Mostly eating

I've been on holiday over Easter and mostly we have been eating.

First, we had to do the shopping to allow the eating, so we went out to Chatsworth to inspect the farm shop.  It was quite a nice day on Good Friday, which is when we went, so we weren't particularly thinking about snow.  Until we got up into the hill tops.  Look what we found!

The road we had intended to drive along was very definitely closed. So we diverted down through Rowsley and Bakewell

It was all rather exciting!

I'm glad I had my boots on - their feet must have been frozen!

Buying flour at the mill in Rowsley

And then the eating commenced.  Jeanette, Matthew, Rebecca and Evie drove up from Portsmouth on Holy Saturday to have lunch with us.  Lindsey was quite shocked when she learned that I was doing a vegetarian feast and that we were intending to be dry as well (in that we wouldn't be drinking alcohol, not that we had decided not to make the house wet!). But nobody seemed to object to their spring rolls and potato croquettes, nor to their butternut squash lasagne, and not even to their cheese and biscuits.  Nobody appeared to object to drinking ginger beer or home made lemonade instead of wine. It was all lots of fun.

Then it was Easter Day (Lindsey was quite shocked to discover that The Builder and I were intending to remain dry - which not only gave us Lent on the wagon, but also the whole of March :-)  A Personal Best, I think).  We took ourselves round to Tabitha and Gareth's place where also were Freyja, Nate, Duncan and Gareth's workmate Aaron, who we hadn't met before, and had a lovely Easter Feast.  Gareth had made roast pork and roast lamb and potatoes and loads of veg

Cally, multi-tasking

You may remember that we couldn't take Cally's birthday cake to her party because the Play Arena couldn't allow us either to cut the cake or to eat it.  So I held off the cake until Easter and took it to the feast.  After all, Cally didn't know it had been intended to be a birthday cake rather than an Easter Cake:

Oooh look.  Cake!  Oooooooh look. A choo choo.  It's a choo choo cake!!! Well Done, Gamma!!

Then it turned out that Nate had found exactly the same cake mould and had also made it for Easter:

Nate didn't get a well done!

So we put them together:

And then we fell spectacularly off the wagon.  Bea, Steve and Richard came for lunch on Monday and we had lots to eat and lots to drink (except for Steve, who was driving). We had coffee and sandwiches at Bragazzi's in Sheffield with Freyja. We went to the Rutland in Chesterfield for lunch on Wednesday. Jo and Rob from work came for lunch at our place on Thursday and we went to The Nettle for lunch on Friday. It was a grand week of lunching.

No lunching today.  We're shortly off to Stockport.  There will have to be evening feasting instead.