What a week, with two trips to Paris – one for pleasure (a gift to my mum to celebrate her 60th) and one for work. I know the city very well – I work for a French company and get to travel to our Paris offices quite frequently, plus we have plenty of friends living […]
- Eating out
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A perfect night of gin and vietnamese
As I got a little windfall from work last month, I decided to treat Andrew to dinner. I was expecting him to request steak (I had my eye on Hawksmor or MASH) but he wanted Vietnamese for dinner, which I was very happy with as well! We used to live in Islington and adored Viet […]
Is little and often really the way to go?
Last week was my first attempt to curb my evening chocolate snacking by eating little and often throughout the day. Usually I eat my weekday breakfast (porridge made with skimmed milk, mixed with a grated apple and cinnamon) before 8am, and then don’t eat again until 1pm when I have my packed lunch (soup with […]
Pho-nomenal leftovers
I love it when a recipe comes together, and as I do have a tendency to keep going back to my old favourites, that doesn’t happen as often as I would like. Last week I made a Vietnamese Pho (noodle soup) for the first time, and it was a fantastically successful experiment, so I repeat […]
Comfort food
I have been feeling poorly these past couple of weeks with a chest infection. It’s slowly starting to clear (I think), but I have been a bit lazy with my cooking because I haven’t felt 100%. Looking back at my diary I see that I didn’t eat as badly as I imagined and did start […]
The problem with dieting
A friend of mine was recently lamenting yet another week of eating and drinking more than she should: how she had broken her diet yet again and she felt awful about being such a failure … even more so because this was part of a regular pattern where good days or weeks deteriorated into bad […]
Cake, bread and more cake
I made my mum’s 60th birthday cake on Sunday using the recipe described in my last blog, and also decorated it on Monday. In fact, the sponge was a slight disaster, because I added a packet of caramel chocolate drops I had been given at last year’s Cake and Bake show, and I forgot to […]
Let them eat cake
It’s birthday season for friends and family at the moment, and so I have been baking cakes (which is one of my favourite hobbies anyway). I use a fail-safe sponge recipe from Nigella’s Domestic Goddess book which forms the basis of many of my cakes, and so I thought it would be worth sharing here, […]
Thank you Jamie (and Nigella, as always!)
I bought Jamie Oliver’s 15 minute meals at the end of last year, and whilst I would not recommend it as a quick way to cook (it’s not unless you have every gadget in the kitchen and someone to do your washing up for you) the recipes are easily adaptable and very tasty. I thought […]
Dough-y goodness
I have been fed up of buying bread rolls each day to have with my soup, so last weekend I made some lovely little rolls, using Nigella Lawson’s essential white loaf recipe from Domestic Goddess. The recipe is detailed below. For weightwatchers fans, each roll works out at 2 discovery plan points. 500g strong white […]