Rick, Nicky and Claire in NZ

Nicky planted some lettuce seeds a few weeks ago. She put them in little pots, then put the little pots in the top and bottom of one of those plastic cake holders that your get with supermarket cakes, and put them on the Rattigan to get some sun. A week or two ago they started to sprout, one of them particularly diligently. We caught the edge of a tropical storm (Ian I think) at the beginning of the week, and got more wind than rain, and the effect the wind was having on the optimistic lettuce seedling reminded me of E.H. Shepard’s illustrations of Piglet tramping his way through the 100 acre wood against a very strong head wind. So now we don’t have lettuce seedlings outside, but Piglet's on the Rattigan. The tropical storm passing over us has been the main feature in this weeks weather, bring intermittent showers and lots of wind. Washing has still been dried outside however, and the requisite ironing completed. Along with the shopping I have also done a couple of Mac jobs. Me

It has been one of those weeks which has for me, been busy, with lots of little bits.The weather has been a bit variable so timing with putting the washing out has sometimes been an issue, but we have had plenty of warm and sunny spells, and the weekend has been pretty fantastic. In between the punctuation by laundry, I have had a range of Mac jobs, various shopping trips (all food of course), and my usual cookery duties. I tried another Paul Hollywood recipe this week, from my Christmas present book: corned beef pie. It turned out very well, and has largely been consumed on the Rattigan in the sunshine. As an aside, we watched the Winslow Boy (the more recent film, not the old black and white one) this week I and discovered that I have been spelling Rattigan incorrectly since its inception. Sorry Terrance. I didn’t have to cook on Tuesday night because Jancis invited us over for dinner; chicken with apricots followed by boysenberry ice cream - lovely. We had a very relaxing even

Well that’s the first proper week of the new year under our belts (along with quite a large quantity of Christmas food which has taken up residence under my belt), so what have we been up to? Nicky has been back to a full five day working week, though with the schools still being on holiday and lots of people still away, it has been a bit quieter than “usual”. She started the week off by un-decorating the Christmas tree and getting it ready for me to recycle while having her breakfast on Monday morning. I took the rest of the decorations down later in the day, after collecting a couple of Macs to work on at home. Monday and Tuesday were gorgeous hot sunny days, and then a bit of cloud the rest of the week with some showers on Thursday (which was because I had washed the towels and was trying to dry them!!!). So, we have had dinners on the Ratigan and 40° in the roof which generally means it has been a reasonable week. Our big news is Claire and Ryan moving to Dunedin. They bro

I can’t remember if I have told you dear reader, but last year I invented low-fat butter (some may call it lemon curd). It doesn’t have as much butter in it as butter but can be used in much the same way and is therefore really low-fat butter. Well, in true Wallace and Gromit style I have been inventing already this year, due to necessity. In order to heat up the mince pies on the beach it was necessary to develop the beach microwave. It may just look like holding the mince pie in the sun and slowly rotating it for 2 minutes (and then saying “ping”), but it’s a pretty close simulation. Anyway, welcome to this brand new squeaky clean year with the moniker 2014. Even though it is still all sparkly and fresh, things continue as with the old year. Monday was a battle with the weather to get the washing dry, as it couldn’t decide if it wanted to rain or shine, so did some of both. I also did shopping and baking, making a cake with some lobs which turned out not to be fantastic, but OK. C