Day 7 - basketball and deep fried sprouts

Happy Harlem Globetrotter's Day! A very specific day to celebrate but celebrate I did. We are now the proud owners of a basketball in their honour and the boys have enjoyed watching trick shot baskets on YouTube. I'm told by regularly by my eldest that he is good at basketball, now he has the chance to prove it. I think that persuading him of the greatness of Everton is a lost cause so maybe we can find a basketball team to follow together.

I must admit that my attempt to celebrate Old Rock Day failed miserably. I was excited by the idea if old rock, I was thinking ZZ Top and Bruce Springsteen. It turns out that the rock in question is the more solid dirty kind. We paid a visit to Attingham Park, partly with the intention of searching for Shropshire Rocks. If you haven't come across the phenomenon, it is when people paint rocks and hide them to be found and rehid.  We met some friends and spent so much time chattering that we completely forgot to hunt the stones.

Tempura Day was much more successful. Firstly, the recipe actually finds a use for fizzy water. On its own, sparkling water is the devil's drink but add it to flour, cornflour and baking powder and it makes a tasty light batter. We tried it with courgette and aubergine which worked ok, mushrooms and prawns, which were tasty, but the best of all was tempura sprouts! I already knew that boiled, roasted or mashed sprouts are a healthy tasty treat but deep fried in tempura batter and they truly come to life. A must for food lovers everywhere. They even go well with the sweet chilli sauce I used for dipping.  I'm salivating at the memory. Yum.

The last celebration for today is I'm Not Going To Take It Any More Day. This was a tricky one.  I thought about complaining about the clothes which are always being left on the bathroom floor or beds not being made but these seemed too trivial. Instead, I thought that this would be a good opportunity to tell people about a local boy, aged 6, who decided all on his own that he wasn't going to take it any more and did something about it. After watching Blue Planet II,  he was upset about the plastic in the oceans and so he wrote to Teresa May and Donald Trump to ask them to do something about it. He copied the letters to Prince Harry, Ben Fogle and Sir David Attenborough. The latter two replied, thanking him for his efforts. If enough of us take such actions when we see the need, maybe those with the power to do something would be minded to do the right thing! Well done him!  Respect.

That's enough for today.  It was also Bobblehead Day but that would have been a step too far for one day. Good night for now.