Cooking, baking and being a general domestic goddess...

It's hard to admit in the world of Mommy blogs that I am RUBBISH in the kitchen.  Facebook knows it well, I am often lamenting some kitchen disaster or another.

I have a talent for burning food and oven gloves.  I nearly killed me and Chatterbox once with an incident with an oven glove, we nearly passed out from the smoke - so toxic and thick. Urgh - BE CAREFUL WITH OVEN GLOVES (they should come with a health warning).  At work I burned a hole in an oven cloth, they were amazed.  No-one had ever managed to burn an oven cloth before on a hot plate that wasn't hot enough to burn an oven cloth.  Yes my people, if Britain's Got Talent ever allowed me on the show I would most certainly win, but I feel that it's a talent I should only share with my family.

Rice - always gets burned.  So, I tried to make it in the microwave yesterday, I followed some instructions I found online to the letter and it boiled over.  I open the door and it floods my countertop.  Then I can't pick up the microwave plate because it's covered in boiling hot water.  If I pick it up with my new super dooper flame, burn, heat resistant expensive oven gloves that G bought me (which already has holes in because of my previously mentioned miraculous oven glove burning ability) then the water would seep through the oven glove causing me to drop the plate.  So I had to put plastic bags over my oven gloves to stop the hot water seeping through and scalding me.

*sigh*

Cakes and pizza are awful.  I must admit this isn't just my fault, I have a slimline oven which is terrible.  The heat is too intense (I think the heating elements are in the base, top AND sides).  Cake and pizza is burned at the edges and uncooked in the middle.  Even if I turn down the oven temperature they still burn around the edges and are uncooked in the middle.  So frustrating.

However, I've just seen on Sandra's blog that you can enable a cake to cook evenly by wrapping damp towel strips around the edges of a cake tin.  I might try that and see if I have any success!  Here's her post: Cleaning, Cake, Cooking.  Oh and if you love cooking visit her food blog, Full Bellies, Happy Kids one of her lasagne recipes I adapted for us and it is a great success - one of my few culinary successes LOL!

I can make a great baked potato though!  Actually I'm OK if I concentrate - I'm one of those people who is always doing 3 things at once.  You can't always do that with cooking.   You need to be checking and stirring.  Instead I set something cooking, wander off, get distracted and am brought back to reality by a loud hissing spitting noise or the smoke alarm going off. :)

Stuff and nonsense

I don't know why the title. LOL

It's been a wonderful Easter holidays, the girls have been off school and I've been off work since Good Friday, we all return on Monday next week.

I'm quite nervous returning to work.  I have been working in the school kitchen now for almost three years, but on Monday I start work in the school office.  It's more hours over four days a week.  It'll be interesting at first getting into a new routine, so if I don't post here or visit your blog you'll understand!  I'm rather nervous because it's more hours, but rather excited because I'm back in a job I think I do well - those who know me know that catering in any form is not my biggest talent! :)

So last week we did two exciting things - we visited the Lake District (see my previous post for some AMAZING photos of the beautiful landscape) and we bought a new car!  Well, new to us.  It's so SHINY!

This week so far I've visited Granddad (Dad's dad) on Monday with the girls, he's doing well - thank you to those blog friends who have been praying for him, please continue to pray though. In the afternoon Chatterbox had a friend over for tea, which was fun.  Yesterday I went to see my Grandma (Mum's mum) in the morning, in the afternoon me and the girls did some drawing and then went on a bit of a walk. Today I need to try to get some cleaning and ironing done.  Tomorrow I'm not sure...

Hope you're having a great week! :)

Beeeeuuuutiful Lake District

We spent a night away at the Lake District - Windermere to be exact - we had a lovely time. Cumbria has had some SERIOUS snow, some of it beat the snow we got around our house recently (big snowdrifts everywhere!), but the snow only remained really on the higher ground, it made the mountains and hills beeeeuuutiful!

Lots of trees to climb

Aira Force- Aira from old Norse meaning gravel bank, force is a northern English word for waterfall.

Skimming stones