14 August 2011

Busy Sunday

After being out for much of Saturday, today was one of those racing-to-catch-up sort of Sundays. Tomorrow, work starts on replacing our bathroom and there was a lot of preparation and general tidying up I wanted to do (the new bathroom is going to take part of Child1's closet, so we had to get her room organised, too). Everyone mucked in, though, and it feels like we're making progress.

The bathroom has been on the 'to do' list for a while. I think it is the same age as the house: early 1970s, and it looks it. I can't bear to put a big picture of it up, so here's a small one. You can see that the suite is a very 1970s shade of pale brown. Not sure if there was an official name for this - I know that the downstairs toilet we had was called 'Harvest Gold' (a shade that can best be described as vomit-yellow*).

The basin in the current bathroom is metal and has several rusty patches on it, while the toilet uses a Niagara Falls-like quantity of water each time it's flushed. The whole room is a bit of an embarrassment and it had got to the point where we replaced it or we turned it into a museum of the 1970s bathroom. It'll be great to get it finished, even though it will be annoying in the short-term while the work is being done.

In between cleaning and tidying up I had to do something with the ridiculous number of tomato peppers we've been picking. The chicken manure I added to the greenhouse beds has created our biggest crop ever of these.

Luckily, they're easy to deal with. I just cut off the tops, remove the seeds (some of which I keep for next year's crop), cut the peppers in half and put them in freezer bags. I use a drinking straw to suck out the air, which helps them keep for longer.


We ate the huitlacoche (a.k.a. corn smut) today. I cooked it with some onion, garlic and part of a cayenne pepper, then used the mixture to fill burritos. Well, 'fill' is the wrong word (there wasn't enough for that), so I topped it off with grated mozzarella cheese before cooking the burritos. They tasted fine: a cross between mushrooms and corn. The children refused to touch them, but Mike was willing enough. I don't think he ever checks up on what I'm feeding him, to see if I'm telling the truth about whether it's edible or not. He'd be awfully easy to poison...




*Sorry.


1 comment:

Diana Studer said...

Are you two, still with us?