ways to grow peas

Buy peastraw which is full of peas and mulch your garlic and then watch the sea of pea plants appear. Peas and garlic (or legumes of any kind and alliums of any kind) aren't great companions because the alliums have antibiotic properties which interfere with the nitrogen fixing bacteria of the legumes. But it is all looking green in my patch. I must let the shop know. Peastraw is not supposed to grow! I am going to leave it all there and see what happens. Better than a sea of dock weeds.

My kefir is still alive after a fortnight and indeed has grown a lot. I've been drinking it myself so far but I'm going to try it out on the children today. I have some friends interested in some but with the Christmas break, they don't want it until they get back from holiday. I have found a solution to my niggles with using baby muslin cloths to strain it (heaps of kefir gets stuck on the muslin and it is finer than I need).

A bridal solution.

I bought some bridal veil netting from the fabric shop yesterday and that works much better.

Yesterday I made a flash chocolate cake which called for six large eggs, some sugar and some chocolate and some butter. That's all. No flour. So I used eight of our smaller eggs and beat it all up and put it in the oven as required and then noticed the yolks still on the bench so pulled it out of the oven and poured it back into the bowl, added the yolks and back into the tin for the final effort. It tasted good. I made it for our lovely childminder Robyn but got to have some at her house when we took it round.

I also made sushi. I've been playing round with alternative therapies again in an effort to get rid of some boring things like constant neck tension and frequent headaches. So I'm now under instructions to (amogst other things) have lots of seaweed and ginger, most easily available as sushi. I'm learning to like wasabi as well, which I used to leave off my plate.