Telephone Lines and Ready Steady Cook

The week has seen the usual regular activities sprinkled with a few extras: church on Sunday (Roarke was serving in creche), he had drama practice on Tuesday (he had a 24hr bug thing on Monday so missed rehearsals as he went to bed at 7.30pm and slept till 9am!), on Wednesday he took Samuel and William on a home education trip to the Royal Observatory.

The boys both really enjoyed it, including the presentation and the workshop that had been organised. It is interesting to see just how different William in when he is interested in something - paying attention, Roarke said that he asked lots of questions, knew lots of answers, and generally got fully stuck in. He's also continuing his own, slow progress in recognising letters and words.

Samuel is definately well into his teen stage, including being eyed up by some school girls on the bus on the way home from the trip apparently!

Josh is pining for SAVVY as they have broken up for the Easter term. He's learnt all his lines for his part already and can often be heard practicing them.

Last Monday the local exchange had problems and we ended up losing our phone line and our internet too. I got very stressed!

So, as a result, my kitchen is sparkling, my bakeware drawers have been tidied, the top of the fridge has been cleared cleaned and sorted, and I baked. Lots.

Gluten free bread (Olive oil bread from the Healthy Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day
book, but I ran out of olive oil so used mainly canola oil - still smelt and tasted divine!)

Samuel helped make gluten free donuts (of which only these two and half were left by the time I got the camera!)
and of course some chocolate easter crispy cakes

I also made some great dinners, but I always forget to take photos of them!

We got a phone line and internet back after 48 hours but after not having any phone calls in two hours (unheard of) we realised there was still an issue. Sure enough, the engineer had made some wrong connections and we have someone else's phone line/number! It is actually quite upsetting as I know that not only are media calls going unanswered, but local home educators enquiries are also not getting through. Seeing as I take several a day usually, this is really concerning. BT have said that we are a priority - because of those helpline calls - but we are now a week around and apparently someone is coming out tomorrow to "the property". Why they need to come here I have no idea when it is a mistake at the exchange. I've got a horrible feeling we're going to have our phone number changed.... surely I can ask for compensation if so?

Thursday I was really busy. My mum came over to focus on Jonathan so that I could focus on our business. Where2EatinKent has now become a limited company and we've got some major projects on the go. It was good to be "working" for a change (lol) and actually the thing I was working on was very rewarding and I soon got into the swing of things and got lots of work done.

Today we had a local home educating family come over, who we've met once before some time ago. The children were William's age and younger and it was good for him to have friends around that weren't older than him for a change. The kids all had fun, and us mums had a good chat.

Josh and Samuel have gone out to get to church for 5pm to serve in setting up Baseline, ready for when it started at 6pm.

I'd been rumaging in the reduced down section at Sainsburys and had bought some garlic ciabatta and some taste the difference cannelloni. Now, I know I should have read the packet, but still I think it is badly done that the cannelloni need sauce to be able to cook them but it doesn't highlight that in anyway. So there I was, ready to put them in the oven, suddenly seeing I needed a jar of tomato sauce and a jar of cheese sauce to cook it.

It shows how far I've come as a cook I guess, and how confident I am now, that instead of throwing a wobbly, I just thought "oh well, I'll have to make some".

I sauted off two shallots, melted in an anchovy fillet, put in a glass and a half of red wine (frozen down in portions you see, from the left overs of a bottle of wine a dinner guest brought a few weeks ago), added a tin of tomatoes and "seasoned to taste". I then half blended it then left it to reduce down to thicken. Meanwhile I made a roux to make up an extra thick cheese sauce. Some fresh thyme from the garden went into the tomato sauce along with one ball of frozen chopped spinach. Once that had defrosted out into the sauce I then pour it into a dish, added the cannelloni, topped with the cheese sauce and some torn basil leaves (from the pot on the window sill) - and into the oven. Served with the ciabatta and a totally-out-of-place glass of gluten free beer, it was LOVELY!

So glad I had the confidence to make that up myself :-)