I generally do a grocery shop once every two weeks or so. Some women like to shop for clothes, or shoes  – I shop for groceries. I really enjoy it and I can spend a good hour wandering the aisles with my trolley (yes TROLLEY!) deciding whether we’re going to be healthy or naughty. Healthy usually wins. As an extra challenge, I always aim to bring home at least one item of food that we haven’t tried before.

The most recent “mysterious” item was… Junket.

What is Junket, you might ask? According to Wikipedia, Junket is a milk-based dessert made with sweetened milk and rennet, the digestive enzyme which curdles milk. Sounds delicious, right? Err… right?

I remember having Junket as a child once or twice – I believe a friend of my Mum’s brought it around and I remember it being delicious. I think it was frozen. I don’t know, it was a long time ago. I figured what’s the harm in buying some and giving it another go? Maybe Phill and I will love it. You don’t know unless you try!

Junket comes in tablet form. You pop open two tablets, drop them in a glass and mix with two tablespoons of cold water. The tablets start to dissolve the instant the water hits them and it turns into a cloudy liquid.

You add the dissolved tablets to 500mLs of lukewarm milk, sweetened with a drop of vanilla extract. This is the hard part – the milk can’t be too hot or too cold or it won’t set properly. It’s got to be perfect. Another essential part of the recipe is that you can only stir in the dissolved tablets for a few seconds, then you have to stop stiring and pour the liquid straight into a dessert bowl. You have to stop stirring because it doesn’t take long for it to start to set and you don’t want it to curdle.

So I poured it into a dessert bowl…

… and realised I hadn’t added sugar! The particular recipe I was using was to make Junket custard and a tablespoon of sugar was required to be added to the milk while it was heating. Damn! I glanced in the bowl and decided it wouldn’t hurt to just add the sugar to the dessert now. I’d quickly stir it. What could go wrong?

Uh… this?

Dammit! The instant I stuck a spoon in it, it completely curdled into a chunky, watery mess. Apparently the packet wasn’t lying when it said you only have a very limited time to stir and transfer it to a bowl once you’ve added the dissolved tablets – it was literally seconds! This was obviously ruined, so I tipped it out and, determined, started again.

This time around, I added the sugar to the milk and, once it had dissolved, I added the tablet water. I transferred the liquid to the freshly washed bowl and, well, I stared at it for a while, intrigued. After a few seconds I gently wiggled the bowl and observed how the surface of the Junket had already set into a jelly-like state.

I left the Junket out for 10 minutes to set, then transferred it to the fridge, where it remained all day until I was ready to serve it for dessert. Uh, which didn’t go so well. I guess it hadn’t totally set because when I put the spoon in it, it was a lot more liquidy and less stable than I remembered from childhood. I served it anyway and … it was as expected. It tasted like liquidy milk with a texture like tofu.

Oh well. Maybe I’ll get the tablets out in a month or so and try again, but until then I guess I will classify this as a Junket FAIL. Has anyone tried Junket before? Had any success?

I have a lot of snails in my yard. They come out when it’s raining and slowly climb up the garden walls, usually coming to a stop halfway up, where they stick for days. They hide amongst the bushes and chomp away at my plants – oh, and they scare the crap out of Puddy (which is rather amusing, especially if I race after her holding out a snail – she goes absolutely mental!). They can get a little overwhelming in numbers and when this happens, I’m not ashamed to admit I gather as many as I can in a bucket and dispose of them quickly and quietly.

So anyway, I was outside the other day gathering snails and I found the cutest little snail. It was so little and fragile that I thought for a moment, what if this snail is the one that makes me change my mind about snails? I mean, when I picked it up, instead of shoving its head back inside the shell like the bigger ones do, it stuck its head out and wiggled its feelers around. I actually felt a twinge of guilt since I’ve probably, at some point, murdered a member of its family.

Look at it, isn’t it cute? I’ve eaten snails in Paris before and I must admit, if they had come out looking as cute as this one, I might have felt a little hesitant. The snails we’d eaten didn’t exactly look like snails, just little black meaty things inside a snail shell.

Then … the snail did something gross. It pooped on me!

See that? That’s a big, gross snail poop!

Trying not to freak out, I flicked the snail poop off my hand … and then I saw the slimy trail across my fingers! I  suddenly remembered why I hate snails. It was like snapping out of a dream. This thing wasn’t cute, it was gross!

Without hesitation, I tossed Slimy the Snail into my bucket of victims and hurried inside to sanitise my hands. Snails are like mice – they could be cute pets if they didn’t leave a continuous trail of icky after them like slime, or poop. Or both.

At least Puddy doesn’t have a trail of icky. Just a trail of destruction…

Stonehenge was one tourist site I really wanted to visit while Phill and I were in England. I’d never been to Stonehenge before and I was eager to do make the road trip out there. The site has so much history and mystery and I wanted to be a part of that somehow, even if it was only by visiting the stones, taking photos and just enjoying the moment. I know that some people don’t find Stonehenge that interesting and I guess it is just “a bunch of rocks” if you want to look at it that way, but let me tell you – I was very impressed with our visit and it was well worth it!

Phill and I and some friends picked up a rental car from the middle of London bright and early in the morning and (very slowly) made our way out of the city in peak-hour traffic trying to navigate with a faulty GPS system … now that was interesting. After an hour and a half of bumper-to-bumper London traffic jams, we finally got on the right road. After a few hours of driving through delightfully English scenery of fields and black and white dairy cows, we drove up a hill which revealed this amazing sight as we began to descend:

Can you see it there in the distance? I swear Stonehenge just randomly popped up out of nowhere! I’d read that it just appears and I guess they weren’t lying! I don’t know what I expected, but it was nice to see a world-famous tourist site pretty much untouched, without signs and flashing lights and queues and stalls selling keychains and bracelets. The only traffic jam we found ourselves in (which we at first thought was due to being close to Stonehenge) was actually due to a car accident. We easily found a parking spot and scrambled out of the car, cameras at the ready.

Stonehenge is surrounded by a tall fence, which inevitably leads to this:

Seriously people, it’s £6.60 to get in and you get a free audio guide and as much time looking at the stones as you want – just pay! The entrance fee goes towards maintaining the site and, compared to some tourist attraction ticket prices, this was a small amout to pay for entrance. Incidentally the old man in the blue shirt in the foreground here was looking at me like I was crazy. Here I am, standing metres away from Stonehenge and I’m apparently taking a photograph of him, haha!

We had arrived around 12:15pm and quickly moved through the queue, collecting our audio guide and walking through the underpass to the other side of the road where Stonehenge was waiting. There were only a few tourists walking around the stones, which meant I had many opportunities to snap almost people-free photos, which was awesome. There’s nothing worse than photos with random tourists in it, especially the bored, frustrated-looking ones with bad sunburns.

The stones are roped off but the rope is very low to the ground and not imposing upon photographs or your view at all. I also didn’t find the distance between the path and the stones that large. A few of the reviews I had read made me feel like I would need to bring binoculars – this, obviously, was not the case. I think tourists must remember that this is a sacred and protected site. Of course they will rope it off to protect it from the public. They want it to be around forever.

The grass was quite brown and dry, but in some photos it did come out greener. I think Phill was a little disappointed after seeing so many beautiful photographs of lush green grass surrounding the stones – I had to remind him that we were in England during summer, which is, contrary to popular belief, actually hot and dry.

I loved the clouds in the sky. In a way they reminded me of Australia – so did the heat. It was damn hot out there in the field with no protection from the sun. We walked twice around the stones, as there’s no pressure to leave. It was actually quite relaxing and I did enjoy listening to the audio guide, which gave some very interesting information. I particularly thought it was well worth listening to some of the popular conspiracy theories about how Stonehenge was built and for what reason.

You can see the Slaughter Stone in the foreground of the above photo, named for its red stain caused by rain reacting with iron. You can’t really see the red in this photo and to be honest, I wouldn’t have noticed anything special about it if I wasn’t listening to the audio guide. It’s amazing how much detail is in the layout of Stonehenge and every few steps around the circle gives you a completely new view of the site. I think the above photo shows my favourite view – Stonehenge looks less “ruined” as the stones are still resting on the top which gives you a better sense of how it might have originally looked.

I really enjoyed our visit to Stonehenge. Have you been there? What did you think of it?

I love this photo! I had been busy photographing some macro shots of flowers and bugs and I’d noticed Puddy had gone rather quiet, which is always a sign that she’s doing something naughty. I looked up and saw her sitting in front of the wall, staring up at something, her tail flicking back and forth like crazy.

For a moment I was absolutely gobsmacked. What the hell was she looking at?

She turned and meowed at me. I raised my camera to capture her craziness and – a-ha! – the sun caught it and reflected a shimmer of light onto the wall. Puddy went bananas, jumping and reaching for it, obviously thrilled the amazing light spot had returned. So that’s what she had been waiting for!

I played with her for a while, giggling the whole time at how cute she was.

Cats are crazy.