100g butter; 1 tbsp golden syrup; 1 tbsp demarera sugar; 1 tbsp drinking chocolate, (yes I know 1st recipe I’ve heard with it in too!); 16-18 digestive biscuits; 250g milk or plain chocolate.

Melt butter, syrup, sugar and drinking chocolate in a saucepan. Crush the biscuits, (hit them with a rolling pin – oh once they’re in a bag first!) and mix into the melted butter, sugar etc. Pour into a tray. Melt the chocolate and pour over the biscuit mixture. Leave to set. Cut into pieces to eat. P.S. If you’ve got a big family and husband who would like it – do double straight off I’d say!

Brocolli & Goat’s cheese quiche

8oz shortcrust pastry; onions; 1 medium pack of goat’s cheese cut into 1cm cubes; big head of brocolli; cup of milk / cream; 6 eggs; grated cheddar cheese; salt & pepper

Oven: Gas Mark 6 ish

Flan dish: grease a 12″ diameter flan dish

This is great for parties and meals for guests, and is vegetarian and also healthy for kids too. The recipe is a bit make it up as you go a long! I like making my own pastry, with butter rather than marg and you can even bind it together with an egg yolk instead of water if you want it really rich!

First, roll out pastry and put into flan dish and prick with fork all over and put in oven for 20 mins. Meanwhile break a large head off brocolli into large florets about an inch big and put on to steam or boil for 10 mins. Then chop an onion and fry on a low heat for 5 mins. Then in a bowl mix up the 6 eggs, salt, pepper, cup full of cream or milk. Now get the flan out of the oven and lay the fried onion on the base of the pastry, then evenly distribute the steamed brocolli and crumbled up goats cheese on top of the onion. Then pour the egg mixture on top trying to cover all the areas! And then grate mild cheddar cheese all over the top and put in the oven for about 30-40 mins. Is lovely!

The school summer fair was great today too.  Bouncy castles and BBQ and good weather and runner bean plants for 20p.  Plus great to meet more new people.  Anyone want to buy  our old gas oven for £50?  In good working order, silver, 50cm wide?

This rabbit was very nice and after 6 weeks the kids were just getting used to having him around and getting confident with lifting him in and out of his hutch. And visiting children were all enjoying seeing the rabbit and stroking his soft fur… blub blub. And they were all being really careful about not leaving the doors open, and the baby liked watching him and even I, a pragmatic pet-o-phobe on grounds of extra unnecessary work, was enjoying having him around! But the large fox we’ve seen skulking through the bushes at the end of the garden managed to undo the door catches last night, and no more baby rabbit. And we’ve all spent the day feeling very bad about this, and very sad for the poor rabbit as a familiar theme from cosy bedtime ‘FastFox’ stories has become a gory reality in front of our eyes! And we’ve got no Slow Dog and today all supposedly ‘foxproof’ rabbit hutch designs we could find on the internet seem to have matching discussion threads of people with reports to the contrary! So we’ve all been quite deflated – will the kids have to give up on the idea of a rabbit?

But I am not going to see my kids defeated on this one, and as I was planning how I would somehow build the ultimate foxproof rabbit hutch with my son and I will not let this fox foil their hopes of pets, it occured that assuming the fox isn’t skilled with screwdrivers or saws, all we need to do is make sure the fastenings on the doors are able to be opened by the kids but not the fox. This way should be a lot cheaper than a different hutch, or a shed to keep the hutch in. SO current thinking is padlocks; probably key and number code versions for good measure. And as long as the kids can keep a secret, and don’t tell the fox the code accidently……. !

He is amazing and has answered the kids prayers in a wonderful way.  For 16 long and parent-directed days our 5 have knuckled down, and moved boxes, watched CBeebies; bounced for hours on the trampoline, trailed round parks, been to the tip a lot, and dug ground elder from the vegetable patch.  They have been told off, hacked off, and running off, but today…. today little friends came round and they played.  They played.  Dressing up, chasing round with a towel, they could well have been hanging from the ceiling for all I know, but they played! They made friends.  And I enjoyed talking to friends and friends are wonderful things -  praise and huge thanks to God.

Anyway, my husband also caught them mocking us saying, “I know they’ve got lots of kids but do they really need 20 egg cups?“  I don’t think I’ve got 20 egg cups, and I accept that boiled eggs with soldiers probably isn’t something you often offer guests but anyway even if I do have 20 eggs cups some were gifts and some are posh sentimental antique ones like old people would have those china boys sitting on farm gate sort of things!  But maybe I will give a few away then.  Does anyone have need of some egg cups?  They probably do have a point.  In fact as 4 of them are apparently out of a credit-crunched job in 6 weeks maybe I should get more of their wisdom on my stuff – they probably do know more about this kind of thing than me.