The good thing about cooking our own is that each of us can have exactly what we want without making it necessary to cook three different dinners.  We know what works for us and tend to cook the same recipe each time.  So we were delighted to receive in the post some delicious Discovery products and an invitation to take part in Discovery’s Cinco de Mayo challenge.  The idea is to create a delicious fajita meal with the products sent to us; and because they included things we might not normally have tried, it was guaranteed to shake things up a bit!

So, this is what we did:

Stir-fry a red onion for a couple of minutes, add 2 courgettes and cook for a further couple of minutes, then add 2 small peppers (yellow and orange for contrast), cook, followed by 8-10 mushrooms and 3 tomatoes, cooking them until soft. Sprinkle with Seasoning Mix, keeping a little back for the chicken.

Skillet some chicken strips in a hot pan, using the Seasoning Mix as a marinade.

Chop up some avocado and mix with the Garlic & Herb Soured Cream.  Normally we would use plain soured cream for our guacamole but we wanted to see how this would work out.

Everything went on the table, the flour tortillas were gently warmed in a crepe pan and the Tomato Salsa was decanted into a bowl next to the avocado / garlic and herb guacamole.

My son really liked the peppers and courgettes, and didn’t think the Seasoning Mix was too spicy for him.  My husband really liked the flexibility of adding his own skilleted chicken, marinated in a little of the Seasoning Mix to increase the heat a little, and then seared in the skillet.  I liked the way the new Garlic & Herb Soured Cream guacamole took away the heat and instead brought out the flavour of the fajita spices beautifully.  We usually use plain sour cream but this Soured Cream added another dimension to the meal.

Everyone had got involved in chopping, cooking and wrapping, so it was a real family enterprise.  My son liked the fact that he could put together his meal exactly how he wanted it.  This all stems from a visit to a local pub one day when he ordered a DIY dessert, consisting of chocolate ice cream, marshmallows, sprinkles, cream and flakes, the idea being that he put it together exactly how he wanted it.  And that was the beauty of this meal, we could all have exactly what we wanted, and the whole thing took less than 25 minutes.   I’d call that a success on any night of the week.

This is a sponsored post. We received tortillas, tomato salsa, seasoning mix, a jar of fajita season and sauce and a tub of squeezable Garlic & Herb Soured Cream from Discovery for the purposes of taking part in their Cinco de Mayo challenge and writing this review.

The characters in the book are portrayed very much as part of the area.  Even the ones who have no real family roots at least have community roots, in that they are a well established and well known part of the area.  And this got me thinking about my own history.  I often feel like I was adopted or orphaned, although I believe I am neither.  When I was growing up, our house was a house of secrets.  Goodness knows how my mum and dad got married, because all I can remember is their intense dislike of one another.  I was born only 18 months into their marriage, so by the time I became aware, they would have been married only 5 or 6 years.  I don’t even know how they met.  My dad was evacuated from London to Devon during the war, but I don’t know anything about that, no one would talk about anything while I was growing up.  My mum never seemed to be able to tell a straight story, one day it would be one thing, the next it would be something else, so I could never rely on her telling the truth.  And some things she said were so blatant a lie that even a child would not believe it.  So you see how I sometimes feel disconnected, disjointed and without history.  When I left home I lived all over the UK, never settling in one place for very long, so I don’t have those community roots either.

I have such a stong interest in social history.  Part of my degree was Oral History and my dissertation was on what the lives of women were like after the end of the war, when the men came home, wanting their jobs back, expecting the women to go back to the home, to their kitchens.  I love to know about how people live their lives, what their everyday existence is like.  I’m fascinated by history, not the type of Kings and Queens but the ordinary person and how they lived.  I have on order a couple of new social history books relating to London in the 18th and 19th centuries.  And it’s only struck me very recently, because sometimes these things have to be blindingly obvious for me to get them.  Maybe I am so interested in history and how people live and lived, because I have next to no sense of my own past.  I might as well be adopted.  Or an orphan.   Just a thought.  I might blog more about this another time.

On Easter Sunday we went up to Greenwich, which is only about 30 minutes drive away and therefore within much easier reach than the West End.  Greenwich always seems colder to me than the rest of London.  Maybe that’s because it’s right there on the Thames, maybe its because I only ever seem to go there when it’s cold.  But London and indeed the UK is still in the grip of an extended winter and it was gently snowing, so we went to the Ansel Adams exhibition at the Royal Maritime Museum.

I first came across Ansel Adams when I was visiting Yosemite National Park in California about a decade ago.  Ansel was from San Francisco and took a great number of photographs of Yosemite, San Francisco, Monterey and Carmel; all places I have visited, so it was interesting for me to see these pictures.  Anyway, a decade ago, there was an Ansel Adams exhibition at Yosemite and I spent a lot of time there studying the photographs.  They were in black and white and very striking, capturing the beauty of Yosemite perfectly.  I’m in awe of his talent in finding an unusual angle or abstract composition, leading me to study the photo closely, instead of looking and moving on as I might with other exhibitions.

The photo which most grabbed my attention was one taken in 1932 of San Francisco Bay before the building of the Golden Gate Bridge in 1933.  I’ve been in love with San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge since doing a project on the area when I was at primary school, about 35 years ago.  I’ve visited the very spot from which the photograph was taken, I know the view fairly well.  So to see a photograph of the area before the bridge was built was very arresting.

There was a small room set aside with video tape on a constant loop, showing an interview with Ansel Adams in the 1980s and a documentary of him made after his death.  It showed Ansel as a man with a great sense of humour, charismatic and interesting company.  He talked about bracketing, which as I understand it, is a technique where you take three photos in quick succession, one under-exposed, one correctly exposed and one over-exposed, so that you can pick the best one (remember these were the days before digital technology).  Ansel was of the opinion that if you employed this technique, you really didn’t know what you were doing, but he said it in such a self effacing way, and with such a twinkle in his eye, that no one could have been offended, and it raised a huge laugh within the auditorium.

I wish my house was big enough to hang at least a triptych of his work.  Stunning doesn’t even begin to cover it.

On Good Friday we indulged in my favourite activity of all at the moment – spending time in London.  Lindt had sponsored The Great Easter Egg Hunt and we went up to Covent Garden to take part.  I used to spend a lot of time in Covent Garden; I love the place.  In fact, if I had half a million of disposable income, I would buy a one bedroomed flat there and have the whole experience on my doorstep.  As it is, we drive to Wimbledon and get the tube from there.  The eggs to be hunted are huge, designed and made by artists, mounted on pedestals, to be auctioned off after the event in aid of Action for Children.  We found 68 out of the 101, although we were told that one of them had been stolen.  This is a disgrace, as the egg is worth a lot of money to the charity but is more or less worthless to the person who stole it.

As well as the Easter Egg hunt, Covent Garden is host to many and varied shops and boutiques, as well as market stalls.  There are also designated areas for musicians and entertainers to perform.  This is one of my favourite things about Covent Garden and I’ve spent many happy hours hanging off the railings on the upper walkway while an opera singer or string quartet performs on the lower walkway.  I wasn’t disappointed this time either, as there was a fabulous opera singer performing, Seija Knight, who sang several of my favourites, including Schubert’s version of Ave Maria, and the Flower Duet and Madame Butterfly.  I’ve been in tears before watching singers in Covent Garden and this performance just slayed me.  Amazingly, she said that people often come up very close to her as they think she is miming, or using a microphone.  I find this unbelievable as the power and quality of her voice could not be conveyed so clearly by electronic means; she has no need to mime or use a microphone.  A truly special occasion and I was lucky to have been passing at the right time.

How I love London.  There is something for everyone, you just have to know where to look.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I love and adore a really good cup of coffee.  The whole experience matters to me, from choosing the right cup to suit the mood, through putting the right coffee in the espresso machine, to getting the right amount of froth on the milk and putting it all together.  I love the whole ritual and wrote about it once here.

So for me, giving up coffee for Lent is a Very Big Deal.  So big in fact that I’m a bit late in embracing the challenge.  It’s taken me since Shrove Tuesday to talk myself into it.  But I’m finally there: deep breath and drum roll – this is my last cup of coffee until Easter Sunday.

I read somewhere that Battersea Park Zoo in London has a tunnel for the small children to crawl through which brings them right up close to the meerkats in the middle of their enclosure.  I love meerkats, and I know that my little chap does, so we went along to see if the tunnel was large enough for adults to get into too.  Answer, only the very enthusiastic ones!

Great meeting place for a few excited children! Speaking of excited creatures, an Emu took exception to my husband taking it’s photo, reached over and, with a sharp peck of it’s beak, had the camera out of my husband’s hand.  Another dad caught the whole thing on video and it caused a lot of merriment amongst the assembled group.  Luckily the camera was on a long loop around my husband’s neck, so he managed to retrieve it without too much bother.  But just look at the expression on this emu’s face. Not happy!

So, with the fledgling feeling that spring may be just around the corner, what is it sensible to do? Start knitting scarves of course.  It started with my son asking how knitting was done, so we bought some small needles and a little ball of bright green wool, and knitted teddy a scarf.  I found the experience so therapeutic that I bought bigger needles and four balls of that wool that looks as if it has knots all along it and began knitting that into a scarf for me.

There’s something soothing about the repetitive action and something very satisfying about seeing how quickly the scarf grows.

They say that the hardest thing about exercise is putting on your kit.  I’m aiming to put that to the test.  Being more of an abstainer than a moderator, I have to do something every day or at least on certain identified days, rather than just “three times this week” or “four times over the holidays” or whatever.  I just find that approach works better for me, otherwise I find myself saying “OK, is today one of the days I’m going to exercise, or will it be tomorrow?” and then nothing gets done.  I work best with objectives and deadlines, I like knowing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing to get the results I want.  So, with that in mind, and once all this snow clears and I’m confident enough of the road conditions to get back to the gym, I’m going to put on my kit, step outside the door and go to the gym on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.  I’ll tell you later whether putting on my kit was the hardest bit!

I’ve long been a fan of Kate On Thin Ice, an eclectic blog full of energy and thoughtfulness.  Kate’s running a competition to win some exercise related gizmos designed to help when motivation is flagging (or practically non existent in my case).  This is my entry for the ‘Get Fit Feel Epic’ competition hosted by Kate on Thin Ice.  Details can be found here.

http://www.moneysupermarket.com/life-insurance/get-fit-feel-epic/

When I lived in London, I was about a 20 minute walk from a large multiplex and it was £5 admission if you went early enough in the afternoon.  So I went early Saturday afternoons, nearly every week.  I saw some amazing films, and some trash it has to be said.  But enjoyable, whimsy trash nonetheless.

When I moved out to the country, our nearest cinema was a 20 minute drive away.  It was (maybe still is) a flea pit, filthy on the handful of occasions I’ve been there, litter everywhere, not a pleasant place to be.  So I didn’t.  However, now my little man is at school, settled and very happy, I feel more at liberty to start going again through the day.  The cinema at Bluewater is beautifully kept and has an 11am showing (or thereabouts) for most films and I feel that, as I do not find it easy to go in the evenings for all sorts of reasons, I’m going to take advantage of that early showing every couple of weeks.   I’ve really felt the lack of cinema in my life in recent times, and in order to address that I got myself a subscription to LoveFilm, and had DVDs delivered to home.  Really this was the only way I was going to get to see some of the films I wanted to see.  But now I have a bit more time during the day, I’m going to return to the cinema.

I’m also enjoying introducing my son to cinema.  The first film he ever saw was in 3D, at the Science Museum in London.  It was about life under the sea, and the beginning of the film had lots of octopi seeming to float out of the screen.  It was really amusing to see all the little hands in the audience reach up as if to pluck them out of the air!  Since then he’s seen Madagascar 3 and a film called The Pirates! in 3D and Top Cat and a couple of others in standard format.  He’s loved them all.

Some films are so much better on the large screen: I would have loved to have seen Avatar and I will see the sequel on the big screen.  I went to see Life of Pi in 3D last week (in the evening with some friends) and enjoyed it very much.  It’s one of the best films I’ve seen in recent times and it would have lost so much of its spectacular cinematography on the small screen.  I’m aiming to go to see Les Miserables next week as I think the atmosphere will be so much better at the cinema.  That is going to be such a popular film!

A very wise blogger recently said to me that making longer term goals part of goals for the day was very worthwhile, as is waking up and deciding that actually, today I want to achieve nothing (thank you Jetta!).

Today was a bit of a mixture of pursuing long term goals and doing nothing.  I wanted to visit a volunteering centre to see what they might have that I could get involved in.  Their flyer suggested “it’s not just about charity shops” and that appealed to me.  So whilst I waited for them to open, I went to the coffee shop (thereby scuppering my healthy eating record for the day).  I was just about to leave to go to the centre, when I read the flyer again – please ring to make an appointment.  Hmm.  It’s not a drop-in then.  I rang and left my details but nobody has yet called me back.  The centre is open only on Wednesdays, so another week will pass before I can follow that up.

So having started the day by going backwards, in some respects, I decided to make amends by going for a swim.  This resulted in two life affirming events, to make up for the two false starts earlier in the day.  The swim was brilliant, the pool was practically empty, and I managed a good 30 lengths in about 20 minutes.  When I was sitting in my car getting ready to drive back, I saw two separate women trying to get into their cars without unlocking the doors.  I do this ALL THE TIME!  And it makes me feel like such a Charlie.  It was amusing and reassuring to learn that I am not the only scatterbrain who forgets over the course of an hour that she left her car locked.  I’ve no idea why I do this, but it’s good to know I’m not the only one.

So today was a bit of a treading-water day.  I’m not sure how much I’ve actually achieved, but my intentions were good!