Happy Easter to all who celebrate it - and Happy Chocolate Day to those who don’t. This is a big year for us; my Mum finally fulfilled one of D’s longest standing ambitions by buying us an Hotel Chocolat Ostrich Egg. It is gargantuan. We will be eating it until Christmas. The thing with us and chocolate: we both love it and have a number of sweet teeth but don’t tend to eat it in massive quantities. I have friends who tell me they can’t have sweet stuff in the house without it being consumed; we have an overflowing stash drawer and generally just have a small treat after dinner. One of the fe ..read more

It's Friday! And am frankly SHOCKED to see that it's been a month since I last posted. I have more stuff about Paris to share, and I never got around to talking properly about the gorgeous meal we had in Roots at the back end of last year. Poor little blog; it gets sadly neglected. In exciting life news - I recently got a much longed for promotion at work and I couldn't be more pleased. I'm back working in an area that I love and where I think that I can make a real difference, plus early impressions are that I have a fabulously supportive and fun manager and team around me. I feel incredibly ..read more

I celebrated a big birthday during the first December of the pandemic. One of those big ones that end with a zero and mean, unless you're a better man than me, you feel like spending the day in bed drinking wine and weeping at the passing of time and general futility of existence. It was not a good time to celebrate a birthday although I have to say that my lovely husband and Mum and Dad pulled out a number of stops to make sure that the day was well marked. Still, we had originally planned to celebrate with a trip to Paris. And D was determined to make sure that we made it, even if a bit late ..read more

Halfway through February already - the days are slipping by at a frankly alarming rate and I can't believe how long it has been since I last blogged.  Excitingly, it is entirely possible that we have already had our top dish of the year thanks to a fabulously foodie short break in Paris (abroad!) However, up until this last weekend, I felt my cooking mojo had been somewhat lacking. Looking back over our archived meal plan for January, I'm a little surprised at how much we cooked actually because I definitely felt that it was all a bit meh. It could just be the January blues (pernicious b ..read more

2021 was the year that started with a lockdown and ended with not-a-lockdown-but-most-of-us-choosing-to-stay-indoors-anyway. It did a good impression, in parts, of being normal but it really wasn't. It was the year where many of us queued up like dutiful citizens to get not one, not two but three jabs in the hope it would grant us freedom but then realised that freedom was slightly scary. A funny old time. In the latter half of the year, as reflected in my occasional blog posts, D and I tried to get back into the swing of eating out and we were rewarded with some absolutely fabulous meals. Wh ..read more

I sometimes find it hard to believe that I've been burbling away to myself in this little corner of the internet since 2010. So much has changed in that time - and, as the saying goes, so much has stayed the same. Last year was the lowest volume of posts since the blog began, and I think the majority of those were talking about meals we ate out. And I still haven't told you about our trip to Roots in December.  I won't make any promises to blog more -I've given up on anything vaguely resembling a New Year Resolution. But it would be nice to keep this ticking over, if just because it is a ..read more

Let's talk rice. If I had to put my carbs in order of preference (and this is the kind of game that D and I play regularly) rice would tend to come near the bottom of the list but I love rice, I just tend to think I love bread and pasta and potatoes more. And then I eat some really nice rice and feel terrible for maligning it so.  We had this rice with a very delicious lamb bhuna on Saturday night. I would share a picture, but I am terrible at food photography when the food is attractive, and we all know that there is nothing attractive about a plate of curry (taste aside, of course). He ..read more

Why yes, this does appear to have turned into an eating out blog. I am going to continue to maintain that it is just over excitement after months of captivity lockdown. And, also, we want to pump money into the catering industry. And, also, greed. But for once there was an actual occasion at home - my beloved D's birthday (no, the beloved is not ironic. Stop laughing). And we booked a two night stay at The Gilpin, a gorgeous country house hotel situated just outside Bowness, way back at the beginning of the year. A different time, when booking a hotel and a restaurant still seemed like a ..read more

You will have noticed that there have been quite a few posts recently about eating out. You might be forgiven for thinking that D and I have been eating out a lot recently; you would be right. After eighteen months of home cooking and takeaways, getting back out into the world of restaurants and multiple courses and wearing something other than pyjamas to eat has been extremely gratifying. A couple of weeks ago, we were lucky enough to be treated to a meal at one of our old favourites, Raby Hunt just outside Darlington. We've been there a couple of times before - most recently in 2018 - an ..read more

It's been less than a year since I last wrote about Restaurant Inver and I don't wish to repeat myself, but I can't allow the meal that we had there a fortnight ago to not go unmarked on this blog which, aside from anything else, is a much loved personal record for D and me of great food and great memories. As far as food and memories go, this last trip to Inver, the little restaurant on the shores of Loch Fyne, was up there with some of the best. Full disclaimer: we were there to celebrate our tenth (tenth!) wedding anniversary. We were predisposed to be happy. We had a bottle of champa ..read more