Pinoy Hubby

I've been trying to use up the contents of my freezer so I can fit my ice cream maker inside! It's been quite interesting as I've made a list of everything in there and intend to cross it off and add to it - no more rummaging wondering whether we have any more chicken breasts, or telling my fiancé there is no garlic bread left and then finding some the next day (sorry!). It's also meant I don't have to buy as much as there is more food in there than I thought! One thing I came across was a packet of cubed beef. My fiancé loves steak but isn't as keen on beef when it's casseroled but this sort of cubed beef really is best in the slow cooker. Rather than do a traditional casserole though I wondered if I could make it into a curry, and found this recipe from BBC Good Food for Thai Beef curry. I used red chilli rather than green as that's what I had in the fridge, and I already had some galangal from when I made a Thai curry from scratch after doing a cooke

Only three weeks until the wedding - eek! Monday - bank holiday though the weather is not meant to be good so we can't barbecue Lunch : bacon sandwich (his favourite and I will buy some nice fresh bread) Dinner: I am still meaning to  make dessert: avocado and chocolate mousse from I Quit Sugar (he can have ice cream!) Tuesday Lunch : salad Dinner : I will probably have to take a sandwich as I'm off to a local pool for a snorkelling/scuba diving lesson. I don't expect to be doing the latter but the former will definitely be a feature of our honeymoon but I've never done it before and am terrified! I thought having a practice in a pool to get used to the mask and breathing tube would be a good idea before we head to the Galapagos Islands! Wednesday Lunch : salad Dinner : I'll have salmon with cauliflower mash from the freezer and broccoli, he can have chicken and mashed potato. Thursday - I'm working from home Lunch : quinoa risotto Dinner : spiralized veg with

Last week my friends D and J invited us to their house for a barbecue and to meet their new baby son. It was also J's birthday the following week and the first time we had been to their house since we moved there, so I decided to take some celebratory cupcakes as well as some food to go on the barbecue. I wanted something a little bit unusual and also quite summery and as I've made some great recipes lately from my Hummingbird Bakery book Home Sweet Home, I had another look and decided their Eton Mess cupcakes sounded great. Eton Mess is a dessert involving strawberries, cream and pieces of meringue, broken up and mixed together. I was a bit surprised to see the recipe involved making a custard, since that isn't normally part of the dessert. I wasn't going to have a lot of time to make the cakes and the custard part looked like it would take a while, so I decided to leave it out and just make a creamy buttercream instead. As well as the strawberries that you can see on

  The third element of my recent hen night that I wanted to write about was the meal we had at  Redfearns  restaurant in Wincanton. It's a fairly small Thai restaurant that was very kind to us in terms of giving us a big table and not minding that we were the last people there!   Wincanton is an old market town in Somerset; I'd never been there before and to be honest all we really saw was between where we parked the car and walked up to the restaurant, but it did look quite pretty!   Redfearns' menu wasn't that big with only six main courses – when I go to Thai restaurants normally I’m used to having a lot of choice! They did have a Phad Thai which is my go-to Thai meal and I was going to order it, but the rest of the group wanted the tasting set menu, and everyone in the party has to order that. I was too busy chatting and enjoying myself to really mind either way so went along with the set menu, and realised afterwards there wasn't actually that much in it that I

I had a few card toppers left over from a cheap craft pack that I didn't know what to do with. They were in the shape of presents, and quite large - they would almost certainly dominate a card - and they just didn't look right on their own, on a patterned paper background. I hit upon the idea of using one of my sentiments rubber stamps - it has the words 'happy birthday' on a rectangular stamp, repeated four or five times in different fonts. I decided to stamp this several times over a square blue card blank to create a background that wouldn't clash with the present die cuts but that was more interesting than leaving it plain. It's certainly not a spectacular card but quite fun and is a quick and easy make if you haven't got much time.

Sometimes you want a proper dessert but really quickly - something that you can literally put together in five minutes after dinner. Mug cakes are really good for this, or here's another idea I came up with (quite a while ago, pre-wedding diet!) from just looking at what I had in the house. I broke up some chocolate digestive biscuits and put the pieces into the bottom of two serving glasses. I melted some milk chocolate in the microwave and mixed it with double cream to create a ganache I spooned this on top of the broken biscuits, and drizzled over some Choc Shot liquid chocolate And here you go - a deconstructed chocolate cheesecake (of sorts ) that only took five minutes to make, involved no cooking other than the microwave, and tastes delicious! I'm sending this to Credit Crunch Munch. This month the challenge is hosted by Michelle at Utterly Scrummy and was devised by Helen and Camilla.

After my alpaca walking experience, my 'hens' and I went on to the Holbrook House Hotel in Wincanton, Somerset. The rest of the hen weekend consisted of drinking wine, dinner with some games and more wine, then back in the hotel and more wine, and then a well deserved spa day and massage the next day. I'd had no idea where we were going so was surprised when we crossed into Somerset, but it wasn't actually far from the alpaca place in Dorset. Holbrook House is a Georgian-style country house hotel set in 20 acres of woodlands and was very pretty, as you can see from the picture above. The rooms were spacious - I shared a double with my sister - and apparently not a bad price either though as the bride I wasn't allowed to pay. The bathroom in our room was also really nice with White Company toiletries. This was the view from my window:   The spa was excellent, with two treatment rooms - I had an aromatherapy massage - a pool, Jacuzzi and steam room. The only thing I

On Friday and Saturday temperature is expected to be around 21 but showers are forecast. I have some barbecue food in the freezer that needs to be defrosted before it can be eaten which is why it's annoying that we haven't had a good enough weather forecast for a couple of weeks for me to know we are definitely going to eat out! So I will defrost something and then either switch around the menu or cook it in the oven if we have to! My weight loss has been really helped by eating spiralized vegetable stir-fries I think. I don't normally like repetitive meals but with only a few weeks to go until I get married, if it's working I'm going to stick to it! I think there's something about the fact that it takes longer to eat that you feel more full. Monday Dinner - working late, will probably have to grab something from Tesco on the way home Tuesday - my fiancé's mum's birthday - we are having a takeaway at her house Wednesday - spiralized veg stir fry with som

   I wouldn't say I'm alpaca-mad... I just have an alpaca cuddly toy, an alpaca hat, a scarf made from alpaca wool, alpaca writing paper, stickers and post-it notes, and a bag that says "alpaca bag" (geddit?). Oh and some alpaca cookie cutters.   So it perhaps wasn't surprising that when my friends and my sister came to organise my hen night that they decided alpacas should be involved! There's a place very close to my wedding venue called Alpaca Adventure , run by the very hard-working Wendy (and I think her husband) who has a full time day job as well as running a farm with over 30 alpaca plus sheep, hens and a pig. She takes the alpacas to competitions and has won several rosettes for effectively 'best in class' and sells the wool to a mill which uses it to make clothing.   She also does alpaca walking, which means you can basically go and walk an alpaca round a field on a lead. It sounds a bit random, and perhaps it is, but it's great fun!   F

My low sugar diet also means low carb, as the starch and glucose in potatoes raises your blood sugar, so I've been looking for some good alternatives. I like cauliflower and wondered if I could make a fish pie and put mashed cauli on top, and found a few recipes online doing just that. I followed this recipe for the cauliflower puree but I couldn't get mine smooth enough; I think if I had cooked the cauli for longer so it was softer that might have been better. I wouldn't have thought to add cheese and cream into it as well; it was quite nice, though to be honest I would have preferred mashed potato! For the fish pie, I cooked a mixture of fish - I think I had white fish, salmon and smoked mackerel, and added some chopped leaks and made a white sauce. I put it in a pie dish, spread the cauliflower mash over the top and popped it in the oven to brown. Here you can see the fish and the topping. This felt like a very virtuous recipe and is good if you're cutting down on p

  When I made my fiancé this chocolate birthday cake from the Outsider Tart cookery book the quantities given were so large that it made three big layers. I didn't need the cake to be that big so I put one of the layers in the freezer, and used it a few weeks later when I wanted a cake to take into work. The cake broke a little while it was defrosting but otherwise was absolutely fine - this is a really good cake that includes Coca-Cola in the mixture!   I made some chocolate buttercream which I spread on the top and around the side of the cake. It does look a bit messy at the moment, but that won't matter! To decorate this cake I decided to use up some things I had in the cupboard. I wanted to use things up and I also didn't have much time - we'd gotten back from a weekend away in Wiltshire and I only had the evening to do it before work the next day, and as we'd been away all weekend I had a lot of other things I needed to do! I had some white chocolate fingers