I like Pesto sauce with pasta, and so does Sarah - as long as it's freshly made pesto, as encountered in restaurants. I'll tolerate pesto sauce from a jar, which she won't, but I still vastly prefer the fresh stuff.
One day I'll set up the resources needed to make it, but in the meantime, today we found a way of reviving jar pesto... we were having gnocci with sun-dried tomato pesto, but were both craving garlic, so I decided to liven the pesto up by pouring a bit of oil into a pan and frying a crushed garlic clove, then adding the pesto, then the gnocci.
The result was YUMMY. Not in the way that freshly made pesto is, but in a different way; the garlic somehow took the bitter edge off of the pesto's taste, and made it lovely instead.
I plan to experiment with doing this to other types of pesto and seeing what the result's like - but I'd still like to make my own fresh pesto sauce one day.
I was outside yesturday evening when the kittens came trotting over and placed this at my feet.
I am both happy that they consider me worthy of their presants but at the same time feel sad for the poor little rodent. Still it means they are definatly good mousers now - even though that isnt a mouse!
Cats naturally tend towards the highest point they can get to. I presume this is to do with the ease of defending a high point and the ability to easily survey the most terrain, but either way, they seem to enjoy lounging in places they have to climb up to...
For ours, when they're indoors, the highest point they can reach is the top of a box, which is on top of a bookcase about two metres tall, in my office (which is upstairs to begin with). It's also a rather awkward place to extract them from when we put them out for the night, which I think they've realised too. But by climbing up on my desk, I can get them down anyway.
Anyway, as I came back to my desk after lunch, I realised that both of the black and white cats were curled up together up there, and made a cute picture (although I only had my mobile phone to hand, so sorry about the quality):
No this time it isn't part of the curse instead it was a bit of bad luck for peeps upstream of us. The dam of their lake broke and a huge surge of water came down the stream that runs through the garden here! This was in the afternoon of the 13th of Jan 2007.
We weren't actually here to witness this but a neighbour took some photos - we were quiet starteled when we saw them!
This is the stone bridge by the water cress pond, there is normally a little statue of a boy called Gilbert residing in here. He was missing after the flood but once the water level went down it turned out he'd just been knocked off his plinth!
Our compost heap is now responsible for phosphate and nitrate contamination of the water courses! Yep thats it half submerged there.
Beleive it or not there is a tunnel that thestream flows through just under the road there - it is completely below the water line meaning water had to have come over the road!
As you can see compared to our little trickle this was something else! Poor Barbara had not long planted out a load of iris and rushes along the stream which all got washed away 🙁
Where we park the cars has been getting muddier and muddier to the point of Sarah slidding right over when getting in a vechile!
Barbara said she had some gravel from the graval path around the veg gardens that we should move there to stop the problem. So yesturday Al and Mike put their backs into shifting the 'gravel'.
NOw being a geologist I was amazed to find that 'graval' in this instance means - mud with lots of pebbles in!
The result as I predicted is an even more muddy parking space than before though without the great ruts that had begun to appear! We are hoping that the rain is going to was the mud away leaving just the pebbles which might actually work but given our current bad luck field is unlickely to!
Recipies | alaric | 
Tue 23rd Jan 2007 11:05 pm | 
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