Determined to see if I could not waste any of the pumpkins this year (which were free and locally grown anyway) I decided to deal with the carved out stuff today. The pumpkins themselves are round with the chickens who are making very short work of them. It is also quite gruesomely amusing watching the chickens peck at the pumpkins eyes 😆 So I fished through the flesh and stringy stuff and seeds and seperated out the seeds, chucked the best of the flesh in a pan with some carrots and stock and cumin for soup and then whizzed up the rest to make puree. I’m planning pumpkin and cheese bread, and pumpkin and orange cake with cream cheese frosting tomorrow to use up the last of it.
I made some bread rolls to go with the soup for lunch, toasted about half the seeds (with a teaspoon of bovril which has given them a lovely twiget-equse flavour) and then made a rather unsuccessful cake. I knew the mixture was way too wet while making it but decided to chuck it in and see what happened anyway. What happened was the very top burnt, the just under the top cooked beautifully and the middle and bottom didn’t firm up and started to bulge and collapse when I turned it out of the tin. This has proved to be no issue at all as the chickens eat the burnt bits, Scarlett ate the cake-y bits and Ady and I have had helpings of the rest which is now being called Pumpkin Pudding with custard and it’s lovely :).
But getting back to stuff other than cooking…
This morning we watched Evacuation which was interesting. Davies and Scarlett were not actually that horrified about most of it though, claiming they live without technology for a week at a time while camping, an outside toilet is not an issue, they’d love to live on a farm and it all looked fun. They were less keen on being away from me and Ady for weeks, months or even years mind you. They are over their annoying each other-ness from yesterday and spent most of the day connected up to each other on DS.
We all came together again for lunch. I’d managed to whizz the blender with soup in it without having the lid on properly so had to clean up lumpy soup from pretty much every surface in the kitchen! As others have already said I really should have taken a photo first, it just didn’t occur to me at the time. As predicted the kids were not keen on the soup but they did like the bread rolls.
I got out the Planet Earth kid we’d got at the charity shop last week to look at and we set up the volcano in the bath. It’s the standard vinegar and bicarb and actually due to me not fixing it up properly it didn’t stream through the plastic volcano anyway but Davies and Scarlett assure me they never tire of vinegar and bicarb :). We read a bit about volcanoes but weren’t really in the mood for the next part of the kit which was painting miniature globes and drawing tectonic plates on them so we put it away again.
Davies wanted me to find the walkthrough for Viva Pinata DS again as he wants to finish it – he’s been on the last level for nearly a year so we looked at that for a while. I phoned up to arrange for my car to have it’s windscreen fixed. I found a crack in it way back in about January which has slowly grown bigger and bigger and I know would be an MOT failure when it’s due next month so thought I’d pre-empt that cost this month as I have a £60 excess to pay on my insurance for it. I also rang the hostel manager at Truleigh Hill to arrange to go up and look round and check out whether the kitchen has been improved since 2 years ago.
Early dinner for the kids and then off to gymnastics, along with £60 for this half terms fees. I dropped them off and then went to Asda and CoOp in Lancing as we’re trying to shop for half price or better, or reduced to clear items only this month. The plan is to visit supermarkets when we are passing anyway (so nights the kids are at gymnastics or Badgers) and menu plan around what bargains we can find to see if we can food shop cheaper than we have been. It will take a while to really see the benefits as we can’t not buy staples like flour, pasta, rice etc but long term the plan would be to stock up on those when offers are on. Ady went to Sainsburys and got loads of their Taste the Difference Mince reduced to a pound a pack. So we have 9 of those now in the freezer. In Asda I stocked up on poppdoms on offer, butter we needed anyway, kids pasta on offer, frozen veg and then on to CoOp where I had some great bargains; loads of lovely bakery rolls all at 5 and 10p each, some half price croissants and pain au chocolats which we’ll have in the morning, a bag of 5 oranges for 10p, some root ginger for 10p and a bag of British root veg (stew pack) for 10p. CoOp definitely the place to go at 630pm then. I think we spent £80 between us and we have a full up freezer already for the month. 🙂
We both got home within moments of each other, quickly put the shopping away and went back out to collect the kids who had had a good time at Gymnastics.
Home for the first few pages of before bed. I’ve finally had a look at a CV for one of Ady’s work colleagues that I’d been promising to do for months so I feel good about that. And now I have no idea how it got to be tomorrow o’clock!