A Cup of Pretty; A Slice of Yummy.

Yes, yes, I'm still here. :)

I was in desperate need of some inspiration yesterday. The hours are like days and the days like years now, and it's all I can do to keep myself mildly distracted. Thankfully, I did have a project I'd been putting off for several weeks to work on: making my own cheese.

And thankfully, once again, it happened to be a beautiful evening here in London, the perfect excuse to take myself on a long and aimless walk around the neighborhood and admire the now verdant trees and beautifully, heavily, gravid flower bushes.

It is thus that today's post came about, focusing on two ostensibly unrelated things, united only by their equal beauty and spiritual healing power to little old me.

* * *

A Cup of Pretty.

There is a street nearby that I'd actually never walked down before. The sun was setting and the breeze was turning cool, but my mile walk had warmed me sufficiently and so I decided to go down that unknown road and see what there was to see.

Happily, my short walk revealed to me a beautiful, quiet, and typically British neighborhood street with wooden doors, brass knockers, houses with names, and lots of impossibly small but quaintly - darlingly even - arranged front gardens with wrought iron gates and ferngully vines, budding trees, bursting bushes, and the most delightfully natural mixture of fragrances hanging in the air along with the golden-dusty sunshine of before sunset.

dusty-before-sunset-sunshine

One particular flower bush was so over-whelmed by the number of blooms it had, that there were at least twenty or thirty beautiful, bright pink blossoms (in the perfect state of bloom!) littered on the ground below it. I took that as a clear divine intervention / sign that I should rescue them in the name of beautifying my house.

* * *

A Slice of Yummy.

deliciously fresh queso blanco / queso fresco

A while back I read this post on What's Cooking? and vowed to try making my own cheese. It's something I'd always wanted to do and when I read Ben's suggestion to use this recipe, I had no "it's too hard" excuses left in me.

I couldn't find cheesecloth.

Having already passed the deadline for his Homemade challenge, I figured I'd do it anyway and just keep it to myself. I left it unsalted and intend to use it for either a simple tomato and cheese salad or my first attempt at one of my favorite Indian dishes: Saag Paneer.

Here is the (sole) fruit of my labor, aka, a slice of yummy.

Saag Paneer, here I come.