The beet my heart skipped

Home from our holiday in the Highlands to find out that everybody else had more snow than we did. Except for my brother, but even he phoned to say that my folks had lots of snow in Angus. Tom, the big brother has just moved to Berkeley with his partner and their apartment looks fantastic. There will be scrimping and saving in the Mog household till we have saved enough money for a pair of tickets over to sunny CA.

Our little holiday cottage was great, there was a pair of birdfeeders outside the lounge window and they were our main source of entertainment. Siskins, Blue Tits, Chaffinches and best of all, a woodpecker all came for meals at our diner. We knew that there would be limited food buying opportunities due to the remoteness of the cottage so we bought a huge chicken and lots of veg from our local farm shop and packed flour and yeast. A holiday first for Archie - he learned how to make bread from scratch and he turned out to be a champion kneader. We could have lived on bread and jam quite easily for the whole week, it was that good.

Knitting occurred, another of the long term log cabin squares was finished and one more started. I brought another project, a little child's sweater, to work on but forgot to pack a tape measure. The log cabin was mindless easy knitting anyway, just right for a holiday.

Things are still a bit chilly at home but the garden was needing some tidying up. The perpetual spinach, aka beet, has bravely survived the worst of the weather so as a reward I cut all of it's leaves off and boiled them. The beet should grow new, smaller, sweeter leaves and the old more bitter winter leaves will be pureed and added to soup or possibly curry. The fruit bushes are showing signs of flowering and there are seedlings in the greenhouse. All we need now is a little sun.