I’m not very good at my photo diary of late. I acknowledge this and apologise but I’m trying to be true to my promise to only do it when I’m not stressing about something else. In the weeks since we got married, during my photo diary absences, I’ve stripped, made good, decorated and furnished a room in our house (only the utility room but nonetheless) so I thought that yet more stuff about what hard work decorating is would just be tedious.

During this, I’ve actually re-laid a section of parquet flooring, where the old flooring had been damaged and so I’ve got bits from elsewhere and patched it in and I’ve built a small brick wall. This is because for the last three-and-a-half-years we’ve had our tumble drier vent poking out through an old dog-flap, which has let in wind, rain and wildlife into the room, none of which has helped our home’s insulation or security. So, I’ve been busy.

Today though, we’re celebrating DMs birthday and although I’ve had to go out to work today (a new job that means working on Friday afternoons as well as Saturday and Sunday as has been my pattern until now) so I was out from 2pm until 7.30pm but I found myself needing to cook a “big birthday supper” too. So, I made sure it was something that I could do quickly and easily (chilli bean dip, fajitas and Eton mess made with blackberries from our field instead of the more traditional strawberries).

These tomatilloes were picked from our greenhouse today and I made them into a traditional salsa verdi as accompaniment for the fajitas. I’ve never grown tomatilloes before but feel that I could now recommend them to fellow Brit gardeners. They’ve coped with a miserable summer and not succumbed to the blight that their cousins the tomatoes suffered. (They have been grown in my greenhouse rather than out-doors.) The salsa verdi was wonderful and I read on a Mexican food page online that you can pick them, remove their papery outer and put the green tomatilloes into the freezer ready to be pulled out and used later. So, I’ve bunged some in and will certainly do the same with the rest of my crop as it gets to picking size.

DMs birthday supper has been a successful celebration of his big day, my work in our utility room is now all-but-done (some teeny finishing off things that I can’t do until David has done a couple of things for me) so we’re celebrating that too and finally, we’re celebrating a trial crop that’s worked out well for us! (Unlike some of the other trial crops I’ve loaded soon.