Starting the week

It’s Monday morning and the house is quiet.  The dog has had his breakfast and gone back to bed.  The cats are wandering about as I can hear the tinkle of collar bells.  Not so small daughter, collected from uni yesterday with bags full of clothes, boots and other items ready for packing into her rucksack is having a lie in.  I’ve already been in to see her once and dropped a cat on her to try to encourage her to get up, but there’s nothing quite like your own bed, is there?

In today’s post, I’ve got progress reports on everything I showed you last week and a bit more besides.  The weekend passed by in a blur, to be honest, and in the end I decided it would be much better to chat to you today than add a hurried post to the rush of the weekend.  I’ve got my brew, I’ve got my photos and you have my entire attention! 🙂

Let’s start with the apple pies!

Thank you for all your suggestions on how I can improve my pie production for next time.  Carol said that standing the frozen tin in hot water for a minute would release the pie so I could freeze it without the tin – I imagine you’d need to put it back in the tin to bake though, wouldn’t you, otherwise it could be a bit messy if your pie collapsed in the oven?  Baking the pies first so that they don’t stick to the tins in the freezer in the first place is definitely the way to go for me, I think, as it means I will only be re-heating rather than baking from scratch, so I’ll do that in future.  Tineke suggested re-heating them in the microwave (from ready-cooked) to eat with a brew and that is an excellent idea, although these pies are more dessert-sized than snack sized so maybe I would need to experiment with smaller ones – although an email dropped into my inbox over the weekend with a recipe for apple and caramel muffins and they would be excellent eaten warm with a brew … yum!  Flora said that she puts baking paper in the bottom of the tin to stop the pastry sticking and that is very sensible.  Every time I make pastry I can hear my school Domestic Science teacher (showing my age now, I think it’s called Food Tech these days) saying, “It’s a poor pastry that can’t grease it’s own tin” so I persevere with putting it straight into the baking tin and it invariably gets stuck so I think I might ignore that voice in the future!

Here are two of the apple pies baked and ready to eat with custard for Sunday dinner dessert.  Big daughter and I thoroughly enjoyed them and yes, the pie did take a bit of persuading out of the tin but it’s going to get broken up where it’s going, isn’t it, so I don’t worry about that too much 🙂

I also think I might have cracked the hummus recipe thanks to The Batch Lady recipe that I talked about last week – I added paprika as well as cumin and it was very good!  I’ll need to make another batch of it to make sure but so far, I like the batch that I’ve already made and it really does freeze well so I’ve been popping hummus icebergs out of the freezer tray I bought  and one has been enough for a decent portion for lunch.  I am so happy that I think I’ve finally got it!

On to the airing cupboard which started out as trying to find a sleeping bag and turned into a mammoth decluttering project.  It took me quite a few days to go through everything that was in there – and I mean everything – but now it’s done.  I’ve dropped bags of old sheets and tea towels off at Dunelm as they will recycle them and I’ve got a big bag of things for the charity shop too and now, the airing cupboard is a proper useable space again.

I think “airing cupboard” is a new term for some people – I had assumed it wasn’t just a UK thing – but anyway, it’s a cupboard that houses the hot water tank and has space for bedding and towels.  It’s a warm space because of the hot water tank so it airs the items that are in there – a toasty version of a linen closet if that’s what you have.  Our airing cupboard no longer has the hot water tank in there as we had our boiler changed to a combi boiler when we moved here and that heats the water when you need it; previously, the hot water was heated by the Aga and whilst that means you always have a big tank full of hot water, it can be more expensive to run an Aga that way and once someone has used up all the hot water, you have to wait for it to heat up again.

We still have the cupboard space, though, and it still holds the bedding and towels so we have never called it anything other than the “airing cupboard” even though it’s not technically that any more.

There are no “before” pictures as it was in a bit of a state and nobody wants to have that sort of photo immortalised on her blog, so I’m going to show the “after” photos instead 🙂  I made a couple of trips to IKEA to buy a new shelf for the Ivar unit we have in there and some Stuk storage boxes for bedding.  We’ve got single, double and king-sized bedding and previously, it had all been stacked up in a precarious pile on one of the shelves.  Now, the single and double bedding is away in the Stuk boxes (you can see one on the second shelf up – they’re great, they fold flat if you need to store them later and they weren’t expensive either) and the king-sized bedding has its own shelf as it’s much more bulky.  I keep the duvet covers and one pillow case tucked inside the second pillow case so that each set is kept together and now they’re here on one shelf, it’s so much easier to see what we’ve got.

At the bottom of this photo, you can see my bubble wrap stash.  Goodness, there was a lot of it!  Rolls and rolls of it that must have come things delivered to the house at some point, plus lots of little pieces from smaller parcels and some bubble wrap “bags” that were the inside of padded envelopes.  I always pull them apart as you can’t recycle the bubble wrap with the paper so I must have started keeping them in case I needed them, but I think they may be going into the soft plastics recycling in the future!  I really don’t need any more bubble wrap!

I’ve got the big rolls fastened together with a strap that I found which I think had come around a mattress to help you carry it, and there’s more bubble wrap in the Mickey Mouse bag.  Phew!

Towels and bedding sorted, the other side of the airing cupboard now has proper labelled storage for all the other things that live there.

I did have little storage boxes for the shelves before but they were the sort that were wide at the top and then tapered down – I think that’s for easy stacking but it does mean you can’t fit as much in them as you think, and the wider top means you can’t fit as many boxes on the shelf.  The purple and cream collapsible crates were an Aldi special buy (handy timing!) and just to give you an idea of size in case you think something like this would work for you, the bigger ones are 21 x 28 x 12cm and the smaller ones at the end are 21 x 14 x 8cm so they can stack on top of each other if you want to do that.

I discovered the Clutterbug website a few months ago (I might have mentioned this before) and honestly, it’s been a revelation for me.  Cas has divided personal organisation style into four categories which are loosely everything out on show, either in one big container or in smaller containers, or everything hidden away, either in one big container or in smaller containers and then she goes on to give more detail and how to organise your stuff based on your personal preference.  This is a very general overview and if you are someone who needs a bit of help in this direction then I would highly recommend taking the free quiz on the website and even doing the free masterclass if you want to.

I have realised that I feel happiest when everything is away out of sight but in easy-to-find storage (and now I realise this explains why I like the Scubl boxes so much compared to lobbing everything into one big box for my IKEA Kallax unit) and I can’t tell you how great I felt to look into our airing cupboard and firstly see the carpet, but then to see everything had a space to go.  Even better, I got the chance to use my label printer (another Aldi special buy from years ago but you can see the one I have here (Amazon link)) and now everyone else can see what’s in there too so I won’t get summoned to plunge the depths of the mess to find something, or risk anyone getting flattened by falling toilet rolls or duvet covers.  It was a big job, but definitely worth it!

Phew, on to the next update – ready?

I have finished both pairs of trekking socks for not so small daughter – hooray! – and they’ll be going into a bowl of water to be soaked and blocked today.  I don’t usually bother blocking socks if they’re going straight onto feet but I do think these will benefit from a wash as they’ve been unravelled and carried about so much, and they’re also going to be photographed as this is a new pattern for release this year.  I’ve called these the Well-Travelled Socks as my girl is now pretty well-travelled with her globe-trotting experiences, and I hope that this pattern will be a good one for anyone else needing boot socks for their own travels!

I’ve just spotted a long tail on one of the socks so I’ll need to sort that out and then these socks will be spending the afternoon drying on the Aga lids.  If you saw my photo from last week, you may notice that the bright green pair (that’s West Yorkshire Spinners Signature 4ply in Spruce held double) has now blue toes (Signature 4py in Cobalt) as I ran out of yarn just before the toes on the second sock.  I decided not to go back to re-knit the heel flap in Cobalt for both socks and then have to re-knit the foot for both too – I like them like this and fortunately, so does not so small daughter.  Also very fortunately, the socks fit (she tried them on last night) and she’s got a good selection of them for her trek now as I made her some new pairs last year for when she went to Nepal in WYS ColourLab DK Sock.

This has turned into a rather long post and I should really go and make sure that not so small daughter is up now, but before I go I want to show you some photos from some recent dog walks.  It’s harvesting time of year and the fields and footpaths have plenty of fruits and seeds for birds, wildlife and foragers.

The field behind these seed heads is blue flax.  I only just caught the flowers this year which I was sorry about (you can see the field in full bloom in this post), but at least I didn’t miss them completely.  They’re such pretty flowers and such a vibrant blue; a field full of them is really a sight to behold.

Now the field is full of ripening seed heads waiting to be harvested – I’m not sure what this will be used for but flax is commercially harvested for fibre, seeds and oil so I’m sure it’ll be at least one of those!

The elder trees are laden with berries …

and the hedgerows are bursting with blackberries …

In other years I’d have been picking these myself to make something but I have decided not to do any of that this year (I even chose not to make elderflower cordial in the spring) as I want to try to get myself more organised (I’m on a bit of a decluttering mission now) and then maybe next year I’ll get back into it.

You wouldn’t eat these seeds but they do look very pretty!

And finally for today, I thought you would like to see Astrid in her nest.  She thoroughly enjoyed sitting in this box for about a week and then it was abandoned and now it’s living a useful life in the airing cupboard as a storage container 🙂

The dog isn’t far away – you can see him sleeping on the floor at the top left of the photo.  They all like to stay close just in case there are any snacks on offer … 🙂

That’s me done for today.  I can hear stirring from the end bedroom and not so small daughter and need to start going through what she’s got to take with her as she leaves for Tanzania next week.  It seems to have come round very quickly now!  I hope you have a lovely week and I’ll catch up with you again soon!