Rice pudding

Good morning

Will tell you about rice pudding in a moment..

Do you ever get up and think what's the point? Actually it starts before you even get up, do you think, bugger it stay in bed?

That was this morning, the initial thought was just turn over, snooze the alarm etc. Give the blog  a rest for a day and chill out for today. 

This blog is about showing what goes on behind the scenes in the shed in the fens, the good the bad and the ugly, plus hopefully putting out there what we learn along the way.

Instead of just snoozing the alarm and not writing the blog, we got up and went through the motions getting to the point when it's time to write it. These routines (will write about this another day) prior to writing meant that we are writing this with enthusiasm and a willingness to do so. 

During the morning routine one of the main questions was why do we feel this way, the answer was obvious, things didn’t go as we hoped they would. We had things in the pipeline, for example shows we wanted to get into that we got confirmation that we were unsuccessful. Meetings got postponed or cancelled. Nothing is happening quick enough etc. It is interesting because none of the things that happened yesterday were big things, they were just a combination of small things which can quickly shift your momentum and mindset from a positive forward thinking one to one that feels its going backwards. 

So what did we do? We took ourselves out of the situation, had a rest, talked, reset and asked ourselves some questions

Were we right to build expectations? 

The initial answer was that it was stupid to put those expectations on ourselves, in the future don’t have any expectations then you will never be disappointed. Hang on, but if we don’t have expectations, hopes and aspirations what's the point doing what we are doing. Then it was a light bulb moment. It's great to have expectations, it's great to have hopes, dreams are amazing and well aspiring to be better can only be a good thing.

What we then had to ask ourselves was a different question. 

How can we manage our expectations better, what can we learn from the experience and what will we do differently going forward. 

So as a silly example we will tell you about Rice Pudding, hopefully you will get the point.

We had been talking about homemade rice pudding in the shed, so yesterday we decided to make some. Firstly it took ages to actually find the bloody rice, two shops later and after being sent down the rice aisle and then back to the home baking aisle several times, the staff working were definitely having a laugh with us we found the rice. It's in the home baking section near the tinned rice pudding if anyone wants to know and it's 99p for 500g.

We followed the recipe to the letter (which is something we never normally do!) and placed it in the oven for 2 hours. 

Late last night it was time to sit and enjoy the rice pudding, it looked great, smelled great so we chucked it in a bowl and took the first mouthful, “ouch” it was bloody hot (never learned that one) but that wasn’t the issue. The rice wasn’t cooked, it was like eating warm thick sweet milk full of toenail clippings. So we tried again, the second spoonful blew it this time so it didn't burn but still the toenail clippings were in there. Tried a third time…What's the definition of insanity again, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, well we are a little insane then. Had two options, just eat it or leave it, decided to bin it, crack open the chocolate and enjoyed that.

If you have got this far well done! Will get to the point 

So what do we do now, were we daft to have an expectation of how amazing the rice pudding was going to be? No, certainly not, we love rice pudding. Do we just go and buy some from a shop? No, we are not going to settle for a commercial one, we wanted a homemade one. Are we going to try again? Absolutely, that’s tonight's plan. Are we going to hope it's amazing? Yes we are.

What if it isn't as we expected? Well we know the answer to that one now, as long as it doesn't remind us of toenails we will eat it, if not we will bin it and most importantly we will keep having a go and learning until we get it how we hope it will be, or even better!

So in the shed in the fens, we have expectations, we have hopes, we have aspirations and we are going to keep having a go and learning until we get things how we hope they will be or better!

Have a great day!