Coffeehouse.co.nz

The last week or two have seen three new kitchen experiences here:

1) Cooking with Quail’s eggs. They’re just so cute! And fiddly to de-shell. And seem to taste pretty much the same as ordinary eggs. Did I mention that they’re really cute though?!

2) Finally using our pizza stone to cook pizza on. Which did a fantastic job of getting the first crispy base pizza I’ve ever had with home made pizza dough.

3) Finally using our pasta machine to make some, wait for it… Wait for it…. PASTA! A bit of fun and games there, but we seem to have got the hang of it, and our ravioli and noodles turned out fine in the end.

Yup, it’s all go here!

Hopefully this has gone by pretty much unnoticed by you, but I’ve just shifted the server this blog is hosted on in preparation for some pretty big infrastructure changes here in the next few months.

A few things currently still look a bit different as I still need to track down some of the changes I made the the template that ran the previous version and redo them in the updated one, but all in all I’m pretty happy with how the move went. No major dramas, no databases getting lost… All pretty smooth!

Cross fingers it continues like that!

A couple of weekends ago we had a night out of London.  Once again we went and stayed with Liz and Dave.  And every time we do they always take us to something that is happening in the local towns/villages.  Last time it was a raft race and this time it was a good ole fair in Stamford. The fair had been set up all over the town, basically wherever they could find space (not like I remember from when I was a kid and they are set up on a local field or something similar).  So the town was taken over by a number or rides, candy floss sellers, and game stalls.

Its been a while since I have been on a ride, but Liz managed to convince me to get on ‘the frog’.  And once on I was thinking “what have I done?!” and “is there no way to get off now until the ride is finished?!”  But once I had been round a couple of times and was used to what was happening I managed to relax and remove the startled look from my face. And for the bargain price of £3 it was eventually quite enjoyable!

The afternoon saw us play many a game of pool at one of the local pubs.  I do love the quaint English country pubs. You just can’t beat them!  Then the evening had us at their local town hall for an Irish night.  A meal, some drinks and a raffle – of which we managed to win a prize.  A quiet night but something different for us which is always really nice.

Then on Sunday we visited another couple of relatively local spots. The first was a grand collection of hills and holes from an old quarry. Really nice to wander around, even if the flowers weren’t quite out yet. The second was the Nene Valley Railway.  It has steam trains which you can go on or even learn to drive (we didn’t do either – yet. We may yet be back…)  We just spent the time wandering around the old trains and then looking at a lot of 3 wheeled cars (like the one Mr Bean had) in the car park.  All in all another nice weekend out of London.