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.

Mauritius Bar

Having not seen my friends from the library where I used to work for ages, I travelled up to Norbury to meet everyone for a meal. We'd chosen a little restaurant on London Road, as it was nearby to the library so people could go straight there from work.

The place was deserted when we arrived, it looked like just the family of the owners in there. Our table wasn't ready to we got ourselves a drink and waited for everyone else to arrive before moving over to our table. One of our group is actually from Mauritius so we were all looking forward to sharing in some of her national dishes.

Unfortunately, the food was abysmal! We are assured that it was not representative of Mauritian food at all so I'd definitely give their cuisine another go, but not at this restaurant. So... the food. I ordered the whitebait to start, as there were only about 5 starters, and that seemed the best and I must admit, it wasn't bad - in fact, most people seemed happy with their starters, apart from the hour wait for them!

The mains were less successful - there was again about an hour wait for most, others had to wait longer. I'd order the red snapper which came with creole sauce, and it wasn't a bad taste, but the fish had been crucified! Several members of the group were vegetarians (or fish-phobic) and the menu didn't seem to have very many options for this so we'd asked the waiter if there was anything else they could do. He came back with the following options; Mixed vegetables in black bean sauce, mixed veg with sweet and sour sauce, or mixed veg and potato curry. These dishes seemed to be just frozen mixed veg and a sauce out of a jar - really not worth the money (or time) we'd spent on them.

At the end of the meal, I think the waiter could tell we had not had a very good experience, and tried to soften the blow with several random liqueurs. They didn't smell to bad (although they did smell quite toxic) but as I was driving I refused the bribery. So to sum up, the company was amazing and it was lovely to see some old friends and meet a few new ones. But the food was good, both in terms of taste, and value for money, and value for time! 2/10!

Trip to Wimbledon Night 2

So.. after the party, Ian still needed feeding - I'd had quite a bit to eat at the party so just wanted something light. We took a look at the menu of the place we were staying (The Rose & Crown) and as there was mussels I sent Ian off to the bar to order me those, and something for himself. They were out of mussels :(

Back to the room we went to get some money, and then back out to the village in search of food. This time we stopped a lot closer to the hotel, a restaurant called Piccolino's. As we only wanted something light, I went for the pasta with clams (cos the mean lady on the table next to us had just eaten the last of the mussels). Ian went for the Marinated prawn, swordfish and scallop skewers with saffron rice and cherry tomato sauce, with a side of chips cos he wasn't sure if he'd like the saffron rice. Turns out he did, but the chips were some of the nicest chips I've ever tried so I helped him eat those too! The swordfish was very good - I really wish I'd ordered the swordfish steak as it's a really meaty fish with tonnes of flavour. Ian gave the skewers 7/10 as although they were nice, it got cold really quickly. My clams were good but I really wanted the mussels (or the swordfish having tasted Ian's) as they have more flavour, so 7/10.

So our trip to wimbledon was full of good food, even though it was an expensive weekend, it was just what we both needed after a hectic couple of weeks at work.

Trip to Wimbledon Night 1

Ian and I had to go to Wimbledon for the weekend for my aunts 60th birthday party, and while we were there we thought we'd sample some of the local cuisine. The first night we wandered down the High Street and came across a little restaurant called the Cote Bistro. It was nice and quiet, so Ian and I could enjoy some lovely conversation. The waitress bought us a bottle of complimentary mineral water which was a nice touch.

The starters arrived, I had ordered the mussels (what a surprise!) and Ian had ordered the calamari. The mussels were amazing, the portion wasn't huge, but the individual mussels were and that meant they were packed with flavour, 9/10. Ian's calamari was also really good, it was the right texture, it hadn't gone rubbery like it can do if overcooked, 8/10.

The mains were brought to the table not long after. Ian had ordered one of the specials, Roast Duck with cherries with potato gratin and watercress. I thought it an interesting combination, I knew Ian liked both duck and cherries, but I wasn't sure what he'd think of them together. They worked perfectly together, the sweetness of the cherries mixed with the flavour of the duck made you 'ooo' involuntarily, and this is why Ian gave it 10/10! He didn't eat the yummy potato gratin which I stole, but instead had chips, which were skinny and crispy and very nice. My main was a fillet steak, which was cooked medium rare. The steak was really good, although the outside of it was a bit peppery for my tastes, but was interesting to try, 8/10.

Now, having had two really good courses, we couldn't resist trying the dessert menu. Ian ordered the creme caramel - which was billed as the restaurants speciality, and we weren't disappointed. The caramel flavour was intense, and I contemplated ordering a second one for myself! Ian is giving it 7/10, as although it was a really amazing creme caramel, he says it was still only a creme caramel. I had a tarte tatin (apple tart) which was good but I kept losing the apple on the way to my mouth! 6/10.

So, a good evening was had by all, and we returned to the hotel with nice full bellies (although Ian did later polish off a whole bag of popcorn!).