped our direct debit to the oil company for a while. I think it was because they owed us money. While the DD was stopped we weren't included in their *when we are in the area we will top up your tank no matter how little or much you need* package. It was always handy when we were in it because we never had to think about keeping an eye on the oil level.

Then when the DDs started again they decided to put us back on the package - without telling us - and one day we arrived home to find we somehow had a full tank of oil and a docket through the door for £800. We are now totally paranoid about oil thefts.

Because of this we are determined NOT to put the heating on. At FOUR times the cost of previous fills we are hoping this will last four times as long so have to use it four times less . . .

So, no, we haven't had the heating on since about April.

The neighbours have. I have heard their boiler coming on in the middle of the day when I have been outside in a tee shirt, and for hours when they aren't even in the house! Dude! Don't they have extra jumpers?