Flying through the air with the greatest of ease

For our five year anniversary, I took Adrian out on a date.  But not just any old date, a trapeze lesson date!  It was part of the summer session of the Gorilla Circus down in Battersea Park, and was a two hour class learning how to do a knee-hang move.

I could explain it, but here's Adrian getting it perfectly on his first go!

Damn those naturally talented people...  I had a bit of a harder time:

But in the end I managed to get it!  I was so determined that there was no way I wasn't going to get those legs through that bar...

But because Adrian was able to demonstrate he was good enough, he got to do a move with the instructor:

Impressive non?!

Here are the rest of the photos.  I'm covered with bruises today and have incredibly achy shoulders - but it was totally worth it!

Great recipe site

Not that I normally want to promote anything Australian, being as partisan as a good NZer ought to be, but I’ve just rediscovered this website and am going to post it here for you, as well as for me to remember to use it!

This Sanitarium 'great recipes' site has a wealth of healthy, and Antipodean-cooking-style-friendly recipes.  It’s also nice and basic which is normally what you want when a) you’re trying to come up with inspiration for what to buy for the week and b) when it comes to actually making it during the week.  I also like how it’s got lots of vegetarian recipes which is how we (mostly) eat at home – saving the planet and our budget one meal at a time...

We’re making a variant of this pumpkin, feta and pea risotto tonight – I’m a big fan of risotto (good for the shoulder muscles) so hopefully it tastes good!

(P.S. Sanitarium have never heard of me - I just like their site...)

Kippers

We tried out a different farmers market last weekend (we normally go up to the one at Clapham South on a Sunday) just to see what was there and how it compared.  This one was on a Saturday by Oval tube station in the grounds of St Marks Church - it was funny to see all the stalls backed up against ancient gravestones!

It was quite a bit bigger than our usual, with cookies, a coffee stall, different vege places and lots of fancy cheese/spreads/bakery/meat etc. stalls.  I resisted trying some of Adrian's pain-au-raisin, but when he got the strawberry and white chocolate cookie all my resolve crumbled! 

The vege we've had so far has been good - especially the giant lettuce - but the new thing was the fish stall.  It had samphire which I didn't even know what it was, and coincidentally was on the menu at the pub later that night (obviously I ordered it being a sucker for interesting additions to menus) - however, it was crunchy and delicious so I'd definitely try it again!  The other thing we got were some kippers.  I'd never had kippers before, but knowing that they belong to the high omega-3 fish family, we thought we'd give them a try.

I made this River Cottage recipe, which was good, but the problem was the bones!  It took ages taking most of them out with tweezers, and then the ones I missed just looked wrong when you were trying to eat the dish (even though they were really small and light).  Apparently you can get de-boned kippers in cans?  The other thing I was surprised about was how salty they were - is that a sign of a good kipper or not I wonder...

Anyway, it's all about experimentation, and I got to use the mint I've been growing in the garden which is always good.  We'll try the fish stall again and see what else he's got to tempt us!

Tea with the Queen

As Kiwis in London, we're eligible to apply to attend one of the Queen's annual garden parties held at Buckingham Palace every summer.  It's a ballot, with a one in four chance of success, and this year we were one of the lucky ones!  (The hilarious thing is that while NZers just apply online with our passport number, the Australians have to send in something like three letters of character with their application...).

Bastiaan and Pip got tickets on the same day as us which inspired us to make it a really big event and do it in style!  Firstly we went to afternoon tea at a hotel in Belgravia - one of those Groupon deals which meant it was a bit of a palaver to organise and was a bit odd when we were there (it certainly wasn't the Langham or anything...), but the scones were pretty gosh darn good. 

Then it was onto the palace!  There were something like 8,000 people there, mostly in recognition of service to the community - so we felt like we were slight intruders - but we definitely looked the part so that was something at least!  The boys looked incredibly dashing in their top hats (and the old ladies we spoke to thought so as well!).

The Queen and Prince Philip came out accompanied by the national anthem, then they do a bit of a walk-around, then have tea in the royal tea tent.  Us plebs have the regular tea tent, but the food was so delicious (amazing cucumber sandwiches, passionfruit tarts, salmon tarts, chocolate square things with a gold crown on the top and all sorts of other goodies.  In fact, as this article shows, the food's so good everyone gets a bit greedy and goes back for seconds!

We didn't manage to meet the Queen, and had a bit of trouble getting a good look close up as she's quite short, but got a good look at Prince Philip who I must say is doing pretty well for 90!  We also got to walk around the grounds and took some sneaky snaps (cameras weren't allowed but everyone had their phones out...).

It was fun leaving through the front of the palace with all the tourists gaping at us - I felt like a bona fide celebrity!  Then we headed round the corner to The Library Bar at The Lanesborough - a very formal bar in a five star hotel which was fabulous and very fitting for our attire!  Bastiaan and Adrian got essentially very large glasses of neat gin, while Pip and I had champagne cocktails.  With four drinks costing an eye-watering £72 it's not somewhere you'd go very often I think...

And not to be outdone, we then moved onto Galvin at Windows which is the michelin starred restaurant at the top of the Hilton.  It had incredible views and the food was great - exactly the right sort of thing to finish off the day!  The rest of the photos are here.

If only every Tuesday was so much fun...

Can you run up 1,037 stairs?

Well, I certainly can't, but Adrian managed it in just over 5 minutes - amazing!

Back in May we volunteered through the NZ Women's Business Network for a charity climb up The Gherkin which was organised to provide funds for the Christchurch earthquake relief.  The event, 'Step Up 4 Christchurch', had the morning briefing meeting up the top of the building which was very cool - it's only open to the public once a year and it's really hard to get tickets for it, so it was a neat opportunity to be able to see it without lots of people and for a good cause as well!

We were stationed down the bottom, letting people up into the run and it was interesting to see all the various types of people who were participating.  The guy who won did it in 4 minutes 56 seconds which was pretty incredible...  Our turn was at the end of the day (immediately after eating a late lunch which definitely weighted me down I reckon!), and it was a great feeling to get to the top and celebrate.  I did it in 9 minutes flat (mostly walking) which I didn't think was too bad.  All the volunteers had a glass of fizz up the top, then tootled off home with the left over goodie bags - nice!

More photos are here.

The rain in Spain falls mainly in Andalucia

Having essentially fallen asleep due to the sheer necessity of not wanting to throw up anymore (this is a lovely way to start a post isn't it...), I awoke as we finally arrived in the twisty, turny streets of Ronda.  Pip had been wanting to come here for years, and we were all hoping it would live up to expectations!

Having ensconsed ourselves in our hotel, we went out exploring all the incredible vistas that Ronda is known for.  It's perched high up in the hills with a series of fantastic bridges over a deep ravine, and despite the mist and blustery winds, we managed to get a great sense of the town.  Sadly my stomach wasn't up to eating much, but we tried our first tapas and everyone got stuck into the ham that had been sadly missing in Morocco!

From Ronda we drove down the coast to Cadiz which is on the south-western coast.  It had a wonderfully eerie cathedral and we walked all around the coastline and out onto the piers to see the waves throthing about.  The boys went out for 'one drink' and we saw them about 3am - and finally someone else felt as bad as I had been feeling!

And then it was the turn of Seville.  We did lots of walking around, seeing the cathedral, the Plaza de Espana, the bullfighting ring, and on the last day, the 'Feria de Abril'.  This is essentially a week-long excuse for the people of Seville to dress up in flamenco outfits and spend all night partying and dancing!  Families have their own tents which they've kept for generations, and there are also big groups of people with tents (and the public tents for the plebian likes of us).  There was also a big fun-fair, where of course we managed to try out a few rides - just for quality control purposes obviously.

It was quite an odd experience to be there when it was so wet (the torrents of rain in Seville were unbelievable), and then also personally not to be able to eat anything was a bit of shame (particularly when the others were eating giant skewers of seafood and meat, and all this delicious tapas and sangria), but in the end the enforced starvation killed off the bug which was such a relief.  Since Kazakhstan I seem to have the dodgiest tummy - no more boasting about having an iron stomach that's for sure!

Anyway, here are the photos of Spain - see if you can count some where it's not raining!