Week 3

I'm pleased to report this week has been marginally more interesting than last week, although lets face it, it wasn't hard to be.

 

Monday - I cooked a roast chicken in the slow cooker and was incredibly impressed with the result! I may share my recipe with you soon, the chicken was so succulent, and it gave fantastic leftovers!

 

Tuesday - I had a magazine meeting, which is usually in a university room, but as that room is shut over the exam period, what else were we to do but go to the pub? It's just a cheap student haunt, but I really like the lamp with the little individual shades - so cute!

 

Wednesday - I'm working on a knockout flapjack recipe for you. Working on being key. It's got potential but it's putting up a good fight. But it'll be delicious once I crack it I promise. Look at all those seeds and dried fruit. You can almost pretend it's healthy!

Thursday - okay this is a bit of a cheat. There's four photos. But I've put them into one file, so I think that makes it okay. Also, Thursday was a big day for me. I wanted to share. I handed the final version of my thesis in. I had an amazing burger at Handmade Burger Company (chicken, pineapple, bacon with mango salsa), paired with a strawberry milkshake. Then I went for a walk along the beach with Ben and had a little midnight paddle. Great fun, if not a little nippy.

 

Friday - sushi for dinner! A lovely pre-party treat.

Saturday - Words can not describe the hangover. But hey, I'd just handed in the biggest piece of work I've ever done, and I had a great time at the party. So I crawled into my flatmates bed and demanded they put veggie fingers in the oven for me. Reasonable I think.

Sunday - hangover vanquished, no more thesis stress, and it's pouring down. This can only mean one thing - time to get my life in order. Emails sent, magazine work done, diary updated.

 

How was your week?

Fondue for Two

Can you guess what we were doing with marshmallows, strawberries and grapes? I suppose I've rather given it away in the title, but the rhyme was too tempting (I won't say good, that would be a lie...) to resist. Fondue! Chocolate fondue to be precise. Just look at my face tucking into it. A real luxury, it was just the thing to cheer us up after a long day of working on our dissertations. The first draft is due in on Friday, and as we've been working on them since June, it can't come soon enough. This little treat really cheered up the start of the week. We chose fondue but I'm curious - what do you tuck into when you're feeling indulgent?

Deck the halls!

Decorating a student flat for Christmas isn't always easy. Getting a student flat to look good any time of the year can be hard. The furniture tends to be mismatched, the carpets are functional and everything just has a slight air of neglect about it. We are particularly lucky to live in an really nice flat with a landlady who really cares about it.It's still not that easy to make it look exactly how we'd like, but here's what we've come up with to add some festive cheer.

The first step was picking the tree - not an easy task! We didn't want to go wild, but really, no one could call the one on the right of the photo a tree. It's definitely a Christmas bush.

Dom named the trees and gave a heartfelt speech about how a Christmas bush just wasn't quite suitable...

...and so the medium sized tree, Dave, was chosen.

We popped him on a table to give him a bit of a boost, which made him lovely and proportionate to everyone but me. I may not have mentioned this before, but I am very very tall, as you can see from the blurry photo below.

Even though none of us have ever had our own Christmas tree before we managed to muster up a respectable amount of decorations, and didn't have to buy a thing!

Check out all of our recipe books - would you believe Delia belongs to one of the boys! Have you put your decorations up yet?

A Week in Pictures

I thought I'd share my week in pictures, Friday to Friday.

At a friends flat-warming on Friday, rooms were themed, with a dance room, conversation room, cake room, and camera room - this is the result of out trip to the camera room...

In town on Saturday I bought Ben some winter clothes. The boy is so unequipped for the cold, especially when you consider he's lived in the frozen North for three and a bit years! Then it was ceilidh time. For those of you unfamiliar with the time, a ceilidh is a traditional Gaelic party, where folk music is played. set dances are danced and traditional food is served. When I first moved here I hated them, but now that I know some of the dances I enjoy them a lot. Warning - the light did extremely strange things to my photos!

Sunday was a definite duvet day, that ended with me making my Christmas cake (blog post to follow!)

Monday. Back to real life - lab life. This week I was photographing barnacles I've been keeping - I'm trying to find ways to inhibit their growth so they don't grow on the bottom of boats. It's as dull as it sounds.

Computer problems are about all I can remember of Tuesday really, along with essay marking and meetings. I had to go all the way home because I'd picked up the wrong laptop charger in my rush to leave the house. Although it put me in a pretty bad mood I took the chance to go for a crunch in the autumn leaves.

On Wednesday there was a debate about the cinema, but the weather was so foul I did a bit of baking prep for Halloween and then we ended up crawling under a duvet and watching Homeland. We're halfway through the second series, and are absolutely hooked! 

Thursday - Halloween. An average day and we had people round in the evening. We at our body weight in cheese and cake and played skeleton Jenga. We know how to party in this flat! 

Friday meant a boring morning in the lab where I was measuring my barnacles from photographs, but a lovely lunch at the international food market and a screening of the Johnny Lee Miller/Benedict Cumberbatch Frankenstein at the local picturehouse. 

And what were my wild Friday night plans I hear you asking? I sat in bed editing an ad-pack for the magazine and answering emails. And then I fell asleep half way through writing this post, before I even watched Graham Norton.

What did you get up to this week?

Cheese

This post didn't need a fancy title. Just one word. Cheese. Because cheese is sometimes all you need. And when it's warmed in the oven, with a golden melting middle, then it's really so close to perfection that you may as well stop looking for anything else. And now that it's September, the nights will be getting cooler. You'll want some comforting food to settle in for the night with. 

It looks so innocent to begin with. A bit like the moon on your plate. A moon of camembert. Maybe the moon really is made of cheese. Wouldn't that be wonderful?

I know I said cheese is all you need. But it needs friends too sometimes. Get some grapes, apples, cranberry sauce and one of those part baked loaves you finish off in the oven yourself. Go on. The post will still be here when you get back.

You all set? Has the cheese been in the oven for 15-20 minutes? Great. Go for it. Tear off a chunk of bread, and dunk it right in the middle. You're probably going to get covered in melted cheese. That's okay. You have to embrace the mess to properly enjoy it.

The edges might still be a bit hard. That's okay too. Smear them on the bread, and top with some cranberry. It tastes just as good, I promise.

  

What's your favourite way to eat cheese?

You've been a long time coming but you're here now...

Last week I had to get up at 7am on my day off. Not cool. But it did mean that Ben and I got to pick up Anna and Dom from the train station and move into our lovely new flat, and celebrate Anna's birthday! So I suppose I can get over it. Because they arrived so obscenely early on the sleeper train we had plenty of time to catch up over breakfast in my favourite restaurant, The Sand Dollar. A café during the day and a bistro some nights of the week, the food is to die for and the staff are wonderful. We had a long day ahead, so we decided to fuel up good and proper...

The boys are very serious about their breakfast, but Anna looked a little happier to see hers.

After thoroughly stuffing ourselves we went back to the flat I'd been staying at temporarily for presents!

We're a very domesticated flat, and Anna got an incredible Dualit Coffee Machine off Dom and a glass bowl for her KitchenAid, commonly known as Baby, from Ben and I. Sadly both of these presents came in very big boxes, which didn't make our move any easier. But the boxes were nothing compared to the sofa...

Like I said. We're very domesticated.

   The boys did manly things for a while, and Anna and I had a bit of fun in the kitchen.



Finally, we finished the day how we started it. Piles and piles of food.

 Our eyes were a little bigger than our bellies though, so we had plenty of leftovers to get us through the next day of unpacking!

I'm so happy to finally be in this flat, it's been a long time coming. Now that I've been here a week or so, I'm starting to feel properly at home, but Ben and I are rattling a little. We definitely need it to be the end of the summer so that Anna and Dom come home from Bristol for good, and we're all back together again.

Anna has her own lovely blog - you should pop by, she's currently documenting her and Dom's summer down in Bristol.