Family, frivolity and foraging in your Heyday Friday newsletter

Something of a hotch-potch (and a lot of 'f's) in this week's newsletter - a flight of fancy building, a couple of fun viewing recommendations, and a handful of smart tips to save on food waste.

Hello!

This week’s blog features a building I’ve seen from the outside so many times, but, to my shame, have never been into. Until now.

A building that it turns out is every bit as magnificently bonkers on the inside as its immediately recognisable, entirely out of place, exterior.

A building that could have been the home of a Disney princess, but instead was the holiday residence of a real life king.

A building that is brimming with more lavishly opulent design and mythological creatures than any I’ve ever seen.

Bet you want to know what building it is, don’t you?

All will be revealed when you CLICK HERE.

And in the meantime, here’s a rather fuzzy picture of me admiring one of its riotously sumptuous rooms (there are lots of much better ones in the blog, I promise. I’ve had to zoom in far too much to this one)

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WORDS OF WISDOM

I’ve written in the past about why being by the sea is MY HAPPY PLACE so that would explain why these wise words have always meant so much to me. But they’re also relevant to THIS WEEK’S BLOG in a way you’ll discover when you read it.

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THIS WEEK I’VE BEEN……WATCHING

I said last week I was off to see the new Bridget Jones film. Here’s what I thought about it: funny, sad, moving, maddening. Taking those in order - there’s plenty of the kind of joyfully relatable fun and laugh out loud situations we’ve come to expect of our titular heroine as we catch up with her nine years after the who’s-the-father dilemma of Bridget Jones’s Baby.

But whilst Mad About the Boy has plenty of jollity following the latest chapter in Bridget’s never straightforward love life, this film is also suffused with the sadness of our heroine finding herself as a single mother to two young children after Mark dies in an accident whilst working on a case abroad (no spoilers here, it’s revealed at the very start of the film and in the trailer - see below). The absence of Mark also provides the film with its most moving moments as Bridget and her children face life without their much missed husband and father.

I laughed and wept exactly as everyone I know who had already seen the film said I would, and exactly as I promise you will if you haven’t already seen it yourself. (Oh and I must just add that all the exteriors are shot in and around an area of London I spend a lot of time in, and it looks fab!)

As for the maddening - as good as Renee and her pretty much faultless English accent is, I’m afraid I still can’t reconcile having an American actress playing this most iconic of British heroines. I simply don’t believe there wasn’t a home-grown actress who was right for the role and therefore can only guess that it was pressure from Hollywood and/or investors in the original film who insisted that the part go to someone well known to American audiences. Maddening.

You can see Bridget Jones Mad About the Boy in cinemas in the UK and on whatever streaming service it appears on, in due course

And watch the trailer HERE

ALSO…….

I thought the first season of The White Lotus was great. I thought the second was fantastic. It’s too early to pass judgement on the third, the opening episode of which aired on UK televisions this week (and is only being released weekly, how quaintly old fashioned).

With the set up we’ve come to expect of Mike White’s Emmy award winning drama, we join a bunch of mostly odious rich people in a luxury resort (this time in Thailand), one of whom is murdered, but we won’t discover who or why until the last of the eight episodes.

There are characters behaving suspiciously, characters behaving varying degrees of odiously, characters with secrets, characters who seem innocent and sweet - but probably aren’t - and characters who clearly have personal demons and agendas.

I can’t say I was gripped by this opening salvo, but maybe it’ll pick up - as the trailer (below) suggests it will. I’ll definitely be giving it the benefit of the doubt and watching episode two this week. Have you seen it? And if so, what do you think?

You can watch The White Lotus on Sky Atlantic

HERE’S that trailer

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SMART SAVE TIP OF THE WEEK

I’ve become very familiar with the idea of ‘shopping in your wardrobe’ (rummaging through your clothes for pieces you already own but hardly ever wear and putting them together in different ways to create fresh outfits, rather than buying yet more new stuff), but I was presented with a whole new waste-not-want-not notion in the latest issue of the National Trust magazine.

They call it fridge foraging and it’s the idea of using leftovers and commonly wasted ingredients either to make tasty new dishes, or in other ways that are beneficial to, for example, your garden.

Take leftover egg whites and yolks. You might already know that you can freeze them in bags or ice-cube trays for use next tie you make something like a quiche or meringue. But did you know that you can use crushed-up eggshells as a natural fertiliser?

I’m already a dab hand at turning leftover, stale bread into croutons (I fry the chopped up cubes in garlic olive oil, but you can also roast them in the oven) and would certainly use it to make bread and butter pudding if I didn’t hate it quite so much.

I’m also getting better at remembering to save the peelings from well washed veg and potatoes to roast in a hot oven drizzled with olive oil and then eat as a snack or on a bowl of soup.

This week I tried something I’ve never done before, and which worked really well. The NT article suggests a great way of using leftover fresh herbs (have you ever managed to use up all the herbs in a packet before they start going off? I haven’t). Using a food processor or pestle and mortar, they recommend combining the herbs with garlic, oil and any kind of nut or seed to make a pesto which you can either stir into pasta or freeze for another time.

I had some rocket which came with one of my Mindful Chef meals. I’m afraid I’m not a huge rocket fan, not because of the taste which I like well enough, but because of the way I end up picking it out of my teeth for hours after eating it. So I thought I’d give that the fridge foraging treatment. And this was the result

A punchy pesto which tasted delicious with spaghetti. I might have overdone the garlic a little, so good job I ate it on an evening on my own!

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WHAT’S MADE ME HAPPY THIS WEEK

I loved it that my girls knew their great-grandmother (she died when they were 8 and 6) and I love it even more that my little granddaughters are lucky enough to have their great grandmother still going remarkably strong at 92.

I took two of them to see her over the weekend and it was wonderful to see how much they enjoy being with her- and visa versa - and how much fun they have playing together. It makes me more happy than I can say.

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FRIDAY FUNNY

This could definitely apply to great-grandchildren too!

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That’s it for this week. I hope your arms and hearts are full of the people you love in the coming week.

Do please leave me a little heart if you’ve enjoyed this and I look forward to seeing you next time.