Recipe for a happy Sunday: part 2

Happy Sunday guaranteed. Here's how to make it work:

children happily sleep-overed and now taking dog on a long hot walk (intention is to exhaust dog and possibly 7 year olds too)

Caprese salad. This is a bit of Italian heaven taught to me by my sister who is lucky enough to live in beautiful Tuscany - the small, the taste, the colours are all quintessentially Italian. You need good ripe tomatoes, mozarella, best olive oil, drizzle of balsamic vinegar, salt and lots of basil. Slice, tear, douse and arrange as you like on a serving dish - preferably an hour or so in advance, to allow the flavours to ooze and mingle. Buon apetito!

Sun - and lots of it. It's going to be a scorcher - those attending Wimbledon best remember their hats.

Strawberry pavlova (can't give you the recipe for this as that would be plagiarism - look at recent Delia, Waitrose: the combination of mascarpone and fromage frais in the filling is an inspired deliciousness). I drizzle a sticky reduction of summer fruits, sugar and Cointreau over the finished pud - adds a bit of contrasting colour and extra yumminess).

Sleepy, contented adults who have all shared the same hectic past few days - in need of rest, recuperation, the odd glass or two of something chilled and possibly a bit of tennis

And - most essentially - invite friend who is brilliant with all things meaty for the BBQ ... again.

Hope you have a good Sunday too.

Comments

Colour, Delacroix, flochetage and why don't we all have a go at inventing words

Yes - it is a real word. Flochetage. Well, a real-ish word. One invented by the painter Delacroix, when he found the dictionary cupboard bare and required a word to describe his technique of layering different coloured paints, using lightly pulled brush strokes to create texture and pattern and thereby enhance his base-layer colours (... lost? - stick around, read on and all will become clear. Or perhaps muddier ...). Flochetage implies both stringiness and threadiness. Apparently. And it sounds good - in a filling-the-mouth-with-sound sort of a way. Try it ... flochetaaaage. Not that I speak French. So I am probably mis-pronouncing it. Nor am I an artist. So what do I know about painting techniques - except that I think this one works. What I do like is the concept - you invent a new technique in whatever it is you do, hunt around for the vocabulary to describe it, find the dictionary is lacking, so make up a word of your own and announce to the world what it means. Delacroix isn...

My beloved boy, how lucky I have been

It's an odd thing that when we are waiting for someone to die ... and I say someone here even though the one in question was a dog - but to us he had character and a place forever in our hearts and was more of a familiar someone than some of the people in our lives. So, I'll start again - it's an odd thing that when we are waiting for someone to die, our senses go into overdrive. We notice things that normally would be part of the background of our every day. We breathe more - or rather, we don't but what we do is notice our breathing more, as we watch his. We pause. We think. We listen to ourselves and our inner voices speak. Memories flood our dreams ... though sleep is fitful. Why am I telling you this? ... ... we lost this beautiful boy today And in the hours before he went, I saw perfect spheres of dew on blades of grass - little orbs holding micro-images of our world; a bumble bee drunk on nectar, yellow-dusted with pollen, resting in a crocus; ten - yes, ten! ...

Walking, wondering and not walking at all

We all walk. I walk every day. I also lie. I don't walk every day, as in I don't take the dogs for a walk every day. Poor boys, in this season of tax returns and desperate seeking of extra work and working to pay the tax bill, they are the losers. Four-legged-friend was looking distinctly skinny in his hind legs, when I brushed his coat while he wolfed down his supper this evening (he tries to eat the brush if I take it near him at any other time, so meal times have become grooming times). Oddly, I lose out on the walking too, but this fails to have the same effect on my 'skinniness'... Anyway, we all walk. We walked on Christmas day - Littlest and I walked at the weekend - Slowly. Time to appreciate the trees. Time to encourage the smelly boys into the freezing water. Time for the sun to go down. Time to walk very, very slowly - Littlest's finger phone was engaged throughout in deep discussion with the zoo warden - da...

Walking The Dog

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