Banana bread

Banana bread is store cupboard cake for me and one that I make often. Manly because I can't eat ripe bananas and this is a very tasty way to use them up. The basic recipe I use is Delia's. I like to experiment with the ingredients this one has oats, raisins, walnuts and pumpkin seeds in.

Becky

Happy Birthday Becky!

For my sisters birthday I have framed my fabric landscape as one of her presents.

Spiced chai blueberry smoothie

I had a craving for a chai latte. As I now live in an area of town were I cannot easily access a coffee shop that does fancy things like that, I remembered that Spiced chia latte from Drink me chai was a nice substitute. So I google Drink me chai, because I could, and found these recipes. So instead of driving to a coffee shop I cycled to co-op. But they don't sell drink me chai products, so I drove to Tesco (which I do realise slightly defeated the original point, especially as Tesco has a Costa in) I then set about making a Spiced chai blueberry smoothie.

The blueberries were a pain to sieve, but other then that this was an easy recipe, and I got to use my stick blender (my favourite kitchen gadget - I occasionally make things just so I can use it). It was also very nice, as you would expect it had gone a bit brown by the next morning but it still tasted just as nice.

Foodies Festival

One of my friends suggested going along to the Foodies Festival in London. Which sounded like a fab idea, I even persuaded another friend to come along with us, unfortunately the friend that suggested we go could not go in the end. Despite this we had fun. I was expecting a layout a bit like Reading music festival, with open tents that you could cram into and watch what you like. It wasn't! we arrive at a leisurely pace around 11am and were disappointed that we had to register to see the activities, and because of the time we had to go back at 14:00 to register for shows at 13:30 at the earliest. There was a long queue and whilst we were queueing they told us that we could only register for one show. So on that front we were disappointed.

We did however enjoy the stales and had a very nice lunch of Falafal from Exotic Tangine, we enjoyed watching the Diablo bloke show us how to make circular toasted sandwiches (or pittas, wraps or even pastry apparently) of which I was very tempted to buy. We also decided that we want an arga with all the trimmings, we watched one make flapjacks whilst we drank our Pimms. Later we decided to investigate the Hendricks stale for another cocktail, Hendrick's summer punch recipe available here, I would have had another. Needless to say by the time we go to see the one show we had managed to book on we were a bit droopy eyed, though we did learn how to make the perfect crepe hosted by Cafe des crepes (based in London), they make it look very easy and it isn't.

Cheese and Onion Bread

 

I decided to try a packed bread from the supermarket, just because I was curious about the quality. It was yummy bread though it was dense. I think that was down to my bread making skills rather than its fault. It was quicker to make, the packet did not ask for much kneading or prep, but that just took away most of the fun, its was also quite a small loaf. Lovely warm with butter though!