July 2017 - Week 2

Monday 10th to Sunday 16th July 2017

Monday the air con engineer called to clean the air conditioners. For dinner I made a Puy lentil curry with roasted new potatoes, a delicious vegan dish.

Tuesday we were resigned to cleaning the flat as we have people coming around for dinner tomorrow! That meant we were too exhausted to cook so we had pizzas for dinner.

Wednesday morning was taken up preparing my main course for tonight’s dinner; jerk chicken, rice and peas, pineapple chutney, roasted yellow pepper sauce and a green salad with a lime vinaigrette. Sam took over in the afternoon making our starter of peaches baked with mozzarella and Parma ham with a balsamic glaze and a strawberry, raspberry and kiwi Pavlova for dessert. It was all great! Our guests were Chris and Tina and also a Dutch couple who have moved to Malta from Curacao, Lena and Jeroem. Their English is good, as seems to be the case with all Dutch people, although one or two jokes did get lost in translation.

Thursday Tina called around to drop off the key to her house; she forgot last night. She and Chris are going away for a three weeks holiday in Sicily and we have been conscripted to water their plants. Anyway, she was hyper, having had a coffee, which is always an iffy idea with Tina, and in her excitement she forgot to leave the key, so she had to come back again later! For dinner we had leftovers, basically repeating last night’s dinner.

Friday we visited Sliema to check out the Debenham’s sale but nothing took our fancy. For dinner Sam had a rib eye steak with chips; I had chicken wings flavoured with my Bonza BBQ spice and a baked potato.

Saturday we went to the Craft Village for cappuccini. We visited the Olive shop and I bought Sam an olive wood ladle as a birthday present. On the way home we stopped off at Sherries garden centre and I bought Sam an orchid.

Tomorrow will be Sam’s birthday and to mark the occasion we went to Lovage. We don’t generally go there any more because the food has gone downhill. However, the room and the service are great and it holds happy memories for us. Unfortunately the food was poor again. I had Gozitan goats cheese patties covered in a cornflake crumb. The cheese is tasty but quite hard and dry and there was no sauce or similar to moisten the dish so I poured balsamic over it which helped. For my main I had belly pork. It came in two pieces and the bottoms and one side of each were completely black and burnt. If you managed to do that at home you would at least cut the burnt bits off before serving it. The roasted peppers and courgettes were good. Sam started with battered prawns which were tasteless (also the verdict of the diners on the next tale), then for her main she had pasta stuffed with venison in a sage butter. The pasta was sloppy, the venison stuffing too dense and the sage butter was noticeable by its absence. Again, her dish was dry. Anyway, we enjoyed our evening even if the food was rubbish! I can’t see that we will visit Lovage again any time soon seeing that there are so many better restaurants to choose from in the same price range.

Sunday was Sam’s birthday! Her wish was to do as little as possible, which translates as lying on the terrace reading magazines and books. Today was a bit cooler – mid 30°s – so that was doable. For dinner we had goats cheese and vegetable pizzas.