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Tonight was the 1st of Dec, and I have to say that it felt really kind of odd not to take a picture of our dinner tonight. Green chicken curry (again) if you’re still interested. In fact I even reached for the camera when we’d finished cooking. Funny how things so quickly become a habit.

If you missed the earlier link it’s, here, and it not only tells you but also shows you what we ate for dinner throughout the month of November.

You may think it’s kinda weird to do a study of what you eat for the month, but I think we actually found it quite interesting. We may have tried hard some nights but for the majority of the time we just did the ‘usual’, and to be fair it’s quite normal for us to try hard to try new things every now and then, and then sometimes just eat toast!

So what do we think? Although we were aware that we had to take pictures of stuff, I think that’s a pretty good representaion of what we normally eat. We’re a bit surprised that we didn’t have more Asian food in the month. It’s normally a large influence on our diet, with a lot of Thai, Indian and Japanese here and there. I guess because it was colder that we went for more of the stogy comfort food type of thing, rather than the lighter dishes.

Pick a favourite? Not really sure I could. It was all pretty good, even the sardines on toast! And Bec and I would probably disagree anyway! Maybe we’ll do this again next year and see if anything has changed…

A while ago I was looking through Olive magazine and found an advert for the BBC’s Good Food Festival, and grabbed some tickets. So after remembering we actually had to take the tickets with us, off we set across London to the massive Olympia exhibition hall. And was it worth taking the decision not eating breakie. Hell yes!

There were mases of food and drink stalls with samples to try, and we made the most of it by trying as much as we could. And after all the sampling we came home with some various stuff, which actually motivated us to cook more than the ready made soup that we had been planning to have tonight all week.

The majority of the prices seemed to be discounted and there were some really good bargains to be picked up. However, unfortunately we didn’t come home with a bottle of the ‘100% pain’, a chilli condiment that we tried. By the look on Bec’s face, the product lived up to it’s name. It took her a lot of bread and about 10 mins to come right! Strangely enough I really liked it!

As always, there were a couple of random stalls there with not much to do with food… One selling sandals, and a power company trying to get people to change their power supplier. Duh! Of course we don’t want to talk to you about that! We’re there for the food!

Today is the start of us photographically recording our evening meals for the month. Why? No idea really. It just came up when we were in Houston and discussing the differences in food and stuff between the UK and US.

You can find the piccies and maybe descriptions here, or there is a link to the page on the right in the “pages” listing.

You can see what they’re eating in the States here.

Maybe a bit of motivation to appear healthy, but we’ll try to just eat what we’d normally do.

Check back later this month to see how it’s gone. And give us grief if there are too many meals of toast!

A visit across to the far side of town for a friend’s birthday, and a visit to the Kiwi Kitchen for lunch. Nice little place, with a couple of Jazz musicians keeping us company.

It did remind me though that NZ doesn’t have much of a cuisine to offer though. Apart from the obligatory green lip mussels, paua patties, kumara chips and a bit of lamb, there wasn’t too much that really stood out as anything particularly Kiwi. I guess that’s probably enough.

Yesterday I finally got around to making up another batch of mango habanero sauce/chutney. And I’ve decided that mangos are a pain in the butt to work with. Slippery little suckers, and I can never tell just where the flesh ends and the seed thing really starts.

It’s got me wondering just how they deal with them in large quanities for juice though. Hmmmm.

Sauce is good though! And I now have quite a lot to use up in a short time. It is amazing how much heat just 3 little habaneros can add to about 4 cups of sauce. Yum!

An early Saturday afternoon stroll along the Thames ended up at the seafood fair at London Bridge to indulge in some seafood – yummy. Just a little festival but it attracted a lot of people in quite a small space.

We tucked into some Paella, Thai fish cakes, prawns etc and we saved the best till last – some oysters. We tasted Scottish oysters and Rock oysters, the Scottish oysters were suppose to be the pick of the bunch, but somehow we preferred the plain ordinary rock ones, but they all went down like a wee treat.

And what better than to be eating seafood accompanied by some good ole NZ Nobilo vino blanco. The food and wine was also really well priced, good value for money. It was a great afternoon out.

A pretentious Friday night dining experience for a complete change of pace, Gilgamesh Bar & Restaurant (but don’t visit their site unless you like big, slow loading, Flash sites). We made our way up to Camden to a flashy Asian restaurant, and I must say after visiting the restaurant we feel that its location leaves something to be desired. For the type of restaurant it is and the market it is trying to capture I am not convinced that its location is quite right, and that’s not helped by the fact that when dining you are sitting beside a freight rail line.

The restaurant and bar itself are big spaces and I would say it is posey Asian – the décor is all carved wood panels with dim colour changing lighting. A little bottle of coke costs £2.50 and get this, they pour it into a glass and don’t give you what’s left in the bottle. Now I don’t know about you but when I have paid extortionate money for a drink I want the whole lot! The menu was pretty thin on mains, which seem really pricey, but there were quite a few nice dim-sums that we pigged out on, and the food was good.

We’re not sure how long they’ll be able to sustain the way they run the place either. There seemed to be more staff than patrons and the majority of them seemed to have nothing to do other than stand around at the kitchen waiting for food to be cooked.

I can’t say we’ll be going back in a hurry. But we’d have to say that all in all if you like pretentious places then I’d give this one a go.

Today was harvest day. Thought I’d better lighten the load on the plants by removing the ripe ones…  I think some will have to end up in the freezer, as I can’t see us using all of these in the next week!

Thought I’d try some chilli cooking today while it was raining and (relatively) cold outside. Today’s effort was mango and habanero chutney. I used the recipe from here, with double the chillis of course, but had to guess when to put the mangos in. They probably should have proof read the recipe first!

Tastes really good! And a big, big kick, which is nice.

Now I just have to wait to get some nice white fish to try it with.

Update: Looking at the photo on the site I realise that it might look like a big pot of sick. It doesn’t in real life, and really doesn’t taste like it, honest!!

Having heard that it was on, it just wouldn’t have been right to miss it! The 2006 West Dean Gardens chilli festival!

The gardens themselves are down south from London, just out of Chichester. So we had a nice train ride through some countryside for a change, and then a bus ride though narrow country lanes. Makes a change from the tube every day! Probably took us about 2 and a bit hours to get there, but not a bad trip.

So what was there? A lot of people, all enjoying chilli related activity, and a heap of stalls with all sorts of chilli stuff, of course! Lots of sauces, hot (temperature and spice) food, plants, crockery, tea towels, cards etc., bands and beer and cider… And a lot of plants and seeds to buy. Managed to avoid buying too much though. Only came away with a lot of seeds for next year.

It was also nice to wander around the normal gardens though. There were massive vege gardens, glasshouses etc. to look as well as all the chillis. But it was all soooo dry! Brown bits of lawn, empty pools and ponds. All a bit sad, but not surprising given the extremely dry and hot summer!

Really nice sunny day out in the country. Good fun.