Ratatouille- Le Festin

Veggie Hubby and I have been married for a year today, our first year of marriage has whizzed by. To celebrate, we're off to Paris tomorrow. We watched Ratatouille last night, the second time we have seen it. I didn't notice when I first saw it at the cinema, but the music is also beautiful, & I like that it's in French even if I can't understand it without reading the lyrics.

En vacances...

I am in my French holiday home in Brittany at the moment, hence my lack of blogging. Here is a picture of a nearby marina. I am having a kind of Internet detox. Instead, for the past few days I have been...

• Travelling on the Eurostar for the first time
• Reading 'The Book Thief' by Marcus Zusak (an excellent book narrated by Death about a girl growing up in Nazi Germany)
• Picking blackberries
• Watching the stars and Jupiter through a telescope
• Walking through a river with my dog
• Eating lots and lots (including Breton cake, galette, crêpe, croissants mmm)
• Climbing rocks
• Shopping in little artisan shops
• Taking photos
• Drawing pictures
• Playing games with my niece
• Improving my French
• ... and watching British TV in the evenings; it's good that I can watch British TV as the majority of French TV seems so tacky.

Pastries

Apart from cupcakes which are actually secondary, I love pastries! Whoops should have mentioned that before, but actually its true, i love pastries, I would eat one everyday with breakfast and a cup of tea/ cappucino/ orange juice. I eat cinnamon whirls, pain au chocolat, croissants, almond croissants, apple danish, chocolate twists- anything goes!! At the moment, the supermarkets seem to be constantly running out of the good stuff, especially my all time favourite- the maple and pecan, it seems that eldery pensioners who get there early manage to grap the good stuff (no offense!). So yesterday after 2 long pastry free weeks i decided to bake my own.......cinnamon whirls, and yes they tasted very yummy.....

Theres a funny story too, on my wedding day Dentist Hubby asked what I wanted for breakfast and i said 'just a pastry and some juice' now at the time he didnt know about these types of pastry and thought i meant the creamy cake type things,he wondered why i would want to eat that in the morning but went rushing round the hotel looking for cream cake at 7.30am! Anyway I think he did come back with the proper pastries in the end, an guess what he's addicted to them now aswell!! x

View from the window

11pm...

Gloomy day

On my way home from work today, the rain suddenly started pouring down. It was so heavy, I could barely see the road infront of me. I have seen heavy rain before, but not quite like that.
When I arrived home, I was happy to see that the roadworks which have been going on for a week on road opposite my flat were no longer there.... however then I noticed that they had moved next to my parking space. Delightful! It looks like an open grave. All the grass has also been driven over lots, it looks like a wasteland. All to probably give water supply to some new homes that have been under construction ever since we moved in, and were due to be completed in 'Spring 2008'. Thank you Thames Water.

I also see that is gloomy for Canada in the Olympic medal table. I checked to see where Great Britain is, and was pleased to see it is ninth place. I am not surprised to see this small island behind countries with much bigger populations like China and the USA. Then, I checked to see where Canada is in the Olympic tables, and checked again, and again. It isn't even in the medal table yet as Canada doesn't even have a single bronze medal. Even Togo and Kyrgyzstan have one bronze medal each! At least there is a Winter Olympics...

Peanut Butter Buttercream!

At the weekend I just could not resist, so i made these chocolate sponge with peanut butter, buttercream cupcakes! I ate one and it tasted good!!! I am still a bit wary of making them trully American style with a huge mountain of buttercream, probably as the content of butter and sugar required to make the icing is very disturbing. I made Dentist Hubby take them to work today as I dont think its a good idea for us to finish them all!!

x

Temporary inhabitants

We have some new temporary inhabitants in our flat, Horace and Hermes. Here is Horace (I think!). Even rodent-hating Veggie Hubby is starting to warm to them, he suggested that we feed them frozen peas tonight, and told me to take some pictures of the "little ones."

Olympics

I can't believe that the 2008 Olympics have started. I was there 4 years ago, at the Athens Olympics, and I'm sure I'll be there in 4 years time, for the London Olympics. I don't have many photos from them on this computer, but here is one. The Beijing Olympics just aren't quite the same, I wish they were being held somewhere else. Nevertheless, I am still looking forward to watching some of the events, in particular the gymnastics.

I have had a busy few days. I went to see The Dark Knight on Wednesday which was enjoyable but violent and too long. I am still saddened by Heath Ledger's death, he was the best thing about the movie. Last night, I happened to eat out again, this time at Gourmet Burger Kitchen. Veggie Hubby loves to eat burgers, as he prefer being Meaty Hubby but ends up being Veggie Hubby most of the time because of me. He now has an aim in life: to try every single option on the Gourmet Burger Kitchen menu, and has ticked off two so far. The vegetarian options are quite strange (but good) as really they are mainly just vegetables inside burger buns, rather than veggie burgers. My burger was sooo tall, it was a shame my camera was at home. Then, from tomorrow night I shall be gerbil-sitting my sister's gerbils Horace and Hermes, for a few days. Aww.

Eating Out- Ps I'm back!

Heloo everyone! I am back after a little vacation which i shall tell you all about in the wrong order! I am glad Veggie Carrie missed my cupcake blogging! So.... Last week my little brother came and stayed with us which was fun as its his school holidays. He was very useful in keeping CutyBaby occupied as she has now reached 'phase tantrum'. Anyway, so the weather was really hot and we walked into town. One day for lunch we walked around everywhere and all the food seemed to have finished, so finally we tried M&S and for under a £10'er we managed to get a mexican chilli bean wrap, an egg roll, a pasta and spinach salad, a somosa, mango smoothies, 2 bags of tortillas and some salsa= amazing! Frankly the food was delicious, fresh, and for the price very very good and filling. I shall definatly be going there again. Now in contrast another day we decided to try a local Italian place called 'Artista'. They didnt have hardly any vegetarian options and in the end we ordered one vegetable pizza, and i ordered a pasta tagliatelli with mushrooms. Now i specifically told the waitress that i wanted it with LESS mushrooms, and their menu described it as 'Pasta with prawns and mushrooms in tomato sauce'. Ok so when the food came, the pizza was large and tasty. I tried one bite of the pasta dish and it tasty very very 'fishy' and i immediately didnt like it, prawns do not taste that fishy. After a while of picking out the mushrooms, i started to think there were other things in there apart from 'mushrooms' things that looked suspiciously like mussels!!!!!!!!!! URG all i have to say is that the menu definatly had not said it would contain other seafood, and the thought of the mussels urggggggggggggg, it was totally disgusting. And it didnt taste that good either. Moral of this story= never eat out!!!
x