Showing posts with label bastille day. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bastille day. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 2, 2017

Leftover Genius, Pampanga Picking, and Berrying Hopes

It has been a while, so lots have happened since the last post. It would be tedious to talk about each item at length, so I'll just go with (hopefully) succinct bullet point entries. That's the hope anyway. My writing is hardly ever succinct. I tend to go on and on, even with bullet points. So...

Before everything else though... I'm worried that it's raining right now and I've got wash on the line - towels and sheets at that, harder to dry. Anybody want to throw a free drier my way? Driers aren't commonly used in this country, and I do love line drying, but I'm thinking a drier makes a lot of sense in the typhoon season. My wash is under a roof but the rains have frequently been accompanied by strong winds lately. Anyhoo...

Here are those bullet points. They're based on the most recent pictures I have on my phone.

  • Bastille Day Picnic - I made crêpes galore - crêpes aux pommes caramélisées and crêpes jambon fromage. I also tried making macarons à la meringue Française, but I used rice flour instead of almond flour, and then I was too lazy to wash the sifter, so I didn't sift, so is it really any wonder that they were a dud? The kids still enjoyed them like champs though. I had quite a bit of caramelized apple left over, so I made vanilla cupcakes a week later and frosted them with apple cinnamon buttercream. No picture.

  • Pinoy Pickers - We drove over to Pampanga one Saturday to pick up this vintage toy pedal car. My husband got it for the boys, but first he's going to restore it (so maybe it's not really for the boys, lol). Pampanga seems the place to go for picking. That's where my husband bought his classic VW Kombi as well.
  • Movie Night Munchies - Friday is movie night at our house unless we're going out. Anyway, we had red sauce pasta earlier for lunch. My second. Cameron, finished off the pasta (vegetable fusilli) for his afternoon snack, picking them straight off the pot until they were all gone (no sauce, just drizzled with some salt and olive oil; he actually prefers his pasta that way.). So we ended up with a lot of left over pasta sauce, tomato with ground beef, and since we had a loaf of bread on the brink of expiration, I decided to combine both into some sort of pizza bread. There was still sauce after that, so I stored it and just yesterday, incorporated it into a second tortilla de patata (the first one just had dill and spring onion). No picture of the tortillas. but there's one of the pizza bread along with the apple cookies I'd also made for Movie Night. Dang, that rain's getting stronger.
  • Blooming Mulberry - I'm excited about these flowers! We waited months for this plant to bloom. I don't know if it was the rain or I unwittingly pruned correctly, but whatever - I'm stoked! I'm just praying right now that they actually turn into berries. See those cinder blocks beyond the wall? That's one of the townhouses they're building next door. At least they've painted the firewall, so when I look out my bedroom window, I see a blindingly white expanse. It actually makes me a bit claustrophobic even if there's about 15-20 meters of open space between my windows and that stupid wall. When I stand close to the window, I can see some sky. Ugh, I hate it. These structures have blocked not only the view, but the natural light and mountain breeze as well. 
Now that I'm done with the bullet points, I remember a bunch of other noteworthy (to me anyway) details from the past weeks. I didn't snap a photo though, so they're not getting blogged about, lol.

We do have a couple of videos to string together into a vlog episode, but we need more time to post that. Until then. Or until another video-less blog post. :)