Banbury cakes

Being a fan of Eccles and Chorley cakes i thought it was high time i sampled the similar Banbury cake, especially with my roots in Oxfordshire (back 4 centuries blah blah). So i went to Banbury yesterday to get some! I didn't just go there for cakes of course. I also had a nice walk along the frozen towpath of the Oxford Canal and took some photographs in the station too. You can see my canal photographs here.

The cakes are very good by the way and can be ordered from Brown's own website. I think i'll just get some whenever i am in town, which is fairly often.

Mince pies

Its been some time since i did any baking (not that i have done a lot), last week i made some mince meat and then my wife helped me make my first mince pies. Tonight i flew solo for the first time as a baker and made some more mince pies. They taste fine though are a bit crumbly. I should be a great baker being a descendent of the Grants who had bakeries in Birmingham and Oxford but maybe i just don't have the genes. Or need more practice...

A weekend in London

I've had a birthday week this year, "festivities" which started back on Monday in Stratford ending this weekend in ..er.. Stratford (but London this time!) I had a few days down in #ThatLondon culminating in dinner in Kimchee Korean restaurant which was amazing. I had my first bibimbap and it was great! It was the first time i have been to a Korean restaurant in this country (i have been to one before in Beijing but it was rather different, dog indeed was on the menu there!) I settled for chicken this time...

I also had another trip to Little Venice which is fast becoming one of my favourite parts of London. I took a few photos in London and you can see them here.

The week hasn't all been fun, amid the restaurants, travelling and concerts i also had an essay to write! This is the final TMA of my course, i just have to tidy and polish it a bit over the next couple of days and then i can move onto my final EMA and dissertation proposal...

A night out

I don't socialise with my work colleagues much, its not that i am anti-social or hate them or anything, but i do tend to keep the work and personal spheres of my life fairly separate if possible. Last night however the CSU/Web crew went out for drinks and dinner.

Dinner was at Kinnaree, a Thai restaurant and was quite nice too. I don't usually like eating out at Asian restaurants to be honest but this was pretty fine. It was also located alongside the canal at the Mailbox in Birmingham and you know what i am like with my inland waterways.

Afterwards there was just time for one more cocktail, so how about a Long Island Iced Tea, not that it seems to include much in the way of tea...

Foodtography project completed

When i photographed my dinner earlier it completed a week long foodtography project i have been running where i photographed and uploaded every breakfast, lunch and dinner i had since Monday morning. I actually surprised myself in not forgetting to photo a meal, in fact i did not even come close to forgetting which just shows you that when i have a bit of mental discipline i can achieve anything. The results of my experiment can be seen in this Flickr set.

One thing to notice is that i seem to eat a lot of fish! I had fish and chips no fewer than 3 times including Friday night's lemon sole as shown above and fried mackerel once. However this was slightly unusual, usually it would be no more than fish once or twice. I might run this project again next year and see if my diet has changed over the time period.

A week of foodtography

I am going to conduct an experiment over the next week, i am going to photograph everything i eat. Every breakfast, lunch and dinner will be documented (and of course i'd better not screw this up and forget any meals or i will look a right Charlie!) Foodtography is quite popular online now though i am mainly doing it so i can see at a glance what i eat in a week which hopefully will scare me into sticking to my diet! I will post my pictures to this set on Flickr.

Waitrose bananas

A few weeks ago i switched from Tesco to Waitrose as my main supermarket. I have not suddenly become much more wealthy but my wife is a Waitrose employee (or partner or whatever they call it) and so we both have a discount card. With the discount it works out about the same as Tesco though the quality is better and the choice is so much better.

This is despite the average Waitrose store being a fair bit smaller than the mega-Tesco store i used to do my weekly shop in. The cheese counter i especially love visiting in Waitrose, my wife works at one of these so she advises me as to which cheese to get!

I was really sold on this supermarket when i bought some bananas last week. Now i've become used to bananas being rather bland and tasteless and have continued eating them for the health benefits. When i first tried a Waitrose banana last week however i was surprised, it actually tasted of banana!