Indian summer

I have been grossly slacking on the blip front recently, so I knew I had to come up with something, however bad, today. Luckily the sunset obliged :)

I haven't been idle the last few days. Monday evening: choir practice, crunching the notes for our new repertoire with the sopranos. Tiring work ...

Yesterday evening we invited Shay, Trish and Sue over for dinner/freezer emptying. Spoiler: we aren't going to see them for a while and this was the one window of opportunity. We invited them early because T had an early flight to catch this morning (Wednesday). And did our best to do a low-effort menu. It worked out well:  avocado, orange, and roasted pepper salad with added feta;  the lovely recipe for roast chicken with tzimmes from Diana Henry's A Bird in the Hand, which I have made several times before (scores highly on the effort versus results scale); cheese, of course, and a cherry and almond tart made with cherries from the now nearly empty freezer. Easy and can be made well in advance.

Sue had brought a wine that gave me the title of my blip; it was called Eté Indien, the label featuring a sunset -- a vin orange, something none of us had tried before. It's a white wine made by the method for red wine, so the grape juice ferments with the skins, and it genuinely is orange. We all nearly choked on a first sip ... it is quite odd.  Some reconciled themselves and had second helpings, but it's not something I would actively seek out again. We reverted to more traditional choices to drink with the meal.

We waved them off at 11:30, loaded the dishwasher, and went straight to bed, but we weren't too lively this morning.  Did some packing and tidying up intermittently through the day, and I went to my last gym class in the evening. At this point I had taken no photos, but seeing the pink clouds when we came out, I swiftly dashed to a vantage point and took a couple of photos. Phew -- blip in the bag! And chilling with more bits and bobs from the fridge and a couple of glasses of wine.