EH - Essex > Hebrides...the next step of the adventure?

girlatplay

greent said:

girlatplay said:

I have all the ingredients for your tea too. That sounds delish indeed.  How do you make the burgers? Just mince and onion then oven?

Not sure about EH but I mix mince and finely chopped onions and black pepper and shape into burger shapes and chill to firm up before cooking. Some people add a little egg or breadcrumbs to the mix (I've also added in really finely diced red pepper before)

Thank you.  I'll give them a try at some point.

milann

Can’t beat a home made burger. 

Hope you’ve enjoyed your weekend. I started watching Derry Girls a while back but forgot about it….thanks for the reminder. I’ll have to go back and continue watching.

EssexHebridean

girlatplay said:

I have all the ingredients for your tea too. That sounds delish indeed.  How do you make the burgers? Just mince and onion then oven?

Yep - pretty much as greent says - I finely chop the onion using a mandolin with a chopping blade, then "smoosh" that and the mince together well with my hands to get it really well mixed. Season, and add a shake of breadcrumbs (straight from the freezer) smoosh (technical wording again there!) it all together again then shape into patties and chill again before cooking in a frying pan on the hob over a low/medium heat. I usually make mine quite chunky as I don't mind them being slightly pink in the centre (I'm very confident of the origin of the mince I'm using - wouldn't risk that with supermarket mince) and they take a fair few minutes on each side. 

SH that's good info on the FD reg saver - although won't affect us as we view the regular savers as "locked away" money anyway. 

Thanks everyone for popping in - always lovely to have visitors! 

My weekend was going very well until a ring on our doorbell yesterday evening - MrEH answered it to find one of our upstairs neighbours there asking "have you heard about "EH's" car?" - uh-oh, never a good sign, that. Turned out that some nasty low-lifes had decided to heft a brick through the windscreen. Bit of a nightmare as we didn't really have space to get the car into the garage either - although that had to be hastily rectified as no way could it stay out as it was. Plus of course the inside of the car is liberally coated in fine shards of glass too - I managed to get the worst of those up using our mini-hoover at least enough so I could get in to move the car. Handily our friends on the top floor have permanent CCTV running since they had a couple of attempted break-ins of their garage, and that covered the area where my car was so at least we have footage of what happened. The other fortunate thing is that although the brick was thrown - from a distance of several feet in front of the car - it hit the screen, then bounced upwards and (thank goodness) backwards before clearing the roof and all bodywork and landing at the kerbside - SO fortunate it didn't hit the roof in particular as I'd imagine that could have lead to a write-off of the car. All in all, annoying but not devastating - £75 windscreen excess is irritating but we're in the fortunate position of having the right insurance, having a second car so my trip to Eastbourne this weekend isn't impacted, AND having the funds on stand-by to pay that excess. Windscreen repair is now booked in for Thursday when MrEH will be WFH, and he'll then have the use of my car over the weekend (although I may have to get him to take it to the garage to give it a thorough vacuum out, as well.)

In other news - hallway works start again today - this week should be decorating plus the tiled floor in the internal porch area - Lovely Steve is currently knee-deep in the painting side of things and we'll get stuff like doorknobs for the cupboards ordered today ready for fitting. Quite exciting, and also rather handy now as we're rather desperate to get the stuff from the hallway back in place again - particularly the freezer which had to be moved from the garage back to the spare room/MrEH's office last night... Hopefully we'll also be able to get the main run of flooring sorted fairly soon too - Steve is hopefully quoting for that, too. That in turn should make quite the difference to the temperature of the flat once winter hits.

Shopping for the week ended up being split over Al's and Sainsbugs, with an additional trip to F'rmf00ds to top up storecupboard supplies of tuna and also buy some ice creams (much needed this weekend!) Al's was a hefty £37 (this included a chicken which will do a number of meals, some snack food for holiday and some storecupboard stuff, too though) and Sainsbugs was just fruit etc that we couldn't get at Al's - ££6.31 spent there. While down at FF's we also popped into our favourite local charity shop to drop in a couple of bags of stuff for them, and I found a really nice little summer skirt for £2 which I'm very chuffed with. There was also a town centre visit yesterday morning with a bit of (planned) spendiness - new walking shoes and a new bra for me - both needed. (and the bra was another bargainous M@tal@n one - £8 which is an absolute steal for anything that works for me! Finally we took advantage of Ordnance Survey's current "3 for £20" maps offer to update three of our Hebrides maps ahead of the upcoming trip - we've been talking about it for a while and this replaces maps from 2007 and even one as old as 2003 so probably overdue! 

I've just done a bit of planning/rearranging  of holiday days as well - I had this Wednesday booked off but I'm not now planning on going to the event that I'd booked that for so have switched that to next Monday which tallies up with both catching up on stuff after Eastbourne and me not travelling into London on a day when MrEH won't be, either. I've now got nice short weeks for the next few weeks running which will be lovely! Also now trying to plan in our Hebrides trip for next year, too - as we've got the availability dates for the cottage from Anne so trying to work out dates that work for her with dates that work for us with beer festival stuff etc. Looks like another summer into Autumn trip is beckoning though, with a reversion to spring into summer the following year, all being well. 

Lots going on, it seems!  

leftatthetrafficlights

@EssexHebridean that's massively annoying about the car! 🤦‍♀️😔 it's good that you can minimise the impact but still awful regardless! 

Glad the hallway stuff is getting sorted and a few short weeks sounds like a good idea with how busy you've been recently! 😉😁

beanielou

Blimey.  That's so not on 

girlatplay

I'm sorry to hear about the car.  I'm glad you can get it fixed fairly easily and that no other damage was done but such an inconvenience.  I always feel extremely angry when things like this happen as we work hard for what we have and then we have to pay when the bad guy gets off scot free (the majority of the time).

It sounds like you are getting closer the the hall being completed.  That's exciting!

lucielle

Does the cctv show who did it and can you go to the police?  Very annoying!
L

EssexHebridean

Already reported to the police, and they are sending our neighbour a letter asking him to send the CCTV footage - I'll send through the short clips I have from it too but the hope is that they might be able to get a registration for the bike from the original footage. They have confirmed that ANPR cameras haven't turned anything up though. I don't honestly expect there to be anyone caught to be honest - but we'll be keeping a VERY close eye out for bikes matching what that one looked like in the area for a while. GAP - it makes me cross too - I can only begin to imagine what the culprit's reaction would be if someone damaged his bike, yet he thought nothing of damaging someone else's property like that. I can't really begin to understand what makes someone like that - but I can only feel fortunate that it was only glass damage to be honest. 

I confess I'm really excited to see how the hallway is looking by the time we get home this evening. The cupboard door knobs are now ordered, and the "stop" to prevent the inner door smacking back and damaging the plaster. Those will both be collected by MrEH tomorrow morning I think, then we need to measure the stop thing to see if it is also suitable for the main front door, and if so we'll have to order another one as well. 

Banking checked and all OK - we've decided not to add anything more to the premium bonds for the time being - although we'll most likely throw the proceeds of one or another regular saver across there when they mature - that's always been the plan. There are another 4 payments to go to each of our N@tionw1de Start to Save accounts - so those will mature just before Christmas by the look of it - and our Coventry reg savers will be in the New year, I imagine we'll probably immediately open new versions of those too. I see the current issue of that will soon be offering 2% which isn't too bad at all for a relatively short fixed term. 

Need to work out for definite where the money to pay Steve will be coming from too - although I think I'm pretty sold on the idea of nicking it from the car account to be honest. 

foxgloves

What a completely senseless act of vandalism that was, @EH, to brick your car windscreen like that. Expect it made some stupid little farty feel like a big man for a whole massive 30 seconds. I agree with you that it could have been a lot worse if it had stoved in a panel on your car, though. 
F

Cheery_Daff

Urgh, how very annoying! And why, since they clearly weren't planning to steal the car?? I take it nothing was stolen from inside?