April Instagrams

Monday in Lisbon

On Monday April 20th, I went wandering in Lisbon. I was not sure what I was looking for but I found something. Enjoy the photos below of my explorations.

Sunday Recap May 31

On Monday I had a lovely day off of work as it was a bank holiday. I am still not sure how these work or why the banks get so many holidays but I a glad to not be in work.

A big event was happening in Liverpool on Monday so I decided I would check it out. I got the bus into town and luckily as my stop isn't on a big road, I was able to get on as the next big stop the bus stopped at, people filled the bus and the bus could not pick anymore people up. I felt bad for all the people trying to flag down the too full bus and we drove past them.

Heading into town, I got off and headed towards Pier Head. The amount of people in Liverpool was shocking. People had come from all over to see Cunard's Three Queens sail together into Liverpool and do some manoeuvres in the Mersey River.

I soon realised that it was just too packed to see anything, too many people and gave up. I grabbed a quick lunch and caught the bus back home. I relaxed and watched the events unfold on a live stream. I must say I was not very impressed. I understand that these are massive cruise ships but they did a circle then made an arrow formation. The grey water against the the grey sky made it look a little lack luster.

On Tuesday I returned to work and did overtime everyday. Nothing exciting happened Tuesday or Wednesday but on Thursday I got off at 3 from work and joined my coworker to watch Mad Max: Fury Road. The film was amazing and I highly recommend it. It had a really high rating and I felt it deserved it. The acting was really well done and I was entranced through out.

If you have a chance watch it at the cinema. It was very good!

On Friday I got off work and went to Tavern & Company to enjoy some Mexican BBQ. I had the beef chilli burrito and it was pretty good. I think I prefer their brunches more but I wanted to try their dinner menu. The ribs I had as an appetiser were very well done and I enjoyed those.  I am really looking forward to enjoying some of my favourite Mexican restaurants in August.

It has been raining through out the week but Saturday and Sunday have been quite nice with sunshine. I snapped a few photos of the wisteria tree outside the house all pretty covered in rain drops. Sadly the caretaker of the house got someone to cut the front gardens grass and he chopped a good amount off the tree. 

Two weeks until I am in Copenhagen. I am getting very excited!

Sunday Recap: May 24

So this week has been pretty good. The weather has been alright and I have been doing a lot of overtime at work.  I didn't get up to a whole lot during the week but snapped some photos throughout of the neighbourhood. The one above is my walk from where the bus drops me, the one below is the little shortcut between my house and this lovely patch of empty land that had beautiful flowers growing in it.

Last night I attended my coworker's 21st birthday party and snapped the photo above as I waited for the bus to buy a weekly pass.  The photo below is of Childwall where the party was, I arrived a bit too early so had a wander.

On Saturday I decided I would cook up a storm and made my favourite Lentil & Sausage Stew by Budget Bytes. I love this recipe blog/website. I find the recipes I try to make really easy to follow and make. This soup I have made too many times to count. I add a few things like the addition of corn to it, I do not use dried lentils so just follow the recipe and use one can of lentils. Since I make this so often, I usually buy double the amount of the canned and vegetable items so all I have to do is pick up the sausage and I'm ready to go.

The photos on her blog are a lot nicer but I thought I would photograph my cooking as I went along. I'm a bit of a slow chopper so to prevent my sausage from burning, I cut all my veggies up and then cook the sausage versus doing both at the same time. I tried Heck sausages for the first time, I usually go for the Tesco brand but the sausage selection on Saturday was seriously limited.  I peel the sausages out of their casings before cooking them, the only difference I really found when doing this was that the Heck sausages were a bit more difficult to slide out of their casings.

The second thing I made was the Easy Spinach Ricotta Pasta, which popped up as Beth's latest recipe. I glanced at the recipe list and saw I had everything required minus the ricotta and the pasta. I added it to my grocery list and picked up those items when I headed to Tesco. I do not make a lot of pasta though I really enjoy making it and I had never worked with ricotta before so this was all new to me.  The fettuccine noodles that  got were not the flat ones displayed on her website so I was unsure about the portion of pasta to cook. You can see in the the photo below that my garlic is a little burnt. This was because I was frantically trying to find out the measurements of pasta. I cooked half the box then doubted myself and while dealing with the half portion of noodles, I cooked the last half portion as well. There are not too many photos of the making of the pasta as I was a bit flustered.

The pasta turned out to be delicious and I kept the second portion of noodles out of the cheese so all I need to do is buy more ricotta and mix in the pasta some time this week to make a quick and easy dinner.

As mentioned in the photos above I headed to Childwall on Saturday night to attend my coworker's 21st birthday party. I had never been to a 21st birthday party before as I don't think they are as popular in Canada as they are in other countries. I am still not really sure why people celebrate them. Possibly a thing picked up from the US? You can legally drink in the UK at 18, so not sure what is important about being 21.

Anyways, it was a fun time had with several of my coworkers and I was glad I went. The buffer was interesting and filled with little snack foods that I had never seen before. I tried a sampling and enjoyed everything minus one little item that I was not even sure what it was.

It's a bank holiday weekend so I get Monday off.  Happy times.

All the best.

-Paige