News of the Day

Big doings this weekend for a lot of folks.  

 Here on the island, it’s the weekend of the 50^th annual Oak Bay Tea Party.  

In the UK they are celebrating on a far grander scale:  
 This is the weekend of the Diamond Jubilee, honouring the 60^th year of 
Queen Elizabeth II’s reign.

We don’t often see childhood photos of the Queen, so I was interested to see this one, taken in 1928 and shared by The Vintage Tearoom this week on Facebook.

Talk of the Jubilee festivities brought high tea to mind, and I found some pastries that would be perfect for a celebratory cake plate.   

These strawberry and lime stuffed cupcakes from Miranda at My Favourite Things  
look almost too beautiful to eat. Thrifty Foods has strawberries on sale this week so I may need to give the recipe a try!

A lot of crown shaped and crown decorated items appeared on Pinterest just before Mardi Gras, including these pastry crowns filled with cheescake mousse and topped with glazed banana bits by Hungry Happenings. 

I think they’d be perfect for a Jubilee Tea.

My own weekend is shaping up to be pretty quiet.  I spent quite a lot of time cooking and cleaning today, but did get out to do some shopping this morning.  I found the most beautiful tomatoes and basil while I was out and about, so you know I had to make a salad.  Look for the recipe tomorrow.

I spent less time than usual on line today, in part because I couldn’t access Aunt B’s news feed or activity log on Facebook.  Facebook has been really buggy lately so I’ve been working on sending my favourite pages to my RSS feed.  It’ll be nice to have everything in one place, and to know that I’ll get to see my foodie friends’ posts more reliably.  If sending pages to an RSS feed is something you’d like to do, you’ll find this post from Blogging with Amy very helpful.

My Facebook friends have been very encouraging to me this week.

Miz Helen’s Country Cottage featured my Roasted Asparagus with Butter Crumbed Eggs on this week’s Full Plate Thursday linky party

and The 21st Century Housewife, shared my Puffy Omelette with Cheddar and Chives on her Facebook page today.

I found some frugal tips on line today too.  This great upcycling idea from

Creative Recycling Ideas – Riciclo Creativo Idee fai da te’s

may find a place by our front door. 

(I love the hanging up your glasses one:  I’m always misplacing my specs.)

Canadian Budget Binder always has good information on saving money. 

Today they shared a link from Kitchen Daily with eleven tips on reducing kitchen waste.

Some of them were new to me but I have to say:

-Apple cores and peels are not discarded at my house. I add a little water to them, simmer them until they're soft and then squeeze out the juice. I use it in baking recipes or to round up another fruit or juice when making desserts, jams or jellies.

-Orange and lemon peels are never discarded at my house. If I'm not going to use them right away, I grate them and freeze them for use in recipes later on.

-Discard day-old rice? Not a chance! We usually use whole grain rice and it takes a long time to cook. Since it takes about the same amount of time to cook a lot of rice as it does to cook a little, we make our rice in big batches and use it throughout the week. Sometimes we even portion it out and freeze it (if there's room in the freezer) for later use. Without leftover rice, there would be no fried rice or rice pudding at our house, and we incorporate it in a lot of other recipes too. If reheating it, we just pop it into a steamer for a few minutes to get perfect, fluffy grains.

So that was my day.

I hope your Saturday was a happy one.

Do you have any favourite tips on reducing kitchen waste you’d like to share?

If so, I’d love to hear them.

See you tomorrow.