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

EssexHebridean

Bobarella wrote: »

I have made hummus with red kidney beans before. Interesting....But edible

I was going to use one of the three tins of chickpeas I also have for that... :rotfl: On the subject of food i popped to the Turkish supermarket at lunchtime - remembered I needed green lentils, and also bought a bag of their lovely flatbreads which it occurs to me will go nicely withe the Jack Monroe burgers.

£5 paid off the card tonight. :T Needless to say phone app didn't bat an eyelid at letting me do it without the card reader!

Plotting and planning here for our next Hebrides trip in a few months. All change this year - new accommodation, different ferry route...I'm using my journal to make notes of what needs booking and I'll probably do a bit of it on Friday while I'm sitting here shivering with no kitchen window... :eek:

Dinner out with a Cheery pal tomorrow evening as long as the Tube Strike doesn't stop play - and yes I deliberately capitalised Cheery! :T:D

MistyMountainTop

I want to come and have dinner at your house every night. Corn fritters sound amazing - how have I not had these before???

I've made some kidney bean burgers from a Jack Monroe recipe that were fantastic. She has another one that uses beets, I have some in the fridge so am hoping to try them soon. Unfortunately no one else in the family was as impressed as I was with the burgers, so I will make them and freeze what I don't use for myself, and give the others chicken or beef.

How long is the ferry trip?

EssexHebridean

Ooh I saw her beetburger recipe as well Misty - that looked good! The corn fritters are super-easy, a great way of using up stray eggs and really tasty too!

There are assorted routes we can use for Hebrides trip - in the past we've always gone across by the shortest (1hr45m) and the last few years we've come back via the longest (a bit over 5 hrs) - this year's will be the "compromise" route from Mallaig > Lochboisdale and takes 3.5hrs. :T I LOVE travelling by boat so this level of time on one makes me very happy. MrEH is more conservative about it however...:cool: The trade-off is a VERY early start on our last day - so we'll have to see how that goes - an hour earlier getting up means 2 hours less driving on the mainland so probably worthwhile though.

**

Just remembered I need to sort printer cartridges for home as ours has run out I think. I may need a list for tomorrow though so must add that to there. I figure if I have to be indoors for most of the day I'm going to make it work for me. Kitchen visit has slipped until a little later but that's probably not a bad thing - albeit there is now a chance that the kitchen man and the water meter man will arrive at the same time! :rotfl:

Hoping that once kitchens and water meters are sorted I'll be able to leave the window chaps to their own devices for a bit and sneak out and at least do the shopping...

Tube strike isn't looking like causing too many issues so dinner and a natter tonight is GO! :T

rtandon27

Oooo your light has turned green so I'm guessing you made it home from the big smoke!

Cheery_Daff

We did indeed stuffed full of cake mind you :rotfl:

We need printer ink too - although printer is currently refusing to recognise it has any paper in it so need to sort that first before I buy ink for a printer we can't use!

EssexHebridean

Haha RT - yep! Tubes were somewhat chaotic - but the nice thing is even us Londoners actually TALK to each other in that situation, so there were a few giggles along the way too. Catch-up with Cheery was ace too - and we both ended up full of sticky toffee pudding which is always a good thing!

I now have a new Kitchen window, new kitchen door, and a rather fabulous front door - VERY exciting! I also have a very reasonable quote for replacing the other windows round the flat too - which has now been added to my list of works - I can see us getting those done sooner rather than later. We've got to go to the kitchen showroom tomorrow to decide on worktops and handles - also very exciting. Then we get emailed a drawing and the plan for the kitchen, and the prices go to our builder (which is the way it has to be done apparently!) - hoping we can get the details all tied up to crack on with it now!

Shameless fish & chip dinner tonight - with the only excuse being that I spent half the day FREEZING as the windows were done and as MrEH got the best of it as he just had to come home and admire them. So I demanded a chippy tea. Fair I think!

I did manage to achieve a fair amount too - started the day with a mammoth list and have got most of it done - just a few bits to carry across to tomorrow.
- Once the windows were done I popped out to sort the shopping.
- The week's mealplan is done, AND part of the next weeks too.
- A large pile of paperwork is reduced to a smaller pile of paperwork and a lot of it filed away. - The intermediate travel for the way to and from the Hebrides is booked, and the bunkhouse we use for the first night is paid.
- Bathroom has had a swish.
- The final CC transfer for the months expenses is done.
- I've ordered the new doorbell
- The window & doors are paid for
- my phone is backed up.

The water man turned up and agreed that there wasn't room for a water meter, although apparently we could have TWO water meters - one for the bathroom feed and one for the kitchen. The kitchen one, he told me, would be fitted behind the dishwasher. From there,the conversation went a little like this...
Me: Oh, right. So how would I read that then?
Him: Oh you don't need to read it...
Me: *raises eyebrow* Oh?
Him: No - it sends a signal with the reading...
Me: Riiiight. So how do I read it to check that the readings are correct then?
Him *looking a little less confident* Errr...well you can't...but then you don't need to?
Me: Yes. I do. We won't be doing that! :rotfl:
He's gone back to tell the water company that we need to be put on an assessed bill... :rotfl::rotfl:

Oh, and I rang HMRC to double check whether the texts I'd kept getting hinting that I had tax to pay were genuine. Turns out the chap who told me before christmas that no, I didn't was wrong. Not impressed, and £105 lighter. Grr!

EssexHebridean

Cheery_Daff wrote: »

We did indeed stuffed full of cake mind you :rotfl:

We need printer ink too - although printer is currently refusing to recognise it has any paper in it so need to sort that first before I buy ink for a printer we can't use!

Hee hee - I spent so long writing my post you'd posted in between times! :rotfl:

What make of printer? We had one do that and the advice was that it was just something that make/model did, and annoyingly we ended up having to replace. Mind you as the cartridges for the current one are about to cost us just over £40 we'd probably be cheaper to buy a new one this time too! (No, we're not going to!)

angelpye

I have made the burgers and froze them because they made my DD cry when she tried one...she can be a bit emotional if she doesn't like something and the texture is a little odd. I adored them though so great for a night when she wants something I can't face having so regularly.

EssexHebridean

angelpye wrote: »

I have made the burgers and froze them because they made my DD cry when she tried one...she can be a bit emotional if she doesn't like something and the texture is a little odd. I adored them though so great for a night when she wants something I can't face having so regularly.

Oh bless her - hope they don't have the same affect on MrEH! :rotfl:

Forgot to mention earlier by the way - shopping came to £34 odd after a couple of vouchers were taken into account, but that included 2 bottles of screenwash concentrate at £2.75 each and a 6-pack of water filter cartridges for £15.24 I think it was - about the cheapest unit price you can get the Maxtra cartridges for anyway. I *think* that qualifies for savvy shopping. Oh and Greying - if you see this - ThaT supermarkeT has a 4 pack of "ripen at home" avocados for £1.75 - but admittedly you'd need to be confident of finding a use for all 4 in the timescale to make it worthwhile. Might have succumbed to a mango too...

Cheery_Daff

Good shopping! :money:

Printer is canon ip7200 - deliberately bought after checking cost of cartridges after being stung on that before :eek: we get ours from Inkredible - mostly because of the name but they're also cheap and sell generic ones :j

Brief search tells me it's not only our printer that's done this and there are suggestions to try... yawn... :rotfl: