Tidying up

Doc confirmed I have a cold. He gave me a prescription for some cough syrup to get rid of the 'schleim' I have. Haha. It still cracks me up that the German word for phlegm is schleim.

I haven't done half of what I wanted to do either in work or at home. Have a pile of washing up to do, badly need to hoover and it's now nearly ten o'clock so I can't. Will have to get up and do it before work tomorrow as I'm heading to the airport straight after work. Didn't finish bringing stuff down to the cellar either and that's just going to have to wait now.

I have hurt something somewhere which is making it difficult for me to walk this evening. I think I need a good massage to loosen up my shoulder and that will fix everything else. I felt a twinge in my back today and that only happens sometimes when my shoulder is acting up and I'm been favouring it without realising. A day or two later though I'll start to get twinges and cramps so I know it has happened again. I'm scheduled for an MRI at the end of the month for the problem I've been having with my other foot so it will be interesting to see if they find anything with that. I was just thinking about the fact that almost everything I have tends to happen on my left side. Possibly somewhat attributable to the fact that I'm a citeog and so obviously use my left side more. But I'm kind of wondering if the problems I had with my shoulder 14 years ago for the first time might actually be the cause of everything else. They eventually fixed that issue (which, now I come to think of it, the physio said was in my neck rather than my shoulder) with lots of physio but were never able to explain exactly what had happened or why. So it will be interesting. I'm a bit nervous as well because I remember my mum being told she had a trapped nerve and that was the start of the few months which led to more tests and the discovery that she had cancer. So it's one of those things I can be a bit irrational about. While I'm home though, I'm going to try and contact the doctor to get hold of her medical records. I don't even know what kind of cancer she had because my dad wouldn't talk about it. I only found out by accident that she had cancer about a week before she died, didn't think to ask any of my aunts or uncles at that stage and now that I'm older and realise it might be important to know, it's difficult to start a conversation with relations I've had so little contact with for so long and who may or may not actually have a clue what they're talking about. This was illustrated to me the other day when I was talking about this with my sister and mentioned that based on bits and pieces I'd overheard over the years I thought it was some kind of gynaecological cancer and she, for the same reason, was sure it was a colo-rectal one. I think it's time we just found out. I do know my dad had malignant melanoma and a brain tumour because we were brought into the hospice for a family meeting when he was moved there but it would probably be a good idea to get his records at the same time. I find as I'm getting older that I have difficulty remembering all the things that have ever happened to me so I have no hope of trying to remember if my mum or dad had x, y or z at any stage.

Better get on with packing. Nope, still haven't done that either. Nor did I manage to finish all the food I have. Still have a giant courgette in the fridge but I think I'm just going to take it with me. Have apples as well but will see what state they're in before I start planning space for them in my case. And I am definitely making sure to leave room for my blanket project. Yes, the wonderful patchwork blanket that I decided to knit for my friend's 40th birthday is still not finished but I am going to finish it on holidays. It is coming with me because on my way home after my holiday I will be visiting him for a day to celebrate his birthday. It's his 41st mind you but still. Better late than never.

Working too much

Have a few 12-hour days behind me now as well as having brought a document home to proofread yesterday. But am getting to where I want to be so that I have a chance to keep things ticking over better going forward so that is worth it at least. Got my email inbox back down to less than 20 emails and sent items emptied - it's always such a weight off my mind to do that. I'm heading back to Ireland for two weeks on Friday and when I come back I really want to make a big effort to not work any overtime. That means I need to be more efficient with my time but I need to do it. I sometimes think I have somewhat workaholic tendencies but really it's because of having grown up working in my dad's business. The line between home and work is very, very thin for me so I don't even notice the hours being eaten away out of my evening. I have friends who resent having to stay even a few minutes late at work but these are mostly the friends who only had to work during school holidays and never during school term. Whereas I started working when I was twelve and worked almost every day from then until I left home (left the country to make sure I was getting away from it) at twenty. I worked two or three hours after school every evening and then all day Saturday and Sunday lunchtime and evening or Saturday lunchtime and evening and all day Sunday. We all did it and at the time it didn't seem strange at all but now I'm sort of beginning to realise how it could have led to some problems in maintaining a healthy work/life balance. Yes, that's a terrible phrase but it's an important concept. And one of the reasons why I think I might just be better off if I can get to the stage someday where my life is my work and I don't need to go out and earn money but can just do all the stuff I want to to live my life.

My cold is hanging on so I'm going to go to the doctor tomorrow. If nothing else, I want to be able to say to the people at the airport that I really do just have a cold. Although when clearing out my inbox I re-read the email we got a couple of weeks ago after swine flu cases started happening in the town I live in and apparently at the first sign of any cold-like symptoms I should have gone straight to the doctor and not gone near the office. Oh well. I have no aches and pains, no fever and what I was sneezing and what I'm now coughing is clear so I'm fairly confident I'm flu free.

The heat over the weekend was oppressive again. I should have spent a few hours at least cleaning and tidying my apartment but I didn't manage to get much done at all. This evening it is mercifully cooler but I only got home from work at half-nine and really need to go and sleep soon so I don't think I'll get much done.

I did make raspberry jam yesterday and oh my, it is delicious. I got four jars plus a half one from the 900g of berries I had and half of that half one is gone already. The recipe said I might end up just eating it straight out of the pot and I thought it was just another piece of chef's hyperbole but it really is that good. Don't care if it stays that runny either, if so it'll be a fantastic sauce for rice pudding, maybe some ice-cream. Oooh, sponge cake and ice-cream with this raspberry jam would be amazing. Hmmmmm. I used the recipe from the River Cottage Preserves Handbook. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It's really just absolutely fabulous.

I also made tomato ketchup yesterday but despite having gone to the shop on Saturday specifically to buy cloves I, for some completely unfathomable reason, bought ginger instead. More ginger to be precise because I only bought a huge bag of it recently. No idea what I was thinking of. I know I was distracted trying to figure out if I should buy whole cloves at the same time since I'll need them in a few weeks for making chutney but how that led to me picking up ground ginger instead of ground cloves I'm not sure. And of course I didn't notice any of this until I was tidying up after having put the ketchup on to cook i.e. after I had added ginger instead of cloves. Haven't tasted it yet - might be interesting.

I have a large courgette still to use but not many days left to be cooking before I leave so I'm thinking of making this pizza crust from it.

And I did take some photos of my vertical gardening attempts but will have to post them at a later stage. I found several catepillar types growing in the leaves of my spinach today so have removed and disposed of those leaves affected. They were really inside the leaves though, not just on them. Very strange but then again I've only had catepillar problems once before and that was on parsley so maybe that's what just what they do if they can. It was like they were sucking all the green out of the leaf around them.

Don't know what's going to happen while I'm away. I have no-one to leave a key with and ask to come in and water plants for me so hopefully I won't arrive back to an apartment full of wildlife and completely dead plants. Still, I was looking on my attempts this year as very much experimental so I don't mind too much not getting anything from them. I wasn't really expecting to so have essentially been too surprised by actually getting some salad leaves and spinach to use any of it. Have had a few tomato flowers appear, only to wither up and die before really opening properly. Two more plants have a few flowers now so maybe they'll do something.

Sniffles

I have a serious case of the sniffles. Despite the fact that the birch tree pollen I found out recently I am allergic to is not supposed to be a problem anymore by June, I have been sneezing all day. I've read a fair few accounts of the flu symptoms though, including people who have had swine flu recently and sniffles isn't anywhere high up on any of the lists so I'm not really worried about that. I do think I've got a cold though as my head is starting to feel stuffed up - happens in summer sometimes and I've been so hot the last few days, every time I move for more than a few minutes I start sweating buckets and then I have to stop and cool down and I think it's just my body adjusting to it. Of course I'm going to knock everything out of whack by going home to Ireland for two weeks at the end of next week. Although they have been having warm weather as well. Not the 30 degrees it is here today (that's 86 fahrenheit I think) but still into the 20s. I have sooo much work to get done before I leave though that I really don't want to be feeling under par for the next few days.n Heading to bed now with a spoonful of Night Nurse which can usually knock me out fairly soundly and hopefully a good sleep with cure more than any medicine could.

Beans and things

Was very brave today and tried cooking with chickpeas for the first time thanks to a recipe I saw on this blog which I had almost everything on hand for. So easy I can't believe how often I have intended to do chickpeas and have chickened out. I can see them playing a much bigger part in my future eating. Especially since the heat here is making me wilt - anything that adds more options to cold eating for me is a good thing. It's not outrageously warm really but compared to how Ireland normally is, it is sweltering and I reckon it'll take a good few years for me to get used to it. Must have been about 30 degrees yesterday and it was due to be 27 today but it is really humid with it. We had massive thunder storms yesterday afternoon and loads of rain but within an hour you could barely tell it had rained.

Today I feel like I have spent most of the day in the kitchen but I'm doing something for half an hour then need to sit down and rest while I cool down before going for it again. Can't believe it's almost nine o'clock. The tomatoes have finally arrived back at the farmers' market and I was going to attempt my first water bath canning and make some ketchup. But I haven't gotten to it so am going to wait till tomorrow after work.

What I have done:

Cooked chickpeas which I had soaked since yesterday, chopped up tomatoes, feta cheese and combined with the dressing of lemon juice, mustard, olive oil, black pepper and garlic.

Cleaned and de-stalked blueberries, redcurrants, blackcurrants and strawberries. Ate a fair few of the strawberries and made the rest into a rough purree to have with yoghurt for breakfast or desserts this week. The blueberries, redcurrants and blackcurrants are in the dehydrator - it will be interesting to see how they turn out.

Did what seemed like neverending amounts of washing up.

Used gooseberries to make pectin stock. I want to try and make more jam next weekend without having to use jam sugar.

Cooked broccoli and cauliflower to make a bake but couldn't face turning the oven on so that will be tomorrow's dinner. Also cooked some turkey pieces to add to it - will have some of those now with bread as my supper and leave the rest to add to the bake tomorrow.

Podded, blanched and froze a kilo of broad beans (350g podded weight).

Drank lots and lots of water. And watered some plants I just haven't bothered to for a couple of weeks.

Hung up the load of washing I did this morning. Naughty me doing washing on a Sunday again but the heat had me so exhausted yesterday I forgot about laundry until it was almost eight o'clock.

In other news I am working my way through visits to doctors. My bloods are all fine, even, surprise, surprise, my cholesterol (my diet isn't as bad here as it was the last few months in Ireland but I haven't exactly been making a big effort to cook and eat healthily). The colonoscopy was clear of any problems and I just have to go back in ten years for another and in the meantime try to get a hold of my mother's medical records so we know once and for all exactly what type of cancer she had. German doctors are very interested in prevention being the best cure. I did find out that I'm allergic to birch tree pollen so that's interesting. Appointment with the orthopaedic doctor tomorrow about my feet and that should be everything.

And finally I am getting places on my patchwork blanket. I knew when knitting it that I should have been taking care of the end bits as I went along but I didn't so now I just have hundreds of squares that need to be finished before being sewn together. I'm not quite halfway through but it is getting there and going fairly quickly now. Finishing things off is probably one of the most important aspects of most crafts and it's the one I'm least proficient at and could do with working on.

Oh, and I did an online IQ test yesterday and apparently have an IQ of 131, which according to one page I found (obviously I am going to take the one with the most favourable explanation :-) ) means that I just make it out of the highly intelligent category and into gifted. Since I got a good result I think I am going to stop being so dismissive of IQ ratings as a method of rating intelligence!

Edited to add: while I was destalking the currants earlier I thought to myself they might not be all that suitable for drying as they are so small and so juicy - what's going to be left. They've been in the dehydrator for six hours now and, given their small size, I would have expected them to be shrivelled up to nothing but they're not. Really not sure they're going to work out but even if they don't it will have been worth the experiment.

The Man

Nothing at all to do with simple living but I just came across this and thought it was amusing (even if it does play up lots of horrible stereotypes that normally annoy me):

The Man

Mould on soil around tomatoes

Since I potted on the tomatoes there hasn't really been any growth (8 days ago) but I assumed they would just be recovering from the transplant shock and that roots would be growing. I used a mixture of a tomato compost and soil. Today I came home to find a large amount of mould growing on the soil of two of the plants. Any ideas?



Not great pictures but I don't seem to be able to get any decent ones any more.



I didn't have anything to use as proper drainage so I scrunched up some newspaper and put it in the bottom of each pot. If anything I was worried this would mean I'd need to be extra careful to water enough as the paper would draw water out of the soil (which is what drainage is supposed to help with I suppose). Am hoping it might just be these two but if it's some horrible disease then presumably everything else will probably have or get it.

Ta-da!

There's definitely going to be a learning curve with this whole drying malarkey. Need to cut smaller bits next time (was trying not to cut too small in case the bits shrivelled up to nothing). And should just switch it on a bit later and leave it running overnight rather than getting up in the middle of the night to check it a couple of times. Switched it off around half-five because I really needed a full two hours sleep before getting up for work and didn't thnk it needed that much more time. But it did need a bit more. So, although some bits are a bit squishy rather than dried I'm happy with the results. I didn't actually try any until I got home from work this evening but the strawberry bits taste just like jam. Fabulous.


I just popped the finished product into a couple of glass jars and have them in the fridge. Will need to use them fairly quickly I think as they aren't all fully dried. Mind you, I don't think the strawberries would last long anyway.

650g of strawberries gave me 100g dried
425g onions gave me 50g dried