So it’s my favourite time of year YAY!! I love Autumn, it makes my soul sing. It’s also a great excuse to pull out my scarf collection and go stomping. I’ll take any excuse to go admire the colours of the changing leaves, pick a few blackberries, hawthorn berries and rose hips, maybe one day I’ll even be clued up enough to forage some mushrooms too.
Food!! How could I forget about Autumn foods?!? Some of the best foods appear around Autumn time, for instance cider… I mean apple crumble. All the apples, root veg and squash/pumpkin. I love roasted squash! My mum used to make a pumpkin and chicken in white sauce meal every year just before Halloween and I still make a point of cooking loads with pumpkins and squash through October/November.
This Autumn is a little more special than normal, last weekend M and I got married. It was everything I’d dreamt off in an Autumn wedding.
We got married out on the lawn, under a tree in front of a small group of friends and family, all while autumn leaves fell from the trees behind us (talk about an amazing backdrop). We then followed it with a reception in a small hall/barn decorated by ourselves, and served stews and crusty bread… proper Autumn grub!! Oh and the cake!! There was obviously lots of cake. Our wedding cake was 2 tiers of delicious vegan gooey chocolate cake covered in salted caramel frosting, NOM!!
As a small aside… how difficult is it to make a wedding eco!! We did our best to minimise excessive waste. All our invites were hand made using recycled paper, instead of cut flowers we decorated with succulents and Heather which we then gave as wedding favours, and all the candlesticks on the tables were hand turned by my mother and brother using locally sourced wood. Any left over food we kept and shared around and all our crockery was hired. We somehow still managed to produce 3 black sacks of rubbish including the caterers waste, and a sack of recycling – gah!!
We spent the first night of our honeymoon in a glamping pod in the Lake District with stunning mountain views. Then we continued our trip down the West coast to somewhere near Manchester where we picked up our hired Narrowboat!! Now I’m not gonna lie, I do have a bit of a Narrowboat obsession and watch a fair few Narrowboat boat vlogger videos with little O at bedtimes. We bumped into one vlogger, Robbie Cummings, on his boat ‘Naughty Lass’ while we were on the water! Check out his documentary coming soon to bbc1 and I think channel 4?! So naturally O and I were very excited about our trip, M wasn’t so sure, but by the end of the week even he was talking about owning “maybe just a small day boat for now” teehee. It was amazing! With a speed limit of 4mph on the canals and much slower where other boats are moored, you’re pretty much forced to take life slowly and chill out.
We pootled along the ‘cut’ enjoying the wildlife, the low dappled sunlight, the accentuated colours of the trees and the cool nip of Autumn air. O spent much of his time shouting QUACK QUACK and throwing food at ducks, while M and I alternated between standing at the tiller and passing each other hot brews. Perfection!!
Back to reality… I now have a mountain of wedding stuff to pack away before I find my house again, I need to get back to lesson planning for my boys, and back to actually checking my diary and getting to stuff. When does sleep happen? Probably around the time I start hibernating for the Winter which is the next exciting thing in my calendar! Time to read up on Hygge!
The Wildling Within 