I normally eat some biscuits or fruit during my morning coffee break. There was something wrong with this banana. When I opened it it looked very dark as if it was over-ripe, although it was still quite firm. I decided not to eat it.

I ate one from the same bunch yesterday and it looked fine. Unfortunately I won't know if the other ones are ok until I try to eat them.

We had some doughnuts left over from yesterday so we made a milkshake using them.
Serves 2 (this makes roughly 2 pints):

• 2 Krispy Kreme plain glazed doughnuts
• 1½ pints of milk (approx)
• a couple of heaped tablespoons of vanilla ice cream.

Put the milk and doughnuts in a blender and liquidize thoroughly. Add the ice cream and liquidize a bit more.

I checked the site map on the website and noticed that they had quite a few more outlets than when I last checked. They are now available in Manchester. And according to the map, they have a couple of outlets in the Atlantic ocean, south of Ghana.

Somebody at Morrisons needs to be sent on a vegetable identification course.

The 'Avocado' looks more like Fennel to me.

We had one of our rare trips to Birmingham today. It's been nearly a year since I last went.

Leaving New Street Station via the Palisades shopping centre, we stopped at the Pretzel shop. We bought two: a cinnamon and a hundreds-and-thousands coated one. They were a bit messy to eat but worth getting. Next time I think I'll get a couple of plain ones. One to eat there and the other to bring home and eat with cream cheese.

We visited the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, which was bigger than we were expecting. We went in by one door and came out of a different door in a different building. We didn't notice when we crossed the bridge between buildings.

At the Bullring, we got to Selfridges while the Krispy Kreme doughnut light was on, meaning that free doughnuts were being offered to customers. Which was nice.

There were also some cheeses on special offer in Selfridges. We bought a creamy but mature one called Old Amsterdam and a really nice ewe's milk cheese, but I can't remember what that one was called.

Update: Found the receipt for the cheese - it was called Brinata.

We have the occasional Gin and Tonic at home - usually using a decent brand of gin. Our bottle of Gordon's ran out so we had a glass using the Lidl own brand gin left over from the sloe gin.

We last drank Lidl gin a few years ago, back when I was still living in Aberystwyth. Lidl sell two types of gin and we found the cheaper had more flavour. I don't know what they've changed but we found the gin to be very bland and tasteless. It looks like we'll have to stick to the good stuff from now on.

This is my first attempt at making Sloe Gin. The units are mixed metric/imperial because I didn't note the weight of the sloes in kg.

• 2½ pounds Sloes (or sloe/wild plum mixture)
• 300g white sugar
• just over a litre of gin.

I made it in a 2½ litre jug which once contained cider. The sloes and sugar nearly filled the jug. I poured in as much gin as I could until it was nearly full.

I must remember to invert the jug a couple of times per day for the first few weeks, then every few days for the next couple of months. It should be ready to drink by Christmas.

I thought I'd have a go at making Sloe Gin this year. I went for a walk in the countryside near Coventry, to a place where I suspected there might be sloes. The first trees I found were quite poor with only a few sloes on each, and they were difficult to reach. I walked further and found a few trees which were much better.

I sorted and washed the sloes when I got home. I managed to pick 2½ pounds of them, although some were larger and will actually be wild plums.

The Warwickshire Wildlife Trust held their first food and drink festival today. It was a fairly small affair but there was some good food available. We bought some local wine (from Leicestershire) and some locally made cheese. We also bought some chocolate fudge which tasted really good - almost like a soft chewy block of chocolate rather than fudge.

I bottled our rhubarb wine tonight. It was a fairly simple recipe:

• 1.5kg Rhubarb
• 1.25kg Sugar
• 1 small tin of grape concentrate
• bakers yeast

I managed to get just over 5 bottles. I'll give it a few weeks to begin to mature before tasting.

On a related note, I've ordered an electric juicer. This should make future wines easier to make. It's blackberry season at the moment and hopefully I'll have time to go and pick some soon. A friend with a grapevine has promised to give us a load of grapes, so the juicer will definitely come in handy there.

For the last couple of days, my backpack has made a regular 'thunk' type rattling noise whenever I've walked anywhere. I couldn't work out what it was, and it was starting to get slightly annoying.

I found the cause when I noticed the small plastic tub of digestive biscuits which I'd put in my bag on monday, with the intention of having them during my coffee break. They had turned into a collection of irregularly shaped digestive fragments.

It's not been a good week for forgetting about food.

Since monday, there has been a strange 'fart' like smell in the car. We couldn't work out where it was coming from so we sprayed the upholstery with Febreeze to try to remove the smell.

We were at the supermarket this evening and I picked up one of the reusable carrier bags from the car boot. In the bottom of the bag I noticed a pack of mozzarella cheese which had burst open, spilling the cheesy brine all over the inside of the bag.

Mystery solved.

The cheese must have been sitting in the car for over a week. The heat over the weekend will have caused the pack to expand and burst. I rinsed out the bags when we got home, so hopefully that will get rid of the smell.

I like the way Wing Wah have expanded the dessert selection to include a wider range of gateaux and cakes. I like the way they decorated the mini swiss rolls with a blob of cream and a chocolate wafer. I also like the way they put a blob of cream and a raspberry on the jam tart. I don't like the way they decided to add a sprig of parsley to it.

Our peppers seem to be doing quite well. Most of the bushes have fruit forming. Some of the peppers are about an inch long so hopefully we'll have some ready to eat soon.

A while ago my parents gave us a large tub of soil, which allegedly contained some lilies. Green shoots appeared in the spring which gradually grew. They've now got quite a few large flowers.

I don't think the garlic farmers need to start worrying yet. We cooked with the home grown garlic today. The cloves were very small - I'm sure the whole bulb was smaller than the clove I planted last year.

The garlic itself smelt reasonably pungent - not quite as 'garlicky' as the Tesco Organic garlic (which has a much better 'fresh garlic' smell than their normal stuff).

Seen in a shop at a motorway service station on the M1: