Mmmm-Monday: Lemon Meringue

Kel and Orange Soda, Cookie Monster and Cookies, Homer Simpson and Donuts... Oh man, me and Lemon Meringue. It's a passionate, undying love. I cannot get enough, and I hate sharing (just ask Sunny!). So when I was shopping in London with the girls over the weekend (we were on the hunt for my wedding shoes and failing miserably - Rach and Missy were about ready to pelt me with shoes) and we stopped in John Lewis for a bite, I couldn't resist the towering peak of meringue. It. Was. Glorious.

Summer in a Day

Exactly 3 months to the day before our wedding, we took Rach, Tom and Missy to see Hall Place. The weather was amazing (and we haven't had many days where you'd class the weather under the 'amazing' column lately...) so we walked around the grounds for a while and had a bit of a picnic.

I wore my new dress from Apricot (wait, which they also do in peach!?).






I made a daisy crown :)


Sunny and Tom had a bit of a kick around...

... but then they found a stone with a massive hole in it and spent a long time trying to get the ball through the middle.

Fly Away Home

I went home to Cardiff last week and was lucky enough to watch the last of the Great Tit chicks leave the bird box my parents have attached to the fence in their garden.


He was fluttering clumsily around the garden for a long time before his parents came back to help and was a total natural in front of the girl with a camera and dripping wet hair (I had to abandon my blow dry poste haste when Mum came rushing upstairs to let me know!). Good thing I wasn't a cat.

Mmmm-Monday: Nutty Banana Split

Who doesn't love a good Banana Split? Yum!

Mmmm-Monday: Tuna Steak with Lime and Coriander and Jewelled Rice

Sunny was particularly proud of this creation. We absolutely love fish, but get a bit bored of automatically serving it with a side of chips. Hey, I'm not one to turn down a side of fluffy chunky chips with my fillet o'fish, but after a while it gets boring. This rice. Oh this rice. It's flavoured with honey, turmeric, roasted almonds and peppers and it's just the bomb. It tasted so good and went so well with the Tuna that we could have skipped the sauce (in fact the coriander and lime was a bit on the strong side - sorry Sunny!). Yum!

Tuna Steaks with Jewelled Rice

Mmmm-Monday - Tomato, Mozarella and Basil

If you'd have looked out of your windows last weekend then you might have spotted a blue moon. Instead of breaking out in fur and fangs however, Sunny donned the oven gloves and spoiled me with a three course meal! He went all out and totally surprised me - not sure why, I was all about the oven food back in the day before he came along and showed me how to cook from scratch.

Anyway, he knows how much I love buffalo mozarella (God, I could eat blobs and blobs of the stuff), so we started with sliced tomato, mozarella and basil. Tip: Salt and Pepper on tomato makes them taste ah-mazing.

Mmmm-Monday: Fresh Pasta

Okay. The last time that I decided to give fresh pasta a go, it was a total disaster - which came as a horrible surprise because the recipe had been so easy! It's taken nearly a year for me to feel the urge to give it another try. The truth is, yeah, the recipe is really easy - but when it comes to actually making the pasta, you definitely need the right equipment to do it properly. You need, The Machine...
Having had a good chuckle over my ridiculous first attempt, Sunny's parents bought me a pasta machine for Christmas. Flashforward to last Thursday; for some reason I came home from work in the mood to de-box it and give it a spin. I made the dough (Easy! 1 egg:100g strong '00' flour) and then set the dial on the rollers to '1' and got cracking. You've got to steadily flatten the pasta through the machine by gradually decreasing the space between the rollers.
I slimmed the pasta down to setting number '7' and then got to play with the cutters. :) My machine has two; tagliatelle and spaghetti.
I never had a Play Doh Barber shop when I was kid but I always wanted one, so when I started making uber long ribbons of tagliatelle from flat sheets of pasta dough my inner child was at peace. It was just the right kind of messy fun. Alright, the strips weren't perfect, but that's part of the fun of fresh pasta.
I put the strips on a hanger and left them to dry out for an hour or so, then cooked them up. They were done literally as soon as I dropped them into the pot of boiling water. Yum!