Anticipation and the new beastie in my kitchen

First of all the beastie in the kitchen - Chris and I are both on a mission to eat healthily and lose weight, and at our age, we are aware of the danger of rising cholesterol levels. Our diet is already better than it was in England as we eat very little processed food, and there is a wonderful range of fresh meat, fruit and vegetables available locally. But we do like chips, and other fried foods, so when I saw my son's gadget for frying without, or with a minimal amount of, oil, I was very interested. Back in Spain, we visited our village 'electodomesticos' and the man knew instantly what we wanted and soon had one in the shop for us. He said he had one in his home and it was very good! So here it is. It seems to me bigger than the one my son had, but there was no choice of size when we bought it, so maybe it is just that my little kitchen would fit into one corner of his huge one, so the appliances seem larger by comparison. Anyway, yesterday I made lovely chips from fresh, raw potatoes and half a tablespoon of oil. Not bad at all. I hope it cooks other things just as well so that it justifies the space it is taking up.

And now to the anticipation - around November of last year I showed you a cactus in my garden with a single flower bud on it. I had to wait for a couple of weeks as it slowly swelled up and eventually 'popped' and an amazing flower appeared. You can see the flower on my blog if you click here. Thanks to my friend Jane's blog, I now know that it is called 'Stapelia gigantia', a very fitting name as compared with most flowers in my garden, it was fairly gigantic! Jane's was in flower a few weeks back, but mine didn't open until mid-November last year. (She lives higher up the mountains than me so maybe that has something to do with it). Anyway it looks as though mine will be out a couple of weeks earlier this year, and here is what I am anticipating - a truly amazing display of flowers! The plant has spread out onto the path, and has several buds at each end of it, but very few in the centre. I can't wait to see it when some of those buds have opened. Watch this space...

Jam, jam, glorious jam!

I mentioned in my previous post that I had bought plums in the market to make jam, and got rather more than I had intended, so Thursday morning I decided I had better do something with them. The yellow plums were a bit bland but I think it sharpens them up a bit and brings out their flavour if you cook them, so I made us a pie with those, and then I set about jam-making with the red ones.

I make plum jam the old fashioned way, peeling, stoning and chopping the fruit by hand. I much prefer little juicy bits of fruit in my jam to the purréed version or to large lumps of fruit that make it hard to spread. It took a long time, around three hours I think, but I feel it is worth the effort. Then I added the sugar and soon it was boiling away. It set well and I filled sixteen jars. They were cooled and labelled in time for my charity evening on Friday, where it all sold, along with some of my 'Hot chilli and ginger jam', which proved to be very popular. I knew there would be quite a few Spanish families there, so I made a mixture of English and Spanish labels. We raised around 800 euros altogether which was a good effort. We are aiming to provide some speech therapy for several disabled children in the village as they have very little government funding this year.

I will have been back home for a week by tomorrow, and the time has just flown by. So I thought it was high time I had all my photos sorted. Last night I weeded out the worst ones, and sorted all the rest and they are now uploaded in a folder on my gallery. I tried to make folders within the folder but couldn't do it so they are all together and they follow on more or less chronilogically. First there are a few from the family gathering at my sister's house following Elmer's funeral. It was not the right occasion to keep flashing a camera around, but I won't be seeing them all again for another year or so, so I did collect a few informal groups and couples. Then it moves on to the walk Jean and I had on the common opposite her house, followed by our walk through the woods down to the chines, and along the coast to Bournemouth. I am still facinated by natural things so such walks for me are a delightful source of 'finds' such as patches of moss, fungi, light shining through trees etc. At Bournemouth you will have to forgive the rainbow of beach huts. They are made from recycled materials and painted in all shades. They were so pretty I just had to take pictures of them all. My next stop was the get-together in Wolverhampton with all my sons, their wives and some of the grandchildren. The next occasion was the trip to Oswestry to meet my new great-grandson, and then on to Mike's house for tea with his two younger boys. Finally I spent time in Birmingham with Ben and we had a lovely walk around Sutton Park which we drove to in his brand new mini (Boys and their toys etc...)

This folder is now on my gallery and is titled 'UK holiday 2011'. As it contains photos of the children and other folk, I have made it a semi-locked folder which can only be seen by readers of this blog using this link. So please click HERE to see the photos, and pass on the link to my blog to any family members who don't usually read it but who may like to see the pictures.