Summer Update

Boy oh boy! It has been one hell of a summer and I have been none stop busy and completely unable to think straight, let alone get around to paying attention to my poor, lonely blog. Why so busy? WELL, I bought my first flat, I celebrated a birthday in the South of France, I joined the photo shoot for my mates’ new album cover, I danced the nights away at latitude festival, I planned and partied at my sister’s hen, I helped my lovely friends with the launch of their online boutique, my sister got married, I made the cake (!),   I joined in the London Olympic party spirit with gusto, I got to see blur (twice) and my sister got married again at our house in Spain...See what I mean?!

It’s been amazing but a bit of whirlwind, so here is a brief update in pictures:

First off, the flat. After months of waiting, my sister and I finally completed on the flat of our dreams in Brixton. It’s a stunner and we are the happiest little ladies in the whole of South West London. Yes, it still needs a lot of attention and new furniture  but it has such beautiful light and space and, after years of renting, we finally have a home to call our own. Hoorah!

 

 

My good buddy Alyshia took a few of us to her hotel in Cap Ferrat in the South of France to celebrate her birthday. Wow! The generosity her family showed us was beyond anything we could’ve expected and I don’t think any of us will be forgetting their yacht in a hurry...

 

 

I just happened to grow up with a few of the lovely and talented guys from Mumford & Sons so, when they needed a few pals to help them take pictures for their new album cover, I was delighted to help. The day ended in a food fight and I was digging food out of my bra for hours after, but oh what fun. I’m so tiny and blurred, I thought I’d give you a helping hand in spotting me...

 



LATITUDE. My friend Neil was running the hilarious comedy shed for Monster Comedy and we used it as a base for the whole weekend. When we weren’t laughing our heads off, we were watching some cracking music. It was also pretty cool to run into Brittany from the Alabama Shakes whilst treating myself to a late night noodle feast.

I planned a pretty awesome hen party for my sister Mary with a few of her wonderful friends and a couple of other sisters. A blast from start to finish with a suitably whopping great hangover the next day

 

 

My gorgeous friends Rachel and Lucy launched an online accessories boutique and, oh wow, it is really something special. They asked me to a bit of modelling (in the loosest sense of the word)  and I was lucky enough to get a preview of all their wonderfully cool and quirky stock. LOVE indeed. Looky looky at the beauties on my feet, hands, neck...check it out!  www.fromlondonwithlove.com

 

 

 



My bootiful sister Mary got married to the wonderful Nick from our house in Wimbledon. All five of us sisters were back together as my biggest one Katie came back from Hong Kong for the big day. It was so special and the happiest of days

Aaaand, I made the cake...

 The Olympics came to London and I totally surprised myself at how much I loved it. I didn’t have any tickets but that didn’t stop me!



My sisters and I all had tickets to see the incredible blur at the end of the Olympics, but, GET THIS, my clever friend Mei managed to also wangle two tickets to a last minute blur gig at the 100 Club on Oxford Street. That’s a capacity of 350 people. As you can imagine it was incredible, yes we nearly died and I may have broken a few ribs but to see blur with 350 people one week and 80,000 the next.

 

 

SO close!

And then so far...

 

 

My sister always wanted to get married at our house in Spain but, for admin reasons, this wasn’t really possible so she ended up having a second beautiful ceremony in the mountains followed by a big ol’ fiesta. I cried like a baby, I danced like a loca lady and I scoffed tapas and paella to my heart’s content.

 

And finally I got the time to relax for a week by the pool with some of my very bestest friends at my parents Spanish abode. Mmmmm loverly!

 

 

So what now? Well exciting times are up ahead as well, but that’s a story for another day .

 

Stowells Light Wine

I’m the youngest of five sisters who went to an all girls’ school so I think I’m quite good at understanding what women want! SO, when I saw a new low calorie wine was available, I thought it was my selfless duty to try it out and see how it tasted...

What with this being a sort of experiment as to whether the low calorie stuff will ever be a realistic replacement to the kind we all know and love, I thought it would be best to recruit an impartial panel of judges.

The Panel

The Wine

  

The Scores

 

6/10: Georgia - "The wine was definitely drinkable (it tasted of cranberries!) but a little sweet to have a lot of it. I think if I were to vary it with some normal rosé or white then it would be an excellent guilt-free treat. "

5/10: Jennie - "I'm pretty undecided. I like the idea of it and would probably drink it again, but I don't think I care enough about the calories to pass up on a good wine for this..."

 

9/10: Melissa - "It doesn't taste 100% the same as normal wine, but it's still very drinkable. For so few calories it definitely appeals over normal wine!"

 

9/10: Hellie - "Fruity and elegant, the perfect Sunday night tipple."

 

8/10: Kirstie - "It was really quite tasty, much more so than I imagined - and great as I am really into running so still being able to enjoy wine is a real plus...Deliiiicious"

 

7/10: Jess - "Nice fruity flavour, suitable for a summer’s afternoon due to the low alcohol content. Slightly on the sweet side for my tastes."

 

3/10: Millie - "It tastes like adult Ribena. Not the wine for me!"

 

And me...

7/10 - I like the idea more than I love the wine itself. As well as the calories, the alcohol content is lower so it is kind of perfect for a summer afternoon in the sunshine. Put it like this...I'm not going to pass up a great bottle of wine for Stowells Light version but I definitely think I would buy it again. I would recommend trying it because those who liked it, really liked it! It's love/hate, but if you're a lover, think of all those calories you could be saving, eh?!

Sunny Lunch in Kensal Rise

I hate to be one of those people who only talks about the weather, but I can’t help looking out of my window at the intense hail storm and dreaming back to two days ago when I was helping my sister and her fiancé with a spot of gardening and having lunch out in the sunshine. Having had horrible, grey and rainy skies for weeks, we spent the whole weekend moseying around outside and just enjoying life for a bit.

It might have been a little premature of us (being that it was pretty chilly when the clouds came out), but we just couldn’t resist eating outside, having a delicious lunch with lots of treats from l’Angolo deli in Kensal Rise. If you’re ever in the College Road area, you must go in and get some of their humous. My sister’s vegetarian fiancé swears it’s the best he’s had...

 



When Lucy met Graham Coxon

A couple of weeks ago a very exciting thing happened to me. Yup, the title of the post probably gave it away...I got to meet one of my all time heroes, Graham Coxon!

This was literally the highlight of my year so far so please excuse my ‘I think I’m going to explode with happiness’ face in this picture. I think we can see that I was just a little more excited by the whole situation than Graham.



I had a million questions to ask him, but when it came down to it, I was just way too nervous and there was a whole room of people listening  to me talk which made me feel like a right wally. Bar all the obvious questions about the music, I was really hoping I could grill him about some foody things and maybe even get a good restaurant recommendation out of him.

Well this wasn’t to be (because I bottled it) but I thought you fellow Coxon / food fans may like to know what this wonderful rockstar has in his dressing room:

Mini chocolate bars (Maltesers, Milky Ways...)

A big fruit selection

Peanuts

Crisps

Bread/ toast

 

Yup, that’s it. At least that’s all I could see without snooping too obviously. If only I’d known, I could have won him over with some delicious, homemade treats. What a wasted opportunity...

Valentine Warner at Pizza Express: a pizza masterclass

On Tuesday evening food bloggers from around London assembled in the downstairs private room at Pizza Express, Holborn. We had been invited to sample Valentine Warner’s two new pizzas for the chain and have the man himself show us how to make them. Well, I didn’t have to be asked twice! I have a huge soft spot for Pizza Express because it’s always a reliable, reasonably priced, good feed (and they quite often have some sort of deal going). I was there like a shot.

So it turns out that Valentine is no stranger to Pizza Express, having worked as a waiter for them several years ago, but how things have now changed! Having offered to produce a new pizza for their menu, Pizza Express granted him creative control over two guest pizzas, the Puttanesca and the Fennel  and Salami, which he developed with their chefs. The former was Valentine’s take on the pasta sauce and a nod to the fact that in Italy pizzas don’t always need to be covered in cheese, the latter, an indulgence in his long standing love of fennel.

First up, the Fennel and Salami. The pizza features the basic passata and mozzarella with fennel salami from Trealy Farm, along with a generous sprinkling of fennel seeds and a restrained helping of chilli flakes. Once cooked, the pizza is topped with rocket and sliced fresh fennel which have been tossed in a lemon dressing. His passion for the ingredients and his enthusiasm for the pizza he had created was apparent and it really came across in the flavours. I LOVE fennel anyway so this was always going to be a winner with me, but the addition of the fennel and rocket  salad with lemon oil made it taste incredibly light and fresh. This pizza isn’t going to be for you if you’re not into fennel, (they even had Trealy Farm create a more intensely flavoured fennel salami specifically for Pizza Express as it was felt the flavour needed to be stronger), but I would urge you try it next time you’re there if you fancy something new because that pizza is gooood!

Next was the Puttanesca, which Valentine himself describes as being a “grown up” pizza. Based on the pasta sauce of the same name, it packs a real punch with salty anchovies, capers, green and black olives, along with the fresh red chillies, lemon oil, lemon zest and garlic oil and finished with fresh oregano after it’s been cooked. These flavours are comparatively mellow in a pasta dish, but generously piled on a pizza it’s pretty intense. Intense in a good way, but I’m not sure I could make my way through a whole one. For me it’s a sharer pizza or the kind of pizza that you would want to get if you were having “one for the table”; essentially what happens when one pizza per person is just not enough!

Valentine’s right, the lack of cheese on the Puttanesca and the strength of the flavours, do make it more of a grown up pizza but it’s still good and worth him taking the risk of being scoffed at by a few purist italians who find the idea of turning a pasta dish into a pizza a bit of a joke. In a way it’s obvious that it would work because those classic flavours blend so well together and even though they’re strong, they aren’t battling with each other.  Valentine insisted on a higher quality of olives than usually found in Pizza Express to be used on this pizza and it makes a difference. For both the Puttanesca and the fennel and Salami, the attention to details and the impact of flavours makes them both worthy of taking a place on the trusty old Pizza Express menu.

It helps that Valentine Warner is friendly and incredibly likeable but the proof of the pizza is in the eating and I definitely think these are going to be big hits for Pizza Express. Me, I have a date with a Fennel and Salami pizza lined up for next week...

My partners in crime  for the night were The London Pizza Bloggers and if you are ever looking for a great pizza in London I would highly recommend them; essentially just a couple of greedy pizza lovers who are making it their mission to sniff out the best pizza joints in London. www.thelondonpizzablog.com

Pierre Herme Macaron

Every now and then you come across something that kind of changes your life as you know it. For me, one of these moments occurred in the summer of 2009 when I was offered my first macaron; a Laduree creation that had me reeling! Since then I have always tried to keep the macaron in my life, indulging whenever I have the opportunity. They are so sugary and rich (but they don’t come cheap), so they will always be an indulgence item, but boy are they worth it!

I always thought of Laduree as the pinnacle of macaron craftsmanship, that is until Christmas, when I was giving a gorgeous looking box stuffed with macarons of the most amazing colours and flavours. They were from Pierre Herme, the French patisserie chef who has mastered the creation of weird, wonderful and beautiful macarons.

I have visited their store on Lowndes Street only a couple of times since then because I find it practically impossible to resist the urge of buying a big box, but a sudden urge for macarons (plus a need to buy a present for Ben’s mum) sent me there the other day and I was once again reminded of its greatness.

Let’s put his in perspective, this place made not one BUT TWO sweet macaroons with foie gras at Christmas! Yup, they really push the boat out with the flavours and it honestly works. Having poked my nose in last weekend, my attention was caught by a gorgeous bright red and green macaroon, which they told me was their special Mother’s Day creation. Believe me, I can think of no better place to get a treat for your mum! The Mother’s Day macaron is Pistachio and Raspberry compote and fits in just perfectly with a big, mixed, box of macarons (as I found out when I was eating a box of them later in front of the TV). The store always has some of the classic macaron flavours, but mixes them up with something a little more interesting such as, Green Tea, Chanterelle Mushroom & Lemon. It’s good.

So, if you are thinking that Pierre Herme’s boutique might just merit a visit, it’s worth noting that they are running their Macaron Day on Tuesday 20^th March, too late for Mother’s Day but still a great way of welcoming the first day of spring on Wednesday 21^st...If you need an excuse.

Walking home with my valuable macaron!!

For one day only on Macaron Day, Pierre Herme will be stocking a staggering 25 flavour of macarons, including their foie gras variety(!), in what they call a “taste retrospective”. The event is held in aid of Ambitious about Autism and with the tag line “1 Donation, 1 Macaron” and with a percentage of all sales on the day to be donated to Ambitious about Autism, you can’t go far wrong. You can find out more here: www.pierreherme.com/media/catalog/product/JDM-UK.pdf

Now, I have made macarons on a few occasions with varying degrees of success. One thing is for sure though, I certainly can’t make them as neat as I’d like! I always like to try out different flavours and my latest batch of lemon and pistachio ones certainly went down well, it’s just a shame I didn’t think about the colour composition before I started as my greens and yellows all look a bit samey. A nice chocolately brown and pink would’ve brought them to life quite nicely...something to think about for the future, but for now here’s my macaron recipe very heavily influenced my Eric Lanlards from Home Bake, which I have found to be the best:

Ingedients:

For basic macaron mixture:

100g ground almonds

100g icing sugar
90g egg whites (from 3 large eggs)
100g  caster sugar

1.       Sift the icing sugar and almonds together in a bowl.
2.       In a large bowl, whisk the egg whites on a fast speed with an electric whisk. When this starts to thicken, gradually add the caster sugar until it forms stiff peaks.
3.       Fold the almond mixture into the egg whites, along with your chosen colouring and flavouring with a large metal spoon.
4.       Pre-heat the oven to 150 degrees Centigrade. Lay baking parchment on large backing trays and using a wide, plain nozzle, pipe out discs of mixture approximately 3cm round. Leave these to dry a little for 5-10 minutes.
5.       Bake in the oven for 12-15 minutes, making sure that they don’t start to brown.
6.       As soon as they come out of the oven, it’s a great tip to lift the baking parchment and pur some very cold water onto the tray. This makes it much easier to remove the discs from the parchment with a spatula.
7.       When they are cool, sandwich together with your choice of filling.

For my lemon and pistachio macarons you will need the following:

Lemon:

2 drops of lemon essence for flavouring
A few drops of yellow food colouring to achieve your desired depth of colour
Good quality, shop bought lemon curd for the filling

Pistachio:
For the main mixture, substitute 20g of the almons with raw pistachio nuts and blitz them up into a fine powder (so 80g ground almond and 20g whizzed up pistachios)
A few drops of green food colouring
Pistachio Ganache  for the filling, as below:

Ingredients

100ml single cream
40g unsalted pistachios (smashed up into small chunks)
40g caster sugar
1 tablespoon caster sugar
2 egg yolks
20g butter, softened

A few drops of green or black food colouring

For the pistachio ganache:

Heat the cream in a saucepan over medium heat then add the pistachios, sugar and caster sugar. Bring to the boil, then add the eggs and cook and turn down, making sure it does not boil but is on the point of boiling. Remove from heat, stir in the softened butter and food colouring, then refrigerate.

Rick Steins Fish & Chips, Padstow

 Battered Oysters

Last weekend I took a much needed couple of days and headed down to Cornwall with my sister (Alice) and our boyfriends (Ben, George) in tow. The plan: to eat, drink, walk and generally look after ourselves very well until we felt we could face London again.

 
We were staying in George's bungalow in St Austell; a perfect little place to dump stuff during the day's activities and really settle into in the evenings. Very cosy with about 50 electric heaters blaring! Several evenings the pineapple rum made an appearance; it is delicious with ice after dinner (or whenever you fancy it really, I wouldn’t want to be too prescriptive!).
 
Well we certainly did look after ourselves and we pretty much ate ourselves to a standstill most days and yet, after two solid days of gluttony, we still managed to get completely over excited about getting ourselves down to Rick Stein's Fish & Chips for Sunday lunch.

 
We were queuing for about 30 minutes in the cold because (as you can imagine) the restaurant is pretty popular with visitors to Padstow. You can’t book at Stein’s Fish & Chips, which is really as it should be at a chippy. The prices are also pretty standard for fish and chips, but the taste is definitely better than most. I won’t say the BEST, that honour belongs to The Victoria Inn in Penzance, but I’ll save that for another day...

The restaurant was bright, simple and comfortable, with big scrubbed wooden tables which you will share with other people unless you are in a larger group. It’s table service without the frills, but essentially it was efficient and friendly and luckily the food appeared pretty pronto. We warmed up with a glass of wine, whilst the boys drank beer name after Rick Stein’s dog, Chalky.

Just because we couldn’t wait for our mains, and because we were intrigued, we ordered a couple of battered oysters a piece to get started. Ordinarily I'm pretty “take it or leave it” about oysters but these were really amazing. I could’ve easily just eaten a huge plateful of them for my lunch and couldn’t stop myself from asking the chef how he did them on my way out. The restaurant was just winding down and although the kitchen was closing, the very friendly David took me behind the scenes  to show me how they were done; I was making mental notes like a mad thing hoping mine might be half as good!

Obviously I intended to try these at home but, as I was buying my oysters at Whole Foods, I realised I had no idea how to shuck an oyster. My advice: if you’re going to try this at home then ask your friendly fishmonger for a quick tutorial. Martin at Whole Foods was very obliging and I even got a free oyster to taste out of it! Honestly though, I would have had no clue if it hadn’t been for my mini lesson. I actually had an oyster shucking knife at home (an unused present), but you absolutely need one so if you don’t have one then you must get one. They were selling them at Whole Foods for £11.99 which I reckon isn’t too bad.

Here’s my take on those oysters and I urge you to try it. A bit fiddly (and there’s obviously the need to be careful with sizzling hot oil), but it’s worth the effort.

The Bill:   £50.80

8 battered oysters      £1.45 each

3 scampi & chips        £8.50 each

1 cod & chips           £9.50

2 mush peas             £1.15 each

2 Tartare Sauce         95p each

Ingredients:

8 oysters

For the batter:

1oz plain flour

½ tsp cornflour

50ml cold sparkling water

300-500ml vegetable oil, for deep frying

Salt & pepper

1.Add the dry ingredients for the batter into a bowl and whisk in the sparkling water. Season with salt and pepper.

2.  Schuck the oysters, making sure they are cleanly separated from the shell. Discard the flat side of the shell and keep the rounded side for serving.

3.  Heat the oil for frying in a heavy bottomed saucepan (or fire up your deep fat fryer if you have one).

4.  When the oil is sizzling hot, lay an oyster shell on a slotted spoon and lower into the oil to kill on the pesky bacteria.

5.  Set the shell to one side and dip your first oyster in the batter so that it’s well coated. Drop into the oil for about 45 seconds and watch it crisp up and brown!

6.  Scoop the oyster out with the slotted spoon and repeat.

7.  Serve the oysters in their shells with wedges of lemon.

8.  Eat them quickly whilst their hot!!

Total Cost of Ingredients:    99p an oyster

(ingredients for the batter were already in my cupboard)