Tag: seasons

Fruit Crumble

~ Ruth ~ 4 Comments

A chronological line up of pics showing a day in the life of two types of autumn fruits progressing from plant to plate 🙂

The fruit on mum and dad’s plum tree is ripening nicely just now, as are the brambles growing along the side of the road by the house. So the other day my husband picked some of both and I made them into one big fruit crumble.

After cooking in the oven I could see the fruit had been far juicier than I had anticipated so the end result didn’t look the best with all the juice soaking right up through the sugary cinnamony crumble topping but oh, the smell – and the taste – was absolutely delicious.

We had it hot with custard on the first day, then cold with vanilla ice cream the next… yum! 🙂

Weekly Prompt: Line Up

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Scottish Summer Sea

~ Ruth ~ 5 Comments

Experiencing the usual combination of warming sun and chilly wind and showery rain all together clamouring for attention on the same blustery summer day can only mean that I’m definitely back in Scotland – a bracing walk along the pebble beach between Fort George and Ardersier this afternoon left me pink-cheeked, tousle-haired and smiling at the sheer magnificence of the ever-changing weather. It certainly feels good to be home again 🙂

Weekly Smile

One Liner Wednesday: Shit, it’s Hot!

~ Ruth ~ 13 Comments

Shit, it’s hot!

OK, so for all you people out there who live in everyday hot countries, it may not be hot by your standards, but remember that here in the UK we live in a naturally temperate climate in homes designed and built for keeping people snug and warm, not airy and cool.

And as most of us don’t have air conditioning as standard, when I tell you it’s well over 30-something degrees celsius outside I mean we are all also living inside in that sweltering, suffocating, humid heat, not sitting smug in a cool air-conditioned environment watching the heat and sun out of the well-shaded window.

Or, worse than being hot stuck at home, if you’re really unlucky you have no option but to commute to work all suited and booted in a sardine-packed moving metal cylinder travelling deep underground with NO air-con, surrounded by a whole host of other hot sweaty and grumpy commuters in the stagnant, stifling heat, many of who have no concept of personal hygiene.

We had some spectacular thunderstorms overnight last night, but disappointingly it’s still ridiculously hot today. And tomorrow is potentially record-breaking – if we do hit the predicted 37 degrees celcius (98-point-something farenheit) then apparently that will be the hottest July temperature ever recorded here in the UK – ugghh!.

So this mini-heatwave we’re having just now is absolutely unbearable for me – I’m soaked in salty sweat all the time, sticky and stinky, damp hair stuck to my scalp and forehead and neck, and I absolutely hate it. I don’t even do traditional beach resort holidays because I dislike the heat so much – lying on hot sand all day and being eaten alive by foreign bugs is my idea of hell.

I’m not even a huge fan of summer as a season in general – give me the balmy grey delights of spring and autumn any day over the black-or-white extremes of summer or winter…

So anyway, that’s why I feel perfectly justified today in saying ‘Shit, it’s hot!’

One Liner Wednesday

The View From the Kitchen Window

~ Ruth ~ 7 Comments

The kitchen window in my mum and dad’s house looks out over an everyday Scottish rural landscape of arable farm fields. It’s a view I rarely paid much attention to while growing up in the very same house, but over the last few weeks as I’ve stood there washing the dishes several times a day I’ve really learned to appreciate it’s subtle nuances…

Although in some ways it’s always very much the same rectangular framed view, I’ve found it also varies a lot depending on the time of day and the weather and of course the working needs of the farm… so here you can see variations of one Scottish farm field captured over three weeks in winter.

It just so happened that the field was ploughed while I was there, so I took the opportunity to record that event for posterity too – but I think that’s probably for another post all of its own…

By the way as ever it rained quite a lot too while I was there, but to be honest the dull, dark, grey version of the miserably wet landscape simply didn’t inspire me to record it! 🙂

Fallen Leaves

~ Ruth ~ 2 Comments

 

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After yesterday’s blustery winds and last night’s really heavy rain, instead of the gentle spiralling fall of dry and crispy puffed-up autumn leaves to kick and crunch through, we’ve been left today with a soggy-bottomed slippy leaf mulch sticking to the pavements and jammed into gutters and drains – not so pretty to photograph, but I tried anyway 🙂

Taken in Leytonstone, East London