If like me you are looking forward to the end of the week and you are feeling a little tired, then I’ll bet you are not relishing the thought of cooking again tonight. So, why not give yourself the night off?
Forget decisions about what to cook, the last minute dash to the supermarket for the vital ingredient, slaving over a hot stove and the washing up. Why do all that when, just for once, you could order a pizza to feed the whole family for as little as 1p thanks to tasty bingo?
All you need to do is come to play every Thursday night at 6pm at ohmybingo.com. You can pre-buy 1p cards for the weekly game and then you just need to be the first to bingo on the Pizza Pattern!
You can play as little as you want to, with no minimum number of cards to purchase. And at 1p a card, even the maximum number of cards (96) won’t break the bank!
Best of all, if you win, the prize will be credited immediately to your account. So, if you play tonight at 6pm, you’ll still be in time to order dinner for all the family should you win…
Not everyone likes coffee – it does have quite a specific taste after all. However, those that do enjoy it, whether just the occasional mug or a frequent cup as a caffeine-fix, they will often notice the difference between a cheap value brand as opposed to a high quality variety.
The single-most important thing that impacts the flavour of coffee is how the bean is roasted. The coffee beans themselves are odourless and tasteless – both of these things come out throughout the roasting process. So be sure to pick a coffee that suits your personal tastes. For example, a lighter roast tends to signify a strong aroma and taste to the coffee.
For the truly dedicated, you can even opt to grind your own beans to ensure you get the right grind and the freshest flavours. Obviously this isn’t always practical – say you work in an office, you might be better off opting for a specialist bean to cup machine like the DeLonghi, Jura or Flavia drink machines.
Bean to cup machines offer a balance between getting the full aroma and taste from your coffee beans, and also speeding up the process in order to save you time and money. Flavia drink machines are amongst the most highly regarded bean to cup coffee makers, but are just one of a whole variety of brands available.
Nothing says a love of food like a food festival. Of course, there is more to a food get- together than a bunch of food lovers stuffing their mouths with mouth watering treats. You can talk about it, join impromptu cookery classes, take photographs and share your favorite recipe books with other connoisseurs. If you do not find this passion for food to be over the top, then you will right in place at some of the wackiest food festivals from around the world:
Faro Sweet Festival
This is a rather interesting one. As of yet, it is an off the beat event that, for the most part, attracts food aficionados. This ensures that the palate as well as the conversation is of good order. Delectable sweets from the festival include Portuguese crepe, fartura, salami made from chocolate and cookies and the don of desserts, the Dom Rodrigo. It is a sticky and sweet fusion of egg noodles, egg cream, pumpkin jam, almonds and cinnamon. Although a celebration of sweets is unlikely to be to the at the upper end of a crazy food festivals compilation, four days of gorging on these sugary treats is bound to make you sick in the stomach.
National Baby Food Festival
The citizens of Fremont, Michigan are supposedly a happy lot. Yet, once in a while, matters get out of hand and thus, they organize the National Baby Food festival. Activities include trying out baby food and whipping up the best baby food dish that you can think of and the event high-light, baby crawl race. This festival takes place in the month of July.
Pontefract Liquorice Festival and the Isleton Spam Festival are worth trying out for those who have a stomach for this extreme food fun.
If you’re sick of having a plain lamb roast dinner of a Sunday but don’t know how to spice things up a bit, why not try a lamb kleftiko recipe?
This Greek-inspired dish is both delicious and easy to cook; it produces lamb that is so tender that it literally falls off the bone.
Recipes for lamb kleftiko can be found all over the internet, but the best we’ve come across involve a few common ingredients:
• Lamb on the bone (leg, shoulder, shank)
• Shallots
• Greek feta cheese
• Broad beans (optional but a nice touch)
These and a number of other ingredients are all wrapped up in a foil or baking paper parcel, then slow-cooked to perfection.
So many of us throw away a small fortune on convenience lunches, like sandwiches and pre-packaged mini meals, during the working week. This seems like the easy option, but it’s actually costing you more money and could be bad for your health due to the excess of salt and sugar in these foods.
This is why you should consider making your own lunches to take in; try it for a week and just see how much money you save.
As well as making your own sandwiches, wraps and salads, another quick and easy way to make your lunch is to use the surplus from last night’s meal. Make slightly more for tea than usual, and what you don’t eat in a Tupperware container for the next day.
If your chocolate dessert arrives in front of you in a restaurant and it’s a teeny-tiny portion, you may feel ripped off or tempted to demand a larger pud.
However, if this tiny portion is rich and intense in flavour, this small portion can actually be the perfect way to round off a meal. Large slabs of chocolate cake, however delicious, will only make you feel over-full and bloated at the end of a meal, spoiling that enjoyably satisfied feeling.
This is why I’m a firm fan of potent, petite puddings. Try the following and you’ll join me:
• White chocolate mousse
• Bailey’s chocolate mousse
• Chocolate fondant cake
• Chocolate torte (the best example of a tiny, intensely flavoured tempting treat)
• Dark chocolate truffle with raspberry accompaniment
The great thing about banana bread – apart from the exceptional taste – is that it uses up overripe bananas that have started to blacken or attract fruit flies. Rather than chucking them out, why not make banana bread with them using the normal baking ingredients you have in your cupboards?
My favourite recipe so far is the Nigella Lawson one, which you can find on her website. It basically uses:
• Plain flour
• Sugar
• Melted butter
• Baking powder
• Vanilla essence
• Mashed-up, overripe bananas
• A pinch of salt
What’s more, you can mix things up a little by adding a shot of dark rum, sultanas soaked in bourbon before cooking, or even some fruit or chocolate chips.
Rocky Road is the American variation of the good old ‘fridge cake’ (that means that there is no baking required as it sets in the fridge). The beauty of these recipes is that you can tinker until your heart (or stomach) is content with this little recipe. You can change the types of nuts you use, (brazil nuts, pecans, chopped almonds, etc), add or remove the glace cherries, or leave out the marshmallows (not sure why you would want to!) – whatever you like! You just need to keep the basic template of butter, chocolate, biscuit and syrup, and you can play around with the other pieces in your own way.
Ingredients:
- 4tbsp golden syrup
- 200g plain chocolate
- 150g milk chocolate
- 150g unsalted butter
- 175g malted milk) biscuits, crushed
- 150g marshmallows
- 150g unsalted peanuts (you can use chocolate covered ones for that extra chocolate kick!)
Method:
- Line your 30x20cm tin with cling-film and put it to the side.
- Weigh out the biscuits and put them into a large plastic sandwich bag. Seal it and use a rolling pin to crush the biscuits. (This step can also be done in a food processor.)
- Weigh out the marshmallows and peanuts, and put them aside ready.
- Melt the chocolate, syrup and butter in a pan over a low heat. When this is smooth and molten, tip in the biscuits and stir quickly.
- Continuing to work quickly, tip in the marshmallows and peanuts, and stir thoroughly.
- As soon as everything is evenly mixed in, tip into the prepared tin and smooth it out with a spatula.
- Leave the tray in the fridge to cool; once set, cut it into squares and enjoy!
As a child, I always ate what was put in front of me, without argument – then I got to go out to play, and have desert, etc – I knew how to play the game. But my sister did not, especially when it came to meal times. She never wanted to eat the meal the way we were supposed to eat it – main first, then desert, or sometimes she would want to combine foods – so, raw vegetables with baked beans or pizza dipped in soup but then not eat the soup.
I never understood it, and still don’t. My parents never really let her get away with it, but I wonder what she would be like now if she had been allowed to eat as and when she wished? She ate a range of foods without complaint, she just didn’t want to eat them in the order she was told. Is this perhaps the way to get kids eating things that are good for them? Or is the social custom of eating certain foods in certain ways and orders so ingrained into our society, that we simply cannot get away from it?
On a busy morning, when I am rushing to get out of the house and beat traffic, I have a tendency to forget breakfast, and grab a cereal bar instead. But it never feels like actual food, and it certainly doesn’t set me up for the day. But i do enjoy the “healthy” meals to microwave for lunch – like the supermarkets steamed veg and fish, or the chili chicken noodles – they taste great, and don’t cost too much, and are incredibly light on the washing up.
So why do I not grab a porridge pot and take it to work to heat up? One and a half minutes, with a little water, and porridge is my breakfast. Perhaps the stigma of eating breakfast at work is too great?
Either way, I am very pleased to have convenience food around – but I still prefer the taste of the real thing, made at home.