Rocking Your World 2020: Week 47

I am starting today with a couple of photos that family members have sent to me and they have really made me smile. 

So first we have my great-grandsons who seem to enjoy their time and always have a ready smile for the camera. Their natural colouring seems to lend itself to Autumn, as I always get lovely photos of them around this time. Here they have obviously had fun finding muddy puddles, and running through the fallen leaves.

Their Grandad, our son Mike, and his partner Lucy have two Jack Russel terriers. They are brother and sister and in September they reached the splendid age of 16. 

Ally, (on the right) is still amazingly fit and loves to go on long walks with them in the Welsh hills near where they live. Dave is showing his age more. He has had several bouts of illness this year, and he usually chooses to stay at home, though a trip to the beach is still fun. This week Mike posted this photo on social media with the caption, "Dave is of a course a dear to us always, but in his dreams he is a deer to everyone, a mighty stag, defender of us all!"...  Perfect placement!

And so to my week. 

The bathroom continues to slowly move along. I believe last week we were still waiting for a replacement for the shower tray which was damaged in transit. Well the new one arrived Saturday morning, BUT, it was 8cms too short! Apparently the manager of the manufacturers had loaded it into his VW and driven over from Murcia especially for us the night before. It turned out he had picked up the wrong one, so on Tuesday the correct one turned up and was installed. Then the tiler came back and finished the tiling all around it, and since then the builder has been in assembling some other pieces. So now the shower screen is in and the toilet is plumbed in, so next week the cupboard and wash basin unit will be done and it will be just about ready to use. It seems to have been a very lengthy job, but at least the end is in view now.

It is nearly three weeks since I did my 'big shop', and I had run out of fresh vegetables and fresh milk - I really don't like the readily- available boxed milk in tea, so I travel to buy fresh when I can. So yesterday I decided I must drive as far as Turre to restock. No-one was around to question my journey, so I went a couple of kilometers further to our nearest Lidls near Garrucha, as they have the best range of fruit and vegetables around here. I did a successful smallish shop, and while there I bought a dear little baby poinsettia, to sit on my kitchen counter top, and an amaryllis that already has two buds on it. I am hoping I can keep them alive long enough to enjoy them. I also bought one larger poinsettia to go in the top of front porch holder. Later I will two more to go below it, but right now there is a fair amount of builders equipment and dust out there, so they can wait until everything is cleared away.

As I had finished my second crochet scarf and I am still waiting for the yarn for the next project to arrive, I thought I would have a go at a pattern I saw a while ago. I ordered the wool, but it was back in the summer and I found the pattern was quite tricky so I put it away until the days were cooler. So this week I have managed to make one motif. It is another new technique to me, called Brioche crochet, where basically alternate rows are worked in the two colours, with the paler one sort of embroidering the pattern over the base colour. I do like it now it is done, but it took a lot of concentration and fair bit of unpicking when I made mistakes, so it will be a background project to do one motif now and then when I want a change of eyesight. The pattern is called Coral Story.

And to end with, a little Spanish lesson for anyone interested. A craft blog friend shared a recipe for dog treats with me last week and the main ingredient is pumpkin puree. We don't get the cans of this that the recipe called for so I needed to make my own. Out here the roundish orange pumpkins that are popular in UK, are not seen often except in the big supermarkets at Halloween. But the Spanish have a generic word "calabaza" which covers almost any vine growing gourd style vegetable. The exception are courgettes which are called "calabacin". They use a sort of jam/preserve which is made from very highly sweetened calabaza puree as a base of fruit tarts and pastries. Although I can now buy peanut squash quite easily (also called calabaza), the most common local one is large, mainly green and has a very knobbly skin.

Inside the flesh is bright orange, with the usual mass of fibres and pips in the centre.

Because they grow quite big, and once cut, have a fairly short shelf life, they are usually sold in wedges. In the market you can say how big a 'slice' you want and they cut it for you, but at the minute it is usually ready cut and firmly wrapped in cling film.

It is a very versatile vegetable, full of vitamins and fibre, and it is much easier to prepare than its nearest UK cousin, Swede. I serve it mashed with carrots, sweet potato and parsnip, or roasted in thick slices, or just cut into cubes and microwaved for a few minutes. It cooks much faster than carrots or swede. This wedge has been roasted and pureed and is now in the fridge waiting for me to make it into doggy treats.

But before I do that I will just link up with Rocking Your World and Annie's Friday Smiles.