Hello Summer :)

After a somewhat dismal July and August, September has arrived with the sun, and some actual summery weather . . . 

Rali Ceredigion was back in town, there was a tall ship out in the bay, and the beaches have been packed (just as the lifeguard service shuts down!).

Even at sunset people have still been out and about enjoying the water and the almost Mediterranean evening heat . . .

We even fired up our new wood pellet pizza oven one evening - we bought this back at the start of the summer, but have only got to use it a couple of times so far.

It does make a very nice sourdough pizza - and Martin roasted off some of his chilli harvest while we were about it - hopefully there will be more opportunities to experiment over the next couple of months.

Aside from the lovely weather, we've both been suffering with heavy colds (not Covid - we did test!), so haven't felt quite as inclined to enjoy the sunshine as much as we would have otherwise.  Fingers crossed, for a sunny Autumn!

Baking Hot

The latter part of July has been baking in more ways than one.  

From glorious sunshine at the top of Consti . . .

to firing up the pizza oven . . .

. . .  to a bonfire - disposing of the the last batch of garden debris.

Still hot enough to allows us to bake potatoes in the ashes the following day!

DIY Pizza Oven

As part of the #kitchencourtyardredesign we had been considering options for a barbecue installation - then, somewhere online, we saw a DIY pizza oven that someone had made by piling up old bricks, so decided to combine the two . . .

And here we have it - lots of clay bricks, the grills from a defunct barbecue, and a roof of more bricks sitting on some spare aluminium greenhouse struts, topped off with a couple of spare concrete roof tiles.

All built on top of a 'table' structure made from breeze blocks and a paving slab.  Almost everything was stuff we already had - although did pay a few quid for the (reclaimed) bricks.

So, it was:
a) cheap
b) almost entirely recycled
c) easy to construct, dismantle and move
d) somewhere to use up twiggy bits of wood that are a bit small for the log burner . . .

. . . and it made great pizza!