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

number 9 the ninth

Back in the day when I was an innocent child- well more innocent than I am now, (mwuhahahaha) I attended the Junior Chefs Academy at Thomas Danby College. My chef, one Timothy Bilton had many a nickname for me, for a period of time I was known as Watership Down because of my tendency to eat raw herbs. However the name that stuck the most was the ironically termed Lightning. 3 guesses why... my need for speed is legendary...ahem..
When I left the academy with fond memories,I followed Tim's career ,some may call it borderline stalkerish and you can imagine my excitement when a certain Timothy appeared on the Great British Menu. I learnt that he now owned the Butchers' Arms in Hepworth, Huddersfield and I have always been meaning to go.

This 'bucket list' gives me just another excuse to do the things that I've always wanted to do so it was high time for me to pay my old mate Tim a visit.

The Butchers' Arms prides itself on using local stuff, the ingredients used to make up the menu  are locally sourced, even the decorations in the restaurant are made by local craftsmen such as the coat rack made of forks and spoons or the unusual looking clock.

I know that you are all dying to know what I ate and oh my it was good grub.
To start, I had goose liver parfait and in the words of all good tasters,,om nom nom nom. For main, a steak and kidney pie, the peas were served in a little copper pan and a small strainer for the chips - its all about the presentation I'll have you know.

Pudding was a more confuddling affair as I want it all and I want it now. The mother, sister and I had two deserts between the three of us, a sticky toffee pudding and an ice cream plate which consisted of midnight mint mmmmmm, rhubarb and custard, heavenly and white chocolate and cherry ripple, even more heavenly = )

Tim came to say hello at this point and told us of his endeavours. The sister was impressed that he would still recognise me, but who could forget my face..lol

Walk like an Egyptian - belly dancing part 2

Walk like an Egyptian

The integrated section of the DVD not only had me putting the different steps together but also with movement - help!!!

As I may or may not have mentioned before the kind of belly dancing that I am learning is Egyptian, I am not sure what exactly the difference between Egyptian and other forms of belly dance is but my mate Lelia (the woman on the DVD) says that Egyptian belly dance you keep your leg straight i.e. don''t really bend your knees.

I therefore got excited when there was a section on the disc call the Egyptian walk - how exciting- alas it was not what I expected, with the funky hand moves and bobbing your head. You actually had to walk whilst popping your hip up and down, maybe I should walk like that next time I go into town. Like Joey says on Friends ( the pearl of all wisdom) maybe I need a new walk.

The last lesson in the integrated section was moving whilst doing hip circles/figure eights and all that jazz, if your confused right now don't worry, so was I. Basically when your doing a circle, when your weight is on the opposite side you move your leg, so when your in the right section of the circle you move your left leg (luckily this is not the way it was explained to me as seeing as telling my right from left is rather challenging.)

Balance comes in handy when you have to turn, side stepping and hip circling at the same time, its like turning on one leg.....and she topples over . Fortunately for me and unfortunately for any furniture (or any bunny) that gets in the way I now get to do full on dances- PEOPLE BEWARE!!!

Maybe I should get a costume?

feeling snakey- belly dancing part 1

Feeling snakey
I thought it would be easier, cheaper and less scarring to others if I learnt to belly dance via DVD, hence afternoons spent in front of the telly popping and locking.

Firstly it must be learnt that you must clean the frosting out of the bowl - yes this woman is for real. I am scraping metaphorical frosting out of metaphorical bowls and picking up metaphorical basketballs....erm ok then.

My arms have to be snakey, its all about the serpentine y'all!

The next lesson to be learnt (actually its the third and fourth but whose counting)  is how to pop your hip, then to roll it, then both together. Starting to get a tad confuzzled right about now. I also had the pleasure nay the privilege of learning hip circles. Fun times, fun times, this where we are grateful for only putting the DVD on when no one else is in the house.

At the moment shimmies are the bane of my life, not only do I have to shimmy ( moving my knees back and forth really really fast) but I also have to do hip circles at the same time. I know that as a women I'm supposed to be good at multi-tasking and all that but this is really taking the biscuit.

The next two steps that we learn on this magical mystery tour are camels and horses- incredibly yes they are indeed called camels and horses. This introduces footwork oh dear god!!

This concludes the basic section, if this is basic, I dread to think what comes next.........t.b.c...