Holidays, random acts of culture and gluten-free pastry…

Crikey, I’ve neglected my blog for a rather long time! First I had a particularly nasty bout of tonsillitis, and then (on a happier note) I went off down to Somerset for a week’s relaxation and pampering with my family. It was my sister’s birthday last Wednesday so the week was packed with celebrations and days out and, obviously, lots of food and drink.

We went to rainy Lyme Regis (where my sister comprehensively kicked my bum in a hilarious moose-shooting arcade game…)

…and rainy Bath, where we went to see the Roman Baths and where I found the Oasis butterfly-print pleated dress I’d been lusting after for months HALF PRICE. I actually jumped up and down and squealed in the shop.

Then, on Friday, the weather suddenly improved and we wanted to get out and enjoy the sunshine. Reading the local paper the evening before, I’d spotted that Antony Gormley’s Field for the British Empire was on display at Barrington Court, a mere 15 minutes or so from my parents’ house. None of us had ever been to Barrington Court before, despite having lived so close by for 25 years, and I’m so glad we went! The house and gardens were beautiful, and the exhibition (which unfortunately we weren’t allowed to take photos of) really was quite spellbinding. According to one of the guides, the most common reaction from children on seeing the rooms full of little clay figures was ‘Meerkats!’, while several adults had remarked that it reminded them of concentration camps. It’s amazing how different people react to things!

In other exciting news, the lovely girls from Domestic Sluttery very kindly asked me to do a guest post on gluten-free cookery, and I had a great time coming up with a truly simple and delicious recipe for gluten-free shortcrust pastry. My sister was absolutely over the moon with the curried potato pasties I made, and we’re already planning lots of other ways to use the pastry!

And finally, here’s a photo of the gorgeous Lily of the Valley that’s growing right outside my mum and dad’s front door!

Instagram, swiss chard and potato curry, and eating better…

The extremely trendy and popular Instagram app has just become available for Android, and of course, as someone who loves taking photos with their phone, I’ve downloaded it! I’ve been having lots of fun trying to work out how to use the thing, and it’s already inspired me to do something new. My eating habits have been absolutely awful just recently – two weeks of eating whatever I wanted because I was building up to a half marathon/I’d just done a half marathon followed by an Easter weekend full of (lovely) cheese, wine, cake and puddings means I really feel like I need to get back on track before my jeans get any tighter!

So I’ve set up a tumblr blog called What Allie Ate Today, where I’ll be using Instagram to share photos of everything I eat. The theory is that if I actually have to take a photo of my food and share it with the internet, I might be less likely to eat badly!

And then this evening I used the swiss chard from my veg box to make Hugh F-W’s chard and potato curry, from my River Cottage Veg Every Day book. The original used new potatoes, but I’ve still got a couple of big baking potatoes from my last veg box (and a new bag of smaller Desiree ones from this week’s) so I used one of those, and the whole head of chard, which turned out to be about 200g. Instead of mixing the tomato purée with yogurt and stirring it in, I mixed it with a tiny bit of almond milk, and I ended up with a gorgeously spicy and soupy curry.

I had it with some mango chutney and didn’t bother with rice or naan as it already had enough carbohydrate for me – OK, so I ended up eating two big bowls of the stuff, but I only actually ate one potato, a load of greens and some spices!

Easter Food Fest…

I’m back from my Easter weekend in Somerset feeling absolutely stuffed – we made all sorts of gorgeous things to eat!

First off, my mum finally got the ice cream maker for her (beautiful) Kenwood Chef out of the cupboard – it was her birthday present from me and my sister last year, but she hadn’t used it! It’s really clever, with a bowl that you freeze, a larger plastic bowl, and a paddle attachment to complete the transformation from Chef to ice cream machine. We used this maple syrup ice cream recipe (we love maple syrup in our house thanks to the four years we spent in New England when my sister and I were little) and unfortunately we were far too excited about watching the ice cream churning to remember to take photos, so you can have a sneaky pic of the finished product instead!

We used more maple syrup than the recipe suggested, and rippled some through the soft ice cream before it went into the freezer to fully set, and it was amazing. Really smooth, really creamy and incredibly delicious!

We then revisited the chocolate pie I made a couple of weeks ago, but as my sister wasn’t around we didn’t have to worry about making it totally gluten-and-dairy-free. While shopping for biscuits we spotted some almond ones in Waitrose, so we used half almond biscuits and half ordinary digestives. Great idea! The chocolate filling was the same as before, except we used almond milk to carry on the almondy theme, and we decorated it with some edible gold leaf just to make it posh!

(Can you tell I was let loose with my mum’s smart Nikon DSLR camera?)

And finally, we made a lemon drizzle cake – but it was a bit of a disaster! When it came out of the oven looking seriously misshapen and a bit odd, my mum remembered that she’d tried the recipe before, a couple of years ago, and had ended up with a weird cake then as well. But we sliced it in half, sandwiched the two halves together with buttercream to hide the wonkiness, and topped it with lemon icing, fluffy chicks and Mini Eggs. You can’t go wrong with that, and it did taste far better than it looked! A bit of clever photography also helped…!

I’m not going to post the recipe, because it’s so impossible to get right that it’s been banished from my mum’s recipe file, but at least we made it look half decent in the end!

More snowy photos!

We had another dusting of snow yesterday morning – just enough to cover the branches and make everything look like a bit of a winter wonderland! It was very pretty but I do hope things thaw out just a little by tomorrow morning – it’s long run time again and I don’t want to fall over!

Kirst’s Crafty Photo Scavenger Hunt…

My friend Kirst has a fabulous blog, The Leopard Anchor, and she’s set up a monthly photo scavenger hunt which I’ve decided to join! I feel like I need a bit more photography inspiration. There are two regular monthly categories – ‘Inspiration’ and ‘Something I Made’, and then three categories that will change every month. This month we’ve got ‘Birds’, ‘Supplies’ and ‘Holiday/Vacation’ – as I’m off to Portugal at the end of the month that one shouldn’t be too much of a problem!

Head on over to Kirst’s blog if you fancy joining in – I’ll be posting August’s photos before I go away!