Time for a Break: Pubs, Walks and Cooking

I don't know, I get back into blogging and Blogger dies on me! Hope it's not the universe trying to tell me something.

Anyhoo, I enjoyed my first couple of days without crazy amounts of work to do in an AGE this week. I do still have one report left, but the largest bulk of my MA work (if we don't count the dissertation) was finished on Tuesday. So that leaves time for some fun stuff - and blogging!

Of course, I started off slowly. Have to ease back into having down time, you know. Tim came to visit and we had a nice lazy time in a put beer garden on Wednesday. This pub, to be precise.

Check out the menu:

Tim & I had fun picking what we would eat if we didn't already have dinner at home planned.

We make our own fun.

We get this view of each other way too often. Such nerds. I believe I've covered this.

That's better.

I wasn't around to blog about my new Joules bag! Been wanting one for forever, actually, as I didn't have anything I could fit my A4 folders etc. in. Nothing fancy or expensive but it makes me smile.

Yesterday, we took a walk in Sarratt, along some new maintained paths we'd not explored before, and inadvertently discovered halfway along that I had been there before on the horses! Turns out my sense of direction/geography is not the hottest.

Then, I made a fish pie! 

Salmon and leek pie, actually.

Yes, I actually cook when not bogged down with work.

And today, I went riding! Mikey and I are practising a new game I call 'reinless steering' and he calls 'stupid'. But he puts up with me anyway, so that's ok.

What Katie Ate

Have you seen this blog? Katie Quinn Davies' food photography is just about the most delicious thing I've ever seen.

I mean. Look at this. Look. At. It.

That is art right there.

I'm pretty sure this pasta dish has a ton of mushrooms in it. I hate mushrooms. Can't stand the things.

This picture makes me want to eat them.

Lots of them

Sweet.

Savoury.

Everything. Everything is beautiful.

(Incidentally, my team mate for the Geffrye project makes the best brownies. Perk.)

I've always been jealous of people who can photograph food. It's hard, and you can't rely on luck to get a good shot, either. Anything I try does tend to come out looking distinctly unappetising, however tasty it might be in real life. Good food photography takes skill, and Katie has it, I tells ya.

Yum.

One of the liveries at the stables just handed me 2 dozen eggs from his own chickens. Off to find recipes which use lots and lots of them. The pepper/chorizo 'carbonara' experiment did not go as well as I'd hoped.

(all images by Katie Quinn Davies)