CuppaTea

Sadly, I expect to be defeated by my own challenge. And yet it was so much fun designing it, and contemplating it, that I plan to continue with it, even though the 2020 deadline looms far too close. When I drafted a list of recipes I might try for this challenge, I expected to have a cake for this category - specifically Black Forest Cake. Just, yum! But now that I am living on my own I am doing much more savoury cooking because people need to eat every day, apparently. ;) And so there are a few recipes, a few dishes, which I have made several times because they are familiar and/or simple enough to throw together after a day at work. My Mum's potato quiche recipe is a favourite of mine. I associate it with Thursday nights when my sisters and I had netball training, because it was something Mum could cook during the day to have ready. This could be a false association, a false memory, but that is where it fits in my mind. And since I have only myself to please or displease

Blue is my favourite colour. It has been for as long as I can remember. And purple and green have come in second, always. And yet, this year is the colour green. I have moved interstate when I had expected to be moving overseas. My new home has a garden, and it baffles me that things grow without any help or hindrance from me. Because someone else (or several other people) have established the garden in previous years, plants occasionally burst forth and I have no idea what they are until someone else recognises a photo I show them. Usually after mystery plants have started flowering. The garden at the beginning of May, before it rained for a few weeks. Mystery plants emerging... Turned out to be these bluebells! I had to have someone come and tell me which green things were weeds and which were garden plants. And then it rained and rained and everything grew before I could get the weeds out and a swath of proper garden plants burst up and I could no longer even se

In 2017 a friend and I set ourselves a recipe challenge to be completed by 2020. In 2018 I nearly forgot all about it, but I am now staring at the looming finish line and am keen to pick it up again. I have completed two out of 27 categories, so in order to complete it I will need to address one category every two weeks. Eek! Oh, except one category is to make one dish from each region of Spain... Well, that might take some effort as well! And paella is a separate category! And so, at the beginning of the year, I sat down and reviewed the categories to begin thinking about what recipes I might like to try, and what time of year might be good to try each of them. Summer might be a good time to try a salad, or any recipe which needs summer fruits, for example. I will need some help finding recipes, so if you have a favourite recipe which you think matches one of my categories, please let me know! Especially if you have a simple recipe from any region of Spain - preferably in Engli

When I wrote at the halfway point , I was less than halfway through two out of three categories, and had admitted defeat in the third category - at least for 2018. What has happened in the second half of 2018?