Fireworks!

Bonfire Night isn't until tomorrow, but this weekend has been full of organised fireworks displays all over the place. I'm lucky enough to have a particularly fantastic one right on my doorstep at my local cricket club - people come from miles around and there's a huge crowd, mulled wine, an enormous bonfire and a brilliant half-hour fireworks extravaganza. Apart from one shower, the weather was crisp and cold and perfect for fireworks!

I went with a gang of running club people, and of course rather than attempt to cram ourselves into one of the local pubs afterwards, we sent a couple of the boys down to the corner shop and crammed ourselves into my flat instead for dodgy wine (apparently the only white on offer was Black Tower...!) and a ton of crisps and pizza. Thankfully I'd done my 12-mile run in the morning!

I also went to the V&A's Hollywood Costume exhibition yesterday, which was fab. I really don't know a lot about films (it's always best to assume I haven't seen things, because I probably haven't...) but even I could recognise the iconic costumes from films through the ages. My favourites were a perfectly 60s green skirt and jumper combo from Mildred Pierce, and a navy sparkly number from Chicago. And of course there were Dorothy's iconic ruby red slippers - although they're more than a little shabby and faded these days! I'd definitely recommend going if you can get a ticket!

 And finally, this week I discovered this...

Ooh yeah. Can't wait to make a butternut squash risotto and stir a bit of that in! In other news, I've started my Christmas shopping...

London 2012 Paralympics!

Having completely failed to get any Olympic tickets, I thought I was going to be disappointed with Paralympic tickets as well, as everyone got swept up in the amazing London 2012 fever and snapped up more tickets than have ever been sold for a Paralympics. I'll admit, to begin with I wanted a ticket as an opportunity to visit the Olympic Park and see the stadium, but as the Paralympics began I became more and more excited about the idea of seeing the events themselves, especially the athletics.

And eventually, thanks to some amazing people at my fabulous running club, I got to go to the stadium not once but twice! I took far too many photos to put into one post, so I've made this collage thing which I hope will give a bit of an idea of the brilliant time I had!

First, last Sunday, we wandered around the park for a bit (it's lovely, with wildflower meadows and incredible buildings and fantastic Games Maker volunteers) and then we saw an incredible night of athletics, including seeing the Duchess of Cambridge present British Paralympian Aled Davies with his discus gold medal and then watching the T44 200m final where Oscar Pistorius was beaten by Alan Oliveira. The atmosphere inside the stadium was totally electric all night, but after Pistorius's defeat there was just a stunned silence. Thankfully along came David Weir to win a stunning gold for Paralympics GB in the T54 5000m! I'd never heard noise like it in a stadium!

And if that wasn't enough, I then nabbed a spare ticket for Thursday's session. Hannah Cockroft won gold, Dan Greaves bagged a silver in the F44 discus, we saw a couple of other GB bronze medals...and then it was time for the big one. The T44 100m final. Pistorius, Oliveira, GB's Jonnie Peacock and a whole host of top athletes. And Jonnie Peacock pulled off an incredible run to take the gold! I thought the noise on Sunday was deafening but it was nothing compared to that moment...and then everyone went completely ape just moments later as David Weir won the 800m! If there had been a roof on the Olympic Stadium, it would have come off. We were also lucky enough to see Peacock and Weir collecting their gold medals!

I feel so fortunate to have been able to see two incredible nights of athletics, and I'm so glad I got to see the Olympic Park and the stadium in use. I can't believe the whole thing will be over tomorrow night - what are we going to do with ourselves? People were cynical before the Olympics but I'm so happy that everyone seems to have got right behind it - and behind our Olympic and Paralympic athletes. I hope London can carry on the Olympic feeling far into the future!

Mid-Somerset Show 2012

I really did have a proper Westcountry weekend last weekend! As I mentioned in my last post, on Sunday we headed over to Shepton Mallet for the Mid-Somerset Show, a small agricultural show in the lovely Somerset countryside. We always used to go to the Royal Bath & West Show when I was little, but after the foot and mouth outbreak in 2001, when a lot of farmers lost their livestock and there were all sorts of restrictions on the movement of animals, it became a lot more corporate and there were more big stands selling farm machinery than there were local producers. But the Mid-Somerset Show was just how an agricultural show should be. It was a boiling hot day and they had a record crowd, and we saw all sorts of fab things.

There were champion chickens...

...and a LOT of Cheddar (unsurprisingly!)

There were also lots of local food producers and small dairies and cheesemakers in the food tent, and I bought some Somerset cider chutney, and some Ringwell and Little Ryding cheese from Wootton Organic Dairy. I love Ringwell - it's made with unpasteurised milk from Jersey cows and it's beautiful, quite dry but creamy and nutty at the same time.

This cow had won all the rosettes...

...and there were lots of very large pigs and lots of old tractors!

One of our main reasons for going to the show was to see The Wurzels, and of course I had to have a cheeky perry (I'm not a cider fan) while they were playing!

And I finished the day with a gorgeous mint choc chip ice-cream from Styles that was made with sheep's milk - it was lovely and refreshing with a gorgeous tang, a little bit like frozen yogurt but much creamier!

Finland Finland Finland!

I'm back from a fab five-day trip to Finland to visit my sister and her chap. It was great! I'd been to Helsinki twice before, but only ever in the winter, and they now live in Turku so there were all sorts of new things to explore.

My sister and I started off with lunch in Helsinki on Thursday before getting the train to Turku, which only takes a couple of hours, and then we all went out for dinner to a really lovely restaurant on a boat. All the food was local and seasonal and there were lots of traditional Finnish flavours - I had smoked salmon with beetroot mousse, white fish with tiger prawns and chive mash, and then the most amazing sea buckthorn pannacotta with spruce syrup and caramelised bananas. It was fab - I'm going to do a whole post on food later! We also had a few drinks in various bars around the town...and found the brilliant cow sculpture I've posted up there! Although we're a bit past Midsummer now, the evenings were still really light - this is midnight:

On Friday Suze and I had a potter around Turku - there's an amazing fruit and veg market in the summer, and an indoor market hall with yet more stalls selling just about everything you can think of. And we saw the building where they make the Declaration of Christmas Peace every Christmas Eve!

Then we went to a little country cottage on one of the islands of the archipelago near Turku, and the weather was amazing. We sat out in the sun watching the boats go past on the Baltic sea, we had a huge barbecue, and I went in the sauna!

And then on Saturday we went to another island and another country house, owned by my sister's boyfriend's parents. We went out on a boat trip around the islands, had another sauna, and ate a ton of gorgeous food. Lots of salmon and new potatoes and dill - fantastic!

It was a seriously brilliant little holiday and I loved exploring a bit more of Finland and seeing how gorgeously green it is in the summer!

Many mini muffins!

I'm off to Paris for the weekend for a hen do, and what do you do when you go to Paris? You bake things and take them with you. Because they really don't have nice baked things in Paris.

What? Oh.

Anyway, I made these mini blueberry muffins because we're all arriving later this evening and the plan for tonight is a girly night in with drinks and nibbles. The theme of the whole weekend is 'something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue' and the blue bit for tonight is the food and drink! Hence blueberry muffins. I used this recipe from A Bitchin' Kitchen, although I used buttermilk instead of sour cream because it turns out one carton of buttermilk is just about exactly 1 1/4 cups. Perfect! I used a silicone mini muffin pan (£1 from the pound shop near work!) and got 24 mini muffins with enough batter left over to make one normal-sized muffin, which may or may not have been eaten straight out of the tin.

I've also made yet another batch of coconut meringues - but with added blue food colouring! They're more of a very pale teal on the outside thanks to the gentle browning of the oven, but I think they're going to be nice and blue on the inside!

So I'll see you on the other side of the weekend with some photos from Paris! By the way, I'm on Instagram now, so if you fancy following me just search for alliesolskjaer.

DIY and Father's Day...

I popped home to Somerset to visit my parents for the weekend, and lots of progress is being made on the new house! It's all coming together now - the gorgeous slate tiles for the kitchen and dining room should be fitted next week, the new bathrooms are done, the kitchen has new cupboard doors and beautiful granite worktops, and they've painted the dining room a lovely warm cream colour with new curtains. The sitting room was next on the list, and as I was home I became part of the painting party!

Wearing the most attractive and flattering outfit in the world, obviously...! I did all the cutting-in bits around the edges (very fiddly going round the beams!) and discovered a hitherto untapped talent for filling cracks using decorators' caulk. We spent the whole of Saturday painting, and it looks fab! The walls used to be a pale grey/lilac sort of colour, which was quite nice, but we didn't realise how cold and dark it made the room until the fresh cream paint went up.

An added bonus of going home for the weekend was that I got to spend Father's Day with my dad. My sister and I got him this brilliant mug with a biscuit dunkability guide (my dad does love a cup of tea and a biscuit!) and we put a little selection of biscuits in the mug so that he could conduct his own dunking experiments. We had amazing home-baked croissants from the farm shop up the road (they're absolute genius - they come frozen and you defrost them overnight before baking them to flaky golden perfection in the morning) for breakfast, and then (after a bit more painting) took Dad to our favourite local pub for a delicious Sunday lunch. I'm a bit knackered today after all that DIYing, but it was a lovely weekend!

A very vintage hen...

My lovely friend Sarah is getting married, and so yesterday a big group of us went out for the day to celebrate. We started off at Drink, Shop & Do near King's Cross - I'd heard loads about it but had never been, and it was brilliant! We had tea and cakes and we made fascinators with ribbons and buttons and netting. It was great fun and a really good hen do activity as it got everyone talking and it meant we all left with our fascinators on, looking like a hen party, but a fairly classy hen party! 


The tea and cakes were lovely and they were really generous, and the Bellini cocktails were fab.

And here's the fascinator I made!

Then we headed to the park for a picnic - yep, yet more cake and fizz! We also managed a fab celeb spot, as Kate Moss and Jamie Hince walked past with their dog! 

And finally, after a bit of glamming up, we went into town to the Firefly bar, which hosts the Saturday Night Swing Club every week. The bar is spread over three floors and in the middle is a room dedicated to dance lessons - every hour you can just show up and they'll teach you the basics, and then you can go off and dance away to your heart's content! Everyone dresses up in 50s gear and members of the London Swing Dance Society show up every week - which is brilliant because you'll be dancing away and suddenly a proper bona fide swing-dancing man will grab you and twirl you around the floor and make you feel like you can dance really well! It was so much fun.

Jubilee eating!

As you might expect, I've done rather a lot of cooking, baking and eating over the holiday weekend!

First off, I made coconut meringues on Saturday, to take to yesterday's barbecue. The thought of throwing away a load of egg yolks always puts me off making meringues, but now some genius people have come up with the idea of selling cartons of egg whites! Fabulous. I used this recipe by Miss Igs and it was perfect...

Then I was inspired to make some scones by a conversation I saw on Facebook! I used Delia's classic recipe, but having read on the egg white carton that you can use three tablespoons of that to replace a whole egg, I decided to give that a go, and I didn't have buttermilk so I just used almond milk instead. And the scones were lovely! I had one as a cheeky afternoon tea, with some caramel apple jam, and froze the rest (I got eight scones out of my dough rather than the 10 Delia suggests).

And then there was the barbecue itself! We had salads, beetroot and carrot slaw, grilled halloumi, veg kebabs (and some lamb bits and sausages) and I made baked falafel. Everything was totally delicious and we even had red, white and blue crisps!

Boats and Beacons...

In case you hadn't noticed, this weekend we've had the Queen's Diamond Jubilee celebrations. I've had a lovely weekend doing all sorts of things - including going to see the Jubilee Pageant on the Thames (in typically British drizzle!) and going to another fantastic towpath barbecue before seeing one of the Jubilee beacons being lit in Mile End.

The flotilla of boats that made up the pageant included the Spirit of Chartwell, which had the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh and the other senior royals on it, but there were also hundreds of ordinary boats involved - rowing boats, working boats, narrowboats, military boats, all sorts. We probably would have been slightly more comfortable and warm watching it on TV (and we'd have had a slightly better view!) but it was great to be there on the banks of the river with over a million other people.

The beacon lighting was lovely, too - I also went to a little street party in Ealing before heading off to Mile End, and both that and the beacon really felt like proper community events, which was nice after the huge crowds of the pageant. There were fire-dancers and flares, and then the beacon was lit and everyone sang God Save the Queen!

Coming up...a whole blog post on the weekend's food!

Zoo Lates!

Despite having lived in London for 12 years, I'd never been to London Zoo. It's expensive and touristy and full of screaming kids, right? Well, yes, but not when you go to Zoo Lates. Every Friday evening in June and July, the zoo is open for adults only, and as well as being able to see all of the animals and all of the usual exhibits, there are bars and food stalls and all sorts of bits of entertainment.

I went with my friend Leonie and as neither of us had been to the zoo before, we decided to give the comedy/cabaret/silent disco bits a miss and concentrate on the animals themselves. With a glass of Pimm's, of course.

We saw SO MANY amazing things! Glittery pirahnas. Gorillas. Giraffes. Okapis. Zebras. Meerkats. Coatis being fed. A SNAKE eating a WHOLE CHICKEN. And then we went into the rainforest bit and oh my goodness, there's a SLOTH all reclined like he's asleep. And another sloth going on a sloth-about and climbing (slowly...) around above everyone's heads. It was brilliant!

Veg Box: 29/5/12

Definitely not soggy this week! And how lovely and summery does all of this look?

I've got butternut squash, beetroot, beans, mushrooms, vine tomatoes, onions, potatoes and some bonus free wet garlic (the leeky-looking things on the top there). One thing I do love about Riverford is that if you get one of the smaller boxes, they don't give you whacking great squash or tons of beetroot or whatever - it's all in nice manageable amounts.

Having said that, a weekend away and a few nights out meant that I still had squash, potatoes and beetroot left over from my last box! So I decided to have a bit of a clearout, and I roasted up a big tray of veg - the beetroot, potatoes and squash, plus some onion and some cherry tomatoes and carrots that were hanging around in the fridge. I like to give my veg a quick steam in the microwave before I roast them, because that way they take less time in the oven (definitely a bonus in today's warm and humid weather) and they all cook evenly with fluffy insides and crispy edges. Yum yum! So supper was a big bowl of veg, topped with some basil and a little bit of super-spicy Reggae Reggae barbecue sauce...

I also couldn't resist showing you this photo from earlier - I popped into central London for a meeting and Regent Street is all decked out in Union Flags ready for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee! I have to admit I'm getting sucked into the whole Jubilee celebration thing and am planning to go to a few events over the weekend - and of course, I can't wait for a whole four days off!

Bristol 10K 20/5/12

This weekend I headed down to Bristol for what was actually my first proper organised 10K run! I was running with my friends (well, they're more like honorary sisters) Anna and Tori, raising money for a really fantastic cause.

We all had a brilliant day - none of us were expecting all that much, as we'd all struggled with illness in recent days and weeks, but the weather was perfect and we were all determined to finish the run. Special mention should go to Tori, who was worried about her cough but actually ended up being struck down with a sore knee halfway round! But she made it to the finish! And I managed to totally exceed my expectations with a new PB - I knocked 35 seconds off my 10K time from the Reading half marathon and managed a time of 55:05. Slightly annoyed that I didn't run six seconds faster and end up sub-55, but a PB is a PB!

Here I am looking knackered at the finish (I wasn't expecting my mum and dad to be there taking photos!)

...and here's all three of us with our medals!

The race was really well organised and it was great fun. It was a little bit quiet, because there weren't that many places where people could stand and cheer, which came as a real contrast after Reading, and I wasn't too impressed with the collection of the timing chips - instead of being part of the medal/goody bag/water 'funnel' after the finish, there were just people collecting the chips in the race village and it wasn't immediately obvious where they were. I can imagine a lot of people forgetting to hand in their chip! But all in all it was a fab day (topped off perfectly with a lovely family barbecue) and we've raised an amazing £730, so we're really chuffed!

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!