Sad News & Lots of Sugar

Hello! Are you having a nice weekend?

I have been eating lots of sugar - my sweet tooth has been full-on since Easter! My current favourite sweet meal - Courtney's Sweet Breakfast Quesadilla! I had one for lunch yesterday with choc chip peanut butter, banana, granola, the last of my Urban Fresh dried strawberries (a whole bag gone in 2 days - love them!) and agave nectar...

And this morning I had one with chocolate orange spread, banana, orange spice granola and agave...

Both times delicious! Not the healthiest breakfast perhaps, but I've been using the excuse of not having a fridge to eat a lot more bread-type products than normal. We do have milk in a cool box, and I have been making porridge some days (indeed yesterday I had porridge with mashed banana and spiced chai powder, but the photos looked gross!) but if I'm having cereal then I like my milk to be cold, and cool box milk just isn't. New fridge being delivered on Friday though...counting down the days!

Unfortunately yesterday wasn't so great for us in terms of family news. Liam had a hospital appointment in the afternoon to have an endoscopy (camera tube thing down his throat). He came out of it ok, but had a pretty traumatic time of it! Trainee doctor messing up the cannula insertion so much that Liam passed out, lots of anaesthetic (although not a general luckily), no tea or biscuit offered afterwards (despite them offering all the other, much older, patients some - poor Liam felt left out!) and then after all that they didn't even see anything wrong, grrr!
Worse than that though, when Liam got home he got a call from his Mum to say that his Nan had died :( I was umming and aahhing about whether to mention her death on the blog - I don't feel that it's my place to put it "out there" if that makes sense, especially as she wasn't my blood relative - but Liam said it was fine, and as I'd mentioned her going into hospital back in December I thought it would be a bit odd to just never mention her again. I didn't want to have to constantly be watching what I wrote. Does that make sense? Probably not. She'd actually, finally, left hospital 1.5 weeks ago and moved into a nursing home which she seemed to be really enjoying - she was definitely glad to have a bit more freedom after being stuck in a hospital bed for so many months - so at least it is nice to think that she enjoyed her last few weeks and went peacefully in her sleep. RIP Nan xx

Obviously after getting that sad news, we didn't really feel like cooking last night. But "luckily", because I knew Liam would want easy food after his hospital appointment, I had bought pizza and ice cream for dinner. The perfect meal for when we just wanted quick food. Even better that I'd taken the photos when I'd bought the pizzas earlier that day - I'm sure you can all guess what pizza and ice cream look like out of the packaging.

I was glad to see that Co-Op roasted vegetable and pesto pizza is suitable for vegetarians:

Big tub of ice cream for Liam, little cookie dough ice cream for Izzy (she was so pleased to have the "grown up" ice cream - normally we save our Ben & Jerry's eating until she's in bed!!!) and a little tub of strawberry cheesecake for me...

Mmmm, love strawberry cheesecake flavour! The Ben & Jerry's flavour is slightly better I think, but as I never see it in our local shops anymore this was a good substitute.

I did manage a savoury lunch today in the form of a baked sweet potato with "ratatouille" made from a couple of stir fried peppers mixed with some salsa, and grated cheese:

but then the sweet-toothed cookie monster struck back this afternoon...

I ate quite a bit of raw cookie dough as a pre-dinner snack while these were cooking, but then when Liam and the children decided to have french toast with bacon/banana/golden syrup for dinner, I decided just to eat cookies!! Haha, I'll probably eat something else in a bit, but for now Mars bar stuffed chocolate chip cookies sound good to me! :)

"Trouble" liked them too!

My friend gave us a load of hand-me-down clothes that her little boy has grown out of. I'm not normally the biggest fan of slogan t-shirts, but this one was particularly appropriate as "Trouble" is one of our nicknames for Toby anyway, bless him, trouble but cute!! ;)

Well this has been another random post hasn't it. I haven't really got anything more to say so I will just leave you with another photo of cookies...can't go wrong with that! ;)

I have been spending some time this evening looking at the Exeter Food Festival website to decide which demonstrations I want to see and stalls I want to visit tomorrow - so excited! Although in reality once we get there it will just be a case of looking at as many stalls as possibly whilst trying not to get crushed by everyone else trying to do the same! The bakery which we found at last year's festival to do our wedding cupcakes will be there again this year, hope they are selling brownie tray bakes again!

Do you have a favourite cookie recipe? And do you eat raw dough?? I've posted about this recipe for Millie's style cookies before, but I love it - it's so easy to change up the ingredients to get different, but always consistently delicious, cookies! Today I used the standard recipe with 100g milk choc chips and 100g white choc chips, and then just chopped up a Mars bar and put a piece in the middle of each cookie dough ball before baking. And raw cookie dough - yes, raw cake batter - no. No idea why as both have raw eggs in them... the thought of the raw eggs grosses me out too much to ever try cake batter, yet I always seem to be drawn to the cookie dough...I never claimed to make sense!