The Priory- Asparagus Overload- number 16

As those who watch 'The Great British Menu' may know, one of the chefs representing the South West has previously been Michael Caine. The restaurant that he owned at the time (I think he now has an abundance) is The Priory in Bath. therefore as a student in Bath and a connoisseur of fin food it would be prudent of me to pay a visit.

When I told everybody (and I mean EVERYbody) that I was going to The Priory the general consensus seemed to be "Oh is your mother finally checking you into rehab" -charming

 

I know you all want to know what I ate so here's the menu

An amuse bouche of breaded pork with tomato sauce and salmon- I'm not really sure it was but it was very yummy.

An appetiser or parsnip veloute with parsnip crisps - two dishes  that were compliments of the chef - score

To start a duck's egg with a mushroom veloute and asparagus

My main course was Plaice with crushed potatoes and more asparagus- crushed potatoes? why didn't they just go all the way and crush them into a mash?

For pudding (get excited) I had a dark chocolate mousse with cocoa nib ice cream with a parfait but I couldn't for the life of me place the flavour of the latter.

Lunch would not be complete without coffee and petit fours which were taken in the lounge accompanied by reading Harper's Bazaar  - yes this is the life

Road Trip! Number 19

Dancing to Lady Gaga and munching on grapes as we cruise down the M1 on the way to London to buy some jeans. A bit excessive maybe but hey ho.

The trip down to London went surprisingly well, well apart from getting lost in the actual city and driving the wrong way on a one way street.....There was also the time when we had to stop to put air the tyres, this did not end well as yours truly managed to drop the tyre valve thing. Needless to say the man in the van behind was not best pleased.

After parking the car in the train station car park we set about finding our accommodation. We were staying in one of the halls of residence of the University of Westminster. Our room was on the 18th floor...wow..

The view was rather exciting though and we had a balcony to be able to enjoy it. The drawback with this was that there was no door to access the balcony, so one had to climb through the window..I thought that I might skip this activity.


In my opinion, shops should take a leaf out the book of the stores on Oxford street as these do not close until half eight. If you ask me this is a much more sensible way of doing things as this allows people to go shopping after they have finished work or in our case, when they arrive.

The spaghetti house was the dinner destination and in true Lady and the Tramp style we got a spaghetata with meatballs. Although I was told that nudging the meatballs with my nose in the middle of the restaurant was generally frowned upon. I'll just leave it to the dogs in the film then.

One does not function in the morning without coffee, hence the first stop of the day at  the Costa coffee. Once revived we set off down Bond street for a spot more shopping.We had big plans for the afternoon. Two words LONDON ZOO!!

We are just big kids and the trip to the zoo was going to make our (well at least my) year. It was debated which animal we were most excited to see and my fave was a toss up between the penguins and the monkeys. One of the more entertaining animals that we saw were the gorillas. What seemed to be a family of gorillas were play fighting and were attracting quite a crowd.

London zoo has the biggest penguin pool in the whole of England and we were thus inclined to go and watch a feeding. The zoo has four types of penguins:
Rockhoppers, the most prominent of whom is Ricky who has his own facebook
Humbodlt
Macaroni
and Blackfooted, whom you can distinguish because they have black feet - well I never

Another hilarity that we encountered at the zoo was Sid the sloth the escape artist (I named him, his name might actually not be Sid). Sid was climbing up and over the tops of people's heads in the rainforest enclosure.
The zoo keeper tried to get him to go back into the 'forest' but he was having none of it, the poor guy just wanted a hug.

Felbrigg Hall number 17

Mary Mackie once wrote a book (she actually wrote two in the series but I've yet to read the second book)  about her husband and herself restoring,maintaining and the general housekeeping of a stately home for the National Trust. The house in question was none other than Felbrigg Hall, which I was rather excited to learn actually existed!

It would be an understatement to say that I asked my mother once or twice if we could go, more like persistent nagging and guess what, it finally paid off.

Felbrigg Hall was originally a Jacobean house that belonged to the Wyndham family-where I know that name I don't know -yes I know its a hotel
The house was later added to in the 1750s such as the library and the Chinese wallpaper in the Oriental bedroom. One of the unique points about Felbrigg is that it has never been decorated and retains all  its original furniture. Unlike where we would redecorate the rooms in our houses every couple of years, the rooms in Felbrigg have not been refurbished for hundreds of years.

We were not the only ones, it seemed, to think that today would be a good day to visit the hall as there was also a green energy day going on. They were encouraging us to get a wood burning boiler and solar panels- all good fun- but they made good cake so whose complaining

number 14 - not quite

This list works because it is a combination of first time experiences, like learning to belly dance or get my eyebrows threaded - never done those things before.

So when I originally put :

14. make soap




I thought, hang about I've done that before. I recall (look mummy my memory's getting better!) that my friend once had a soap making business, now I don't know when, why or what type of soap we made but we did and I got splattered with molten soap...yummy...


In addition soap making is kind of complicated...the ingredients aren't exactly readily available. Coconut Oil? where the flaming umbrella am I supposed to get that?

It was therefore concluded that I should change no. 14 to:

14. make candles

Another thing that I'd already done before. I still have the candle that I made in chemistry club at school. I was the only regular member of chemistry club...yes because I'm cool...I went there religiously, I dunno why it didn't catch on...

Is it cheating when I didn't actually do anything? I have nevertheless fulfilled the criterea for this instance but it was just a long time ago