What are you all up to
Comments
-
Thanks Goldie. I think it’s the timer I am lacking😁 This one is gas fired, on all the time, so we do spend a lot of time in the big kitchen. I have Macaroni Cheese planned tonight, so should be ok with this. Am I right in thinking that it’s hotter deeper into the hot oven? It seems to be with this one.
0 -
I’m sure modern ones are more consistent than ours. But the oven does have “zones” - top left back hottest and bottom right front cooler. When I’m baking cakes and pies I do quite a bit of shuffling top to bottom and front to back.
I cook as much as possible in the oven - e.g browning meat, cooking onions etc. Easy Peasy supper last night - leek, carrots, sliced potatoes cooked in oven till nearly done, then chicken portions plonked on top for 20 minutes.
Sauces I start on the left plate, then move to the right. I often cook sauces to serve at the table in an Aga jug. Less washing up.
1 -
Oh the warmth a Rayburn or Aga gives to the room and the whole house, well it did in our case, stairs went up off the kitchen. The bannister, such as it was, was boarded up and a door put at the bottom to make a lobby. That's why most of the bedroom furniture had to be broken down to remove it from the bedrooms recently 😢.
Even when the Rayburn was removed, and the subsequent 30 odd years after, most folk, me especially stood where it had been, we were so used to leaning on it while chatting etc. Tea cloths were also dry and ready to use. Oh and don't tell my dad, sitting on kitchen chairs with a hot drink and your feet resting on an oven shelf, with the door open on returning from school on bitterly cold days. Once you'd finished your drink it was add more fuel ready for dinner prep!
Yes it was a pain for creating dust and I never needed an alarm, mine was dad riddling it 😀 belowcmy bedroom. And oh on windy days it was susceptible to blow backs, covering itself with soot from the register plate. Ours was actually set in a fire place. That's when I first heard naughty words 😉. We kids adored it, and the Parkray in the lounge but they certainly made so much work. No wonder neither of our parents bemoaned their loss, heat without work, first with storage heaters and and electric cooker and fires, then oil central heating - storage heating was again another guesstimate of heat required the next day!
1 -
Oh - how I miss our Aga. Our last house was a barn conversion which we designed ourselves and it just screamed out "I need an Aga", so we put one in and I used to find cooking so easy that I wouldn't let Ros near it most of the time. Just stick things in and it got on with it - none of this messing about with temperature controls as with fan ovens which I can't understand!
When we supposedly downsized to this house 8 years ago - which we re-built just after we moved in and made it all open-plan, an Aga just wouldn't look right - but I do miss that focal point of the house that everyone automatically congregated around in the winter.
It's true - an Aga is the heart of the house
1 -
H&T it was lovely. Well worth cooking and so easy. I cheated by adding fresh pasta, so I just mixed it in with the meat sauce before it went in the oven. Saved having another saucepan on the go. I froze two portions even though the recipe states “not suitable for freezing”. I decided there’s nothing in it that’s not in my normal lasagne and that freezes well. Cooking the mushrooms separately does make a difference. Hope you like it.
0 -
We cracked it tonight😁 Macaroni Bolognese, and Sis decided to bake some bread cakes. Both a success, lots of shelf shuffling and tray turning, and we timed the bread cakes to be on the safe side. We all congregate in kitchen, it’s true. But I lit the stove as well tonight, the dog was huffing and puffing between the two🤣
That pop up cafe was at Happisburgh today. Hot Soup, mutterings about only one flavour, but we finally shifted that elderly lady, she was made to go for a walk, then back for a Hot Chocolate. We drove through the village of Walton, everything piled high with sand. It made the news last week, when the storm shifted all the sand put down to aid with sea defences and it was dumped on the village. Some gorgeous churches, but we didn’t risk going in with Mum, many still closed by the looks of it.
1 -
A better day weather wise after rain in the night, although it's misty and damp outside now but still on wind. The river down from the site is in spate and roaring away. We did a couple of different walks from the site today, including one that we'd not done before.
1 -
That’ll be for city folk, I doubt they’ll try & stop folk using wood burners out in the sticks👍🏻
1 -
City folk need catalytic converters on the flues. We don’t need that out here but laws are being considered to phase out the burning of cheap bituminous coal. No one with any experience of burning wood would ever burn wet or damp wood as it don’t burn it simmers & hisses which just leaves creosote deposits in the chimney🤷🏻♂️☹️
0 -
Agree R2B. I always have two days supply stacked around the log burner to dry thoroughly before it goes in the log basket for immediate use. Just keep topping up the 'drying pile' to ensure a constant supply of really dry logs. (also another use for an Aga!)
0 -
+1👍🏻, mine go from the slat sided outdoor log stores to 4 crates stacked indoors, then around the stove in the inglenook a few hours prior to needing them to ensure ambient moisture. The glass of the stove can be cleaned with a tissue-that’s a great way to check dry wood is being burnt. . .The smokier the glass the more moisture in the logs👍🏻
0 -
If you watched Countryfile, then you maybe saw one of our cows. Well, not ours now - we sold her to Adam when they were filming here in 2017.
If you want to know what she's up to - as well as looking cute for the visitors - then watch from about 37 minutes in.
4 -
Agree Rocky and R&R, utterly foolish to burn the wrong stuff, creates all sorts of issues. We have beech drying under cover at the moment, it’s moved indoors from an outdoor stock, which is covered from worst of weather. From the indoor store, it’s stacked by the stove for further drying, then into basket for use. Someone dropped us a load of Ash as well a few months ago, that’s doing fine, burns clean and hot. We have Applewood as well. Our stove burns solid fuel as well, we buy from our local merchant, never from garages. It’s like anything else, the informed know what they are doing, but the foolish tend to spoil it for all☹️
On the plus side, as with most legislation, on paper it looks wonderful, in practice, there’s no one to enforce it. Duh!😉
0 -
A lot of wood burners around here have been going for about the last two weeks as a lot of very old stones houses about, would say that most of the wood used here is oak and I have seen it for sale it is usually 2 years old, the little wood opposite us has been cleared this year and so far all nicely stacked up how long it will remain there as our friends would like to have some it as they have a wood burner, we have a chimney on the outside of the bungalow nothing inside so we are all electric, a lot of wood has been on the move around here for the last 6 weeks some trailers are very overloaded.
Our friends are on their way back to the UK for the winter and have had a text from Brittany Ferries saying to stay in your vehicle once on the ferry as the staff will take you to your cabin as they do not want folk all rushing around the corridors.
Has been very wet here and windy but we have escaped the worst compared to the south east corner of France.
0 -
I think we've got mostly fruit wood and oak at the moment, it's stacked up everywhere in untidy piles! We have a big oak tree very close to our home and it needs the canopy lifting a bit our side so we'll keep the wood from that too. I've just watched someone moving in locally and they've grubbed the field hedge out on their boundary, I feel sad when people do that.
We have a defunct aga/rayburn alcove in our kitchen, but I do have a big aga pan rack above it and I cook on a dual fuel cooker beneath. Visitors occasionally bang their heads on the hanging pans but no-one has been totally knocked out yet...
I stood outside our doctors surgery this morning for twenty minutes, (routine blood tests)I had been contacted earlier and questioned about Covid etc, no-one in the surgery, two of us waiting outside plus a delivery man. The receptionist finally appeared took our names then re-appeared because she had forgotten them!! A notepad might have helped..I'm hoping we don't get a bad winter, they'll be digging patients out from snow drifts. 🐧🐧🐧
1 -
Had our ‘flu jabs from our local pharmacy today, we will be away for our Doctors ‘flu jab appointment so we were grateful to her for ‘fitting us in’. That’s that done! Second job for today was our Click and Collect, we have just finished with that - how long I wonder will we have to keep washing and wiping all our shopping ......... years??? I get so stressed and fed up with doing it, I’d like to tell myself it’s just the new normal but it’s not working!
0 -
Our surgery said we would be contacted with appointments in October. OH just got an NHS letter saying to attend at our local town hall on a certain date at a certain time, nothing for me as yet.
OH's appointment is when we are usually looking after Callum, but fortunately it is a school holiday week so we will not be needed. Just wish they would try to send couples appointments at the same time, would save a lot of hassle!
0 -
It’s much more exciting here. We get your attend a drive thru session at the Eden Project!
Several surgeries have got together and organised a mass jab event spread over several days.
0 -
An interesting read on the efficacy of hand washing etc. versus mask wearing.
Maybe I'm careless. But I don't wash my shopping. Nor put it in quarantine. But I do wash and sanitise my hands after putting it away.
3 -
Boring isn’t it heddlo😁 I experiment with what to do. Hard shelled stuff, cans, bottles I stick in sink, zap with Zoflora spray, then leave to dry on drainer. More fragile stuff is still wiped. If I know I won’t be touching some stuff for over three days, I just store it and wash my hands. Same with freezer stuff.
1 -
Now that’s what I call a drive through😁 Our surgeries are using the local Athletics stadium, which conveniently is a mere quarter of a mile from home! Sister has got two dates so far, so the App is working as efficiently as usual🤣
0 -
I doubt it'll be in a biome though😀
The app says "click here to amend your booking". Then "you cannot amend your appointment online but must ring....."🤣🤣🤣
1 -
Wow! I don't suppose you can sneak past them for a mosey round once you've had your jabs can you?
We've just had our invitation to drive through the car park at the local comp (not the one I taught at) - I think Mrs M will have to drive, she's left handed and can dangle her right arm out of the drivers window, while I'm right handed so can stick my left arm out of the passenger side. Only problem will be if they're just doing it on one side which means she'd have to do a bit of reversing!
(Ouch, that really hurt!
)0 -
I read the Guardian article at lunch time and found it interesting. However there are two issue here that run in parallel. Firstly there is the issue of whether you are likely to catch COVID from surfaces which the article suggests is fairly unlikely or at least there is little evidence that it does. Secondly I think we are all now probably paranoid about keeping our hands clean which is no bad thing. All the washing and rubbing of anti bac will have done wonders for good hand hygiene and will have no doubt prevented the spread of lots of other nasties that can make you ill. A year or so ago someone did a survey of McDonald's self order screens and found many of them contaminated with faeces which illustrates the lack of hygiene practiced by some customers!!! Perhaps they should do the survey again to see if things have improved although I imagine McDonalds more regularly wipe those screens down now?
David
1
She is a tart
