hahahah

Last night I was taken out for a curry for my lovely BF’s birthday. We went with his family to quite a nice little Indian restaurant to indulge in some curries. Well, they did, I was still suffering from food poisoning so I had to live with steamed rice and garlic naan but it was still nice.

Anyway about half way through our meal a large group of people in their late 20s/early 30s came in. There must have been about 20 of them in the group and they were really noisy. After they’d wolfed down their starters we breathed a sigh of relief when they suddenly went quiet. It was only after a while I realised that the reason they were so quiet was because they were all outside SMOKING. Hahaha. It was freezing out there and they didn’t look like they were enjoying it too much. I love the smoking ban. It is possibly the best law to have come in over my lifetime. It’s just a pity there wasn’t any rain or snow!

Posh Chocs

One evening while having dinner with relatives I was introduced to some tasty chocolates by Rococo, an English chocolate company. The fillings were really unusual: rose cream, ginger and saffron fudge and my personal favourite, geranium creams. I quickly chomped on around 4 or 5 of them after dinner. They were absolutely divine.

Conequently I subtly hinted (obviously not really subtly) that I would like box for myself from BF. Being the nice BF that he is the very next day he went to source them from my favourite posh supermarket, Waitrose. Now, how much do you think a posh box of chocs costs that contains 20 chocolates? £7? £12? No, SIXTEEN pounds. I nearly fell off my chair when he told me.

Even more unbelievably he BOUGHT a box of them. I am truly spoilt, but I am still enjoying each and every one of them.

Bento boxes again

A recent trip to Cambridge to visit lil Sis has rekindled my obsession with Bento boxes. We went to a really great Japanese restaurant, where they served all types of Japanese food. We tried the sushi and then had our own Bento boxes, which you can see in the pictures. The best one was not my own (of course!) but the grilled eel one that my BF kindly let me try. Delish.


I've always thoughts of eels as rather ugly slimey beasts but it turns out that it's tasty so, perhaps its not so bad after all, although I've still not tried preparing it myself. Anyway it was so enjoyable we had to go back there a second time in 3 days for another helping. If only it was a bit closer to home.

On second thoughts perhaps it's better for my savings that it's not.

Moving Sucks

For the last few weeks I have been ever so s-l-o-w-l-y moving my stuff. I’ve got until the end of December to move EVERYTHING and this has put me into a very lazy frame of mind. I move the odd carrier bag of goodies at the weekend and feel proud of myself. Then when everything goes off near Christmas I’ll have to move lots of stupid furniture into a space that it won’t fit. What a pain. On the other hand, how will I fill my weekend when this is done? Currently I spend my weekends avoiding starting moving my stuff and the rest of the time tidying away all the cr@p I’ve moved in!

Only 4 weeks and 2 days til Xmas!

This weekend has been one long weekend of preparing. I’ve been making cards (I’ve now got 48 cards ready), baking, buying things that I need for gifts I’ll be making in the coming weeks…. It’s never-ending. The good thing is that all this should mean that I actually send my cards before Christmas this year. Last year, shamefully, I gave out the majority of cards AFTER the day itself. This year I started early – writing cards for my kids at school back in October!

Saturday was also a shopping day. Pretty much everyone is catered for this year. I have surprised myself at how much I’ve done in advance and the internet is my new best shopping partner. It’s amaaaazing how much you can get done while an episode of Eastenders plays in the background.

Goosey goosey

Friday was a first. I cooked a goose. Oddly I sort of fell into it so I wasn’t too worried. It wasn’t until it got into the oven that it started panicking about what the daft thing would taste like.

It started last weekend when we went shopping and saw that it was only £14.99 for a goose. We thought we’d give it a whirl. Or rather ‘we’ thought ‘we’ would like to eat one but it was just me that controlled cooking the birdie… anyway, it sat on top of the fridge defrosting for two days and then we thought we should put it in the fridge since it probably wasn’t going to last until Friday in the open air. I had read on the internet that it’s a good idea to prick the skin and let the bird sit in the open in the fridge for a couple of days to dry out the skin so it goes nice and crispy. What a stooopid idea. The fridge reeked for the rest of the week; in the end I had to get BF to open the fridge and get my soya milk out for breakfast it was that bad.

Friday arrived and I dashed back from work ready to throw the bird in the oven when I decided to change the recipe. I originally planned to cook it plain but with a rice and shitake mushroom stuffing. Instead I opted for the Radio Times recipe of the week involving lime zest and juice, honey and 5 spice. Meanwhile I had mislaid the piece of paper that I’d written the instructions which meant a phone call begging for help from Mum.

Three hours later and the goose was ready to eat! To be honest I was shattered by that point but it was nice. I enjoyed the leftovers even more the next day. Definitely going to have another goose for lunch on Christmas Day now I know how to do it!