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.

Sabai-Sabai is a Thai restaurant in Leamington Spa. The food was good but a little on the expensive side. When we saw the deep fried ice cream on the dessert menu, we knew we had to try it otherwise we would be forever wondering what it was like.

The ice cream was encased in a thick doughnut style batter and covered in a kind of crispy breadcrumb. The ice cream inside was still quite frozen. It was unusual but definitely worth trying. The photo below was taken shortly after we'd started eating. The yellow ice cream inside make it look a bit like a scotch egg.

I am currently watching the new BBC adaptation of The Day of the Triffids. It's ok but they have made rather too many changes. It's ages since I read the book so I can't remember all the details but the original Triffids couldn't move very quickly, unlike the ones here. The original ones would kill a victim then patiently wait for it to decompose. They also couldn't reach out and pull people towards them. I never imagined them to look like angry Aloe Vera plants.

The book had slower pacing, which gave time for the characters to develop. They obviously decided to speed things up to make the adaptation more dramatic. The narration in the book helped create the atmosphere, making the events seem scarily plausible. Unfortunately this is lost in the tv version.

I can't remember the exact details of the original ending, so it doesn't matter that I'm posting this before the programme finishes.

Occasionally the programme felt like Aliens: The Vegetable Edition.

We videoed the film Ghost Rider when it was on Channel 5 a few weeks ago. We watched it tonight. I really hope it was supposed to be some kind of comedy. It didn't take itself too seriously but it looked and sounded a bit stupid, as if it didn't know it was so ridiculous. The acting was fairly bad but a lot of that might have been due to the awful script.

The Nicholas Cage character seems to have the same taste in music as The Stig from Top Gear. In the early parts of the film he regularly listens to a lot of easy listening stuff such as The Carpenters.

The Sunday Buffet wasn't running so we ordered from the normal menu. We started with poppadoms and chutneys for starters. The poppadoms were large and crunchy and pretty much what you expect.

For the main course, Emma ordered Chicken Jalfrezi and a chilli naan. The jalfrezi was classed as medium but had a couple of whole chillies decorating the dish. The naan was surprisingly spicy. I ordered the Chicken Bangladesh, medium spiciness. There were huge chunks of chicken in it, along with a hard boiled egg. I chose Nasi Goreng Rice as the side dish.

The curries were full of flavour without being too hot. The rice was almost like a meal in itself. It contained herbs, onion, chilli, egg and prawns and was very nice.

The restaurant was empty while we were there. This may have had something to do with the weather - it had been raining all morning and the streets were empty of people. The food was good and at good prices. We spent less than £22 in total, which included a drink each. Definitely worth re-visiting. We intend to go back when the buffet is on.

The title isn't strictly accurate. The Han Dynasty in the city centre is handy but certainly not nasty. The buffet might be a bit more expensive than last year (now £5.99) but there is a decent choice of food and what I had was consistently tasty.

The buffet foods were a mixture of things either deep fried or stir fried. My first plate had prawn toast, spring rolls, stir fried cauliflower & broccoli, noodles, mushrooms (stir fried and deep fried). The second plate was a selection of stir fried and curried meat dishes.

The restaurant interior is a bit more basic than China Red but the food was of a similar quality.

It may come as a bit of a surprise but I'd never seen this film before. We taped it when it was on TV a few weeks ago and finally got around to watching it today. I tried to watch it once before, many years ago. I rented it from a video library and started watching it. I found the opening few minutes to be excruciatingly boring and decided that I would rather be outside on such a sunny day instead. The video went back to the shop unwatched.

Since today was cold and wintry, I had no such distractions. I still found the start to be very slow and boring. The rest of the film was more like a second rate kids fantasy film, rather than a sequel to the first two films. The alien costumes looked more like something from a low budget TV series. The acting was very poor as were most of the special effects. One the whole I found the film to be very disappointing.

I can't believe the size of the portions they serve at The Bear in Berkswell. For my starter I had the Baked Camembert. I was expecting a few of the breaded cheese cubes on a bed of salad but it was an entire 250g cheese, served in the small wooden box, with toast and a very tasty onion marmalade.

It was good but it was far too much cheese. People would criticise a fast food place if they sold a meal with around 60g of fat but somehow a fancy pub restaurant can get away with it.

The main course followed the trend of large servings. My Lamb Suet Pudding was a decent size. I probably shouldn't have chosen another meal where part of the name was a type of fat. The suet pastry was a bit too thick but the filling was fine.

The meals were good and were reasonably priced, which probably explains why the place is usually busy.

The food was pretty good. I liked the cubic Steak and Merlot Pie.

The bar service was slow and piss poor though. It took them about 10 minutes to make each cocktail and at one point I waited 20 minutes to be served wine because they couldn't find the corkscrew.

It was a toss-up between the lunchtime buffet at China Red in Hertford Street, or the Handy Nasty (Han Dynasty) near West Orchards. We chose China Red simply because we were nearer to it at the time.

The buffet was fairly cheap at £5.90-ish. The selection was reasonable given the price. Starters included prawn toast, chicken satay sticks, ribs, spring rolls. Main courses included beef curry, sweet and sour chicken, noodles, rice.

The food was tasty, but the disadvantage of eating at lunchtime is that I can't eat as much as in the evenings, so I didn't get to have as many platesful as normal.

We went back to Aqua for a meal tonight. We were there as part of a conference organised at the University.

Everything seemed to go smoothly. When you are a group of over 50 people in a small restaurant, you appreciate that the service can sometimes be a bit slow, especially when they're still open as normal.

The food was excellent. When we arrived, there were bowls of olives on the tables. The first course arrived and consisted of plates of falafel and pizza. Subsequent courses had pasta, pizza and a bit plate of spiced chicken.

After the meal, most of us went down the road to the Whitefriars pub for a pint. A lot of the people with us were from other universities and they liked the old medieval building, and the range of beers on offer.

We've seen a few films recently which were highly regarded by either critics or the Oscars:

There Will be Blood
No Country for Old Men
Brokeback Mountain.

They all fell into the 'well photographed but rather slow' category.

There Will be Blood started off rather strangely. No dialogue for the first part of the film, with eerie music which reminded me of the 'moon monolith' sequence of 2001. The oil rig fire sequence was visually spectacular. The ending was a bit odd.

No Country for Old Men looked like it would be a more straightforward film, with a more of an actual story. It was well acted, with Tommy Lee Jones settling into a similar role to the one he played in "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada". The ending was somewhat unexpected.

Brokeback Mountain wasn't an easy film to watch. Not really because of the homosexuality, but due to the amount of mumbling which made it difficult to hear what people were saying.

I'm not a big fan of musicals, but we went to watch this anyway. It hasn't changed my views on musicals.

I didn't find the songs very memorable. Johnny Depp's singing sometimes sounded a bit like David Bowie. The actual story was ok - I think I'd have preferred it as a 'normal' film.

When I got home, I decided to check the Movies application on Facebook to see if any friends had reviewed it. I mis-spelt the name, missing out the final 'e'. The list of 'near matches' for the titles was bizarre to say the least.

We've walked past this place lots of time but had been put off by the loud music coming through the front doors. It was much quieter this time so we ventured inside.

The restaurant isn't licenced but they have an extensive range of soft drinks, including freshly made fruit smoothies. We shared a mozarella and balsamic onion garlic bread starter, which was very good with lots of cheese stuffed inside. We then took advantage of their mid-week £4.99 pasta and pizza offer, and had a couple of 12" pizzas (wood fried according to the sign outside) and a penne pasta dish.

At full price, most main courses are around £7 each, which is good value. When the £5 offer is running, they become amazing value for money. An optional 10% service charge is added to the bill, but as the food was great and the service was friendly, we had no objection to paying it. This was in stark contrast to MYO where they added a compulsory service charge and illegally tried to force us to pay it. As a result we decided to never return to MYO but we're certainly going back to Aqua in the future.

They have a website which lists their menu and prices: www.aqua-food-mood.co.uk