Pockets of beauty & a recipe

Ginger & cinnamon flapjack

Warm words

Gentle early morning with the sun painting green leaves, that haven’t turned or fallen yet, lit up with memories of summer.

Insects fly past my window, and the flowering coriander towers out of window boxes, waving gently. Sunshine comes into the sitting room lighting up my day, and the silence really is, golden.

As I look around my room, the paintings on the walls bring fondness alive. The air is cooler and I snuggle into this safe space before looking at what is happening in the world, and scooping it all into my heart. I don’t know if that makes a difference, but it lets me feel less powerless.

Sometimes, the depth of beauty and peace on days like this, fills up my bones, and I take that out into the world. Quietly. Almost invisible, but sometimes people notice, and they smile at me. Sometimes, noticing the ordinary beauty of things can cause peace to come spilling out of your heart. Perhaps we can paint the world with that.

As I walked down the road later in the day, slippery lemon and lime leaves sparkled across the pavement. The sun still shining. My insides still feeling the early morning peace. My eyes searched for pockets of beauty.

The tree outside my window is a mosaic of light and shadow, glistening and moving, and in front of one of the windows, a single string of cobweb is lit up by the sun.

There are a few copper leaves on that tree now, but not many and hardly any have dropped yet. Soon that will change, and I will be able to see the old church opposite, where people live. There’ll be birds balancing on its roof, but today, I see the tree, the green leaves, the sunshine, and one string of brightly lit up cobweb, blowing in the breeze.

Recipe

Ginger & cinnamon flapjack

I love a flapjack when they’re homemade and squishy. Sweet treat comfort food. This treat is very full of the sweet taste—great for vata and pitta types—using both golden syrup and jaggery. If you don’t have jaggery use any sugar.

Jaggery is a good sugar to use because it is unrefined and contains lots of minerals. It has a molasses taste for this reason, and makes these flapjacks really tasty on a cool autumns day. Great for taking out with you on a woodland walk with a flask of something warm and cosy.

You need a 20 x 30 cm tin to bake them in.

Ingredients

• 500g porridge oats

• 375g butter

• 275g golden syrup

• 200g jaggery

• 1 teaspoon ginger powder

• 1 teaspoon cinnamon powder

Method

Grease the baking tin and put the oven at gas mark 3 or 160 c. Combine the last five ingredients in a saucepan and heat until the butter and jaggery have melted and everything is mixed. Take off the heat and add the porridge oats. Put in the baking tin then the oven for about 20 minutes, until golden. Leave in the baking tin until they have cooled then cut into pieces, but don’t take out until completely cold.

Beautiful

Here’s a picture of one of my favourite places to go in Bath. A tiny wood of falling down trees, where time disappears and it’s as if I was alive hundreds of years ago.

Smallcombe wood, Bath, UK.

Till Sunday,

Wishing you the warmest,

Lucy x