Pumpkin, pine nuts & honey cake

My mum got us a big pumpkin from the farmers market last week. The intention was, as one would expect, to carve it, make a pumping soup with the flesh and maybe toast the seeds, in time for Halloween. But life had other plans, so the weekend passed and by monday morning the pumpkin was still waiting for some attention on the kitchen table.

Then yesterday I went to the supermarket after work and grabbed one of those promotional booklets which had an entire section dedicated to pumpkin recipes, and there it was...a new recipe for a pumpkin cake. But best of all, I had all the ingredients needed at home (except for the eggs, which I realised half way through the baking process and had to rush to the off licence!). So, after putting little miss O to bed last night, I did some long due baking and enjoyed a slice while watching the new season of Revenge. 

This recipe will definitely go into my book!

Us in pictures

We didn't have any picture of us in our house until 10 months ago. We never had, even in our previous flats, even when we weren't living together. It's one of those things with no reason at all. It was just us as we were. Us as we were before Olivia was born. And then things started to change, in many ways. One of the things that happened is that we started to print out photos, get canvases printed out for us and all of them went on our walls. There is a narrow corridor in our house, outside the kitchen. We hanged all of our pictures there and O loves looking at them. She smiles at her own pics and tries to grab the other ones. 

And I just put some more up this morning! I printed out these new pics (the ones in the white frames) for G, before he went to SF back in June. Hidden some in his wallet and some in his luggage so he wouldn't miss us too much. And now are on display, to fill our little narrow corridor with more of our memories!

Back to work!

And the day has eventually come, the day I go back to work after the most eventful year of my life! I wasn't really looking forward to it and now that it's here, I feel even worst than I imagined. The only consolation is knowing that little Miss O will be spending a lot of time with her dad, having fun and bonding with him even more than she has so far. I miss them terribly! I'm just glad that the walk to the office is a short and enjoyable one, making my day a little easier. And of course there is always the lunch break when I get to see them and kiss them, making the morning hours moving a bit quicker.

30 drawings in 30 days - first 10 drawings

#1/30 - Municipio - Pescina, Italy

#2/30 - Various plants from the garden - Pescina, Italy

#3/30 - Pescina (old town), Italy

#4-5-6/30 - Various subjects - Catanzaro Lido, Italy

#7/30 - La Tonnina - Catanzaro Lido, Italy
#8/30 - Pineta - Roccelletta di Borgia, Italy

#9/30 - Strada per Pescina, Italy (from photo)

#10/30 - Colline sopra Roccelletta di Borgia, Italy

And the first 10 drawings are done, almost as planned! I have been using my Moleskine watercolour notebook (21 x 13cm) as I'm planning to complete all the sketchbooks I have lying around the house by the end of the year. I have used different page layouts, so far: portrait, landscape, landscape with 4 horizontal inserts and landscape with 3 vertical inserts.
The first batch contains different type of sketches, some of them were done on the spot, some others were done using photos I had taken with my phone. I managed to do one drawing a day, except for drawings number 4, 5 and 6 that were done on the same day...you can tell by the size of the drawings and the lack of details.....

Note: In the UK the hash # isn't printed on the Apple Mac computer keyboard, so just press "alt"+3.