Little surprise packages

I don't like big surprises. The thought of a surprise party fills me with horror. And a surprise trip away seems like a wasted opportunity to plan and pack properly.

But I do love little surprise packages coming through the post, hence why I've signed up to a few such services.

It started with LoveFilm, although they do send an email that spoils the surprise a bit. Then I signed up with Graze, so I receive a fortnightly box of snacks by mail. Like airline food, it is the anticipation of seeing what you've got and the cute little packaged portions that appeals to me, rather than the food itself.

I've just signed up to a new service, GlossyBox, which works in a similar way to Graze, but instead of snacks, it provides a monthly box of beauty and make-up surprises. Now, the odd thing about  this is that, unlike many women, I'm not that interested in make-up and beauty products. For beauty products, I tend to stick with what I know. For make-up on GlossyBox, I ticked the 'Natural' option, although I prefer to think of my look as 'requires an increasing amount of make-up just to look as if I haven't made any effort at all'.

But I was delighted when my first box arrived - the anticipation of seeing which five items I'd been sent.  And it wasn't such a bad lot. A face scrub type thing, a body butter and a nail varnish in a colour I rather like were the highlights. The mini perfume is ok. Not sure I'll get much use out of the lipstick seal thing as I hardly ever wear lipstick, but all in all pretty good.

Which is a relief, because I'd signed up for three months so still have another two to come.

A Balanced Diet

I was sat in a window seat at Pret a Manger, eating my lunch. A man came and sat at the table just outside the window. I noticed that on his tray were five pots of Pret's Caramel dessert. I thought perhaps some friends were going to join him and each enjoy a Caramel Pot, but no. Methodically, but pretty quickly, he worked his way through the five pots. Then he was gone.

That's can't be healthy?

But then again, I was eating a mozzarella and pistachio sandwich at the time, so I'm in no position to talk.

What I Learnt This Week

Where unbranded biscuits are concerned, custard cream are a safer option than chocolate digestives.

Fish Wife

On a temporary basis, we have a third person sharing our office. For reasons that are too complicated/sensitive/dull/ridiculous to go into here, she is not allowed to do any work at the moment, but is still expected to come into the office each day. To fill her time, she talks a lot about not much and seems to be on an endless cycle of reapplying her lipstick, handcream and perfume. The frequent sprays of the latter in a small windowless room has left me with stinging red eyes, but I haven't said anything because since she is only there short-term I didn't see the point in offending her and I reasoned that there were worse smells than an over-powering headache inducing perfume. Today I was reminded of one.

This morning I saw a pack of smoked salmon on her desk. "Shouldn't that be in the fridge" I thought to myself on my way out of the office. Minutes later on my way back in, I saw the salmon was open and she was snacking on stripes of it.

It wasn't even 11am. Surely there are better things for a mid morning snack than fish? I'm biased because I don't like any fish or seafood, but I understand that others may enjoy it for lunch or as a meal. But surely not as a snack? Its like sharing an office with a seal.

Harvest

I'm still someway off "The Good Life" style self-sufficiency (and being Felicity Kendall, much to the OH's disappointment), but I've had some success in the garden this year.

I planted some radish seeds and so far I've harvested 6 of them, but there are more still growing. I'm rather proud of this achievement.

Although I'm not that keen on radishes and there isn't much you can actually do with them, besides put them in a salad. If anyone has any radish recipes, please do let me know...

The next door neighbours apple tree continues to shed its fruit into our garden, most of them falling and rotting before we can do anything with them. But at the weekend, I plucked some from the tree and made an apple cake. It has turned out well but obviously we can't eat a cake every week, so again if anyone has any healthy recipes for cooking apples, please do post.

Is it wrong...

that we have an important event at work, that has been causing untold amounts of stress and hassle, but I'm secretly looking forward to it because the conference centre provides excellent Danish pastries?

The Demise of the Muffin

In the interest of clarity, I should have perhaps called this post, The Demise of the English Muffin, but out of stubborness, I didn't.

It has come to my attention that the word Muffin has now come to mean what we used to call an American Muffin. That is an individual sweet cake with a distinctive top and stem shape, often flavoured with chocolate or blueberries. But it wasn't always this way.

We had our own muffins, it didn't need to be described as English and those other things, were called cakes.

I was musing this recently (my mind being a strange place) and it transpired that my own OH didn't even know what a muffin was. After half an hour of failing to describe one to him, I determined to educate him. I bought a packet and served it toasted. He liked it but now insists on having it with Marmite, which I find rather wrong.

So muffins have made it onto our monthly shop, which we do online. Only this time, they are all out of muffins (have I somehow started a revival?) and send crumpets instead. I like crumpets, but they aren't the same thing, and it may be a bread product too far for the OH.

Sampling the Local Cuisine

We were having a quick drink the pub next door to the restaurant we were eating in on Saturday. Next to us were two foreign girls, obviously tourists in London, judging by the way they kept taking photos of themselves. They were having some of the pub food and my friend noticed that they were having the "traditional Sunday roast" along with a side order of toast.

Toast with a roast! Apart from the rather pleasing rhyme it seemed a bit of a strange combination. But more than that, the toast was burnt.

Burnt toast with a Sunday roast? It was not offered on the menu - I did check.

Presumably they had requested the toast, but judging by the amount of scraping going on, I don't think they'd requested it burnt or well done. Fair enough, they may have fancied a bit of toast, but what possessed the pub cook to serve it burnt? Why did they consider that acceptable?

Its no wonder English food is mocked by other Europeans if this is what we serve up to tourists.

Today's Burning Issue: Fruit

Why has the lone market stall near by work changed from selling fruit to selling toasted chestnuts and fake designer t-shirts? The chestnuts, fair enough as they are staple Victorian Christmas fayre. But what is with the knocked-off t-shirts? What use are they to me? I need fruit. I still need my 5 a day, even if it is Christmas (actually I especially need my 5 a day to get me through). And aren't satsumas Christmassy?

Discontinued

What has happened to the Pret A Manager Egg and Tomato on Rye sandwich? I went to buy one for my lunch and they have gone. I know I hadn't bought one in a while as I'd been trying to cut back on what I spend on lunch but really other people must have been buying them too so there was no need to stop doing them.

Instead I had a Falafel and Spinach sandwich which must be the replacement as it announced itself as new. It wasn't very nice - falafel between sliced bread is somehow wrong.

Tossed

I’ve just discovered the salad bar, Tossed, on St Martins Lane. It may well have been there ages but its new to me anyway. The concept is simple – you pick what you want as the base of your salad (lettuce, mixed leaves, pasta), hand it over to the assistant who tips it into a large bowl, you pick out extra ingredients you want to add to it from the salad bar and your choice of dressing and they toss it for you. Its put in a container, you pay for it and take it away to eat.

A good idea in theory, especially for someone who loves salads as much as I do, but in practice it wasn’t quite right. The servers were pretty impatient so I didn’t really feel I had time to browse and make up my mind what I wanted. Which led to a rather random selection of things that I like but I’m not sure quite work together:

Mixed leaves, cherry tomatoes, sundried tomatoes (I like tomatoes!), broccoli (OH hates broccoli so I have to grab every opportunity to eat it when he’s not there), walnuts (the woman in front of me seemed to know what she was doing and she had walnuts so I just copied), Roquefort dressing (very bad for me I know but again I panicked with my choice – actually it went well with the walnuts).

It made a change from my usual lunches but there were too many walnuts towards the end (do they sink?) and the dressing got a bit sickly after a while. Also I’m still very hungry!

I think the problem might be with me, and the British attitude in general towards food & customer service. I am woefully indecisive so these things are always problematic for me. I need time to consider the options, make my choices, dither, without the man behind tutting and the server banging the salad bowl impatiently. In this country, we are used to ‘getting what we are given’ ‘liking it or lumping it’ when it comes food. We don’t have the culture of requesting the way you want your sandwich made, the way they do in America. And actually, that was bizarrely probably the only thing I didn’t like about New York – you could have whatever you wanted to eat, but you had to make that decision yourself.

I will probably return to Tossed, but next time I'll go back with a plan, a salad strategy.

Soup, Soup, A Tasty Soup

Due to bad weather and the on-set of a cold, I've not done much this weekend, except make soup! Not what you'd expect in the height of summer, but there you go.

It started with my sister's Weight Watchers No Points Vegetable Soup. No, I'm not dieting and nor to my mind should my sister be at Weight Watchers but that is a separate issue - I just wanted an easy-to-make soup.

Ingredients:

2 medium carrots, sliced
1 small onion, diced
2 gloves garlic, minced
500ml stock,
1/2 small green/white cabbage, shredded
100g green beans
1tbsp tomato puree
1/2 tsp dried basil & 1/4 tsp dried oregano
1/2 courgette, diced

Method:

Spray a large saucepan with low fat cooking spray, heat. Sauté the carrots, onion, and garlic over a low heat untill softened, about 5 minutes.

Add stock, cabbage, beans, tomato puree, basil , oregano and salt; bring to a boil. Reduce heat; simmer, covered for about 15 minutes or untill the beans are tender.

Stir in the courgette and heat for 3-4 minutes. Serve hot.

I serve it along with a huge chunk of baguette which completely negates the zero points factor!

Then I discovered a recipe for a Tomato and Courgette Soup on the back of my jar of Basil, so I made that today.



Ingredients:


1 onion, chopped
150g courgette, grated
garlic
1 can of chopped tomatoes
550ml vegetable stock
2 tsp of basil







Soften the onion in olive oil. Stir in the courgettes and garlic and cook for 5 minutes.


Add the stock, tomatoes and basil. Bring to the boil, cover and simmer for 15 minutes.



Serve, again preferably with a load of bread!





It was very easy to make even for a cooking novice like me and delicious. Perhaps now I'll stop spending a good proportion of my wages on soup from Eat every week and make my own more often.

Soup-eating is the only good thing about this awful weather.

Last Supper

We’ve been watching a lot of Prison Break recently – in fact its pretty much the only thing I’ve watched since we moved. We are watching the first series on DVD rather obsessively, then the latest episode of the second series on the television every Monday. When this programme first came out, I scoffed its ludicrous storyline and didn’t watch it, but at the start of the second series, the OH had to write about it at work so he thought it would be a good idea to watch it rather than just relying on Wikipedia. And we’ve been hooked.

Don’t get me wrong, it is nonsense. Surely there must have been another way of breaking his brother out of prison other than having a cryptic encoded version of the prison’s layout tattooed over his (rather fine) body and then getting himself put in the same prison for armed robbery. But it is very watchable.

The other night his brother was facing the chair and was asked what he wanted for his final meal. He picked blueberry pancakes. I was rather disappointed it was just one course, as I’d always assumed you got a big slap up feast of three courses.

This is a favourite ice breaker/lull in the conversation topic of one of our friends – what would you pick for your final meal? I still don’t have a definitive answer after months of on & off thought:

Starter – French Onion Soup with the cheese covered bread crouton thing (if I’m allowed to be very specific, I would like it from Steph & Nic’s restaurant next to Madison Square Garden in New York!).

Main course – I really don’t know. I do love a curry but thinking practically, it wouldn’t go with my other two courses and it is quite filling. Perhaps something Mexican, something with a bit of chilli. This needs more thought.

Dessert – Summer Fruit Pudding with vanilla ice cream. No contest. Its not very healthy but at this stage, I don’t suppose calories matter.

What would you have? Most people surveyed by our friend would apparently have sausage & mash and apple pie.