It is AGES since I wrote my last Cookbook Challenge – naughty me, I am so behind with blog posts. But it’s great to do, as the rule with the Cookbook Challenge is that I have to follow the recipe. Because I am such a confident cook, I often use recipes as a guide rather […]
lamb
Easter 2016 menu
Sometimes it seems a bit of a waste of time to plan an Easter menu around all that chocolate and hot cross buns, and as much as I like to gorge myself on chocolate eggs (this year’s Cocoa Loco mega-egg next to Alfie for scale), now’s the time where my pregnant tummy needs as wide […]
Week 5 – celebrating our 20th anniversary at The Hardwick in Abergavenny
Andrew and I met at the start of our second year at university, when we moved into the same house together. 3 months later we started seeing eachother, and that was 20 years ago on 25 January 2016. Sometimes I cannot believe we’ve been so happy together for so long, especially as we’ve lived with […]
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Grandcoeur Restaurant & Brasserie – Paris (review)
After my rather unsatisfactory experience at an Ethiopian restaurant in Paris, my faith was restored when my colleagues and I visited GrandCoeur in the Marais district of Paris. We’d spent the day together action planning for 2016 and were all rather exhausted, but immediately perked up as we entered the beautiful restaurant, which was quiet […]
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Week 4 – a birthday meal at Grain Store
One of my favourite traditions is the one that my friend Jo and I share, and that is to treat eachother to a birthday meal each year. We used to go with our friend Niasha who has now moved back to Sri Lanka, and sometimes Charlotte of Alphabet Adventures joins us, but we never miss it. This […]
Cookbook Challenge – James Martin: Lancashire hotpot and apple pie
I have been thoroughly enjoying these Cookbook Challenges, where Andrew chooses a cookbook each week (and usually a recipe) so that I can finally make use of the hundreds of cookbooks I own and rarely use. But I am struggling to write up each recipe straight away, and so I really need to be a […]
Cookbook Challenge – Wales: Drover’s Pie and Plum & Hazelnut Cobbler
I know I this is only my third Cookbook Challenge, but so far it has achieved exactly what I had hoped – taking me away from my comfort zone cookbooks and helping me to discover fantastic new recipes which I’d probably not bother with ordinarily. You might not expect these unsophisticated Welsh dishes to engender […]
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Tredwell’s Seven Dials – Marcus Wareing new launch – review
I think one of the best things I have ever done (well, in terms of feeding my greed, at least) is signing up to mailing lists of restaurants I like. It’s great when you get an email in your mailbox telling you about a new restaurant which is opening, especially when it invites you to […]
South African Bobotie
I like to think of myself as being quite adventurous in the kitchen (by which I mean that I am adventurous as a cook, not that I have a climbing wall in the kitchen or abseil down from the bathroom each morning), but there are a few food combinations that just leave me cold, and […]
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Birthday dinner at The Berkeley by Marcus Wareing
Andrew and I went through a stage a few years ago where we went to a lot of Michelin-starred restaurants, but then we decided to buy a house and realised that going out to posh places wasn’t compatible with saving money for a house, and we pretty much stopped going out for dinner all together. […]