The vixen visits...

I have bacon, I have ketchup, I have flour, yeast, salt, butter, sugar, black sesame seeds, eggs etc.  To cut it short I have all the ingredients to make a Sunday breakfast butty, but no actual bread.  So, now I've bought a hand mixer with dough hooks as well as whisk attachments (from Sainsburys only £13.  I dread to think how little someone got paid to make it and in what conditions, but it was the only one they had with both attachments).  So I made some.

Using a Delia Smith recipie that uses 4oz of butter (how much!) but she's right, they are tasty...  Although I only have wholemeal strong plain flour so they're a bit erm filling!.

Then as the oven was hot, and I don't like wasting energy, I made some rock buns filled with ginger preserve gifted to me for Christmas by my beloved cleaning lady - she was AWOL for months but now she's back (huge relief and excitement on my part, she's just bemused I didn't phone and ask her to come back, I was being polite and waiting) and is going to clean the cupboards next week, so I need to show I'm at least making an effort to eat her present!  They are also entirely wholemeal flour and are filling, but tasty.

They are also a bit more charred than they should be as I was busy eating the whole point of this Sunday morning cooking fest, the bacon butty... which resulted in Ivor following my movements closely in case of titbits (sorry mate, bacon's salty, you're not allowed any)

Back in the kitchen after eating the butty and rescuing the welldone rock buns, Ivor heard a noise outside, and abandoned the 'slinking around for leftovers' for 'battle mode' investigations...

You wouldn't think I'd only decorated that wall before Christmas would you? The landlord took the radiator off the wall and left a real mess that I'm going to have to paint over. Anyway, after tutting over the mess (again, but I'm waiting until after my exam on 19th to talk to him about it, I need quiet and can live with a long list of stuff he needs to do for now.)  I turned to the kitchen window and found the vixen mooching around the patio.  By the time I'd picked up the camera, she was up the steps investigating the cat flap,and hearing me, looked right into the window.

See? In the right hand window pane (yes I've not painted that bit of woodwork, my landlord took the gloss away for other purposes and I've not got it back yet). Then she shot off round the corner to dig up my veggie patch.

Amazing! And it's nice to see her close up - she's thin but healthy looking, a bit bedraggled by rain but not obviously mangy. In fact it's been raining all night - so there won't have been much takeaway food discarded in the local main streets, and she's probably a bit hungry as she needs to feed those growing cubs.

It's made my day! Not Ivor's though, he's now crouched by the cat flap snuffling anxiously. And not without reason, as she chased him onto that fence the other day.