Shonky Saturday: shortbread and roses

This is a bad shot. I apologise. It was a grey day. I barely slept at all last night (3 hours, maybe) so spent the morning resting and trying to read a really dreadful whodunnit. Eventually I realised I had read the whole book before. Great relief. Shame about the memory, though.

My friend Eileen had offered to drop in mid-afternoon, so I made some G-F almond shortbread (recipe here). It didn't look in the least exciting, but tasted ok. Steve had gone back to bed, what with the rain and the incipient gales and the football on the radio....

I was able to gift Eileen a package of tapioca, as she had decided to cook, at her husband;s request, a disgusting sounding pudding involving tapoica and pineapples! I had only bought the stuff myself before I realised that tapioca flour is available online: you don't have to grind the "pearls" yourself. I am hoping that the G-F baking course I'm booked on will get me away from the dreaded trinity of potato/white rice/tapioca flour, as all of these are essentially either gluey or crumbly in the mouth, and lacking nutritional value as far as I can tell.
Overdoing the gluten eating definitely still gives me the Headaches from Hell, though. Bo-ring!

After Eileen left, I realised I hadn't got a shot, and the biscuits looked insignificant, so I l blipped the table. CleanSteve likes buying plants, and keeping them on the table, The colourful blue ones are going to be planted out: I chose them at the garden centre last week. The orchid is a present from a former boss, Steve potted it on and it's produced new growth. The roses are because we like them. The ferns are green and cool, and I think they're mostly on the table. We don't eat there much.

I hope I feel less tired soon. It's the holidays, after all! I gave up on reading yet another crappy murder in the Cotswolds novel (why don't I just bin the lot, after having paid at least £20 for collecting all of them last year?) and started on The Tottenham Outrage by Matthew Bayliss, set in one of my former stomping grounds of North London. I wish I'd been a blipper when I worked there four years ago, though I'd rather not recall the pre-blip era of the late 80s when I lived in Stamford Hill. Every Friday night on the estate sounded like a shoot-out at the OK Corrale.