We moved into this house in July, to find the professionally landscaped garden looking very lovely. This is the children exploring it (photo snapseeded for nostalgia purposes) on the very first day:

In principle we have done nothing this first year but are waiting to find out what is there. With which in mind I have kept a bit of a photographic record: slideshow below. In reality of course there were things to be pruned back, apple trees to be installed (why wait a year when we will definitely need some?), a bloody awful yellow scrubby shrubby thing that I hoiked out in a temper and replaced with a buddleia, some new roses to fit in…we removed the top of the swing seat as it acted like a sail and took the whole thing across the garden at every gust of wind, and fenced the pond within 2 days of moving in. The raised beds were pretty with marigolds, poppies and (nasty pink) lavatera, but that hasn’t stopped me clearing one to make room for some veg. The broad beans are 4″ tall already.

Some years ago, Cameron had a corporate thing in the kitchen of a famous restaurant (in Hamburg so not famous to me, but apparently it is. Here.) He was i/c pudding and made a lovely and very complicated bread-and-butter-esque thing with panettone and spiced clementines and wow it is fab and he makes it every year when I buy him panettone for Christmas.

Fast-forward to this weekend: friends for dinner, being very January and uninspired about the whole thing, then saw this whacking great panettone tin in the kitchen and decided Cameron was on pudding duty.  Only trouble being we had no white chocolate, no clementines or orange juice, and not very much butter. So (and bear in mind that Cameron really doesn’t cook) he improvised, as follows, and it was a huge success and you should all make it too. Next time you have panettone lying about.

260g panettone
150g dark chocolate
200g mix of butter and stork
100g caster sugar
4 eggs
6 egg yolks (blimey no wonder I have no eggs left this week)
100g flour

Cut the panettone into small squares and melt the chocolate. Mix the butter (stork) in your mixer “to a foamy mass” adding the sugar a little at a time, then beat in the eggs, yolks, and melted chocolate. Add the flour then the panettone. The original folded this last in gently but C went for beating all kinds of hell out of it, so I think you can mix it as much as you like: large cubes or pulverized crumbs.

Put in dish; bake at 180 for, well, I gave it half an hour and it was a bit too runny still in the middle, but you don’t want it to set firm and dry.  Scoff.

I bought the fabric for this case way back at the beginning of the year, after various people had signed up for a facebook thingummy in which I said I would make them things. (The rest of you: I have not forgotten, it just takes me a while. You will be more surprised when something finally arrives, right?). Karen, who presented me with a scarf and hat embarrassingly quickly, knits on circs all the time and I happen to know she stores them in a shoebox. I wanted to do something with my new sewing machine.
I found this pattern. And then everything ground to a halt, partly for moving house reasons but mostly because I could not figure out the measurements in the pattern and as a new sewer was insufficiently confident to just do it. I tried very hard to contact the author but she either didn’t get my messages, has a policy of not replying, or just found my questions too stupid. Come November I decided to get a grip, enough was enough, and I am quite arithmetically competent enough to work the measurements out for myself. So I did, and it actually didn’t take long at all. Though if anybody who knows about sewing can explain the very good sewerly reason why one would cut a 10″ strip in order to make a 6″ pocket (cut 10″, make a 1″ hem, *trim it to 7″*, make a 1″ hem on the other side – it’s the trimming step I missed out) then I’d be delighted to hear it. I can only wonder if it is to compensate for wonky measuring and/or cutting, so you cut it to be parallel to the hem once you have made it…but if that is the case, surely 9″ would be sufficient?

*that is, a case for circular needles not a case that is itself round.

Them in the know suggest that the sensible thing, when you acquire a new garden, is to leave it be for a year and see what is there. To which I add the caveat unless you want to plant stuff (and of course one has to weed and prune and chop stuff back). Well, we have been here since the beginning of July: I have dutifully noted what is there* and not messed with it too much**, but unless the scrubby bit of bed by the back fence is a secret winter wonderland, as yet unrevealed, I feel quite safe ploughing it all up to put in apples. We know we need apples and if we leave it a year, that’s another whole year before we can start picking them.

So I started with this…

…and have cleared half of it. No signs of gorgeous wintery things to come: I unearthed a (very) few bulbs that I have put back to bed for the spring, although the baby did trample them a bit first. Mostly I have pulled out bucket after bucket of marigold seedlings, and one particularly vicious thorny rose. (Given its odd location and lack of congruity with the rest of the garden, I was little nervous it might be marking the last resting place of a beloved family pet. But nothing there, luckily, apart from a small brown toad.)

Tomorrow, fingers crossed, I am going to tackle the other half then I think we can fit in about 10 trees, as cordons! My dad put some supporting wires up when he was here last weekend so I just need to attach bamboo supports, source some trees, and bob’s your uncle.

* I have taken loads of photos, which one day I might get around to sharing.
** Apart from ripping out a particularly civic yellow-flowered shrubby thing that was situated in vile conjunction with scrubby red roses; the roses remain – for now – but the nasty yellow thing has been replaced with a lovely buddleia.

You need the lovely Montezuma‘s dark chocolate with orange and geranium; about 1/4 – 1/3 of a bar per person. Break it up a bit and put it in a nice little bowl. Add a dollop of butter (bigger than a knob; not quite a slice), some double cream and some agave syrup and whack it in the microwave for 45 seconds or so. Mix it around with a fork and pour onto vanilla icecream.

(If you really must, you can keep it in the fridge and re-microwave it the next day.)

Mao – cat

oosh-oosh – dog

bish – fish

nnnn – cow

nn-nn – monkey

rah – giraffe

gok-gok – horse

gak-gak – duck/bird

…and such an urchin, with permanently bruised shins and grazed knees. She has about 3 or 4 words, mostly gibberish to anybody but me  (gagaga – with quack hand gesture = any bird. Hee hee hee = horse. Maa! – me or Maggie or Tamsin or comeherenow. tatata = drink now please. Dad-n = daddy or Tamsin. roro = …your boat. ba ba ba = round and round (as in what the wheels on your bus do), fff = fish*), but who’s comparing (with Maggie’s over-60 and Tamsin’s well, a few): she can make herself Very Well Known indeed.

* interesting – to me at least – how similar the list is to Tamsin’s list at the  same age.

(a la Earthenwitch). Right now I am:

cuddling a sad and bruised youngest daughter and wondering where all the blood came from (update: she’s fine, just got a huge fat lip. Teeth all intact.)

Packing. And fretting. We appear to have extremely nervous buyers who have now sent three surveyors round (and the third, this morning, warned me that a fourth might be forthcoming). Fortunately I have surveyor-charming skills and have made them all tell me what they find (I’m not supposed to tell you but). Seriously: they are buying a 110-year-old house, it is going to have, ahem, quirks. Features. Oddly, their solicitor does not seem to know they are doing all this. On which note…

waiting for our solicitor to call me back. Nothing so far has led me to believe the poor woman knows how to operate a telephone.

reading umpteen magazines (crafty homey ones, mostly) while resolving to kick the expensive, pointless magazine habit.

trying to get a reading group off the ground: who’d have thought it would be so difficult to get more than two people together in the same place, with books, at the same time.

making (a mess, ha ha) – lazy-days skirts. Flowers for M and hungry-caterpillar circles for T.

editing some nonsense about dogs

using up the contents of fridge/freezer/cupboard with weird and unpredictable results.

Like Clair, I am not being put off by a lack of a theme. Today: random food witterings. Since my gorgeous weekend at Mamaheaven, I have been thinking about improving our diet – since having Jenny we have slipped rather into the fishfingers and oven chips mode; she’s 17 months now and the excuse doesn’t really cut it any more. After scoffing all the chocolate, to get it out of the way, I have been sprouting seeds on the windowsill in a special seed-sprouty jar, and adding spirulina to random fruit smoothies. I made spelt pastry! (All of which is aided by my campaign to use up things from the cupboard, pre-move.) I took some books from the library, most useful of which has been the Accidental Vegetarian, from which I have tried 4 or 5 recipes so far. Just this morning I discovered, serendipitously, that it is national vegetarian week: coincidentally, I haven’t cooked meat since last Thursday.

So far this week: gnocchi with rosemary ragu (7/10 – would have been better with a bit of bacon); fried halloumi with vinaigrette, brown rice and steamed greens (8/10); Italian bean stew (8/10); blueberry pancakes, which oddly contained cottage cheese (8/10). Scores mine as I suspect my carnivorous family might score slightly lower – though the kids really loved the halloumi and they always like a beany stew. I am going to make aubergine chilli tonight then head to yoga…