Happy Easter!

Nick sent this to us as an Easter greeting a couple of years ago - it always makes K giggle like a little boy!

Thank goodness for the Easter bank holiday weekend - four days of enforced time off work! It has been a festival of cooking and eating and an orgy of relaxing...

We kicked off the proceedings by hosting a dinner for eight here on Thursday evening, in honour of one of K's colleagues whose contract has come to an end. We started cooking for that on Wednesday night, to fit all the preparations around work, but somehow I still managed to get chained to the kitchen for two hours on the night making salads... The first recipes we have tried from our new cookbook purchase, Ottolenghi, but how yummy and worth the wait! One with broad beans and radishes, another with fennel and feta and sumac, and lots of lemon juice and olive oil in both. A lovely evening, but one which reminded us that it is difficult to entertain eight comfortably in our flat!

On Good Friday, K went into work - it was the first day that the Tudor wine fountain he has been involved with recreating was going to be up and running and serving wine, and he wanted to be around to make sure all went smoothly. I went in to meet him for lunch, then to be introduced in person to the wine fountain - which is just amazing, but more on that anon! I gained the distinction of being the first person ever to pay for a glass of wine from the fountain! I also went round some of the parts of the palace they had made changes to since the last time I had been - and went round the Georgian apartments, which for some reason I had never visited before but really loved, in large part because they were the Hampton Court home of Caroline of Ansbach, wife of George II, who is one of the characters in the second Neal Stephenson book, The Confusion, which I have just finished reading and which in all honesty has made me far more interested in the 18th century than I have ever been! On the train there, I was reading about the celebrations of her 18th birthday, and here I had jumped forward - or back - in time to the apartments she lived in at the end of her life!

Home long before K to prepare some of the food for our Easter Sunday lunch party - braised broad beans in tomatoes and herbs, the first time I had cooked beans from dried, and I think the only advantage of this was that they held together better during the long cooking process because in the end I am not sure the dish was all that tasty! I also made lemony biscuits and blackberry ice cream for dessert, using the blackberries we picked on my birthday last year, which have been taking up space in the freezer since then - along with a blackberry and apple pie filling, and quite a few raspberries as I rediscovered to my interest...

On Saturday we journeyed out to Little Chalfont - via the urban wasteland of Watford, due to multiple engineering works on the railways - for the interment of K's grandfather Robert's ashes, in the churchyard in Chenies where he now rests with Betty, his wife of over 60 years. We had a nice family lunch in the pub nearby, then back to the flat for the last time, to choose any books and CDs we wanted to keep, and help K's parents and uncle load furniture onto the hire van, to clean out cupboards and sort what remains into boxes. The sale should be completed by the end of April - fingers crossed - but the flat should be empty by the end of this week. It suddenly struck K as we were leaving that he would never go back there.

Home to marinade the lamb for Easter Sunday lunch and mix up another batch of blackberry ice cream.

On Sunday morning we had to prepare the rest of the food for Sunday lunch but also receive K's father and uncle and the hire van full of furniture K was inheriting from his grandparents, which he had loaded up the day before. This included two bookcases - one of which was made by his great grandfather who was a cabinet maker - and to make room for these, K had to take everything off the two (smaller) bookcases we already had ... so at one point our sitting room was just a pile of books, and 6 lunch guests due in less than half an hour...! But amazingly everything got delivered, fitted into place and books shoved back into them at random, and by the time the doorbell rang for the first guest, it was as if nothing had ever been out of place!

They're rather beautiful pieces of furniture but they give the flat a strong feeling of living in the past that I haven't quite got used to yet. They're the kind of cabinet that might have furnished this flat when it was originally built in the 1930s.




And so to lunch. We followed a Greek-inspired menu by chef Maria Elia, from the food magazine we subscribe to, Olive. Over the years it has come to seem very repetitive and there is far too much Gordon Ramsay in it for my liking, but in every issue there are always 2 or 3, sometimes more, new recipes which we try, and which keep us experimenting with food, and for want of a good substitute, we keep buying it.

This lunch menu started with halloumi and a nice salad made with fennel, celery, olives and parsley; and in addition to the braised broad beans, was accompanied by lemon-roasted potatoes with capers, and wilted spinach with pine nuts and a dressing made with sultanas, herbs and red wine vinegar. But of course the star of the feast was the paper-wrapped leg of lamb that we had marinated overnight with garlic and plentiful herbs and spices and more lemon juice - quite a number of lemons lost their lives to put our lunch on the table! This was the result:

served up on a lovely mid-19th century platter which I inherited from my grandmother, and enjoyed by all - but especially by K and I for whom this was the first meat to pass our lips in 6 weeks!! It was gorgeous!!

A long lingering Sunday lunch with Lindsay & Russell and Wanda & Az, that went on until about quarter to 8, which is how we like our Sunday lunches, and all the better for not having to go to work today...

And so to Easter Monday. We finally got a lie-in this morning - K shocked me into wakefulness by looking at the clock and saying it was 1.15!! Which fortunately it wasn't - the pillow was obscuring the first 1! A lazy breakfast - I am now reading the 3rd of the Neal Stephenson books, The System of the World, which K is jealous about because he hasn't read this one yet! - and then we took ourselves off to the Ritzy for some mindless entertainment in the form of Clash of the Titans, which was great! I love the original film and of course this was nothing like that, but there's nothing like a bit of Greek mythology to get you going!

It was shown in 3D, as everything seems to be these days - the Ritzy had obviously run out of 3s for the board out front where they still put up all the film titles of what's on that week in the traditional way, which I love, and so they were advertising Clash of the Titans in 4D! What would that be?? You are actually in the movie I suppose! But I like the idea of it because it always reminds me of Victorian stereoscope images - the 3D glasses you have to put on are literally the modern equivalent of the stereoscope glasses you used to have to use. Though the technology for creating these images in film-form has obviously greatly advanced, somehow this little bit of lo-fi kit is such a pleasing link to the past...

K is now sorting books, CDs and DVDs, trying to fit everything onto the new bookcases, which have smaller and narrower shelves, and integrating the not-very-restrained pile of books and CDs we brought from his grandfather's. If we end up moving to this new flat, chances are that none of this is going to fit...