A foodie day!

The weather has well and truly broken as today has been grey, overcast, rainy and cool with barely any sunshine at all. The cooler temperatures are a relief, though, but it is forecast to be hotter again by next weekend.

Keith and I went to get the Sunday newspapers and called in to see Mum and Dad for a coffee. My Dad said his car has been playing up so we decided to drive it home and see for ourselves. My parents seemed a lot better this morning so that was a relief. I'm hoping that my Mum's medication has now been sorted out and that it's agreeing with her.

I suspected that the battery in my Dad's key fob needed replacing as it was difficult to open and close the car and it kept saying it didn't recognise the key. My Dad's Nissan has a stop/start button so you don't need to insert the key into anything so we replaced the battery (after seeing how to do it on YouTube!) and it worked a lot better. My Dad said the car kept stopping, but I have a feeling that's down to the driver as I suspect he thinks he's in an automatic, having driven those cars for the last thirty years, and perhaps has it in the wrong gear!

We took the car back and when we returned Sophie and I had a discussion about what to do today. The weather was certainly disappointing with a steady rainfall so going for a walk was not a good idea. In the end we settled for researching restaurants in San Francisco, Napa and Monterey which was very pleasant. To our delight we learned there's a Bubba Gump in Monterey! Some of the restaurants were very expensive and eating out in California doesn't look like it comes cheaply, so that's something to be aware of! However, a lot of the eateries had Happy Hour and Sophie and I talked about eating at lunchtime rather than at night, which suits me down to the ground. I don't like having a big meal late in the evening!

We also talked about recipes to cook over the coming Sundays and together we made a rice pudding for tonight's dessert. Neither of us were really keen about tonight's meal - Honeycomb Lasagne from a Co-op recipe. We sat and watched another episode of A Place in the Sun before making a start on the meal, but our hearts weren't really in it!

We had to lightly cook some lasagne sheets before rolling them up into little circles. Unfortunately, I bunged them all in the pan in a bundle so they all stuck together... we had great difficulty separating them so we could stand them up in an ovenproof dish! I'd been cooking the meat in a pasta sauce (we didn't make one from scratch, which was a bit disappointing) and we had to stand them all up before pouring the sauce over the top.

Not our effort, I hasten to add! How it should have looked!

I don't really know why we chose this recipe as I never eat lasagne and it was very simple to make (if you manage to separate the pasta!). If we ever do it again (which I doubt) I would just put the sheets of pasta into a shallow dish with hot water to soften them up.

However, the dish was edible but we used mild cheddar which was a mistake - a strong cheese would have been better! At least the rice pudding was good, though!