I was up and dressed at 7am this morning in an effort to try and have a word with the woman who rides a horse around the estate early at the weekends. The loud noise of the horse's hooves clip-clopping on the roads has woken Sophie up for the last couple of weekends and it means that she's not getting a well-earned lie-in! Last night I told her to wear ear plugs as that would help muffle the sound!
I sat in the living room with the window open and listened out for a horse, but of course, this morning she didn't appear! I had posted a gripe about it on our residents' Facebook page so maybe someone knew her and had already had a word! I was going to be polite and ask if she could ride around later, but I was curious to find out why on earth she rides around a quiet estate so early? By 9am Sophie was awake and feeling refreshed after a good night's sleep so Keith and I went to the garage in Moulton and I put some petrol in her car and bought the newspaper.
Back home we enjoyed bacon and tomatoes for breakfast and relaxed for a while until we decided to make a trip to Market Harborough, somewhere we haven't been for a while. It's been a cold and windy day today and of course the weather was worse in the town! We parked the car and visited New Look where Sophie bought some shoes for her trip to London next week, when she'll be on her feet all day at her company's stand at a big exhibition. We also went to Boots and Waterstones before going to a sweet little cafe tucked away in a side street for a big pot of tea and a slice each of pear and almond cake.
After relaxing and enjoying a lovely cup of tea we called it a day and headed home to make a start on tonight's dinner - a Hairy Bikers' recipe of chicken and mushroom ravioli. We were both a bit nervous, to be honest, but we assembled all the ingredients and put five eggs into a mound of special "00" flour on our worktop. Some of them ran over the top so we were faced with a sticky mess, but we soon had it all under control and I managed to shape it into a dough! I had very sticky hands, though!
We wrapped the dough in clingfilm and left it in the fridge to chill before gently frying the turkey mince (we couldn't find chicken mince in either Tesco or Aldi), leeks and mushrooms. I had used one leek but we had loads of it so we left some out as Sophie's not that keen! When that was cooked we set it aside to cool and relaxed for an hour, which was a good job as the evening turned out to be a stressful one!
Step one was cutting the dough into four equal pieces before we than had to roll each piece out and insert it into the pasta machine to get it lovely and thin. While Sophie was doing that (and swearing quite a bit) I took the thin dough and cut it into rounds with a pastry cutter. The trouble was, it kept sticking to everything so was incredibly fiddly! I put a teaspoon of filling into the middle of each round and then placed another on top and sealed the edges. By now we had flour everywhere and the kitchen was in chaos. I found it difficult to keep the ravioli somewhere that it wouldn't stick and Sophie was flattening the dough and churning out more and more rounds as I struggled to keep up!
We left the fourth piece of dough as by now we had forty ravioli and Mike had said he wasn't eating with us. We put two big pans of salted water on to boil and stuck some baguettes in the oven to cook. All plans to make garlic bread had gone out of the window and the kitchen looked like a bomb had hit it!
I crimped the edges of the ravioli with a fork and Sophie made a start on the mushroom sauce. When it was almost ready we plunged the pasta into the water and hoped fervently that they wouldn't burst open!
Luckily, they didn't and after cooking them for mere minutes we were dishing up. It was now past 8pm and we'd been hard at it since 6.30pm so we were hoping that it would all be worth the effort! Keith wasn't impressed and said that there wasn't enough filling in the pasta and that it was quite thick and chewy. Not really what we wanted to hear! He did say he liked the sauce, though, so that was something!
After washing up and having a bit of an argument about cooking in general, Sophie and I decided to walk around the estate in the pouring rain and strong wind. This was not what I had in mind for a Saturday night when we should have been relaxing!
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