Photo diary: week 43, project 365

 Our midterm break was spent mostly indoors, as we all took turns in having colds. Only my dear husband escaped, lucky devil. We sneezed and coughed. It wasn't fun, but it could have been worse.

The Teddy Bears of Witney make themed displays for all the holidays. Their Hallowe'en windows are arranged weeks before the event and are quite fun, as usual. You often see parents and grandparents with children stopping by to look at the teddies.

A couple of weeks ago I showed the first bloom on the red orchid, and just look at it now.

Tuesdays we measure by the new episodes of GBBO. 

It was a pastry week, and if I were there I would definitely be chucked out. I'm not good with pastry and prefer to buy it. And just who makes their own filo pastry?! I use it very rarely. Not a fan of baklava either, it's way too sickly sweet for my taste.

Last week I forgot to bake anything for the night's viewing, and my child complained that we didn't have anything sweet to munch (we did have some biscuits, but they were not homemade).

I made an effort and baked a chocolate cake with  a peanut butter cream cheese frosting, and decorated with cocoa caramel peanuts from The Curators. 

On Wednesday I was trying to finish reading Death in the Woods by Jo Allen for the next day reviewing. It's a crime mystery set in Cumbria, and the 6th book in the series. 

When you order wild mushrooms from Ocado, you never know what mushrooms will actually be delivered. This time there were pied de mouton. Just enough to make a risotto. I cooked the risotto and mushrooms separately, as my younger son wouldn't eat them, then divided his portion and added the mushrooms to the remaining risotto.

I have never been so fussy as a child, but then we didn't have much choice, if you didn't want to eat something, then tough. The only food that made me heave when I was a child, was boiled onions (as in a whole one cooked in soup for the broth, I couldn't even look at it).

The Leftovers by Cassandra Parkin was surely one of the hardest books I had to read in the past couple of years. It's a disturbing domestic noir which tackles such topics as sexual abuse, the issue of consent or absence of it, exploitation of vulnerabe people. 

One of the characters in the book is severly autistic, and for me there were too many triggers which I found distressing. 

I should have known better really, as two previous books by the same author were also disturbing and dark, but this one makes a very uncomfortable reading.

And more books... After several days of being stuck at home, we finally ventured outside, and of course, Eddie and I popped into the book shop.

We asked Patti if she could recommend us something scary to read for Hallowe'en, and one of her suggestions was Charlie Higson's The Enemy.

When we arrived home, we had a delivery of The Cursed Carnival by Rick Riordan, which I have pre-ordered a while ago.

In the end, we decided to finish Fear Street by R.L.Stine - there are four books in one volume, and we started reading the last one, called Missing. We do enjoy R.L Stine's stories.

The Enemy will be our next project. From the blurb it sounds a bit like The Sparticle mystery series on BBC.

Have you read it? 

Hope you had a more eventful midterm break week. 

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