High hopes

Inspired by the wise and wonderful Cate of Project Subrosa, last weekend I decided to use up our last two eggs and make myself some perfect poached eggs, like so:

 Image: Project Subrosa

One word: YUM.

Unfortunately the situation ended up being a little more like this:

Image: Luis M. Justino

Sigh. Sometimes it's hard being me. 

The worst part was, I was so busy scraping the second egg off the floor that I forgot to time the first egg, which ended up being overcooked (tragedy!) and then when I was finally tucking into my one, sad, unrunny egg, Fin threw himself in typical man-fashion onto the couch next to me and I ended up with half a cup of tea in my lap. It was NOT a good start to the day.

I thought I would redeem myself last night by making a quiche from scratch (well, when I say from scratch, I mean the filling. I didn't make the pastry. I'm not crazy). It was going to be delicious and my troubled relationship with egg-related cuisine would be restored to its former loving harmony.

Image: Michael Verhoef

Sadly, it was not to be. Turns out that if you're going to use frozen pastry, it's a good idea to read the packet first (the word "PUFF" in giant letters is a bit of a giveaway, apparently). Yeah, I basically created a giant vol-au-vent.

Image: Jim Forest. At least I'm not the only one (although maybe he did it on purpose?)

Whatever, it still tasted good.

It brought to mind the time my mum made mince pies and encountered a similar pastry-mix-up disaster. She left the puffy, deformed mince pies sitting on the kitchen counter and propped against them was a note, reminiscent of those old M&S food porn adverts:

"These are not just mince pies. These are the-wrong-type-of-f*ing-pastry, defrosted-by-a-blind-woman, mince pies."

Well, you know what they say. Like mother, like daughter.

So. If I can't redeem myself through cooking, I'll have to do it another way. Like... finally organising a Scottish A Practical Wedding book club meet-up! Hooray!

I first floated this suggestion back in February, because I wanted a piece of this action:

APW book club images via the APW flickr stream
Top L: Emily Takes Photos Top R: Hart + Sol Photo Bottom: Moodeous Photography

I was utterly convinced it would happen. Unfortunately, only two lovely people were interested. And they were both busy that day. Curses.

Let's not let that happen again, shall we?

So, the details. The date has been confirmed as Saturday 4th June at 1pm (although the time can easily be moved to suit everyone) and the tentative location is "somewhere in Edinburgh". If you're on facebook, head over and leave a message on the APW Scotland discussion board. If you're not, you can send me an email and I'll keep you in the loop. The lovely and talented Lauren McGlynn will be there, camera in hand, to document this historic event.

It is *technically* a book club (although I am anticipating an element of chatting-and-drinking-and-talking-about-blogs-and-stuff club), so if you haven't bought the book you can buy one here, or Linsey of the brand new and awesomely-named Boredzilla has one for sale (her cousin's getting married on the 4th so she can't come. Very inconsiderate bride).

Fingers crossed this book club meet-up, unlike the previous non-event or indeed my cooking, will live up to my aspirations. I'm thinking something along these lines:

Image: Andrew Hefter via Where The Sidewalk Begins

Giant hair bows and champagne are always strongly encouraged. Can. Not. Wait.

Happy weekend, peeps.