Recipe: Mac'n'cheese

I treated Lovely Anna to her first homecooked tea tonight, with ingredients from Green and Brown at Little Eaton.

INGREDIENTS
1 pack macaroni - or if you can't find any, do what I've just done and use kids' dinosaur pasta
1 pack cherry tomatoes
40g butter - I used parsley and garlic butter from Green and Brown
40g flour
200ml single cream
200ml whole milk
100g dolcelatte or other blue cheese
100g strong cheddar
Breadcrumbs
100g Parmesan

METHOD:
Put the pasta onto boil, and then in a saucepan make a roux by melting the butter, stirring in the flour and then adding the milk and cream. Keep stirring and heating the sauce, then add the grated dolcelatte and cheddar. Heat through until melted and thick.

When the pasta is cooked, drain it and mix with the cheese sauce and cherry tomatoes, chopped in half. Put mixture into a baking dish and top with the breadcrumbs and grated Parmesan. Bake on 200C for about 30 minutes, or until golden on top.

Pegging it

Today I was faced with yet another of those little conundrums that crops up every now and then in my quest to avoid the supermarkets. After all, I am of the generation that is pretty much used to being able to buy everything anything (and I really do mean ANYTHING) from Tesco.

So where the hell do I go to buy clothes pegs?

Lovely Anna has a washing line, but no pegs, and seeing as I’ve put my first official wash in her washing machine this morning, I figured I’d better not go home without them.

Luckily the older members of staff at the office, who remember a time before we relied on the supermarkets for everything, and pointed me in the direction of Derby’s Market Hall.

I’ve blogged about this place before - it’s a gorgeous old building and all the stallholders are like one big happy family, which makes it a really lovely and welcoming place to shop.

I found my pegs on a stall that seemed a bit like a mini Wilkos (and yes, I’ve just realised that Wilkos would probably have been another place to go for pegs). It had loads of useful stuff so I also came away with a pack of 20 washing up scourers for just £1. The good ones too with the really tough green scratchy bit that actually cleans the pans after I’ve burnt them!

Beat that Tesco!

 

Chris with my handmade card

It takes two!

Two babies. Not one. Two. That’s what my lovely best mate Christina is bringing home from hospital today.

And two babies are, of course, pretty special. Hardly anyone gets a double package from the stork. But unfortunately, because not many people have them, it also makes them slightly harder to cater for.

I found this out at lunchtime when I popped out to grab a congratulations card for the new parents. In every shop I went into I found dozens of blue and pink cards with “It’s a Boy!” or “It’s a Girl!” but hardly anything catering to the plural. A couple of stores had one, sorry looking “Twins” card huddled by itself at the back of the rack.

So in the end I’ve decided to make my own. I bought a pink blank card and envelope from Paperchase, plus stick-on jewels and coloured pens. And tonight I’m going to get crafty.

Results tomorrow….

Not cloud ants... or poos!

Lovely lovely long-suffering Anna almost found herself on the receiving end of quite a disturbing message yesterday.

“I put a bag of what looks like poos into your freezer,” I typed. “But don’t worry, it’s not poos, it’s ready-to-bake cloud ants.”

Not the sort of thing you expect to receive on your lunch break. Bloody predictive text!

What I’d actually put into her freezer were ready-to-bake frozen croissants. Although they do indeed look a bit like tiny anemic turds.

It was part of a little shopping trip to stock up her kitchen with a few of my favourite essentials. I’ve pretty much moved in with her now, although I’m still shuttling back and forth with car-loads of stuff this week. So I popped to Brown and Green, the amazing artisan food store in nearby Little Eaton, to stock up.

Lovely Anna is an Aldi and Morrisons girl, so she’s going to find living with me quite an education. And I’m hoping to get loads of blog fodder from her supermarket shopping trips! Delights that now grace her fridge include milk from Duffield Dairy, a homemade quiche and cheese from a Derbyshire creamery.

Luckily there are no cloud ants in her freezer though.