A Catch Up Before Cooking

With cookery almost upon us I thought it was time for a very brief catch up before the onslaught!

This week saw Marc M and myself off to France again shopping for ingredients. Nothing out of the ordinary, just the usual wine for cooking and any other ingredients that caught our fancy.......like some lobster for a blamanger which we'll probably do over the Christmas week of cooking. These little frozen lobsters really wind me up!! One cooked lobster, frozen in salt water, just defrost and use.........just under 5 euros EACH!!!!! (that's about £3-£3.50!!!!....so we had 4). The same size lobster, cooked and frozen in a supermarket near me (no names, but they stand for price and quality) £14.99..........FOURTEEN POUNDS!!!!!! .......and the story is a similar one with a huge list of other food stuff, it makes me mad it does! (in case you hadn't worked it out, that's the reason we shop in France for so much of our ingredient needs......it just makes more economic sense)

Now the rant is over, what else?

Robert took this picture the other day:



It's a dead male cardinal spider......our 'indigenous' species at Hampton Court. As you can see, Roberts been playing with macro photography a bit lately, so expect to see lots of pictures of stuff in EXTREME close up!

Research has been ticking along nicely this week and I'm making good progress with the stuff that I'm working on, Robert as well so I believe.

That's about it for now, ordinarily I'd be at the Palace by now but family stuff means that I won't get there 'till later today......we can then have a chat about what we're doing tomorrow and hopefully plan some good pictures for you to see.

There's only a few hours left to vote if you haven't already done so (12 hours as I write this post) to let me know how you found out about the blog. I won't see the final tally until I get back after the weekend, but as the previous post says, I'm fairly confident that I know how you all 'got here'.