Water Margin, North Baddesley

Ian and I have two weeks off work, and instead of going on holiday, we've decided to have two weeks of playing games, reading in the sunshine, and eating out. So, for our first meal out, we decided to go to the Harvester in Eastleigh. But reviewing a Harvester seems pointless, so I'm about to review the second place we visited, somewhere we go often because the food and service is great, but somewhere we've not gotten round to reviewing yet.

Water Margin is a small restaurant set between two peoples houses on a road in North Baddesley. It's clearly a family business, and it does well - possibly because it's so reasonably priced. They do a gourmet buffet Sunday - Thursday, £14.90 for all you can eat - but everything is cooked fresh to order. We also noticed they were doing a set lunch menu for £6 when we went today (Soup & Spring Roll + Main & Rice).

Every time we go, we always seem to order a large selection of the appetizers and they tailor the portion sizes to the size of your group (3 people, 3 spring rolls etc). We have the steamed dumplings (Ian doesn't like these because they are a little oniony but I love the flavour so I eat the extra one), sesame prawn toast (this is well topped with prawn), spring rolls (not my favourite but we usually get them for my mum), spare ribs (messy but yummy), crispy won tons, smoked chicken (this is amazing, a definite one to order) and this time we ordered some of the king prawns (again tasty, but not available if you have the reduced lunch buffet at £11.90). Ian always likes to order the soup (Crabmeat & sweetcorn) and I can usually be seen sneakily sticking my spoon in to steal some. I like the way chinese soups are thick, but not creamy - I'd love to be able to replicate this at home (I've never tried so it might be simple).

After the appetizers is the duck course, but they also do really good crispy mongolian lamb (those that know the song should be singing it right now!). So we have half duck and half lamb. The duck comes with the usual cucumber and spring onion with hoisin sauce, and the lamb comes with a sweet plum sauce, which works really well. If I'm honest, I could eat this course for the main as well, but not sure they'd let you.

There are a lot of mains to choose from, and we always hope to try something new if we have room. This time we had lemon chicken (the sauce is nice and lemony), sweet and sour pork, lamb szechuan style & duck with ginger and pineapple. I'm not big on ginger, but that was actually really good (although I couldn't eat too much of it). Other dishes we've tried before include crispy chilli beef (this is very crispy, and possibly my favourite), the squid (I'm still not sure about chinese cooked squid - always seems a bit rubbery to me), and some of the prawn dishes (not exactly sure which) - the prawns are always big and meaty.

Usually desserts in chinese restaurants aren't good, but the Water Margin do a wonderful pineapple ice cream that we can never seem to resist.

So to conclude, the food is great, the value is amazing, and the service friendly - highly recommended!!

Valentino's, Bournemouth

Yesterday, my mum and I went to Bournemouth for the Bournemouth Air Show. The beach was packed, and the show was excellent. Instead of opting for the fast food found all along the seafront, we decided to hold out til the end of the show, and wander back into the town in search of a nice restaurant. Many places seemed more like bars than restaurants, but we eventually stumbled on a little round italian restaurant with a terrace outside. We hovered by the door, only to be told by Joe, the proprietor, that he was fully booked. However, being an italian, he moved around some tables, and endeavoured not to turn anyone away.

Usually, before eating out, I tend to research a bit more, and see what other people have thought - but this was spur of the moment dining. The menu was a decent size, and offered mussels (my favourite if you've not already realised) so seemed perfect to me. I chose the mussels (obviously) followed by tagliatelle carbonara, while my mum went for garlic bread with mozzarella followed by the cannelloni.

The mussels were served in a basic tomato sauce, but as the all you really want is the flavour of the mussels, this is perfect. They were decent sized, hardly any shell breakage (which is irritating when you come to devour the sauce at the end), and very tasty - 9/10. The garlic bread with mozzarella was less crispy than in most places as it had more of a middle to it, which my mum said good (I only ate the crispy bits as I stole bites when she wasn't looking!). The cannelloni was well filled, and tasty, and remained hot for ages despite eating outside where it was slightly chilly. My carbonara came and it was a huge portion, and left me feeling very full but comforted - there's nothing like a big plate of pasta when you've been walking around all day - 8/10.

The food was reasonably priced - £30 for all that, plus 3 drinks (non-alc), but it was really the atmosphere that added to the charm of this restaurant and the friendly banter between Joe and some of the diners showed that it was clearly popular with the locals.

Further Cake Experiments

These days, following recipes seems to easy. So I try to mix it up a litte (if you pardon the pun!). I decided to make something for my friends housewarming, and I had some leftover blueberries, so considered making blueberry muffins. But, Ian decided he wanted lemon drizzle so I chucked the blueberries in with the cake mix so as not to waste them. It worked well, although I could mostly taste the lemon.

I also took my trusty banana loaf recipe and added strawberries. I wasn't sure how to add them - do I mash them like I do with the banana or do I add them whole? I had quite a lot of bananas and strawberries so I decided to do both. The one with whole chunks of strawberry was the one I preferred, mainly because the strawberry flavour was more intense in this one instead of an underlying strawberriness in the second one.

One thing I have discovered though.... fruit in cake rocks!

Blog Neglect - House Buying

So the blog has been pretty quiet of late, and the reason for this is that Ian & I bought our first house at the end of May, and have since been fighting with the millions of boxes of stuff we have. We counted over 100, and then we emptied some of these and refilled them, so we estimate we had about 130 boxes to pack and unpack.

House buying is extremely stressful, it involves lots of chasing of solicitors and things and it leaves a rather large hole in ones pocket! But, we now have a pretty large kitchen, and a dishwasher too, so baking should be easier from now on.

We haven't been completely cake free since April though - I have indeed used the new kitchen to make some baked goods but unfortunately neglected to take photos. Ian has been working late a lot, and as I'm his chauffeur, I've been leaving work at 3 and then returning to work at 8 with dinner and making up my hours. Now, getting home at 3 feels much better than 5, so I have been utilising early leaving days by making cake. The first cake I made was a Peach Melba tray bake, recipe here. I altered the recipe slightly as I'm not a fan of almonds, so substituted them for more flour. The cake turned out very moist in places where the fruit exploded, but this was not a bad thing. My team at work made short work of the cake, possibly because they are cake fiends, and also because it was hard to cut the cake into lots of small pieces as it just fell apart so I had to make each square quite large.

New Blog Feature

Where I work, the canteen has recently put up their prices by quite a ridiculous amount, and consequently lots of people are now bringing in packed lunch. If you eat lunch with people every day for a long time, eventually you run out of stories to tell. So instead of trying to think of new conversations (there are only so many times you can try to think of an animal starting with every letter of the alphabet), I have decided to analyse peoples lunches. I've been doing it for a while, but now other people are bringing in packed lunches who didn't before, some slightly weird lunches have been appearing.

So, the new blog feature is on the left hand side - there is room for the top ten weird lunches. So far there aren't many listed, but the way things are going, I imagine there'll be quite a competition for top spot.

For example, today PV produced from his lunch bag a large baguette, an entire boursin, a big wedge of tesco value stilton, a small number of spring onions, a third of a camembert - wrapped in A4 paper, some butter and a tub of raspberries. I'm all for making packed lunch, but I feel it should be somewhat more made than this! PV proceeded to chomp away at various bits of bread and cheese, interspersed with raspberries every now and then, probably just to annoy me as I believe in saving dessert until last. I think the spring onions were a bit too much for him, and we did all agree that perhaps pickled onions would be better next time. As a result, there was some left over, so we thought it was only right to play with the food in the way we were all told not to as children.

Crustless Quiche

Having never made quiche before, not even with a crust, I decided it was about time to give it a go. The reason I decided on a crustless one was to make it healthier, so there was less guilt when eating it. I chose to make this quiche one Monday evening, not because it seemed like a good time, but because Ian ate my lunch for the next day so it was either make the quiche or eat canteen food. I found a recipe on my weight loss site, www.weightlossresources.co.uk, and set to (I left out the onion and replaced the ham with bacon). I'd already invested in some foil quiche trays, so that I wouldn't have too much washing up to do, and if I turned out to be really bad at quiche making, I didn't have a useless dish cluttering up space in my cupboards. I fried off some bacon and then chopped it into small pieces, mixed up the remaining ingredients and then added it all to the dish. I think the quantity of mixture was too much for the quiche dish, and it was quite hard getting the dish into the oven without spilling it everywhere. I think next time I'll put the dish on the oven shelf first, and add the mixture straight into it so that it doesn't have to travel very far.

The quiche was to cook for 40minutes, so I checked on it after 30, and it had almost quadrupled in size. This worried me slightly, but then when I took it out of the oven, it deflated back down to just above the edge of the tray. The next morning, I cut it into portions, although it was quite hard to extract from the tray. I had the quiche cold with some salad and Ian had his piece warmed up in the microwave with some chips. I think it was better hot, but I was too lazy to walk back to the microwave, and with the cold salad it wasn't too bad.

So, the quiche was a success, mainly because Ian actually ate half of it, and he doesn't really like quiche!

ingredients

• 375ml Milk, Semi Skimmed, Asda
• 120g Cheese, Mature, Grated, Healthy Eating, Tesco
• 70g Flour, Wholemeal, Self Raising, Allinson
• 100g Onions, Chopped, Frozen, Sainsbury's
• 114g Ham, Oven Baked, Dry Cure, Sliced, Asda
• 4 Eggs/200g Eggs, Free Range, Medium, Co-Op

Method

1. Beat eggs, milk and pepper together.

2. In a separate bowl mix together cheese, onion, ham and flour.

3. Add egg and milk mixture to flour mixture, folding until well blended.

4. Pour into a lightly greased dish and bake in a 200ºC oven for 40 minutes or microwave on Medium for 12 minutes.

Zizzi's

This week it was my friends birthday, so we went over to Basingstoke to deliver her present and go out for a meal. The restaurant of choice was Zizzi's - a restaurant chain I've been to before but not this particular one.

I scanned the menu and found they did mussels as a starter so that was that choice sorted! I then took a look at the mains, and decided that I didn't like the look of any of the pizzas (I'm not a very big pizza fan). I've never had a risotto at a restaurant before, in fact, I've only ever had one risotto before which Ian's sister cooked. So I decided to give that a try - this particular one came with tiger prawns, calamari & salmon chunks.

The starters arrived - my mussels came without a bowl to put the shells in and with no finger bowl. This, in my opinion, is a major failure. The other problem with the mussels was that a lot of the shells were broken, which makes eating the sauce afterwards (which I have to point out was quite nice) a little risky as you're likely to swallow the shell. All of these things mean that some tasty mussels that would have received 7/10 actually got awarded 5/10. Another thing I should mention is that when I requested a finger bowl, the waitress brought me out a bowl of boiling water with lemons in, without pointing out to me that it was boiling - and when I put my fingers in and then went 'God that's bloody hot' she said she would return with some cold water - but never did!

Ian's starter was calamari - and this was nice, but the portion was exceedingly small. Because of this Ian is awarding it 3/10, and having seen the portion size - I have to agree! The other starter enjoyed by the group was something called 'Bruschetta al Pomodoro' - which my two friends were sharing. Now all four of us were expecting this to be hot - but it was literally just bread with some chopped tomatoes on top. I don't have scores from my friend but I'd have given it 5/10.

Next we come to the mains - my risotto was not good - the calamari was rubbery and the general rice flavour overpowered all the other flavours - I would have expected it to have been made with some sort of fish stock, but I couldn't taste any if it was - 6/10. Ian & the others all ordered their special 'rustica' pizzas - described as 'bigger, thinner & crispier'. Well, they were big, and thin, but I detected no crisp - in fact the piece of Ian's that I had was definitely soggy. The distribution of the tomato puree was a bit hit and miss, there was next to none in some places, and tonnes in others. Ian would have scored the pizza at 7/10, if it hadn't been for the fact that the restaurant was kind of a pizza restaurant! He expected much better and therefore gave it 5/10.

The best part of the meal (obviously apart from the company) was the Banana Con Cioccolata - Caramelised banana with toffee and chocolate sauce on a waffle served with ice cream. This was really good, the toffee sauce was very tastey - the dessert would have got a 8/10 if it hadn't been for the fact that this banana dessert only came with 4 small slices of banana - not even a whole banana! So, the marks had to be chopped to reflect this, giving it 6/10.

One other thing to note is that Ian ordered a 'lemonade' to drink, and in fact received a 'Sprite' which, as those of you who know Ian know, he quite likes, but he says it is wrong to serve someone a sprite when they have asked for a lemonade and I can't help but agree.