Sunday night chit-chat and sealed pot update

Can hardly believe it's already Sunday evening. While I have managed to get some stuff done (see my earlier post for all of the food-related messing up I managed to do this week), very little of it is the stuff I really wanted and needed to be doing today. The sun has nearly gone over the houses opposite though so I'm hoping to be able to open the windows soon and that maybe some slightly cooler air might come in to energise me. Although quite honestly, I suspect I'll just call it an early night and hope that means I wake up extra early in the morning. The tomatoes are bubbling away on the cooker, though, so I need at least another half-an-hour to let them cook a bit more and get them into the freezer.

Basil pesto (minus the cheese since most recipes recommend leaving it out if you're going to freeze it). 14 big 'cubes' topped off with a bit more oil and enough left over for a pasta lunch tomorrow. From my three bunches I managed to get 100g of leaves and I found a recipe that used 100g of basil with 25g of pine nuts (I had 30g in the cupboard) so I just went for it.

What are you:
Reading
On to chapter two of Transition now. Got side-tracked again, a re-read of a Georgette Heyer book this time. I've noticed that mid and late summer is a time when I turn to re-reading easy books again and again. I have a long train journey on Tuesday so I'll try to spend at least an hour reading Transition though.

Listening to
An ambulance just went by and I can hear the tram approaching. The slight bubbling noise of the tomatoes coming from the kitchen. Otherwise, it's all quiet here at the moment.

Watching
Arrow. I realised that I just stopped watching it halfway through the season so I thought I'd try and catch up on the last few episodes. Like the books I'm reading at the moment, it's all about switching off brain at the moment.

Cooking/baking
Yes, let's not focus on the three bags full of food that I need to bring down to the bins this evening, let's focus on the positive. Today I've pureed nearly a litre of strawberries and frozen in ice-cube tray or ice-lolly moulds. I've removed one lot of not quite solid 'cubes' and put them into a ziploc bag - needed the tray to put the pesto into. And I have a huge pot of tomatoes on the cooker, cooked with a couple of courgettes and a couple of onions. Destined for the freezer to make me fast dinners during the autumn when I'll have very little time. And I had a lovely tomato and mozzarella salad for dinner. Best of all though ...

Happy you accomplished this week
... I've done the washing up. The only thing left to do is the jug that had the pesto in it and the pot the tomatoes are in. Yay me. I've also taken down some books that have been living on a shelf in the hallway for months and put them into a bag to bring to the library to donate tomorrow. And sorted all the bottles I need to bring back for a deposit or to recycling. Apart from that, although it involved some very long hours, I did get a lot done in work this week. And I had a lovely chat with my brother on the phone and another one with a good friend. I also managed to get around to contacting an insurance broker to make sure that the insurance I have is suitable and find out about organising a couple of other things. And I got some good work done in the Bio-Garten yesterday.

Looking forward to next week
Visiting my sister for a week. Not only because it'll mean spending time with her and her kids but also because I get to travel there and back by train (for free, since I had enough points to get a voucher for an international journey) and she lives in the mountains. I cannot explain to people from where I live how much I miss having mountains or hills in the background every day. Really looking forward to it.

Thankful for today
The fact that I am privileged enough that even though my massive amount of food waste this week is shameful, it won't actually make a difference to my eating properly. Particularly as this was the week in which I found the blog A Girl Called Jack and read her Hunger Hurts post from just over a year ago. Check out her recently started campaign to buy someone #22mealsforacoffee. And also, selfish though it may be, I am incredibly thankful to live and work in a country that not only has decent holiday entitlements for workers, it also has a law that states at least one of those holidays must be at least two full weeks long.

Bonus question: what was your least favourite subject in school?
Hmm, this is a difficult one to answer because I generally loved school (despite never having any of those inspiring teachers that show up in films all the time. LOL). If I'm allowed to choose gym as a subject then that definitely has to go top of the list. And otherwise science, I think, especially chemistry and physics. We did "science" for the first three years of secondary school and that meant a chemistry module, a physics module and a biology module. Biology is the only one I kept on for the last two year and that was only because the conventional wisdom was that you must do a science subject. Didn't much like maths either but once I managed to get out of the honours class in my second-last year, I enjoyed it. Really, really hated accounting and statistics in college though. Numbers just aren't really my thing.

If you'd like to join in with Sunday night chit-chat, post away and then head over to Half-Dozen Daily to link up.

Edited to add a sealed pot update:
I didn't think I had anything at all to add this week and so wasn't bothering to post an update. But I did try and get some order into the Table of Doom after all and lo and behold, found a ten euro note hidden in some receipts. Cannot think how I didn't miss it. So, rather than sticking it back in my purse, it has gone straight into the sealed pot.