After having just been muttering on about bad toxic food, I thought it was right that I should now talk about a day spent eating it. And feeling sick. There's probably a time and place for most things and I think if you're gonna eat lots of rubbish, you should do it in style, on a day trip to seaside! Last Saturday it was lovely clear sunny day, and I'd heard it was national chip week, so myself and a friend took ourselves off on a day trip for chips in one of the most beautiful, classy places in the UK ... Blackpool! OK so maybe it's not to everyone's taste, but I have a a bit of a soft spot for our seaside towns, the cheesier the better for me. Blackpool must have the most flashy lights, rock, slot machines, donkeys and retro cafes out of them all. Brilliant. I just love red plastic vinyl seats and the big menu boards of wibbly lines of black sticker letters. And the fact that a cup of tea is only 50p. We started the day with tea and cakes at Golden Mile Cafe. Steph had an apple pie and I had a lemon ...

This was meant to be the first of my "Compare the Rubbish Ready Meals they Sell at Supermarkets to the Stuff you can Make at Home" posts. However I went and looked at a few different ready made macaroni cheeses, one at Morrisons and a couple at Sommerfield and to be honest I couldn't see anything too toxic in the ingredients, so maybe they are ok? Big price variance though, from 98p to £2.99 for a little plastic pot of pasta making them probably work out more expensive per portion. Oh and there's also the unknown effects of plastic that is seeping into your cheese sauce as you nuke it for 3 minutes in the microwave or, if it's posh ready meal, cook it in the oven (I really can't understand how you can put plastic in the oven, surely that has to be wrong?), and the fact that the thing you just cooked it in will be probably be lying around in a landfill for the next few thousand years. Erm so not that great then. I also didn't do any taste comparison but I'm pretty sure a nuked plastic tub of slop wouldn't look or taste any where ...

Just had a really lovely weekend in Machynlleth, Wales, lots of cider, dancing, sleeping, walking and eating. Pretty much all of my favorite things all in one weekend infact. Yay! While we were there we went to a very nice restaurant that deserves a mention, in the Wynnstay Hotel. It was Sunday night so the place was pretty quiet, in fact the restaurant is kind of divided into small dining rooms, and we had one of the rooms to ourselves. It's really cosy, a bit like being in someone's house (if they were incredibly minted and had a huge house with several posh dining rooms), and the staff were all very friendly, didn't rush you, or take too long blah blah blah. Oh and also they have a huge wine list, which they have won several awards for. While the place is probably better suited to meat eaters, (they have a pretty impressive range of local lamb and beef, and do quite a few different game/fish things too), there were a few veggi options, so we were ok. I'm gonna moan now though, why do most places think the only thing veggis want to eat is cheese, and specifically goats ...

Just days after one batter based British tradition another, more established one, comes along. Hurrah! February must be the month for them. It was only right that for Laura's lesson this week we should make pancakes, and invite lots of people round to eat them with us in what was to be know as "Pancake Hour (and ten minutes)". What a brilliant night. After a shady start and a few mis-flips cleverly rebranded as "Pancake Tapas" by Laura, we were rocking. I can't believe Laura had never made pancakes before! By the 43rd minute she had three on the go at once. Woop! So from 6.30pm the race for the title of Mr or Mrs Pancake 2008 was on. With a point for every pancake that was finished and a price of an old wooden spoon from our drawer there was a lot to play for. The atmosphere was tense. A variety of fillings were on offer, the traditional lemon and sugar, maple syrup, ice cream, bananas, nutella, and a few savoury options, cheese, hummous, salad, cream cheese, mushrooms and my favourite, salad cream. Mmm. The clever ones with an eye on the spoon trophy went for simpler fillings, just ...

So Sunday was officially Yorkshire Pudding Day this week, unlike most other Sundays when people eat Yorkshire Puddings with their Sunday roast and it's just called Sunday. A completely new made up day, but an excuse to eat one of the finest things in the world, so all is good. Yorkshire Puddings remind me of going to my Grandma's when I was young. I think it was on Boxing Day each year we used to go round to her house and had Yorkshire puddings, not with the main meal of Roast Beef, but as a starter on it's own with really thin watery gravy, made only from the juice off the roast. We used to love it. The pudding itself was different too, well not a different mix, just a different shape, she used to make just one enormous flat one in something like a baking tray. Apparently this is the traditional method: "It was originally flatter than today's version, and was cooked in a tin beneath meat which was being roasted on a spit over a fire so it could catch all the drippings from the meat. In early days, this was as much out of necessity as ...