Ill Culinary Behaviour

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 Other, more normal, culinary adventures over the last month or so have included:

 Beetroot and parmesan soda bread. Soda bread is a revelation; from no bread to fresh bread in half an hour.

 The worst looking, but best tasting, meal of the year; haddock in Moroccan spices with chilli, carrot, pumpkin seed and orange juice salad. With chips.

 Tapas night!

 If I could only eat one cheese forever, it would be Manchego. Discuss. Use both sides of the paper if necessary.

 Chorizo in olive oil, honey, and cider vinegar. Amazing.

 Patatas bravas.

Teeny tiny little quiches in teeny tiny little quiche dishes we were given for christmas. Mind, the mobile phone in the background gives the impression that it's an absolutely enormous quiche. Escher, eat your heart out.

Easter Holiday Projects

Easter holidays are here! Hurrah! 

 We found a kayak in the river a couple of weeks ago. It turned out to have belonged to a friend, and before that to a friend of his, but nobody wants it back - there's a kind of communist kayak manifesto operating in and around the marina where it seems all red kayaks are fair game and to be shared by the people.

I've been busy over the last couple of days doing some jobs I've wanted to do for ages.

Some nice shelves to replace the ikea ones that were on the bathroom bulkhead. I got this really nice wood from a reclamation yard in Bedminster for about £1.50 a foot. It's nice to get a bit of 'roughness' and the texture of old wood to offset all the shiny newness of the panels and some of the furniture. The shelves are built around a desk to create a little study corner for Simone:

 I made a matching set of shelves for the bedroom, too.

 It was a real treat to be working with 'new', or rather, fresh, pieces of real wood - pretty much everything else in the boat is built with scrap from the build, which has meant constant struggles with lack of right angles and trying to cut rectangles out of ovals. Plus, the smell when I was cutting the joints was just beautiful.

 Because it's hardwood, rather than the ply that constitutes most of the scrap, I was able to get stuck in to some 'proper' carpentry and cut some housed joints for the ends of the shelves. (This is before I knocked it into place!)

 Then, the next day, it was back to using scrap - this is the remains of the futon, and some shelves from the ikea bookshelf, magically transformed into some drawers to sort out the storage under the bed.

 And as an added bonus, the instruments finally have a home!

In other exciting news, Simone has a sewing machine. If you thought that post about curtains a while back was good, just you wait!