A meal for a cold night

I'm supposed to be at a WI meeting tonight, but it is on "Alternative Therapies" and I can't bring myself to mock the mental, so I'm staying in, cooking sausage casserole and watching the finale of Fringe.  The recipe is a Nigel Slater one, from Kitchen Diaries 1, and I love it, so simple and yet so effective.  It's a proper hearty meal - sausages, lentils, bacon, onion and tomatoes, all cooked together for about forty five minutes, then shovelled from the bowl straight into the mouth with a spoon. Wonderful, but you do need to brown the sausages, which I have done, but not for long enough, so they look a bit pallid and unpleasantly fleshy.

Lucy and Hattie are enjoying living on the top floor, although Lucy still asks me whether I can come and sleep with her in the new sky bed.  Hattie is demanding that I stay with her for a bit; I think her mouth hurts her and she's a bit worried by sleeping in a big girls' bed, and just doesn't have the language to express it.  It only takes her about 10 minutes to drop off and she is funny - grabbing my hand hard, and gradually letting go, only to turn onto her tummy, just on the verge of sleep, mutter "not yet" and then collapse into unconsciousness.  Happy times.

I don't want to talk about work.  Only that we closed early on Friday which was great, and I'm glad that we had the experience of sending the kids out into the snow for a couple of days.  It can bugger off now as far as I'm concerned, I've taken my handfull of pictures of "Nursery in the Snow".

It's so cold, even with the heating on, so I'm wearing my big jumper.  Thank goodness for lovely, lovely wool, even if the waist shaping and my waist are only near neighbours.