Afternoon tea and a weekend alone
Last weekend on Saturday afternoon, Jac’s mum Pattycakes and her brother’s partner K came over. Jac and her family are going away for four days to stay in a house by the beach this coming weekend – I’m not going because:
1) we have too many people currently on leave at work, and I wasn’t about to ask my boss if I could take time off as well;
2) since I’d only have Saturday and Sunday off and no extra days, I’d have no buffer days before having to go to work. I hate feeling all tired for the rest of the week because I haven’t had any buffer day(s) /recovery time. This would also cause a logistics problem, as I’d have no way of getting back home on my own on Sunday to be ready to go to work on Monday. I wouldn’t want Jac to cut her holiday short on my account (she has Monday off and plans to return home Monday arvo);
3) and seriously, it just doesn’t bother me to be home alone on my own for a few days.
Anyway, Jac, Pattycakes and K met up so they could make plans for their holiday – who would bring what food, what meals they’d cook, etc.
You guys know very well by now how much Jac loves playing host and cooking for people – this little pow-wow called for a spot of afternoon tea!
A couple of hours before Pattycakes and K rocked up, Jac got to work in the kitchen. She made two kinds of dainty sandwiches – cucumber (just with buttered white bread, and a little salt and pepper), and smoked salmon (using wholemeal bread spread with cream cheese).
I want to like smoked salmon, but I just don’t (more for Jac! She loves smoked salmon). I really enjoyed the cucumber sandwiches. The bread was so soft. I suppose the slices of cucumber weren’t really thin enough to be “dainty”! But Jac had cut the crusts off the bread, which is pretty dainty. :)
Jac also assembled a fruit plate – clockwise, starting from the top, oranges, apples, golden kiwifruit, dried apricots, banana and in the centre, prunes, with a little garnish of apple mint leaves, freshly plucked from our garden.
The best part of afternoon tea was the pikelets. They were freshly cooked by Jac and served warm. I ate my pikelets with butter and jam. Mmmmm, warm pikelets with melting butter.
The pikelet recipe came from Lady Flo Bjelke-Petersen‘s Classic Country Collection, New Holland Publishers, Sydney, 2002, p.115.
Here’s the afternoon tea, ready for the devouring – I don’t usually play with Photoshop filters, but I really like how this effect kind of Cezanne-izes the picture. It is now a still life!
I munched contentedly through afternoon tea while the others discussed and debated and scribbled in their notebooks. Sounds like they’ll have a great time with lots of eating, but I’m really looking forward to my weekend alone. I’ll probably just hang out at home. My latest delivery from Amazon arrived this week, so I have lots of new books to read. And of course, there’ll be blogging to do. I also have a strong feeling that at some point fried SPAM may make an appearance. :)