Celebrations!

Solstice celebrations and Father's Day :)

A happy daddy with two children who adore him and a lovely sunny picnic by the canal. And a moaning wife who sat buried in her book, identifying weeds. And finding elderflowers!! For this:

We've never made elderflower cordial before, although we drink it a lot and had it at our wedding, so we were stupidly excited that it smells like 'the real thing'!! So easy too, I hope it tastes as good as it smells.

And we tried sun paper, which Chloe was thrilled with. We made some pretty shapes and I forgot to take pictures, but we'll put them on our seasons display I think. And we made sun-shaped spelt bread, which we had for dinner. Before:

And after cooking:

And it was delicious! I've decided I haven't been kneading my bread long enough so made an extra effort and it tasted much lighter. We had spelt pasta with roast veg and pesto, and gooseberry crumble (from our garden!) and raspberries (also from our garden!!) for dessert. Our unfortunate policy of ignoring our garden because we have no time to do all the things we want to has actually worked and we've got loads of gorgeous fruit and plants. We felt guilty for neglecting it though, so all spent an hour after tea pulling weeds and sorting things. Well, three of us did - Finn just wandered around laughing at us all. It looks lovely now and I'm exhausted - Daddy's breakfast in bed didn't make itself! It was a really special day, I can't remember having a weekend so relaxing in a long time.