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Cinnamon Loaf

Story location: Home / Blog / food_and_drink /
26/Jun/2011

The recipe came from the Joy the Baker website.

Cinnamon Loaf

Cinnamon Loaf

We followed the recipe exactly as written but we had ordinary bakers yeast instead of 'active dried yeast' so ours took a little longer to rise.



Edible plants and flowers

Story location: Home / Blog / books /
26/Jun/2011

Last week I ordered a couple of books from Amazon, both from the 'Collins Gem' series:

  • Wild Flowers by Martin Walters
  • Food For Free by Richard Mabey.

They are both small pocket sized books which will be ideal to take with you on walks in the countryside. One useful feature of the wildflowers book is a flower-type index where different flower shapes are listed alongside different flower families. It's a useful aid to identification. So far it has helped me to identify Wild Mustard (which was part of the Edible Leaves and Shoots mixture from Garden Organic) and Petty Spurge and two kinds of Willowherb (which grow as weeds).

The Food for Free book covers similar ground to the Edible Hedgerow book I bought from River Cottage. The book contains more plants but with less detail and should be useful to help locate and identify unusual things to eat.



Yo Sushi take-away

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17/Jun/2011

Yo Sushi take-away
Emma texted me to say she had bought something special for our tea but I wasn't expecting take away sushi. We shared 3 take-away boxes. It was a very nice surprise and the first time I'd had actual slices of sashimi, instead of having small amounts rolled up in sushi.



Mexican Lasagne

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14/Jun/2011

Mexican Lasagne
The inspiration for this recipe came from a slimming website but with a couple of minor changes based on what we had in the kitchen. We didn't have any onion or celery salt but since we recently bought a 5kg bag of onions I blitzed an onion in the food processor and fried it before mixing it with the passata.

While we were eating we noticed that the tomato sauce tasted very similar to bought nacho or fajita seasoning so we'll try to re-create the flavours next time we make either of those.

If we do the recipe again we might alternate layers of chicken and sauce but apart from that change we would keep things more or less the same.



Some Squid recipes

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13/Jun/2011

A few weeks ago we bought a pack of Marks & Spencer's Mustard & Pepper crumbed calamari. It's very easy for squid to come out like slightly fishy rubber bands but these were very tender. The only downside was to do with the breadcrumbs which mostly fell off during frying but we scraped them out of the pan and crumbled them on top when we served. Since we were impressed with the calamari we bought another pack shortly afterwards.

Last week we bought some calamari, again from M&S but this time it was pre-cooked (chargrilled in a red pepper dressing) and we put it on a pizza. Unfortunately we had eaten it before I thought that we should have taken a photo of it.

Tonight we had another go with calamari. This time we bought some raw unsliced squid which we sliced and fried alongside some king prawns and served with some gnocchi in a tomato and vegetable sauce.



Go Ape

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10/Jun/2011

I don't like heights and the last time I went to Go Ape I spent a lot of time trying not to look down. This time I wasn't too bad. I still don't like heights but I started to get used to being several metres in the air.

In the tree tops
This time we went to the Go Ape in Cannock Chase. The course was similar to the one at Nottingham Forest but with some different crossings.

My shadow
I took the above photo from one of the crossings between trees.