Category Archives: Photos

Purple Sprouting Broccoli Flowers

Pumpkin Cupcakes

A Little Late, Raspberries…

Autumn Morning Wisps

Saturday Soup – Cabbage and Fleischwurst

This recipe was one based on a soup my mother used to make but which I don’t have a recipe on-hand for.  Trying to find one online didn’t work either as most cabbage and sausage soups seemed to be tomato based which wasn’t what I was looking for.  The creamy soups I’ve been having for the last few months have spoiled me a little, but either way this soup is not the best I’ve made – it needs a little something to boost the flavour – though the blended version seemed to have brought them out better.   I actually love soft boiled cabbage, but if you don’t then this soup is definitely not for you!

Going to have to go back to the drawing board on this one, really.

Saturday soups is probably going to have to change to Sunday soups from now on.  During the summer, I had free Saturdays and busy Sundays and whilst Sundays remain busy, I now have tabletop gaming on a Saturday throughout the day. This means I can’t sit and write a post during the day and get a bit overtired at night (as happened yesterday).  This week blind-sided me a little, hence the post today, but I’m going to give it a few weeks of trying to get most of a post done on a Friday night before admitting defeat!

Tastes Like Sunshine

Minted

Goodbye, Wee Man

We had some good luck concerning the kitten: we took him to the vets and, lo and behold, he was microchipped!  Totally wasn’t expecting that, but glad nonetheless.  The vet phoned us say they’d gotten a number and address and would phone them and get back to us.  Super. Except… that was two and a half weeks ago.

Just as we were beginning to give up getting a hold of his owners as a lost cause we got a phone call from the vets!  They phoned yesterday morning and by 1 o’clock in the afternoon he was gone.  It was all so sudden it seems surreal – as if he wasn’t ever here.

Apparently, our lack of luck with getting a hold of the owner was due to timing problems (night shift worker) and the owner avoiding phone-calls from someone else thus missing ours, too.  The minute it went to a letter, they called the vet right away – surprised that the kitten they’d been missing for a whole month and a half had suddenly turned up!  Apparently they and their family had been out looking for the wee scamp for weeks, worried because they lived near a railway and land where foxes are known to prowl.  Given he’s such a teeny thing (six months old, would you believe!), it would have been easy for a driver not to see him or a bigger critter to get a hold of him.

Having given up on finding him themselves they realised they hadn’t sent away his microchip form.  D’oh.  Still not sure how the microchip company had him on the database – I can only assume they knew which vet had said microchip and traced the owner that way?  If anyone knows how the system works I’d welcome a possible explanation =)

The other surprise came when we found out he’d come from a good few miles away – in Larbert.  We’d not even thought to phone the vets further afield than Camelon assuming that such a teeny tiny cat wouldn’t have walked very far from home.  When he came to us, he looked a little underfed but not starving.  Given that they’d been missing him for six weeks, we’d only had him for three and he seemed to have not gotten into too bad a condition for his size we all wondered if he’d perhaps been taken from Larbert and brought to Camelon by some (possibly) well-meaning stranger who’d found him – only to run off again.

I had wanted to know what his real name was and found out inadvertently when I mentioned that, on finding him, we’d assumed he was a she.  Apparently this wasn’t the first time as originally he’d been called… Millie.  Hehe.  When the truth became apparent, Millie became Mills – a name which has a slight mischevious tilt, to my mind, and suits the wee man well – though I’ll probably always remember him as Cai =)

The place feels rather quiet without him and whilst I won’t miss him trying to eat everything (including my plants) I will miss the wee scamp being a cute addition to the family and generally adding some random to the house.

Sam, on the other hand, with probably be wholly relieved to see the back of the kitten.  Though I do think he was growing on him.  A wee tiny bit. Maybe. ;)

G’bye Mills

Miss ya, wee man.

September Strawberries

Radical Radishes & Curried Kittens

I’ve been trying to keep to a schedule for writing here  but with my big cousin’s stag party at the weekend… well, lets just say that I was still trying to recover on Monday.  It was a great night, though, and I’m looking forward to his wedding in a couple of weeks time.

Today I was ready to blow the cobwebs away and raring to get out in the garden.  I wasn’t going to allow a torrential downpour bit of drizzle stop me from getting out there.  That’s what wellies and big leather gloves are for, right?  Today’s task was finally getting rid of the radishes.  When I first grey radishes, hoping for little, lovely, salad bowl crunchies I failed miserably.  I could get them to the right size, shape and crunchiness, even but the taste was just horrid.  Not sure where I was going wrong, but the upshot was too many radishes I didn’t want to eat!

So, having heard that radish seed in many ways approximates mustard seed, I figured I’d leave the ones which were left in the ground and see what happened.  For a start, the bees loved them – radishes have a profuse amount of flowers and they actually smell quite nice. This is, unfortunately, the only photo I have of them close-ish up:

The  radishes, left to grow, became huge and some even seemed to have started growing secondary tubers further down the root.

As it turned out, apparently the seeds on mine didn’t taste any good either, so I dug the lot out of the ground today to make space for winter lettuces.  Smashing them up to go in the compost, though, I noticed the coolest thing:  some of them had become hollow and were supporting small colonies of critters and beasties – including worms! Click on the images for a closer view.

Not all of the radishes were hollow, but I’d had no idea they would even do this.  Pretty funky stuff.  Cool as they were, though, their upheaval was a must – giving me space for my winter lettuces:

Not a tonne of space but, then, that’s the story of this garden as a whole.  Still, as the season comes to a close, I feel that I’ve really managed to make a decent go of growing things in my long-thin strip of dirt.  It’s been great fun and I’m already planning what I will (and won’t) grow next year.  For the record, the garden looks like so at the beginning of September:

Coming to a slow close, but not done yet!

On a completely different note, below is what happens when you leave an inquisitive, greedy wee kitten in a room with an empty curry bowl:

Yes, he’s still with us, and getting chubbier by the day.  Just look at that round wee belly!