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The latest thing I’ve done is to sort all my ancient pots of spices by “best before” date. We’ve started using Anylist in our house, so I’ve made a list of all my spices in date order on Anylist. Now I’m working through them, starting with the oldest, putting them in whatever food I’m cooking.…

A bit of an odd one in my porridge series this morning. I had coconut milk left over from making pineapple and coconut porridge yesterday. I wanted to use it again, but had no fresh pineapple left. I’d bought quite a few random ingredients in M&S yesterday (still going with my yellow sticker hobby) so…

DS1’s secondary school requires the children to wear black coats and bags, in addition to black trousers, shoes and socks. I believe this makes it harder for the children to be seen by drivers and increases their risk of being involved in road accidents. I don’t think this uniform policy is unusual – I know…

Welcome to the first in my series of experiments with porridge ingredients! (see my intro post here explaining what’s prompted me to do such a thing). Today, linseeds (flaxseeds). What are they like in porridge? I don’t normally use linseeds, but they’re something our Ukrainian guest bought and she suggested I try them in my…

Last year I lost weight. I used the Noom app which worked well for me. One thing I did that helped me was to eat porridge for breakfast every day. My porridge is just oats, water and fruit, no sugar, honey, milk or cream. I quickly got used to having just oats and fruit and…

We seem to have all these disorders that we ascribe to our children. “Attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder” seems to have been around for a while. More recently I heard about “pathological demand avoidance.” And this week “oppositional defiance disorder” was brought to my attention. There used to be “autistic spectrum disorder” but now we…

In this post, I’ll explain how I’m making a database of all the plants in my garden and house and I’ll signpost you to the resources I’ve used, including my own Notion template, in case you’d like to try this yourself. We recently bought a new house which has a mature garden with lots of…

We’ve recently bought a house with a beautiful but slightly neglected garden. Having never really been much of a gardener, I’m embarking on a steep learning curve. I’m determined to do the garden justice even though I don’t know much right now. In the last few weeks since moving in, I’ve been using Plantnet to…

This is my first post describing a fun family activity. I’d like this to be the first of many such posts and hope that I can build a library of fun things families can do together that I and others can turn to if we’re stuck for inspiration. This post describes an activity that my…