Let's play catch-up...

Some weeks I don't blog much because I haven't got a lot to say - either because we haven't done much or because I've got brain block. This hasn't been one of those weeks. I've had lots of things I wanted to talk about, but no time to sit down and write! So this post is likely to be a random assortment of lots of unrelated things...best get going then eh! ;)

Our fridge currently looks like this...

It broke 10 days ago and a repairman came out yesterday, declared it broken and said we'll have to wait until the end of next week for a new one to be delivered. Waaaah!! Thankfully, when I rang to say it was broken, we were offered the option of taking out insurance on it. Seemed expensive for a repair (I would've cancelled it after yesterday's visit if the repair had been easy, and just had to pay the repair, parts and call-out charge instead) but it is much cheaper than the cost of a new fridge, phew! I am getting super fed up of living out of a cool box though. Luckily we have a 2nd mini freezer so we haven't lost too much food but I miss fresh vegetables, the milk actually being ice cold rather than slightly below room temp etc. We've all been sharing semi-skimmed milk since the fridge broke (rather than our usual multi-milk household!) but Toby wasn't too impressed when I tried to give him Kara coconut milk in his bottle earlier because I hadn't had a chance to buy more cows' milk for the cool box! Oh well, there could be worse things, it's made me realise how lucky we are to have access to a fridge usually.

Rant over, let's move on to the food I have been managing to eat! Chocolate anyone?

So cute! My Grandparents gave these to the children - one of the ladies at their church had knitted them for all the children at church on Easter Sunday, and as they had some leftover they gave two to my Grandparents for Izzy and Toby. Toby doesn't actually like creme eggs because of the mess factor, so Liam and I shared one of them...

Haha, I think we know where Toby gets some of his, "oddities", from. Liam refuses to share food with anyone so I had to, messily, cut the creme egg in half...next time I think I'll just eat it all myself!! ;)

Moving slightly away from chocolate, but still on sweet foods (my sweet tooth is still in full swing from Easter!), I made these pancakes for breakfast yesterday, but with orange instead of lime this time as I still have loads of oranges left from recent baking. Delicious, but why can't I make my pancakes look pretty??!!

I do prefer the lime to provide a bit more contrast to the raspberries and coconut, but orange was still tasty - I'm loving all things orange at the moment anyway! Due to lack of fridge, I used frozen raspberries in these this time. It worked ok, but next time I would let the raspberries sit out at room temperature for a bit first as the pancake batter hadn't really got hot enough to cook around the fruit. I still ate them all, of course, and I'm still here...between these and the super gooey brownies on Sunday, I seem to have been eating a lot of not-fully-cooked eggs lately! :-/

On Tuesday we made our "at least once every school holiday" trip to Crealy. We normally have packed lunch but this time we decided to treat ourselves to a meal at the all you can eat Italian buffet. This was plate number 1...

Plate number 2 was pretty identical, except coleslaw and sweetcorn from the salad bar instead of the 2nd piece of veggie pizza.

We also went to a new "Buddy Bear" show at Crealy which Izzy loved...

...especially as all the children got a share of the chocolate coin "treasure" at the end!

This post is getting super long so I think I will save talking about today until another time. Which means that the only thing left to talk about is my trip to Sainsbury's on Wednesday! Not a big deal to most probably, but I can't remember the last time I went to a Sainsbury's! One opened near us sometime within the last year or so (?) but we hadn't been to it until this week. Due to the lack of fridge, we couldn't buy that much, but as well as the essentials I did pick up a few Sainsbury's-only items...

Chocolate orange spread (which tastes just like Terry's choc orange), choc chip peanut butter, Sainsbury's magazine (my favourite supermarket mag) and Sabra garlic & red pepper houmous...which I immediately put to good use with a sweet potato and some goats cheese for lunch...

This is so good! A lot more savoury and strong-flavoured than other types of houmous, so you'd have to be careful what you paired it with, but it went perfectly with this sweet potato meal. The first thing I'm planning to do when we get our new fridge/freezer is go to Sainsbury's to buy some frozen cherries - love them!

Oh, I almost forgot! One more thing before I go... Last night I went to a new exercise class called "Beach Body Boot Camp"! I was a bit nervous about what it would be like, but I actually really enjoyed it! It was really hard work - after the warm up (jumping jacks, leg kicks etc etc etc!) I was already exhausted and it only got worse!! But good fun at the same time - we did cardio in the form of one 4 minute block on spinning bikes plus 2 blocks of 1 minute skipping, 1 minute step and repeat whilst the other 2 groups were doing spinning. In between these cardio blocks we also did weight exercises using barbells (loved this part!) and some ab exercises, stretches etc. I definitely felt like I'd had a proper workout afterwards...which is a good thing really! I went with my sister Sarah and we've already booked for next week, yey, an exercise I actually enjoy! :)

Right, blog post over. Liam is on his way home and I need to make the house look relatively tidy to start the weekend! Having Izzy at home is lovely, but she and Toby seem to make so much more mess than Toby does on his own!!

Have a lovely weekend everyone! Any nice plans? I am off to Exeter Food Festival with my Mum for the 3rd year running (this was my post from last year if you want to see what it's like), I'm so excited to go again, love it! It's also really nice to have a day out with just my Mum. We did try to take Toby the first year but it was near impossible to get around all the stalls with a pushchair!