Attic24

On the Menu

I absolutely hate that sinking feeling that comes around 4pm when you don't have a clue what to cook for dinner. I hate mad dashes to the supermarket. My life is chaotic enough without this added daily dilemma hanging over my head at the end of a busy day. So I came up with the idea of a weekly menu board. This way I can make sure I have the ingredients in and it makes my shopping trips cheaper and easier if I know exactly what I'm cooking day to day.

This menu is from last week actually, and is pretty typical of a week at the Attic24 table :: not a lot of meat, everything homemade.

The risotto was roasted butternut squash.
The frittata is pasta/eggs with bacon and feta.
The fishcakes were sweet potato and smoked mackerel.
The pasta was simple penne with a sundried tomato pesto/cream cheese sauce.
And the antipasti is our regular Friday no-cook meal, a selection of cold meats, olives, dips, salad and fresh bread. 

We all eat together round the table at five thirty when J arrives home from work, and it's one of the nicest parts of my day. I enjoy feeding my family very much, love cooking, love setting the table with cutlery, napkins, glasses, a chunky glass water jug and a small vase of flowers, love us all sitting down together.

The Little People are what us Mummies call Good Eaters. They always have been, and I am thankful for it. Yes they have their off days, but mostly they are happy to eat my cooking, sometimes positively thrilled with it even. Frittata generally falls into the thrilled category, so we eat a version of it most weeks, especially since we found such good eggs to use.

Last week (Tuesday) when I was preparing the frittata, I was suddenly struck by the glorious colours in the bowl. So I thought I would get my camera and photograph it, not to boast about what great cooking I do, or particularly to share the recipe (unless you want it that is) but from a purely aesthetic  point of view, I love the freshness of these pictures, and the colours :: to me they really do capture the essence of easy homecooking. Fresh ingredients, simple recipes. Nothing too fancy or complicated.

In the bowl is cooked penne pasta, 5 eggs, chopped cherry tomatoes, cubes of feta cheese, some lambs lettuce (I usually use wilted baby spinach, but forgot to buy) and some fried bacon bits. Whisk altogether, then sloop the mixture into a hot frying pan for 8 minutes.

Sprinkle some grated cheese on top, then finish off under a hot grill to set the top and brown the cheese.

Serve cut into wedges with a green salad, tomato ketchup optional.
Wholesome, simple, honest, tasty food, made with love. And devoured in minutes by the locust-children (and their parents) chomp, chomp, mmmmmmm.

Summer nights

I took this photograph during last week, Thursday I think it was. It was 9.04pm. The Little People were finally asleep in bed and J was busy doing some work on the computer so I thought I would come and keep him company up in the attic. I had no idea the light was doing this magical thing until I looked out the window and  I was absolutely bowled over by the beauty of it, the way the setting sun reflected on the buildings making the whole scene shimmer and glow.
I know I'll look at back at this picture later in the year when summer has faded and the days are short again and marvel at the fact that this was taken at nine-oh-four-pee-em :: a time when in winter I am yawning and retreating to bed to snuggle down with a good book by lamplight. But no not in summer. In summer I sit by the window and ponder.

The attic24 window at the front of the house is a small dormer type window and has a convenient little window seat built in under the eaves. It's from this window that I take in the view and survey the weather. See you have to duck under the beam to get into this cosy space, and although it's still all a bit makeshift and shabby, we all love it. Its a favourite place for the Little people to play :: I had to remove a playmobil pirate and the Fat Controllers Wife before I took this photo, I have no idea what they were up to together. And yes,  I like to sit here and ponder a while.

And on this night I also had a little rippling going on in the golden evening light. It was an hour of total peace, harmony and tranquility. J doing his quiet tap-tap on the computer keyboard, me enveloped in the soft folds of Cashmerino ripples, the Little People asleep downstairs. I love these cosy fragments of domestic life. And I love that this blanket is so much a part of that cosiness. It's more than a whole bundle of yarn knotted together :: it's a  whole collection of memories too. Stripe after stripe of spring and summer time.
I'll remember this in winter when I am wrapped up in it's warmth, will recall these happy summer weeks when I made a stripe each night in the glow of the setting sun.

Banana Bread

I often bake in the afternoons, in that lull that comes sometime after lunch and before I have to set out for the walk to school at three-pm. Sometimes I have a mini assistant, sometimes she is way too busy to stop and help :: Polly Pockets and Sylvanian Families are very high maintenance you understand. On this particular afternoon it was decided she would help, and I do like these times very much.

So yup, I'd noticed a couple of very forlorn bananas in the bottom of the fruit bowl looking rather more brown than yellow, and it reminded of me this recipe that I used to make years ago from an old Hamlyn vegetarian cook book which was given to me when I was about 16. So you know what, I've been carting this book around with me for roughly 23 years and through fifteen or so house moves. Its very dated now of course, some of the recipes look absolutely vile in full Hamlyn 1980's colour, but at least there's nothing in aspic, bleughhh. The Baking section is especially good though, I don't think baking recipes age as much as the other unsavoury looking concoctions.

So here is the recipe for Banana Loaf a la Hamlyn

• 100g soft margerine
• 175g light muscavado sugar
• 2 ripe bananas
• 2 eggs
• 225g self raising flour
• 1tsp baking powder
• 50g chopped walnuts (optional, I left them out)
• 2 Tbsp milk

Oven Temp 180C / 350F / gas 4

• Cream the margerine with the sugar until soft and light.
• Mash the bananas and mix in well (Little Lady loved doing this)
• Break the eggs into the mixture and beat well.
• Gently fold in the flour and baking powder.
• Stir in the walnuts (if using) and the milk
• Turn into a lined 1kg/2lb loaf tin and bake for 1hr, until well risen and golden.
• Turn out and cool on a  wire rack, serve sliced, spread with butter.

I cut some slices when the loaf was still slightly warm and buttered them ready for the after school "I'm STARRRRrrrrrrving" fest. The Little People and the neighbours children devoured this like you would not believe, it was truly uplifting to hear the appreciative Mmmmmmmmm's. It was over in seconds, chomp chomp, mmmm, and gone. Demands for more, but I held firm and produced a plate of fruit instead, which was also consumed at great speed. It was like playing host to a small, amiable plague of locust-children.

Talking of baking, take a look at my new apron, isn't it pretty?

And I even treated myself to some new oven gloves....

 

....and a pack of three tea towels, they were all from BHS and at reduced price. I like them a lot.

And see my kitchen shelf there? See how remarkably straight it looks after I mentioned it's wonkiness last month? Well I'll be damned, at the same time as my maaaaaaavelous dishwasher materialsed, Wonderful Father-in-law worked his magic with wood and scary tools and made a new bracket to hold the shelf back up.  No more slip-sliding of towels and tins onto the floor and no more bad language. Well not in relation to tea towels anyway. 

Knit and Natter

I am guessing by now that you pretty much know how I feel about crochet, right? And if you've been following my bloglett since the early days back in March, then you'll also know how much I love this lovely cafe in my town.
So put the two together and you can pretty much imagine me in a haze of happiness on the second and fourth Thursday of every month when I wake up knowing it's a Knit-and-Natter morning. Wooohoo! I am so glad to be me on those mornings, to find such happiness in good company, pleasant surroundings, and the sharing of creativity. It really makes me feel great, yeah, really great to acknowledge that for me this is pretty much all it takes to make me blisfully content. If I were a cat I would purr loudly at knit-and-natter, yes I would. Puurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. 

Its not a big busy group, our k+n. No, quite the opposite. More often than not it's just me and the Lovely C who runs the cafe. She is the same Lovely C who's hooking workshop I went to a while back. We have found over the months of fortnightly k+n's that we share a lot of the same passions for things. She gets my tea-towel thing. I get her bunting thing. We talk textiles, yarn, artists, magazines, craft fairs, blogs, Greengate, thrifting, camping, countryside, kids :: its like the verbal version of my blog, the stuff that makes me tick and makes my world go round. Stuff that most of my friends and relatives think is slightly bonkers. So its been amazing to be able to get excited over a magazine article, a mug, a granny square, and to share share with someone who gets it and makes me feel that I'm not alone in the bonkers camp.


Granny squares, aren't they wonderful, I never tire of them. These aren't mine though,  I'm still doing hexagons, but Lovely C has recently become a Hooker and temporarily abandoned her knitting in favour of crocheting these grannies.  And the lovely thing is that up until a few weeks ago, Lovely C could not crochet, but very much wanted to learn. So we arranged a day where I would go to her house up the Dale and teach the basics of granny square-making, in exchange for lunch and some more yarn to finish my second hooked picture. How could I refuse? We spent a sunny day in her idyllic summer house, coffee and chocolate cake, hook and yarn. A break for delicious lunch in the garden, a walk to feed the hens and collect eggs, then more hooking through the afternoon, interspersed with tea drinking and browsing books such as this.
I did not want to go home, felt I could sort of move in to the summer house and live there for a while.

So Lovely C, I know you will be reading this, don't your squares look wonderful in Blogland? They're destined to become a bag and it has inspired me to think about making something similar so that I can arrive at k+n (or should that be c+n now?!), carrying my crochet in a bag that I've actually made. But I need to finish my Ripple first (23 stripes left to go) before starting another project, I think any more than two WIPs at any one time is pushing it.

 

Look, see how nicely these two projects sit together, we should get them together more often, let their owners drink coffee and natter. Bliss.

Summer up the river

These photos are from Sunday, it was a day of true summer for us here in Yorkshire. The sun was a hot hot, mid-summer high-in-the-sky sun, and I have the red shoulders to prove it. We decided on Sunday to pack a lunch and head up river to do a spot of messin'. And where else would we go but to our beloved river Wharfe. We visit it often at various points along the Dale (see here and here and here) and its a bloomin' long river :: according to Wikipedia it's 61 miles/97km long in fact, starting high up in the Yorkshire Dales and ending just south of York where we used to live.

On Sunday we travelled right up high into Upper Wharfedale to the point where the river is still a baby, to a teeny-tiny place called Hubberholme.  There is not a lot going on at Hubberholme, there is a teeny-tiny church, some picturesque cottages and one very nice pub called The George Inn, which has toilets labeled Ewes and Rams. People come here for the scenery, it is magnificent with humungous green hills laced with dry stone walls. And the river of course.The river here gurgles down the Dale in a series of delightful small waterfalls, bubbling over large rocks and filling shallow pools.
Its a well known place to do exactly what we set out to do :: park  the car at the side of the river bank and proceed to unload all manner of furniture, food, drinks, blankets, towels, swimwear, suncream, footwear, fishing nets, buckets, newspapers and books. You know, the average needs for a family of four intending to spend oooh say about 4 hours messin' about by the river.

There is paddling to do :: the river here is shallow with large flat rocks and small, warm rockpools.

There's fun to be had with fishing nets, although no living things were actually captured, just stones and bits of weed but fun all the same if you're age four and handling your very own net for the first time.

And then there's boy-work to be done. Rocks to be hauled and an important dam to be built. Hours of solid graft.

As for me, well I paddled, hauled rocks, searched for fish, rescued both Little People when they slipped and fell in the water with a splash. Rubbed suncream in, sorted the "I need a wee!" dilemma (three times), organised lunch, made tea, then finally settled down for a good read of my latest book club novel, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I love it when home life goes all summery and outdoorsy, even Mummy-duties are fun when they're al fresco.

Reasons to be Cheerful #11 :: Dishwasher

Ahh look, I have found a use for my lovely Greengate tin. I'm using it in the kitchen to keep my dishwasher tablets in. Yes, you heard right, DISHWASHER tablets. Oh yes, joy of joys and one whoppingly huge reason to be exceptionally cheerful around here :: I am now the proud owner of a Bosch Exccel Express SGS56E12GB. And its MAAARvelous I tell you!! Yes according to the blurb on the website, its designed to give me "Maxx Freedom Performance". And furthermore (and I quote)...

"...Bosch dishwashers  programmes and features are specifically designed to make your day easier, to free up your precious time while taking complete care of your most delicate items such as glass and china. We deliver outstanding performance time after time so you can rest easy in the knowledge that facing a pile of dirty dishes is one chore you no longer have to concern yourself with."

Bravo!!

I had been moaning for quite some time about a) the state of my poor hands (I hate using washing up gloves) and b) the amount of time I seemed to be spending at the kitchen sink these days. Our kitchen is very small and the actual available worktop space is miniscule. Therefore it did peeve me greatly to have a large part of miniscule worktop taken up by accumulating piles of dirty dishes throughout the day.
I can't tell you how lovely it is now to be able to put dirty stuff out of sight, and not to have to wash up thirty two times a day. I mean, I do still have to wash some things as our current saucepans don't like dishwahsers, but it's a quick five minute job now instead of a continuous chore.

But I think the best thing about all this is the way in which my new White Appliance actually materialised. It was bought for me as a complete surprise by my wondrous husband and installed by my lovely father-in-law (he is as good at plumbing as he is with wood and scary tools) whilst I was out for the day. I had no idea it was coming. When I walked into our (miniscule) kitchen that evening and saw it, I was overwhelmed with gratitude not only for the machine itself but for J who had gone all out to do this for me as a surprise. Yes OK I admit I often yelled and growled at the dirty dishes and was quite vocal about the fact that I was feeling peeved with the whole small-kitchen-dirty-stuff thing. But I kind of thought that maybe a dishwasher was asking a bit too much (cor, they're not cheap are they?). So I was really genuinely surprised that my moans had been heard, and I remain Thankful each day for such marvelous machinery and Maxx Freedom Performance.
It has transformed my daily life, honestly, I am almost as much in love with this hunk of white machinery as I am with Asparagus. Almost.

In the Bag #1

Ahhhhhhhhh, big smiles all round, it's Friday and the sun is shining and I'm happy. My hills have returned from the grey mist all green and lovely and I've been able to put my boots away (again) and do my daily commute in flipflips :: hooraayy!!!
Do you remember waaaaay back in March when I first began my bloglett, I wrote a post about my Friday jaunting round town? Fridays are generally my shopping day, although every day I have to walk through town three times as part of my current home-school-nursery-home-nursery-home-school-home daily commute on foot. I really enjoy shopping in my town, and try to limit what I get from the supermarkets in favour of shopping local. Like I said the other day when I was swooning over my asparagus (mwah, love you A) it gives me a buzz to come home with my bag bulging with produce and it occurred to me that perhaps I could do a regular little feature showing you Whats In the Bag on Fridays. What do you think, will you take a look, not think me too odd? Oh, you are the best blog readers (mwah, a kiss you you too).

So....In the bag today.....

• six fresh local eggs (our usual eggs have not been for sale this week)
• a pot of homemade lemon curd (couldn't resist)
• Asparagus (of course xx)

• 1 margueritte and 3 verbena plants (yes, more plants, I can't stop buying them)

• 1 granary cob loaf (a slice already eaten with the above mentioned lemon curd)
  
• Wensleydale with cranberries (an old favourite)
  
• Smoked Wensleydale (a new one to try)
  
• True grit cheddar (our everyday cheese)

• a bag of cherries (so sweet)
  
• English Strawberries (eating my Reds now aren't I?!)
  

• CH&I magazine (a quick flick through and it looks wonderful)
  
• Divine Milk chocolate (mmmmmmmmmmmm)
  

Have a great weekend everyone, whatever you get up to and I hope the sun continues to shine xxx

Eating my greens

We are slap bang in the middle of the English asparagus season and I am whooping it up. I don't know if it's possible to be in love with a particular vegetable, but I have a serious crush going on with this one. I can't get enough of it, crave it, delight in buying it , cooking it, and most of all eating it. As my friend Clairey would say, it is Seriously Divine. Ravishing even.

We are very lucky in the town where I live to have a  market on four days a week, and one of the stalls that is always there is the fruit and veg stall.  I like that the produce  is always very fresh, tasty and often local. And that they still use brown paper bags. There's something very satisfying about coming home from town with my shopping bag full of bulging paper bags of produce.

I am eating asparagus almost every day whilst its in season :: sometimes with dinner, sometimes just a  plate of it for my lunch. I like the simple approach to cooking it and eating it. I put the spears in a metal colander over a pan of boiling water and steam it for seven minutes (slightly less if the spears are thin).

As soon as it's cooked it goes onto a plate, then a liberal dash of olive oil, a squeeze of lemon, freshly grated parmesan, salt and black pepper. Eat immediately with fingers. Mmmmmmmmmm...the cheese/oil/lemon kind of melt together to make a delicious paste which goes beautifully with the asparagus, you have to try it.

Sometimes I griddle the asparagus instead of steaming it :: just toss the spears in olive oil, salt and pepper, then put them onto a hot griddle until lightly charred. To be honest I think it tastes better cooked this way, but I hate having to wash the griddle pan afterwards, so steaming it nearly always is. I am such a lazy mare. Oh Asparagus, I do love you so.

Summer magazines

Stamp. Stomp. You hear that? Thats the sound of me stamping my foot rather crossly at the weather, honestly, its a joke. Its JUNE, Flaming June, my calendar says so, and yet there I was having to root around in my cardboard box wardrobe to drag out my winter boots for the wet walk to school this morning. I did contemplate squelching along the wet towpath in flipflops, but remembered the last time when I stubbornly wore my flipflops in the rain and all the dye ran and coloured my feet black for weeks. It was not a good look. So winter boots it had to be and it has peeved me greatly.

As I walked back home in the rain this morning I was wondering what to post about, I could hear myself inside my head wittering on about the awful weather. But really I am a cheerful soul, it doesn't suit me to be so cross and stampy-footed and wittery. So I looked through some of my photos and found these that I took at the beginning of May when the June issue magazines started plopping through my letterbox making me all excited for summer activities.

One of the things I love about this type of magazine is the styling pages. I love that they are often seasonal, and there is a humungous list of every object so you know where to go shop for "the look". From a visual point of view, the arrangement of colours and pattens is stunning, but it's also the suggestion of lifestyle that so grabs me.

The very idea of being in such a pretty kitchen baking gorgeous little cakes for afternoon tea....

.....or picnicing by the river under a pretty parasol....

....or tripping prettily  to the seaside to spend the day at an idyllic beach hut doing beachy, summery things. Its all so appealing.

Oh, it gets me each and every time, I fall for it completely. I crave the whole lot. I love it, love the escapism, the daydreaming, the potential  joy of an English summer doing all these pretty, lovely things in style. I am right there, baking and picnicing and soaking up the sun.

And where would we be without day dreaming? We would be stomping our wet booted feet in the rain feeling permanently cross. Now where are my magazines, I'm off to get lost in them cos the sun shines in these pages.

June

Good morning everyone, yes I think it's still morning? Turned the page on my calendar this morning, said au revoir to May and a jolly bonjour to June. Pretty isn't it, this picture, so fresh and summery. I love cherries, although it irks me that they cost so much. But a bowl of cherries, now that's really summer isn't it? And summer is supposed to be warm right? So what's going on with the weather then?



The view from Attic24 quite early this morning is not a picture of mid-summer warmth. There is a low, cold mist hanging in the air which is refusing to lift. It's decidedly grey and autumnal. I hope this is just a temporary blip and that Summer will begin soon, or even a bit of late Spring will do for now. I had cold feet walking to school this morning (I am point blank refusing to put boots back on and I don't own any shoes). I might have to try inventing a sundance.



Now then, did you all have a good weekend? Our weekend was lovely. In fact I would go so far as to say it was Lovely with a capital L. The Little People went to my lovely in-laws late Friday afternoon for a 24 hour stay. J and I came home, and the house was suddenly incredibly quiet. I had a leisurely, peaceful bath with no floating plastic toys and no little fingers poking in, and then sat and painted my toenails. Uninterrupted. Quiet. I was rather excited and even put some mascara on in honour of officially going on a "date" with my other half. J was taking me out to the beautifully named village of Appletreewick to have dinner here. We have been to the Craven Arms pub many times but had never eaten in the Cruck barn before. Oh what a building! It was magnificent, the fire was lit and it was very cosy and romantic. The food was delicious and I had a wonderful time with my lovely hubby.



And yes we got to have a lie-in the next morning too, oooh we were so spoilt, we slept in till 7.30am! After tea (in my pink spotty mug of course) we ate breakfast outside then packed up and set off back up the Dale to walk. Can you just see the glimmer of sunshine on the distant hills? It was perfect walking weather.



We stopped to have a picnic lunch by the side of this little beck....



...then walked down the valley into the depths of Trollers Gill.



It was a little spooky, but very beautiful and no trolls hurled rocks at us. No deranged goblins either.



And at the end of the walk, a bench to rest weary legs and the last of the coffee from the flask. Complete with little floating fly, see? Very outdoorsy having flies in yer coffee.