Gorgeous #chocolate marquise at the #gwestyCymru #aberwrystwyth. #food

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#autumn in a pan. Squash/carrot/cinnamon / coriander and maple syrup #soup in the making. #soupisgoodfood #food

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#kfc blimp. Fitting I suppose. #canton #food

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First proper taste of #NinjaBeer - super dry, extra touch of sugar and lemon required. Very drinkable nonetheless #food

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Perfect combination to kick off Sunday. #pancakes #food

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Boom! And the cup-muffins are outta the heat. need to cool before icing #food

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Our #carrot #megamuffins about to hit the oven. Recipe on blog soon. #food

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It's not all about eating - been working on this badboy #planter made out of eucalyptus #food #growing

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#eggyBread the #breakfast of champions #food

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You looking at me? You looking at me? Huh? - err, no mr tomato. #beefTomato #food #Hipstamatic #Loftus #DC

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Noodley goodness midway progress #food #Hipstamatic #Loftus #DC

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First Contact - first tasting of the #brew after 4 days bottling. Look at the pic with 2001space odyssey music playing in your kind :) #food

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Ok, so this time had finally come - and yes, i have been a touch impatient (only waiting 4 days - i mean what was i thinking ;) ). I stepped into the understairs cupboard and plucked out a lucky contender for the first sampling of the mighty brew. Felt like something out of Toy Story with the mighty claw coming to whisk away one lucky bottle.

Headed into the garden (yes, i actually managed to go outside as the 40 days and nights of rain had finally left us). And cracked the virgin cap and poured out the liquidy amber goodness.

I will stop being emphatic now - it had a nice fizz, good aroma, still a touch cloudy, slight bitter aftertaste but not unpleasant by any means (but i guess that's why its called ale/bitter). First impressions were rather good. Easily quaffable without feeling you are forcing down sprouts. Which was my last memory of homebrew.

Here's a vid of the first tastings

Will wait another week and a half before the next taster session.

Recipe: Speedy Ramen Noodles!

Ok, this is probably one of the easiest recipes for my speedy Ramen. A bonafide hit in our house for all ages. Succulent meat on a tangy soup with lashings of noodley goodness.

What you need:

Serves 2 - 3

Time: 15 mins

• Stock (made from 2 oxo or posh knorr pot, 2 pints water, 2 carrots, 1-2 leeks finely chopped, good finger of ginger chopped - all boiled for 15 minutes)
• Chicken breasts (1 per person)
• Sweetcorn (tinned)
• chilli (optional)
• lime
• coriander
• noodles (medium/thin egg noodles)
• pak choi (or spinach)

Method

1. Get the stock on the go as soon as you can. Throw everything in the pot and simmer for 10-15 minutes.
2. Whilst this is boiling, get the chicken on a griddle pan.
3. Brown with side then put foil over the pan with a splash of water just before (careful of the steam)
4. Whilst chicken cooking, boil noodles as per pack instructions (1.5 sheets per person)
5. Once noodles cooked, rinse thoroughly under cold water and put to side
6. When chicken cooked through, place on tray to rest (covered with foil)
7. Place pak choi on griddle (chopped in half) (if using spinach leaves, no cooking required - place washed leaves in bowl)
8. Once stock simmered, strain through sieve into new pan
9. Add noodles to stock to warm through over heat
10. Get bowls out
11. Add noodles to each bowl
12. Place in pak choi 
13. Sprinkle corn over
14. Ladel soup over til noodles covered
15. Place sliced chicken breast on top
16. Sprinkle coriander and chilli over
17. Place lime on each bowl for squeezing at the table

You are done! Enjoy!

Homebrew Label Design

As mentioned in an earlier post - one of the things that is great is the fact that you can design your own labels for any of your brews / foods etc. Its a surprisingly dark brew, and so have opted for a slightly dark-side name of '666 Brew - Dark Summer Ale'. I still have no idea what it is actually going to taste like.

Set myself a twenty minute challenge yesterday and came up with these two alternatives. Have decided to go for the simpler design in blue ... contrasted nicely against the red crown caps.

See what you think. Comments welcome.

design A

design B

Design A - in blue and applied to bottles

Just found my first #recipe book. Rupert must be due or a comeback. #food

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#Homemade #peanut and #raisin #cookies have landed in the studio today - cooked up by @defydesigns. #food

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Alcoholic Ginger Beer: Day 1 - The Brew Up

My appetite has been whetted recently by a renewed interest in homebrewing. Ok, not the coolest of home-pursuits but wholly rewarding. Not only do you get to concoct your own beverage and present to the unsuspecting friends/co-workers etc but you also get to design the label! Then i realised you can actually make alcoholic ginger beer (not the plant-inspired version i did as a kid) ... and with a potential 9.5% .... oh my god ....

Anyhow, i digress. I stumbled across 2 recipes online that looked easy peasy.

1. Hugh Fearnely-Whittingstall's Ginger Beer Recipe
Hugh Fearnely-Whittingstall's Ginger Beer Recipe

2. Dave's Ginger Beer

At first instance, Hugh's looked easiest but digging a little deeper, and looking for a challenge (and larger quanitites) i went with Dave's Ginger Beer.

The ingredients as follows:

5 gallons water
1-1 1/2 lbs. ginger root, coarsley chopped (PLUS extra 1/2 lb ginger root and 60g dried ginger)
17 cups sugar (i'm assuming american sizes here)
4 lemons, sliced
3/4 tsp. cream of tartar
1 packet champagne yeast (i substituted this for Wine Yeast Compound and followed instructions)

Off we trotted to Tesco and got everything (it was a wet sunday, otherwise the cornershop fruitstore would have been first port of call). Yes, even the yeast. It seems that Culverhouse Cross has a section for homebrew stuff.

Keeping it simple for the first attempt - i've pretty much left the recipe unchanged other than adding about an extra half pound of ginger and also emptying a whole spice bottle of the dry stuff (just for an extra kick).

Process was pretty simple for getting going, a few tricky bits that weren't covered in the original recipe so i have modified and this is the process i'm going to do:

Process

1. Fill largest pan with boiling water (leaving inch and half from top)
2. Add ginger & cream of tartar
3. Squeeze lemons and then drop in squeezed bits too
4. Add sugar (i managed 9 1/2 cups) and allow to simmer for 30mins (i removed pips)
5. Add remaining sugar to sterilised fermenting bin (7 1/2 cups)
6. Carefully pour ginger mix through coarse strainer and then squish pulp with back of ladel
7. Top up with cold water to the 5 gallon mark and leave to lukewarm temperature
8. Taste (at this point, i wasn't happy so boiled up more ginger root and dried ginger and added back in to mix)
9. Add yeast as per pack (i used wine yeast compund - which meant a heaped teaspoon per gallon straight into the fermenting bin)
10. Check gravity (reading said it could be possible 9.5% alcohol - but we going to stop before completely fermented)
11. Cover and allow to ferment for 7 days (16 - 20 degrees)
12. Check gravity intermittently
13. Siphon into 2litre pop bottles (sterilised) - this will be done through a coffee filter for extra clarity
14. Add teaspoon of zest and finely grated ginger to each bottle
15. Cap and store upright for one week (15 - 17.5 degrees)
16. Release pressure daily
17. Then store under 15 degrees

A few photos:

Grating

The key ingredients

Lemons / ginger / cream of tartar / water / sugar

Fermentation bin after 2 hours

20 degrees

Will be updating once ready for bottling!

Review: The Italian Way / Canton, Cardiff

Date of visit: Mid April 2012
Location: 157 Cowbridge Road, Canton , Cardiff CF11 9AH
www.theitalianwaycardiff.co.uk/

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It was a cold April night in Canton, and surprisingly we were child-free thanks to grannie and the school holidays. After lengthy discussion of where to go (and i mean lengthy - as there are so many nice food places on our doorstep in Canton, Cardiff) we opted for a trip down memory lane to The Italian Way.

Since moving to Cardiff 8 years ago, the Italian Way is one of our oldest Cardiff friends. There with us from the start, it offered shelter, food, music, convivality. Offering traditional fayre in a traditional way that has remained unchanged for at least the length of time i've been here. Plastic printed table mats, over-the-top mirrors (and i mean in a good way), rustic faux-tiling and candlelight set the ambience for good food to be served.

It was tuesday, but i thought we'd better book (remembering times when they literally have to turn people away by the bucket load). We get a couple of bottles from Tesco, it has to be done - after all, The Italian Way is BYO with a zero-corkage policy and frankly, it would be rude not to entertain this offer. We then continue through Canton High Street past Bangkhok Cafe [full to rafters], Ichiban [full], Purple Poppadom [couldn't see - but guessing very full] i was patting myself on the back for taking the initiative to book, seeing that the grazers were out in force tonight.

We turn into the doorway, i was secretly hoping the troubadour would be there tonight - just for the ultimately-kitsch-aide-memoir, but alas, he wasn't and neither was anybody else. 8pm on a tuesday night and we literally had the restaurant all to ourselves. A far cry from the hubbub that i remember fondly - but hey, worse things happen at sea and we have had the most awesome food and evenings in venues when we are first in on an 'early-bird' sitting (fondly thinks back to Oscars in Cardiff) - and we take our seats after being told to almost unenthusiastically 'sit anywhere' - the choice aplenty, we instinctively navigate to the right hand side and set root and before you can say 'thin crust', we have the first bottle opened and wine flowing.

The waitress heads over and takes our order:

What we had:

Garlic bread with mozzerella
Lobster Ravioli
Cozze Italian Way (Mussels in tomato sauce)
Pizza 12inch / Ham / Spinach / Mushroom
Pizza: Spinach / Pepper Sausage / Sweetcorn / Mushrooms

Cost: £45

Time for another glass and a half and our starters arrive.

Sadly the garlic bread was missing, and we prompt our waitress and she swiftly skips off and returns 5 minutes later with the garlicy goodness. As a mussel-enthusiast ( i can't think of a better term), i always opt for the mollusk option when ordering. I was sadly dissapointed. The sauce was nice (sorry - a bad, tepid term to describe food but emotions weren't plucked for anything stronger), but the mussels were over cooked, hard and the shells uncharacteristically brittle. I suspect the result of the machine that goes ping! Over to the ravioli, and the pasta was good but the filling rather reminiscent of what i would envisage lobster-thermadore-a-la-bebe to be like. That said, the food did get all eaten and empty plates were handed back to our waitress.

By this time, two other people had joined us in the restaurant and by all accounts, they were equally surprised by the emptiness.

Just time for another swift glass, and our main arrive. Pizzaaaaaaaaaaah

At first glance, the pizza looked great - the only thing grating our initial view was the rather large five gatherings of spinach located around the perimeter of each pizza. Tucking in and the pizza was great, the cheese - nicely unctuous, the base super-thin (i would say too thin, but C very happy) but was sadly let down by the wet, clumpy popeye-inspired spinach drops on both pizzas which did ruin each of our dishes which we both promptly scraped to the side.

By this point, the meal was not going great and several factors start to put you in a negative frame of mind. Missing starter, empty restaurant, owner eating at the side, chortles and laughter from open-kitchen area at back of restaurant, wet splodges of spinach ...

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ESF Ratings Service: 

Quality of Food: 5 / 10
Child-friendliness: n / a
Service: 5 / 10
Ambience: 3 / 10

Final thoughts
A far cry from our prior-conceived memories. I hope that our visit was a one-off and that it's guns are blazing every other night. Has the Italian lost it's Way? Possibly. Will we be back? Only if we are invited for someone's event and i'm not washing my hair.

Bottle night #homebrew #food

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From tiny acorns grow huuuuge curries

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