I'm no Ben, or Jerry for that matter...

I'm so relieved that today is the last day of February.  Despite the fact that we had a wonderfully luxurious holiday and have managed to spend quality time with our UK family and friends, the last few months have been mixture of good and the not-so-good-at-all.    

March brings us that little bit closer to spring and with spring often comes new beginnings and fresh starts - hope even.  Spring in England usually means sunny days with flowers blooming in just about every direction you could turn. Well except if you happen to take a walk up the path near our house.  Then you just get the pleasant sight of bags full of dog mess hanging from the trees and a ton of rubbish strewn throughout the bushes.  It looks lovely, honest; or so the local council would have you believe because they don't seem to see anything but flowers and fairies if they bother to come check it out. Most years they may decide to take a bit of notice but by then the lush green foliage will have grown back, conveniently covering all the trash and mess leading them to believe the local villagers are just tale-tellers. Or perhaps the Rubbish Fairies really have done a tidy up while we weren't looking.  

Anyway, even if the sunny skies of spring only last a month or two before they open up and wreak havoc on us for believing for one moment that the good weather could possibly extend into summer, then so be it.  At this point in time I will take it.  

In other news, Andy went to work away this week for the first time in months.  It's been a bit of adjustment for me & Molly but we have been keeping ourselves fairly occupied in the evening. For instance, last night Dawn and Carter came over.   

I made these for our dinner: 

Loaded Sweet Potato

They were low fat, healthy and tasty.  I hardly even used any grated cheese as the rest of the toppings were flavourful enough. 

The recipe can be found here and it's worth a try, trust me.  Even if you aren't health conscious and need a new recipe to break the monotony. They are so good.

We then played a few rounds of Skipbo in between trying to make a chocolate & coconut milk (lactose-free) ice-cream.  Key word here is 'trying'.  It didn't seem to amount to much when we were done but I haven't talked to Dawn yet for the final result. The instructions for my ice-cream maker (which I've called Elmo) said it wasn't meant to immediately be the consistency of ice-cream but surely it should have been a bit thicker than what we ended up with.  

Tonight I will endeavour to make a Ben & Jerry's recipe for Andy's return.  Fingers crossed it turns out, although I think it might take a few tries before I get the hang of it.   If you have any experience with making ice-cream I would welcome some pointers.