Fresh bread!

On Saturday we went to a nearby farm shop to buy some fresh fruit and vegetables. Andre wanted to get bacon too. The bacon from the farm shops are so so much better than from the grocery stores. I don't like bacon. I don't even like the smell of it, but I can see how much thicker the slices are and once it's cooked, you've still got quite a piece of bacon instead of the shriveled up piece you're left over with after frying up a grocery store rasher.

This little piggy has not gone to the market. Yet.

After the farm shop shopping I didn't want to go home yet. I don't have a car and we live in a small village so I don't get out much. I suggested we go to a large supermarket. How desperate must I be to be happy with walking around a supermarket! It was a very big one and they sell a bit of everything.

Both Andre and I enjoy looking at things for the house and especially the kitchen. And so we ended up getting a bread maker there.

Andre has been wanting a bread maker since before we left Switzerland. Then we saw the one we wanted (Panasonic SD-254) at half the price it's sold for on Amazon. So far Amazon has been the cheapest for this one. We've done some research to find the best prices!

Andre baked our first bread as soon as we got home on Saturday afternoon. It comes with a booklet with many recipes for different breads, cakes and doughs. We will definitely be trying it out for our weekly home made pizza dough soon. On Saturday we decided on a brioche bread. No idea what it means really, but the bread is really good. It's a slightly sweet bread.

We'll try something different each time until we find our favourite. There is also a sandwich bread which we'll try for Andre's sandwiches during the week.

Sandwich press review

I received a gift voucher from CSN stores in exchange for doing a review on one of their products. I could choose what I wanted to buy and review. I chose this sandwich press by Breville.

As I've mentioned before we enjoy having toasted sandwiches and haven't had a sandwich press for quite a while now so we're happy to have one in the house again :-)

This one from Breville works great. The two flat surfaces are easy to wipe clean. The booklet says not to put margarine/ butter on the outside as it won't stick. I tried this the first time, but my sandwich came out very pale. I now use some margarine to give it a toasty colour.

For Andre's Mexican party we even used the sandwich press to make quesadillas!

We forgot to take pictures when we were actually making them for the party, but here I am re-heating two quarters left over the next day.

Andre's surprise birthday party

Hi Andre, I hope you don't mind me writing about your party?

He hardly reads my blog. He gets the first line or two in his google reader, but seldom reads more than that. Understandably since he's actually living what I'm writing about most of the time.

My husband doesn't like to have a birthday party. I don't know why. Each year I ask him what he would like to do for his birthday, if we should invite some friends over. And each year he says no, he doesn't want to do anything. We can have friends over the weekend before or after his birthday, but not for his birthday.

This year I realised that this is probably going to be his answer every year so my friend and I planned a surprise party for him. We convinced her husband and mine to go fishing last Saturday morning with instructions to be home at 3pm. I think they might have been a little surprised at us telling them to go fishing all of  sudden.

We had worked hard for about two weeks before the party, planning and shopping for everything we needed. We're in the process of starting a business together, planning children's parties. (We will be supplying a beautiful box containing everything parents will need for their child's party with different themes to choose from.)

So Andre's party was a bit of a practice run for us. We needed to take some pictures too. That's why the before photos of the table look more like we're expecting kids to arrive at the party. Well, a few did actually and they enjoyed the balloons!

We decided on a carnival theme, as the girly tea party theme we would have liked to do might have made Andre feel a bit uncomfortable.

With that we had all Mexican food, nachos for starters, followed by quesidillas, corn bread and an avo wasabi salad. Not sure how Mexican that last one was but it sounded good and was!

For dessert we had made a two tier cake, our first time trying this, and decorated it with fondant we had made and coloured ourselves.

It was also our first time making fondant which was an interesting experience. It's good that we now know how it's made and how much sugar goes into it! We now also understand why it's called sugar paste...

We made a buttercream fondant which tasted really good, but was quite soft and we were worried it would slide down the cake. The one we ended up using was the melted marshmallow fondant. Very sticky. Very, very sticky to make.

The bottom layer cake was Victoria sponge with strawberry jam and cream and the top was chocolate with caramel layered in between.

Oh and we even made a pinata! A spongebob squarepants paper mache pinata.

We went for the option of bashing the pinata instead of the nicer child friendly version of pulling strings to open up the pinata. The guys had fun hitting poor Bob until he surrendered and gave them the sweets.

It was a fun party :-)

What have I been doing at home?

Since I've not been blogging too much lately I thought you might be wondering what I've been doing.

1. The past two weeks my friend and I were very busy planning a surprise birthday party for Andre. More on that in the next post.

2. Yesterday I had a couch day and kept myself busy between my laptop and the TV. It was raining all day.

3. I did clean all the lamp shades in the house on Monday as well as vacuum the walls and ceiling. Oh, you're wondering why I would vacuum the walls and ceiling? We have many little spiders who make many spider webs. The walls and ceiling is not the smooth kind and I think this makes it especially comfortable for the spiders to stick their webs to. The best way to get rid of it is using the vacuum cleaner with the small brush attached. Can also be used to clean crumbs off the stove...

4. We went to a shopping centre near us on Sunday and there was a beach. We don't live near the beach. But there was a beach with sand and palm trees and water activities. It even smelt like the beach. It looked nice. Then we carried on and did our shopping. We don't usually have a beach at the shopping mall. Odd.

5. I am (still) busy working on our Switzerland album. I'm using blurb.com. It's a great site to use if you want to create an album. I've done a small trial album and the printing is good. But we have so many photos of our year in Switzerland and it's taking me months and months to get it done. I have done 7 months now. Four more left to go. Almost there. It makes me think twice before I take a picture now, in case I want to do a UK album too. I don't want to have this many photos to go through again! I guess it would go faster if I did more than two pages a day.

6. It was a perfect sunny day on Monday and I saw these ponies in the field behind our house when I walked to the village. It made me glad to be living in the countryside and not in the city.

7. I am making chicken pie again for dinner tonight.

8. I bought two exercise DVD's. One cardio and the other toning using a resistance band I had but which snapped in half the second time I used it. It was not really the second time I used it, I've had the band for quite a while, but it was the second time using it with the DVD. The DVD's make me work hard, but it gets boring having to do the same routine every day. I'll have to get about 10 different dvd's or else this is not going to last very long.

9. I'm thinking I should get a yoga dvd. I need to do some stretching. My back is sooo sore.

10. And that's why I'm going to lie on the couch now and read my recipe books. I want to find some new recipes to try. I will set up Andre's tripod and take pictures to blog about more too.

Foxes in our garden!

Last night we were almost asleep when the outside light suddenly went on. It has a motion sensor so we got up to see what made it go on. There were two foxes in our garden!! I really like the foxes around here. They look just like puppies with very long tails. But I wouldn't try to get friendly with them after I heard about two baby girls who got attacked by a fox in their bedroom in London. You can read about that here... 

These two were sniffling around and it looked like they were catching bugs. I didn't know foxes ate bugs? I didn't really know what they eat. I just looked it up here and they eat anything, including insects.

I tried to get them on video. You can only see the one which was right under our bedroom window. The other one was a little further out on the lawn in the shadows.