Our tomato plants have been overloading us with ripe tomatoes for almost a month now. I was pretty excited about making my own pasta sauce. While I know that bought stuff is considerably cheaper, I'm looking forward to opening a jar of this and just pouring bottled summer over pasta.

It took a while to find a recipe that didn't require the water bath method. This recipe comes from Crafty Cherry and you can find it in the comments here.

As you can see I still have tomatoes to spare. I've already lined up the ingredients for green tomato chutney, to handle the ones that don't ripen before the plants give out. If you have any favourite tomato recipes, please point me in the right direction.

A few years back I started to make my way through the Series of Unfortunate Events. They had me giggling away, in horror many times, with turns of phrase that just begged to be read aloud. I'm looking forward to reading these to little e at some point. In the mean time, I have just read about this at Allsorts.

You need to google the phrase “unfortunately, XXX” and put your name in the blanks. It seams that Amy Winehouse had been doing enough unfortunate things for all Amy's out there, but I did come across these:

Unfortunately, Amy may be heading the same way

Unfortunately Amy had got very upset that her party might have to be postponed because..”

Unfortunately, Amy's had enough of all that good clean living in the tropics

Unfortunately, Amy Lou sees imaginary friends

Unfortunately, Amy lost everyone's money

and this is the best one, it even managed to horrify my dearest:

“Unfortunately, Amy is immediately smitten with the well-dressed hunk, and it isn't long before Jacques, despite his ruthless professional instincts...”

While I have a few questions for him over this one :

“Unfortunately Greg has since removed his Nipple from bebo due to...”

We are busy tidying the house and clearing some space. There are a number of things that we have either never used or haven't used for a long time and so we are letting them go. There have been weekly trips to the Salvation Army Thrift Stores but somehow I end up taking one bag there and returning with half a bag full. It's a slow process. Maybe this will be a bit faster - Online Clothes Swap – Aoetearoa. The swap is only open to NZ residents to keep the postage down and you can see all it's glory here.

I've decided to pass on some summer knitwear that hasn't seen the light of day for at least 2 years. They were all picked with curves in mind, but the sizes varied. One I wished I bought larger and one I loved so much I bought the other colour too.

Meanwhile, the clearing out continues. We needed to reduce the number of blankets we had until they were each refolded and evaluated on their merits. We decided that we do need to keep them all. My dearest commented that really we just like blankets. The problem is more that we really just like stuff. The linen cupboard looks a little tidier, but is in no way less full.

It's slow going, but we will get there eventually.