Last week was one of those weeks that you don’t want to repeat . We have been more or less confined to the house.

I did go out into the garden where there were some uplifting aspects to the week. Our first snowdrops are flowering. This is always a cause for celebration as, although we are still in the middle of winter, it feels as though spring is just around the corner.

The hellebores buds are beginning to open. It seemed to me that they are a bit later this year, so I checked my photo albums and we have had flowers in mid January in previous years.

We have a sarcococca in a pot on the patio. I noticed the scent before I realised that it was flowering, The flowers don’t have petals so rely on their scent to attract pollinators. It certainly worked on me.

Many more bulbs are now pushing their noses out of the soil but there is still a chance that they will regret leaving their cosy blanket of compost.

Another sign that the new gardening year is approaching was the arrival of our main seed order. Onion sets and seed potatoes have arrived at our local garden centre so it is also time to think about  ordering those. Covid restrictions may have been lifted but we will still use their click and collect option.

We’re hoping that the gales at the weekend haven’t caused any damage at the allotment as we don’t know when we will be able to pay a visit to check up on things.

Monday and Tuesday we were housebound as Martyn had to self isolate after his Covid test in preparation for the operation on his nose on Wednesday.

Wednesday was a early start as we had to be at the hospital for 7:15. We expected him to be at the hospital all morning but I had the call to pick him up late morning.

Friday I went for my biopsy stitches removing in the morning and late Friday night we were back at the hospital. Martyn’s dressing kept coming loose – it’s difficult to keep a dressing on the nose – and on top of that the wound started to bleed. 

His wound was redressed with some difficulty and we were told to go back Sunday morning to have everything checked out. He received plenty of attention with three doctors, one being the consultant who had performed his surgery, checking his wound. Hopefully everything is proceeding as it should. Now he has an appointment to return on Wednesday for his dressing changing again.

Being confined to the house I decided to make a batch of individual chicken, mushroom and shallot tarts. The only home grown ingredients was the onion. The tarts were frozen and will be used when we have a salad. They were loosely based on this recipe  although I scaled things down and used low fat creme fraiche instead of cream and left out the sriracha sauce.

I had some pastry left over and so made four mini apple pies.

I forgot to take a photo of Monday’s meal which was a chickpea and vegetable casserole. It used homegrown carrot, parsnip, onion, garlic, parsley  and some of our frozen cauliflower. The recipe  seems to have disappeared off the Internet.

Later in the week, I made  turkey bolognese where the only homegrown ingredient were onions.

I made a chicken, leek and mushroom pilaf that used some of our carrot and frozen leeks.

At the weekend we had some of our potatoes baked and some of our frozen peas as an accompaniment to a salmon dish that also used some of our shallots.

Finally we had another ‘vegetable pie’ that isn’t really a pie. This time I used some of our potato, onion, carrot, garlic, rosemary and our frozen peas and cauliflower. I added some swede that was leftover from Monday’s dish to the topping.

With all the unwelcome ‘excitement’ we forgot the RSPB Bird Count that took place at the end of last week. We’ve been keeping our own records so we will do our own count even though it will be too late to enter our results to the official count. With the extreme windy conditions my guess is that the birds would have been lying low anyway.

As always keep safe and well and here’s hoping that for us this week is less eventful.