Breakfast

It's farmhouse breakfast week at the moment so after my morning 6 mile run I made a full English.
I cooked the bacon, sausage and tomatoes on the hotplate. The eggs were poached as we don't like them fried.

And here's the finished result. The bacon was dry cured and tasted amazing. There was no added water in it so it stayed roughly the same size through cooking.

The bread was grilled on the hotplate after the bacon was removed so it was enfused with a little of the fat. Lovely. Good job I went running first though.

Snow and Chillis

It snowed here yesterday morning and given the chance I would have been on my mountain bike sliding around in the woods. Unfortunately, I was on my way to work in the car. I did get a short run done in the evening, after I'd finished cooking, but by then the snow had gone. Tomorrow I'm supposed to be visiting a customer up in Blackburn and I'm hoping that an interesting trip doesn't get snowed off, at the moment BBC Weather can't make up their minds.
In my opinion there's only one antidote to cold weather and that's hot and spicy food. Last night I made a tuna based pasta dish that contained 6 chillis - 4 Jalapenos and 2 Thai. With that much 'stopping' power I didn't need to resort to some of the more esoteric condiments stashed away in our fridge (Viscous Viper, Jersey Death, etc). I made enough for two days and so tonight I'll get a second hit.

Weekend

I dragged myself out of bed early on Saturday morning so that I could complete my first long run since Ironman. It was very cold and very damp but being a morning person it felt good to be out. Today I made a Steak and Guinness pie for dinner. This is the filling looking all frothy because I've just added the Guinness.
These are leeks from the garden that turned out to be tiny once that I'd cleaned and prepared them. I ended up tossing them on to the mash potatoes as garnish.And this is the finished pie about to be served. It looks pretty rough but it tasted good with a big pile of mustard mash (if I do say so myself).

Some photos from the last few months

This is the fountain outside of Wembley Arena when I went to see Oasis. The queues were huge!

Although it doesn't look like much this is the hole my motorbike left after I crashed it into a grass verge.
Ritual : Packing prior to Ironman UK. Wetsuit - Check, Swim Hat - Check, Tri Suit - Check, etc.
Halloween Steam train.

So much for blogging every day.

Here's some pumpkins that I've been growing since the summer. This evening I'm going to have a go at making pumpkin soup and I'll look around for a punmpkin pie recipe for Halloween.

Biological controls.

When I went to water my tomatoes last night I found this little fella hidden inside one of the growbags. I decided not to evict him as I'm hoping that he has a taste for slugs.

Mansfield Half Marathon

I ran the Mansfield Half Marathon today in the pissing rain, despite that I had a really good run. This was mostly down to the fact that about half a mile from the start I caught up with another member of my tri club, who is also a fellow ironman, and for the first time in years I didn't run alone. A good natter really makes the miles go by quickly and a bit of peer pressure certainly prevents slackening off up the hills.

Afterwards Ann-Marie and I headed down the road to Rufford Park for a little walk before dinner which is were I snapped the picture of the daisy.