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