I know I haven't updated this in a while but I have been doing a fair bit of cooking lately (not always things from my Cooking Challenge list).
Ones I have managed to tick off the list are (I'll update the totals on the Cooking Challenge post):
Jamie Oliver's Chicken Korma which I made completely from scratch including the curry paste - ended up being a bit hotter than a normal korma (had to add loads of yoghurt to cool it down) but still very tasty. I did serve it with plain rice and naan bread but I couldn't get a decent picture of it sorry.
I didn't make those biscuits!
Rhubarb fool from Annie Bell's Gorgeous Desserts book which I made for my friend Helena's birthday yesterday - didn't look much like the picture as the lovely homegrown rhubarb from my friend Amy was more green than pink, and I used Courvoisier rather than Cointreau in the cream, but it still tasted really nice! I did make some poppy seed biscuits to go with it, but didn't manage to get a decent pic last night so here's one I put together today (with yummy French gallettes, I can't claim to have made those!). I've got a load of the fool leftover in the fridge now, so I'll most likely have some for lunch!
I also made a paella with roasted veg a couple of weeks ago - based on a recipe from Ravinder Bhogal's book Cook in Boots which again wasn't on the list, but tasted delicious. Surprisingly easy, although makes a real mess of the wok, and it's just as nice reheated as lunch for work. I'll definitely be trying that one again!
To continue my efforts to actually use the meat in our freezer, I tried my hand at slow cooking with a recipe for breast of lamb with baked onion, which I was pretty pleased with. The lamb was really tender, and the onions were delicious. I probably should have served it with potatoes, but didn't have any in, so made a ratatouille and added some plain pasta to the side.
Ratatouille with melted cheese
The leftover onions and ratatouille I added to grilled bread with melted cheese on top and that was delicious (and frugal!).
Baked onions with melted gloucs cheese and chives
Butterflied Toffee Cupcakes
As well as the Rhubarb Fool, I also attempted Toffee Cupcakes for Helena's party (again not on my list), which ended up being delicious even though we had to digress from the recipe slightly when the toffee cream I'd slaved over curdled (damn it!) while we were whipping it. The toffee sauce was amazing though!
Really glad I've learned how to make toffee sauce now - it'll be a good one on ice cream in the summer! Yum!
I love how this simple card turned out
As well as the baking I also decided to make a card for Helena's birthday since I'm trying to be good and get out of my overdraft by restricting my 'spending money' to just £10 a week. Given I didn't give myself enough time to properly plan anything, I'm super happy with how his turned out. I'll post separately about how I created it.
That's it for food updates for now - I'm making myself hungry thinking about it, so I better get something cooking!
Hi there.
It's certainly been a while since I've written anything substantial on here, but there's been lots going on in my life lately.
Work I completed my first big project at work about a month ago (a Spring/Summer update of new books in our catalogue), which I'm really proud of, and went to London twice in one week for London Book Fair and London Wild Bird Watch, both of which were really good experience, albeit a bit knackering!
Romanian stand at London Book Fair - loved the hanging books!
I got to spend some time with uni friends at the same time (and randomly bumped into another on his way to a football match!) which was just great. I'm now working on the main catalogue for the year which is party a quite tedious job, so I'm looking forward to finishing the amends/proofing stages and getting on to the more creative design side of it. I'm also working on a website refresh project which is going to be an ongoing thing, but am enjoying seeing little things change bit by bit, and working on some proposals to link up with a few people in the industry, which is very exciting, and again really good experience.
Weddings In other news, my friends Steve and Jemma also got married a couple of weekends ago, which was just a brilliant day. If you've read any of my previous posts about the wedding you'll know that Tom and I had agreed to play guitar and sing respectively at the ceremony in addition to other wedding party duties - it was really fun learning new songs together and despite being horribly off-key at the start of the first song (I'm blaming the nerves) we got into it and it ended up sounding quite nice and the bride and groom enjoyed and appreciated it, so that's all that matters in the end.
Luckily enough I also managed to get a new prescription for my labyrinthitis that has recently made a comeback, which has made a huge difference to the dizziness (so no falling over in Church!), and also meant I could have a couple of drinks at the reception as well, which was a real bonus!
The Portal companion cube cake with Halo 'Bride & Groom'
Everything was just so much their personality at the reception it was just awesome. The cake, the name cards, the decorations, their entrance music (the Halo theme!) - everything was just perfect for them. The speeches were great too, especially Andy (best man) - despite his fears, it was funny and very well judged, so well done Andy! :)
I might put this on my desk at work
Jemma and Steve got gifts for all of us in the wedding party as well which was really sweet - the boys got personalised cufflinks (Tom had motorbikes!) and I got a gorgeous notebook and pen set, and a lovely turquoise pendant, which will always remind me of the day (it's the same colour as the wedding colour scheme). It was really thoughtful of you guys so thank you!
The party was great fun - the Transformers theme as the first dance, the band, the 'Jaeger-train', and the last few songs secretly planned by Steve (1000 miles by Vanessa Carlton made me cry). All in all it was one of the best weddings I've been to, and it was great to be staying at the hotel too - we all met up for breakfast in the morning to laugh and joke about the night before, pig out on fried breakfast and copious amounts of tea, or nurse hangovers as the case may have been.
The next day the wedding party (parents excluded) all went to Alton Towers, and again we had amazing luck with the weather - it chucked it down on the Sunday and then was glorious all day long on Monday! - and there was hardly anybody in the park so we managed to get a go on all the best rides at least once (I finally got on Air and Sonic Spinball!). We also tried the new new 'ride' Nemesis Sub Terra which isn't really a rollercoaster, it's more of a scary experience based on the Nemesis backstory - it didn't last very long, but was prett good for what it was, just don't expect a rollercoaster. I'm just glad I didn't have bare legs, put it that way... Here's an ad for the ride:
Gigs and tattoos
The fun didn't stop after the wedding and Alton Towers though, as I'd booked tickets for the following weekend (for Tom's Christmas present) to go see one of our favourite bands Alkaline Trio on their 15th anniversary tour. When we got there we discovered that one of the support bands was in fact The Dear & Departed, who are fronted by Dan Smith, who is also a tattoo artist who works with Kat von D at High Voltage Tattoos in LA (where LA Ink was filmed). Having seen the band featured on the TV show it was great to see them live and in person, and besides the cool factor, I genuinely really enjoyed the music and they were really good live.
I want a butterfly in this style
After their set we went to say hi and had a chat and a photo with Dan. We started talking about tattoos (couldn't pass up the opportunity!) and discovered that he's actually going to be working in Swansea in September so we agreed I'd e-mail him an image of what I was after and hopefully we'll sort something out with his assistant to get an appointment booked. It's very exciting, and because what I want is a little different I wasn't 100% confident that it was something your average tattoo artist was going to be able to achieve in the way I wanted it. At least this way I've seen lots of Dan's work, and I'm confident he's a real professional so if anyone should be able to do, then he should.
After the second supporting act, a guy called Dave Hause (who sang a cover of the Hold Steady's Constructive Summer - yay!), we finally got to see Alkaline Trio! They opened with 'We've Had Enough' which is one of the songs I've been listening to a lot lately, followed by another favourite of mine 'Time To Waste, which they didn't play last time I saw them, so that made me very happy! This is the best video I could find on youtube (my videos were terrible quality) of the opening.
They did quite a few older songs as well that I wasn't so familiar with, but since it was their 15 year anniversary it was to be expected. They did some brilliant acoustic songs including Crawl and Blue In the Face with Dave Hause joining them on stage. I didn't get a good video of this (plus you'd hear me singing in the background which would ruin it slightly), but I found a decent-ish video on Youtube of the same song performed in London a few nights later on.
So that's pretty much everything life-wise so far. I've got a separate post coming up for Cooking Challenge and general food updates, but also lots of other things to be looking forward to as well. I'm going to work at Chelsea Flower Show in a couple of weeks so will be an opportunity to see London friends again, and then I'm planning on looking at wedding dresses again with Tom's sister after that, which should be fun. Then we've got my best friend's birthday weekend and the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, then Tom's birthday, then Australian Christmas, my sister's graduation, and loads more!
It's the FINAL COUNTDOWN...da-da-daaa-daaaaa, da-da-da-daa-daaaaa...
Sorry about that.
It's officially 6 DAYS until Jemma and Steve's wedding and everything is slotting into place - Tom's suit arrived yesterday and it fits him great and he looks so handsome in it!! He really liked it as well, so I think that might be the suit of choice when it comes to be our turn, whenever that may be! (No pressure, of course). I'm so excited to see what everything looks like, the Portal Companion Cube cake, the game character name cards, the first dance.... ah it's all so exciting!
Things have been going well on the singing front too - we've settled on three songs we both like and that we believe are suitable for the church (it's only while they're signing the registers), and we can play and sing them quite happily. We've just submitted the lyrics for the vicar to give final approval but we've thought about it a lot and we're hoping he's ok with our proposed choices:
Grow old with you, by Adam Sandler (from the Wedding Singer)
In it for love, by Richie Sambora (guitarist from Bon Jovi) - the video's here if you're not familiar with it)
Don't wanna miss a thing, by Aerosmith
We've done them a couple of times in front of Tom's family and now they want us to play at his sister Jess's wedding next April, which is cool but we've come to an agreement that Becky has to sing with me, and Rob (Tom's brother and Becky's boyfriend) has to play guitar with Tom. That's a huge relief to me, as I'd forgotten how nerve-wracking it can be to sing in front of people you know, more so than strangers in my experience.
Unfortunately, timing is everything, and this last week I've come down with the symptoms of labyrinthitis again - grrr! So I'm back to being a dizzy mess but thankfully nausea is pretty minimal right now. It's the worst possible timing because I had a mega busy week at work with the launch of my first brochure of the year with the company (it looks so good!), as well as two days in London for various events, so I've had a combination of long days in the office, plus very early starts (of the 'up at 4am' variety) and very long days on the road to and from London, as well as staying up late with uni friends while I was there Friday night, none of which has really helped with the balance issues I've been having. Because it's been so busy at work, it's not been an option to take time off, but I'm hoping that now that all the major stuff is out of the way that I'll be able to chill a bit in the couple of days we have off before and after the wedding next weekend - wishful thinking I'm sure, but you've got to be positive!
I did speak to the chemist though as I'm not sure the drugs I'm taking are really helping the vertigo so I might need to go to the docs on Monday to get a new prescription or a referral to a specialist. The drugs I'm also taking are also the kind that you definitely cannot drink alcohol with so that's a bit of a bummer with the wedding only 6 days away, but I'd rather be sober and not fall over in Church, than have a horrible reaction to booze. Again, terrible timing.
The other complication is that we were planning on going to Alton Towers with friends after the wedding weekend, but I'm pretty sure mega fast rollercoasters won't help the dizziness so I might have to sit out the rides which will be really annoying if I have to miss that. Sometimes life is just not fair.
And of course, when you're feeling dizzy and unsteady on your feet, cooking with gas and sharp utensils isn't exactly the safest of activities so I've not been doing much from my cooking challenge list lately, although I did manage hot cross bun pudding (bread and butter pudding but better - try saying that quickly!) before I got properly messed up by the dizziness. That was definitely a success so I'll be making that again next year :) I'm trying to minimize how much time I'm spending on computers, reading, games or TV right now so I'm not going to type up the recipe for this I'm afraid, but you can find it in Annie Bell's Gorgeous Desserts (in the festive section I think). Only thing I did differently was I used regular caster sugar instead if golden, and I used 1.5 tsp of vanilla flavouring into the custard mixture instead of laying a vanilla pod on top of the pudding, just because I couldn't find any in any of the supermarkets I tried that day, but I don't think that would have made a big different to the taste really.
One word. Yum.
Anyway, I think I'm going to leave the update there for now so I can have a break from typing.
Hope everyone else is well and I'll try and update this more often once the dizziness has calmed down a bit.
Ta ta for now,
I also made a paella with roasted veg a couple of weeks ago - based on a recipe from Ravinder Bhogal's book Cook in Boots which again wasn't on the list, but tasted delicious. Surprisingly easy, although makes a real mess of the wok, and it's just as nice reheated as lunch for work. I'll definitely be trying that one again!
