Today has been very hot by UK standards. It got well into the 30s here on the Island and I think I actually saw colleagues melting across the floor. There was a point of sweatiness from which there was zero recovery towards the end of the working day. I try not to moan about the heat but it was a tad brain-stifling. On the very positive side, since we’re not jetting off anywhere this summer, having a bit of European heat makes me feel like we’re living on the med. Apparently we are back to more temperate climes tomorrow…..

It may be hot but as usual, the small humans need feeding and so tonight we went back to an old favourite of Jimmie’s KFC which I wrote about some time ago. I thought it was amazing but judging by the kids’s faces and time taken to eat it, clearly I served up the usual pigs swill….. The latest foray into cooking round the world fared much better.

Seafood Linguine al Cartoccio

A few weeks ago I was sitting with a colleague in an intensely dull meeting. It was a 3hr meeting on Zoom and I understood approximately 2.5% of the content (for anyone from work reading this, I understood a bit more of it but that doesn’t have the same dramatic story-telling effect!). We may have momentarily drifted from the meeting as I was explaining my latest food adventure. This colleague is conveniently from Italy and so I asked what a typical dish from his part of Italy is. The thing with this challenge is we are meant to be cooking new things and as anyone who keeps up with my cooking antics knows, I cook a lot of Italian food. This is mostly due to his Holiness JO writing predominantly Italian recipes. So, finding a new recipe felt like hard work so, it was fortuitous that I found myself in a dull meeting with a chatty Italian. He gave me two options, I’d never cooked either and this one made me the most excited!

Al Cartuccio means ‘cooked in a bag’. Like ‘en papillote’ in French or in foil as I did it. This recipe comes from The Pasta Project and was really easy to cook. I used mussels, prawns, seabass and squid in the sauce. I will admit to being unable to find fresh mussels in Tesco so ended up using Tesco’s mussels in white wine (cook in the bag kind) and just added less wine to the recipe to compensate. The dish was superb and both ACOD and EEROD ate it all and declared they loved mussels (both) and squid (ACOD) which for me is win all round!

Completely unrelated but a rather lovely dish was a chocolate pavlova which I made for pud last weekend! I used Nigella’s recipe which I have made a few times before.

In other news:

• The girls have all finished yet another year of school. They have all had fantastic reports and so we are quite proud. We have another 8 weeks of parenting ahead until they can be safely deposited back in school 5 days a week.
• LOD spent a week in Barcelona on music tour and got her first ballet pointe shoes. Growing up fast and 5 months off being a teenager!
• I have clocked up yet another year on this planet and am now officially closer to 50 than 40. Yikes! COD managed to get Covid over my birthday so it was a more sedate affair than usual
• ACOD has also managed to clock up another year on this planet. Our youngest child is now 7 and we survived a roller skating party without injuring anyone else’s child. This year’s cake was an easy number 7 covered in 4.5m jazzies! She loved it. It was one of my best in terms of the actual cake.
• I am managing to mess up a lot of sewing although have taught myself shirring and have a cute summer top on the sewing table so hopefully I get to finish that at some point.
• The dog situation has gotten more interesting with our first few beach outings. We’ve managed to ruin one nice couple’s morning on the beach and established Fly isn’t in love with water! Puppy classes start tomorrow so expect perfect dog behaviour going forward! Hahahaha – hardly! Fly and Simba are working on their friendship. In the meantime, Fly is happily destroying all his soft toys.
• I’m managing to run a bit more these days and excitingly, the weekend ACOD will join the O’D Parkrun mornings. I will have to plumb the depths of my patience to get her round 5km!