By popular request, and courtesy of A A Gill's Ivy cookbook---

150 g Cheddar chees, grated.
3 medium egg yolks
1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
1 tsp English mustard
6 drops Tabasco sauce
30 ml Guiness (not very much so you have to drink the rest, an added bonus!)
8 slices bread - a smaller bloomer loaf is ideal
salt and pepper.

Mix together all the ingredients except the bread, and season to taste. Toast the bread on both sides, spread the cheese mixture on top, abnout 1 cm thick and grill until browned. Delicious!

I do believe that living well means eating well and luckily I have acquired the perfect cookbook. It contains recipes from the Ivy Restaurant by A.A.Gill. So now we can enjoy crispy duck and watercress salad, bang bang chicken, not to mention their salmon fishcakes any time we want. This ties in nicely with our aim to find ways of living enjoyably but more cheaply - one of the best is their recipe for Welsh Rarebit - our Sunday evenings would not be complete without it! (The only trouble is that when I actually had it at aforementioned restaurant, dare I say it, it was not as tasty as my version---)The other "problem" is that you look at the menu there and think- "had that, had that,had that---" so really you don't need to go there atall--- But it is fun to eat relatively cheaply at home and then enjoy a nice meal out. One of the first meals I cooked for Liz 34 years ago, and which we still do today, is belly pork cooked very very slowly in a tin of Campbell's concentrated celery soup - it really is delicious! (although these days we have to use mushroom soup as they don't make the celery any more- have tried everywhere but to no avail.) We often have a fetta and watercress omelette, or tuna,celery,kidney beans,parsley,and sesame-seeds salad, or tart's pasta (tomato, parsley,chilli,garlic, spaghetti)- oh dear, I guess I shouldn't have missed lunch today!-- waiting for the people to come and remove our grand piano-- the first bit of yet more downsizing before we move in ever-decreasing circles----

I hoped the grass would be greener once i was no longer employed, and, yes, thank goodness, it is! As it happens, I used to have the most beautiful lawn,(I was the original lawn-mower man!) We laid it with turf supplied by the firm that had supplied the turf for Hogwarts in the Harry Potter films. We actually took a day out to go and choose our strips from a big field in which it had just sprouted---I nurtured it, fed it, watered it, mowed it in stripes, horizontally one time, them vertically, then diagonally- strangely therapeutic in the evening sun after a tough day - and, oh that smell of new mown grass- so fragrant and fresh and - well - green! I AM glad we sold the big house and garden before last summer when the hose-pipe ban would have turned it into a barren brown stump-land (of course it would always recover- grass is so resillient--)I actually made 2 compost bins too, based on ones we saw in the vegetable garden at Wisley. So those were our gardening years. I do miss my shed a little - oh yes we had all the acoutrements! Our vegetable garden was a picture with rows of leaks, peas, coriander, rasberries,-- and behind them a big dahlia bed which liz tended- tulips followed by poppies followed by dahlias-But all that is part of our PAST life now. We dont want to be rotting in a vast house and garden with children feeling obligated to come and visit. Now WE shall do the visiting and eventually we may become trendy grandparents living in Covent Garden-- a different but equally valid take on life as a still-new retiree---