Tea and travels...

This week I've been a bit quieter on the blogging front than I had intended as I decided it was time to go for a little holiday.  So I ended up spending much of Tuesday planning my trip and doing a little bit of novel writing and tea drinking. This was followed by mad packing on Wednesday and heading to the north west to visit relatives before heading onwards to the wilds of Wales. (Well Flintshire at any rate!) On Thursday we decided to sample the delights of Llandudno and enjoyed ice cream on the beach.

Once we had done playing on the beach and strolling along the promanade (whilst avoiding thieving seagulls) we headed back to our travelodge before visiting more family members on the way back east on the Friday.

I also failed to blog yesterday as I was busy trying to stop sheep attacking eating the picnic me and my friends were having at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, going for a walk then returning home before enjoying yet more tea with Paul's family and my son.  It's a hard life being social isn't it! Now it's time to drink a tad more tea and get cracking on my novel again whilst the baby slumbers... adios for now!

Tuesday thoughts.

This Tuesday has been a very lazy one for me as I was up half the night feeding my teething son I was allowed a lie in by my lovely boyfriend. However, as a consequence of these things we missed my the opportunity to take our little one to swimming and ended up staying in for the day.So today I have been thinking about how good tea is when you have the opportunity to drink it and don't have to guard it from curious small people.

I have also been thinking about travelling beyond these four walls and reminiscing about my travels to Barcelona, Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels and New York. (If only in my head...)

Chocolate obsessed me for a short while... until I procured some anyhow!

After that I let myself look forward to my friends upcoming wedding celebrations and my sister's extended 30th celebrations. As well as the return of the Great British Bake off and Doctor Who next month. Those are few things which I have been thinking about today as well as: books, how to stop my son destroying our Nintendo Wii/my Ukulele, food, mess, projects and the cats.

Tea based exploration.

When I was out and about the other month I picked up a leaflet for a Yorkshire Tea Trail and as I'm partial to a nice cup of tea I put the leaflet in my bag for further inspection. 

On looking at the trail it became apparent there were a lot of places that I hadn't been for a cuppa but also that Sheffield and Huddersfield were completely overlooked.

I think it would be a fun challenge to take on this tea trail but I also think that it may be necessary to create my own tea trail for nice places to have a cuppa in Yorkshire and Derbyshire which haven't made the list. Anyone have any suggestions about where I should start?

Chocolate Utopia Nottingham - chocolate tasting.

In  a seemingly inconspicuous building on a main Nottingham bus route in the city centre, is the chocoholics dream Chocolate Utopia....  (The clue is in the name!)  It's a cafe, chocolate shop and chocolate factory all rolled into one. I've been lucky enough to have two trips there over the years once for their lovely hot chocolate many moons ago and more recently for a chocolate tasting session.

The first thing you notice when you enter the premises is the gorgeous aroma and of the chocolate filled cabinets.

Normally  Chocolate Utopia functions as a cafe with tables scattered around and throne like chairs available for customers to sit on; however, they prepared for their chocolate tasting session by arranging all their tables into one large table.

When  the chocolate tasting started we were offered a non-alcoholic beverage of our choice were given a chocolate menu to decide on a chocolate to accompany the drink.  Then once everyone had arrived and were comfortable the owners introduced themselves and explained the history of their business and got pictures, examples and samples out to demonstrate how chocolate is made.

As they explained this process we passed around a sample of a cocoa bean pod, crunched a smaller cocoa bean and sampled cocoa nibs and cocoa butter. Then we moved on to how chocolate is manufactured and we tried chocolate buttons with various levels of coco solids in them.

After we had tried these we had a little breather to stretch our legs then we went down stairs to see where the magic happens. (Or the place the chocolate is made to non-chocoholics!)  We gazed on the chocolate making machinery and were brought our choice of melted milk or dark chocolate in chocolate cups.  Then they brought out strawberries that had been dipped in milk chocolate and had then set.  These were lovely, I had a couple of them.

Once we were ready we ascended the stairs and had a quick breather before we were brought yet more chocolates to try! There was a variety from liquers to dark chocolates to truffles.  There were exotic flavours such as a thai food inspired chocolate and more conventional ones like milk chocolate truffles. We were even asked to try their works in progress such as the cheese chocolate which featured mature cheddar and dark chocolate.

There was lots of chocolates to sample and thankfully the owners gave us an option to save some of it and take it home with us in a doggy bag later.  We also had the option to take a few of the chocolate covered strawberries home with us which we were happy to do.

As we were leaving I tried to take a group photograph and one of the owners came out of the shop and kindly offered to take the picture for us.

It was a great night and I would recommend a visit to Chocolate Utopia to any chocoholic.

Nigella's Croque Monsieur Bake.

I tried this recipe the other week when staying at my Mum’s, she made it for me and a friend in place of a fry up.  It was just as nice! She called it a savoury bread and butter pudding but if your looking it up it’s Nigella Lawson’s Croque Monsieur  bake!

To Make this recipe you need:

6 slices of bread

3 eggs

Half a pint of milk.

About half a block of cheese.

A pack of ham

Some mustard

A sprinkle of salt and pepper

(A bit of butter if your being really bad!)

To make this I got out all my ingredients and started off buttering my bread, grating cheese on to it , popping ham on to that and then putting mustard on top of the butter on one slice of bread. After I did that I popped the two slices of bread together, then cut it in half to make two sandwiches, then put these in a casserole dish.

Now most normal people would repeat this process two times at this point  but I decided to experiment with the mustard...  I tried using less butter and more mustard on one of the sandwiches, then for the last one I decided to completely get rid of the butter altogether and use loads of mustard!

When I’d made up all the sandwiches I whisked the egg and milk together. 

Then I poured this mixture over the sandwiches and sprinkled the salt and black pepper over it.  Where the mix didn’t cover completely I spooned some of it back on to the sandwiches.

Once this was done I popped some cling film over my casserole dish and went out dancing.

On my way back from dancing I called Paul and asked him to pre-heat the oven to 200c and the pop the bake in the oven for about 25 mins. The food wasn’t quite ready when I got home but it was nearly there!  After a little wait we were able to safely say it was quite nice.

 It wasn’t as nice as my Mum’s version I think that was due to my experimenting! Mine tasted very mustardy and felt a bit soggy to me but Paul loved it and there was none left on his plate so I must have done something right! We’re currently experimenting with lower fat meals so this won’t be on the menu for a bit but with some tweaking it maybe something to add to the repertoire....

52 Recipe Challenge - Week 46

This week I decided to make a tart based on a blog post I saw on Kitchen Bitching, the recipe which inspired me was this one: Onion and toasted sunflower seed tart by Panda Bear.

I say inspired because I didn't exactly follow it to the letter I didn't have all the ingredients and wanted to use a few things up in my fridge so I added them to it but the idea came from the above blog post.

To make this tart you need:

1 batch of puff pastry (I cheated and used ready roll)
1 Onion
1 Shallot
4 Eggs
1 lot of Boursin (I used this garlicy goats cheesy stuff because it was reduced at the co-op,  goats cheese would probably do as good a job.)
Half a block of Wensleydale cheese (or whatever you have in your fridge!)
300ml Greek Yogurt (as a substitute for double cream)
1 Pepper
A sprinkle of Salt and Pepper.

To start with I got my ready rolled pastry out of the fridge and rolled it over my pie dish, I squashed it into the dish and cut of the excess.  Then because my pie dish is round and the ready roll pastry was rectangular I got some of the excess and stuck it in the places where it was missing at the edges and neatened it up again by cutting off the remaining left over pastry.

 I put this in the fridge, pre-heated the oven to 200c and got out my vegetables.  I chopped up my onion first before cutting up the shallot.

I then got the wok out put some butter in it and melted that then added the onion to start cooking it after a few minutes I also added the chopped up shallot.

Whilst the onion and shallot were cooking I sliced my pepper and then popped this in the wok as well.

Next I decided to grate my Wensleydale cheese, then I covered it with some clingfilm and put it in the fridge.

I then realised I didn't have any cream and consulted Google about whether yogurt could be used instead of cream in cooking.  I wasn't entirely sure if it could or not but got some out and put it in a bowl and then realised the onion, shallot and pepper was done and took them off the heat to cool.

I double checked the recipe and realised that I had mixed up step 5 but decided that it would be ok and beat the eggs into the yogurt before mixing in half the cheese.

Next I got the pie dish out of the fridge and put some of the onion, shallot and pepper mix on the base.

Before mixing the salt and pepper, as well as the rest of the cheese into the egg, cheese and yogurt filling and pouring it on top of the vegetables that were already there. Then I got the boursin and crumbled that on top of the tart and put it into the oven for half an hour.

After half an hour the filling was done and the tart looked done but the bottom was a little soggy and my boyfriend wasn't convinced so he put it back in the oven for another ten minutes to make sure it was all cooked.

This ended up frazzling the edges but it still tasted good if you avoided the crusts! This make a great tea for two, lunch for me and a snack... I think it's a recipe I'll make again but on a weekend as it took me forever and made a few pots...