Making Me Smile on Monday

It was a snowy start to February here this morning, but now the sun is out and the snow has melted. I love that despite the cold weather, I have daffodils blooming in a container on my patio.

Here are some other things that are making me smile this Monday.



This basket full of fragrant blue hyacinths on my kitchen window sill and the gorgeous jasmine plant upstairs in my library (below). I love the distressed “new made to look old” container it is in and how it is being trained in a circle shape.



Both of them just smell like Spring. And both were a bargain because I already had the containers. They were left over from some of the Christmas arrangements I had so I just took them back to the lovely florists at The Green Parlour in Pangbourne and they re-filled them for me at a fraction of the price of having new container plantings made up. So it’s recycling and economising at the same time! Now that makes me smile!!

And...

I love how these beautiful oranges look in my new blue bowl. The contrast of the blue and orange reminds me of old Impressionist paintings.

But the thing that made me smile even more was finding my Dad’s handwritten recipe for his famous ribs while working on my Family Food History and Recipe Project. It just fell out of one of his old cookbooks. The amazing thing is I had gone through that book before and never found the recipe, which I thought was lost forever.



It felt like a gift from my Dad. I can’t wait to make them.

What’s making you smile this Monday?