Cooking On Wood - Burnt Cake

Last week I started to experiment with cooking on our new wood stove. 

I love it already, even though we're not in the new kitchen yet I've been keen to use it, mainly for heat but having the oven right there has meant I've wanted to try it. 

£3 For 15kg Of Carrots

Now as many of you know I'm never one to pass up on a bargain!

And the other day I picked up a huge 15kg bag of carrots for £3. Bargain!

Now I must confess this isn't at the supermarket, instead I got these from the animal feed store local to us.

New School Forest Garden

As many of you know I'm the sort of parent that gets roped into things, I seems to have an inability to say NO at the best of times, but when it's helping kids I'm even worse.

The school library is the perfect example of this!

Blank canvas

Somehow since the spring I've been attending some small meetings with the head mistress, Felicity - the garden designer and the teacher who runs Eco-club. We've been talking and making plans to create a new forest school and vegetable garden area that the kids can use and enjoy.

Our New Wood Oven

A key thing for me when building our new extension was to make sure we had a means of cooking and heating off grid should we need it. 

We already have a stove in the sitting room that we use all winter. There's not many nights between November and March where it's not lit and we have plenty of firewood to keep us going. 

And although we can put a pan on top of the stove it's not ideal to cook with. 

Love the look of our new stove! 

I was a little obsessed with finding the right stove for our house and spent many houses researching what we should have and what would fit. To start with I thought it would just be another log burner like we had in the sitting room, maybe with a small oven on top. Luckily once I'd worked out what size we'd have available and spoke to some experts it turned out we could have a full on range in there!

I Made Our Double Bed - The Economy Of Making Your Own

Lay in bed I could literally count the springs sticking into my back. 

I'd wake up feeling worse than when I'd gone to sleep. The mattress had to go and the crappy bed with it. 

The Mattress in question was 10 years old and the first bed that we purchased after having a few second hand ones from family. 

Our new bed!!!

It was from Ikea along with the bed frame. I broke the bed frame the first night by pushing one bit with my foot and it's not got any better, slats fall out frequently and I had to make some modifications the first few weeks of having it. By the end I'm fairly sure it's just my collection of books that's keeping it up!

Dried Pears

I was helping with the cake cafe after school the other day and when it was time to clean up they were getting rid of anything that might go off over half term. 

I managed to bag us 10 bottles of milk and a bag of apples before I asked what was happening to all the pears in the baskets outside the key stage one classrooms. No way would they keep for a week over half term in that warm school, some had started to turn already.