New Veggie Garden!

On Sunday morning I got myself ridiculously dressed for Aline's bachelorette 'Crime of Fashion' themed breakfast. Yes: themed breakfast. I wore one of my Gran's evening dresses from who knows when. Certainly the biggest crime of fashion I have in my possession:

Need I say more?!

Alice, who kindly hosted the spectacular breakfast, has one of the most awesome veggie gardens I've seen in a very long time. What I especially love is that she has poppies & cornflowers growing haphazardly between the veggie plants. It reminded me of my plan when choosing our rented house of moving the lavender bushes outside the kitchen window to the edges & making my veggie garden in the middle.

Well, it was just perfect timing! James {our gardener} arrived bright and early this morning & we put him to work on this project. Geoff and I went off to Harry Goeman's Nursery just up the road from us to buy soil, fertilizer & some basil, lettuce, peppers, gooseberries, tomatoes, rocket and some other goodies to get started with.

Now for watering & caring for our little plants so that they can produce some lovely salad additions for us! :)

Geoff's Birthday Celebration(s)

My Love turned 50 this month & so we had a number of celebrations...The first of which, was a family dinner (mine & Geoff's) on the night before his actual birthday day. I made a big pot of fresh pasta...2 huge salads & Geoff made his favorite bolognaise sauce (I made a veggie alternative) & we had a wonderful dinner around our party-size yellow wood kitchen table:

We were really spoiled with Robyn's chocolate birthday cake for dessert.

We have a bit of a tradition of birthday cake in bed with tea on the morning of our birthdays, so I made some fairy cupcakes from Tina Bester's book "Bake" which turned out DELICIOUSLY! (It is actually one of the easiest, most delicious recipes I've come across for cupcakes - even better than my "White Cupcakes" recipe which uses the creaming method) ... I made lemon and (fresh) vanilla flavored icing which I spaghetti'ed on top:

After a lazy morning, we headed out to town to the dangerous camera supplies shop, ORMS. We went out for lunch at Mugged on Roeland and had a pretty lovely day in general.

The last phase of Geoff's birthday was last weekend: we invited loads of people for music, pizza and drinks at Solole's BAROCCA LOUNGE.  Here are some scenes from Geoff's birthday day and of the party: