pasta with cherry tomato sauce

With the grandparents in residence, parenting is slightly easier today. There's tea and toast on tap, a fair amount of washing up and tidying gets done and, as we're suddenly relegated to third-class citizens (he told us he didn't like our faces this morning), we don't have to play hide-and-seek relentlessly all day.

Instead we all take a wander up to the garden centre on Upper Richmond Road for another phase of Operation Make the Grass Come Back to the Lawn. While ana and Kay look at bedding plants, the men spend a couple of hours sticking fingers into waterfalls/watering cans/buckets of stones/compost/statues/monkey puzzle trees before having a lazy lunch at The Treehouse.

It's a glorious day so we sit in the garden out back, in the sun, whilst monkey entertained himself in the bamboo jungle and we troughed on excellent food: soup of the day for Kay, sunday roast for Mike, sausage and chips for Milo, herb crepe with curried lentils for the anas and smoked haddock on mash and hollandaise for me. The only downer was the impact two pints of Meantime had on my energy levels for the rest of the afternoon.

As we'd eaten out nobody is hungry until quite late, but a quick mercy dash to the shops for puff pastry to make a tomato tart with the kilo of cherry tomatoes I brought this week ends in Meantime-tiredness-induced rage. I got over-excited by half-price prosecco and forgot the cocking pastry. Lucky we've got a cherry tomato-flavoured ace up our sleeves:



Food of the Milos
Sausage and chips for lunch, obvs, but I can't for the life remember what he had for breakfast OR dinner. Damn this micro-brewed pale ale!

sources
pasta with cherry tomato sauce - Donna Hay, The Instant Cook, p58