I must confess to being a real lover of the comfort of a Sunday morning baking session – not the cakes or biscuits that housewives up and down the land in frilly pinnies would have made in the sixties and seventies, but a more practical baking session. In this case, bread (rolls and a loaf) and a big tray of butternut squash with ginger and honey to make into soup.

We never buy bread ready made these days and haven’t done since we were fortunate enough to be given a breadmaker by Mat and Mand, who in turn had been fortunate enough to have been given two for wedding pressies. We benefited by receiving the one they didn’t need! Since then, we’ve progressed up the rank of breadmaking to a Panasonic – the best bit of home-use kit I reckon you can get….David Alstead’s law kicking in when the one we’d been given died! (Regulars know David Alstead’s law – it’s the one that goes ‘buy the best you can afford, it’ll be worth it in the long run’!)

These days though, we mostly use it for dough only and then do the last bit of work by hand – I know, I know, it’s the first knead that’s the one that takes all the effort so we do ‘cop out’ if you like by letting the machine do that bit. So, today on went the machine on dough setting to make this tomato flavoured dough, of which half found its way into a loaf and the rest into rolls.

While I was dividing up the dough, I just thought it’d make a nice shot so here it is.

The domesticity of the day continued with a little bit of gardening (too wet to do much more) and a lounge on the sofa to watch the thrilling climax of the footie season – and thrilling it was. Not a dull moment. We did love the fact that Wigan and West Ham made it – even though the Hammers did for us last season, because we’ve got peeps we love who are huge fans of both teams – my Daddy (the aforementioned David Alstead) is a Wigan fan and Colin, Paul (two of my oldest friends) and Andrew (Sarah’s hubby) are all Hammers.

We had a visit from a friend, who whiled away half an hour and admired our latest work.

Now we are about to seal the end of a really nice day with a short drive to see another old friend, who is playing a gig in a local pub. (That doesn’t happen very often when you live ‘in the woolly wilds of nowhere'!) However, he’s a Man Utd fan so hopefully he won’t be too sore at losing to the Hammers!

Last year, my Mum was 'tickled pink'!