We bought the miniature whisky from the Food and Drink show last year but I didn't get around to opening it until tonight. I think this is probably the strongest whisky I have tried: at 62.8% it is over half as strong again as normal whisky.

As expected it has a bit of a kick to it but it isn't too harsh when sipped.

The food was a bit more expensive than we're used to - 3 courses cost £56 for the two of us, without wine. I think it was probably worth it though. Everything was well cooked and well presented.

I started with the Chilli Squid (from the weekly specials) and Emma had the potted prawns. My squid came with a couple of 'baby' octopuses which I wouldn't normally eat but I decided to give them a go.

My main course was the Pork Tenderloin, which came with sweet potato mash and a 'black pudding scotch egg' which had a tiny quail egg in the centre. For dessert I chose the pistachio and chocolate tart, pictured below.

We ate out at Frankie & Benny's in Coventry tonight. The restaurant was a bit noisy but the food was good. We shared two pizzas: Top - Chicken Caesar Salad. Bottom - Seafood Supreme.
The Seafood Supreme had anchovies, prawns and clams. The other pizza was a chicken pizza topped with tomato and lettuce in a caesar dressing. It was unusual to have a dressed salad on top of a pizza - we have often topped a pizza with a strong leafy salad such as rocket or watercress but we'd not thought of using a dressed salad. It was a surprisingly good combination.

We had a frozen lobster which we'd bought from Iceland a few weeks ago. The last time we bought lobster there was barely enough to cover a half-bagel each. There seemed to be slightly more meat in this lobster - it was sufficient for one pizza.

Other toppings included anchovies and capers. The photo above shows the pizza before the cheese was added. The photo below is the cooked pizza just before eating.

We recently bought a few tins of chunky crab meat - this is better than the cheaper shredded crab meat but I think it's actually better than the cheap lobster meat, which was a little bit chewy.

(Cross-posted from the Pizza Blog)

While we were in Kenilworth last night, we decided to pop into Waitrose. It was half an hour before closing and there were a lot of good food bargains to be had. Nearly everything we bought had been greatly reduced. Only one item was full price (Blackcurrant High Juice squash), two items were on special offer (cider and a half-price chicken). We normally buy the M&S chicken which is raised to the RSPCA 'freedom food' standard. The Waitrose chicken didn't say it was to that standard but claimed to use high welfare standards. Since you tend to expect Waitrose to be better than normal supermarkets, the chicken should be ok.

Other food bargains included bread rolls reduced to 5p each, cottage cheese, cooked salmon, Duchy Original milk. The milk was semi-skimmed but not homogenised and there was a lump of cream stuck to the lid. It tasted so much better than the skimmed milk we normally buy.

Oxford Isis mead-washed cheese. Very smelly. We had to put the tub in a sealed bag in the fridge to stop it stinking out the kitchen.

Strawberry Syrup. At over 80% sugar, I'm surprised it was pourable.

The total cost was just over £11 but would have been well over £25 at full price. Of course we wouldn't have bought most of the items at full price but it's always nice to find a bargain.

My boss took a few of us out to dinner last night, to Sunam in Kenilworth. The restaurant was very busy and apparently is crowded on most nights. The food was good. The portions didn't seem huge (apart from the massive naan bread which was shared between the 5 of us) but I was feeling very full afterwards.

... but Waitrose thinks they are in England.

On a related note, we have just finished drinking a bottle of Asda Premium Gin. We first tried it in a Gin & Tonic but were disappointed with the flavour. When drunk on its own, it actually tastes really good but as soon as you mix it with something, the flavour completely disappears. Even adding a splash of soda water is enough to destroy the flavour.

(Cross-posted from the Pizza Blog)

We received a pizza stone for Christmas - one of several kitchen related presents from my parents. We were going to use it for our first post-Christmas pizza but it needed a couple of washes and a while in the oven to drive off the fumes (presumably from manufacturing), so it wasn't ready at the time of our previous post.

The pizza shown here had the rest of the home-made spicy tomato sauce, mixed with red pesto because there wasn't enough left for 2 pizzas. The toppings were sliced courgette, anchovies, capers, grated cheddar and parmesan, and mozzarella. For the meat I had a selection from a Marks & Spencers Christmas pack which contained sausage, stuffing flavoured meatballs and rolled bacon. Emma had a selection of M&S 'party food' chicken pieces.

The stone needed heating up first - we placed it in a cold oven and slowly let it come to temperature, giving it at least half an hour before we used it. We had to make our pizzas one at a time, taking the stone out of the oven, quickly assembling the pizza, then putting it in the oven to cook.

Heston Blumenthal, the chef, tested different ways of cooking pizza on his TV programme. He didn't like the pizza stone, preferring to use an upside down red hot cast iron pan, putting the pizza under the grill to finish cooking.

I really can't see why he didn't like the pizza stone. He wanted to cook his pizza in 90 seconds whereas we give ours 15 minutes at gas mark 7. We like thin bases but we also like a lot of toppings so a very hot fast cooking doesn't suit our style of pizza. Sometimes the pizza base would go a bit soft but the hot pizza stone starts cooking the base while the toppings are being applied so the base stays nice and crispy. It's a bit more fiddly than using our normal pizza trays but the improved crispy base makes it all worth while.

The ingredients for the pizza sauce:

• Tomatoes from our garden (via the freezer)
• ½ a dried chilli (home grown cayenne pepper)
• 1 clove of garlic
• 1 tsp dried herbs
• a pinch of salt.

The tomatoes were defrosted and peeled. All the ingredients were put in a liquidizer. The resulting sauce was very runny so I simmered it to thicken it. The chilli was very hot so I ended up thickening it with cornflour to avoid concentrating the heat too much.

The finished pizza, with quorn sausage, courgette, onion, mushrooms and cheese. I put a small sprinkling of cheese on before the mushrooms to help stick everything together, before topping with more cheese.

I decided to try my tomato chutney tonight. I think it was a success. It tasted like a 'proper' bought chutney. I hadn't followed the recipe exactly - I didn't measure out the sugar and vinegar but poured some in until it looked about right. The balance of sweetness and sharpness seemed about right. Since I used less vinegar than the recipe, it probably won't keep as long as normal chutney so I should make sure I eat it fairly quickly. Since I have two fairly large tubs of it, that's a lot of chutney to eat over Christmas.

We made turkey burgers for tonight's tea so I thought the chutney would go well on the side.

If I made the chutney again, I think the only change would be to chop the tomatoes smaller. Some of the pieces are quite big but since it was my first go at making it, I wasn't sure of the best way to do it.

Our cooker is broken at the moment and while we are waiting for a new one to be installed, we have to cook everything using an electric wok, our George Foreman grill and a microwave. This was an experiment to see if I could cook a calzone using the 'George'.

I made a normal pizza base then spread red pesto on it. I then added anchovies and slices of sausage, leek and courgette. This was topped with slices of cheese before folding and crimping the edges, a bit like a cornish pasty.

I cooked it on the grill until the base felt cooked to the touch and I could hear the cheese sizzling inside. I don't know how long it took because I didn't time it.

The end result was fairly good. The crimped edges were still a bit soft and doughy but the rest of the calzone was good.

I made a fruit cider last month, using standard winemaking techniques but using apple juice instead of grape juice. I decided to flavour it with some 'autumn fruits' to make it a bit more interesting.

For the fruit flavours I added the syrup from one tin of blackberries and one tin of blackcurrants. I also had 200ml of of extracted juice leftover from the plum and blackberry wine I had made earlier. I added 4l of apple juice. There was no added sugar - the sugars in the juice were sufficient to give a cider of about 6.5% alcohol.

When I bottled it, the cider was tasting over-dry. I wanted a sparkling cider so when I syphoned it into plastic bottles I added 2tsp of sugar and a few grains of dried yeast. After a week the bottles were feeling nicely pressurised so we tried a bottle tonight. It had a nice crisp flavour and was just 'off dry' enough for us.

Every now and again we keep promising to ourselves that we'll try to cook a new recipe every week. Most weeks we forget. This week we went part of the way towards our goal by trying a different side dish.

We recently bought some sweet potatoes. So far we have had a roast veg, with sweet potato, onion, pepper and courgette. Not exactly a new recipe, just a variation on an existing one.

Tonight we tried sweet potato mash. I peeled and diced the sweet potatoes and boiled them for about 5 minutes or so, until the knife went in with no resistance. I mashed them, adding a sprinkling of jerk seasoning. I didn't add any butter or anything else - it didn't need it.

We have been going to a lot of country shows recently. We had entered the Hamster Show on Saturday so I had some time to explore and watch some of the shows and demonstrations. The glass blowers were the same people I saw at Wiltshire Country Show but this time they were demonstrating how old-fashioned window glass was made.

The cookery demonstration was also by the same person from the Wiltshire show. He made a tasty looking savoury Chelsea Bun containing cheese, pesto and various other ingredients.

A lot of different foods were available in the two food tents. We tried various free samples before buying a selection of flavoured cheeses (mature cheddar, garlic, garlic and herbs, horseradish, curry, chilli) and a 1½ litre jug of cider.

We used some of the cheese on our regular Saturday night pizzas. We put a different cheese on each half, and cut the pizzas at right angles to the cheese divide, so we each had 2 half-pizzas with 4 different cheeses (We liked them so much we had pizza again on Sunday).

There was no hamster show on Sunday but there was a display. We were kept busy all day dealing with the public, answering questions about keeping hamsters and explaining the differences between the various breeds of hamster.

Earlier in the year I bought a 'mexican garden' seed kit from the Woolworths closing down sale. I never managed to get the oregano to germinate but I have several tomato and chilli plants. Most of the chillies and tomatoes are still green and unripe but we have had 5 small red tomatoes (not enough for a pizza sauce) and one red chilli so far.

I finely chopped one of the chillies and sprinkled it onto one of tonights pizzas. The other toppings were: red pesto, salmon, red onion and cheese. It was a very tasty pizza.

The chillies were fairly strong when I tasted one on its own, but there was a slightly unripe or possibly just a raw flavour. By the time they had cooked on the pizza they were fine.

There are many more green chillies on the plant so hopefully we will have a good supply for the autumn.