Bob is sleeping next to me
Thanks to everyone who wished me good luck with my beekeeping exam. It didn't go too badly, not perfect but I answered most of the questions and the bees didn't go mental and sting me.
I made a blog post about it: http://adventuresinbeeland.wordpress.com
Haven't yet written about an amazing meal out Drew and I had two weeks ago today, called 'The History of Food', held by London jellymongers Bombas & Parr.
For £25 each we had a meal and cocktails through the ages in various rooms within an enormous London townhouse which they'd rented out. They let people in small groups for pre-booked time slots. We began in a candlelit Victorian style library with a young gentleman in a tweed suit who diagnosed our humor for us - not our sense of humour but which of thefour humors was most present in our bodies. I decided I was melancholic, which means I have too much black bile inside me (I find it amazing that people believed this crap up to the mid-twentieth century!). We got given a different colour sticker according to which humor we were.
We were then ushered through to a corridor and told we would be walking a plank over a swamp of alligators, and women with high heels on should remove them in case they toppled in. We went over a narrow walkway over water, though I didn't see any creatures within. Our destination was a bar within a mock boat, where we were served a medieval cocktail and amuse-bouche. I got a spiced-mead cocktail with a figgy snack, which I enjoyed.
Next we took a lift right up to the top of the building, a tiny roof garden overlooking London. A waitress handed us a duck foie gras ball rolled in gold leaf. I hadn't eaten foie gras before as I think it's quite cruel, and I won't eat it again as now I also think it tastes disgusting, like the richest yuckiest thing possible. Luckily we were also given a champagne cocktail with a fizzy grape, which was nice to sip in the evening sun as we enjoyed the view.
Onto the 1950s and a scratch n sniff TV dinner of chicken, chips, peas and strawberry pudding, the different smells were distinguishable but not very satisfying! To work off our 'dinner' came something I really, really hadn't expected. We were told to remove our shoes and climb through a small gap into... only an inflatable stomach shaped bouncy castle! Pure joy followed as we bounced around it. I mean, how often do you go out for dinner and get to jump around a bouncy castle first? It was immense!
After the attendants called us out, we travelled through a foam mushroom corridor to the real dinner, duck leg with puy lentils and a black champagne sauce while we sat inside a giant mould of an iguanodon dinosaur. It tasted great. The pudding course was served from an giant revolving wedding cake stand decorated with incredibly intricate pink and peachy coloured sugar sculptures of things like boats, windmills, birds and teapots, and was not your average pudding either. It was iris jelly with ambergris posset, ambergris being of course whale vomit, more specifically a substance produced in the digestive systems of sperm whales to ease the passage of hard sharp object like giant squid's beaks and then vomited out by the whale if it is in too big a mass to go out through its anus. It tasted pretty nice, but at least one person was obviously a bit freaked out by it...
I made a blog post about it: http://adventuresinbeeland.wordpress.com
Haven't yet written about an amazing meal out Drew and I had two weeks ago today, called 'The History of Food', held by London jellymongers Bombas & Parr.
For £25 each we had a meal and cocktails through the ages in various rooms within an enormous London townhouse which they'd rented out. They let people in small groups for pre-booked time slots. We began in a candlelit Victorian style library with a young gentleman in a tweed suit who diagnosed our humor for us - not our sense of humour but which of thefour humors was most present in our bodies. I decided I was melancholic, which means I have too much black bile inside me (I find it amazing that people believed this crap up to the mid-twentieth century!). We got given a different colour sticker according to which humor we were.
We were then ushered through to a corridor and told we would be walking a plank over a swamp of alligators, and women with high heels on should remove them in case they toppled in. We went over a narrow walkway over water, though I didn't see any creatures within. Our destination was a bar within a mock boat, where we were served a medieval cocktail and amuse-bouche. I got a spiced-mead cocktail with a figgy snack, which I enjoyed.
Next we took a lift right up to the top of the building, a tiny roof garden overlooking London. A waitress handed us a duck foie gras ball rolled in gold leaf. I hadn't eaten foie gras before as I think it's quite cruel, and I won't eat it again as now I also think it tastes disgusting, like the richest yuckiest thing possible. Luckily we were also given a champagne cocktail with a fizzy grape, which was nice to sip in the evening sun as we enjoyed the view.
Onto the 1950s and a scratch n sniff TV dinner of chicken, chips, peas and strawberry pudding, the different smells were distinguishable but not very satisfying! To work off our 'dinner' came something I really, really hadn't expected. We were told to remove our shoes and climb through a small gap into... only an inflatable stomach shaped bouncy castle! Pure joy followed as we bounced around it. I mean, how often do you go out for dinner and get to jump around a bouncy castle first? It was immense!
After the attendants called us out, we travelled through a foam mushroom corridor to the real dinner, duck leg with puy lentils and a black champagne sauce while we sat inside a giant mould of an iguanodon dinosaur. It tasted great. The pudding course was served from an giant revolving wedding cake stand decorated with incredibly intricate pink and peachy coloured sugar sculptures of things like boats, windmills, birds and teapots, and was not your average pudding either. It was iris jelly with ambergris posset, ambergris being of course whale vomit, more specifically a substance produced in the digestive systems of sperm whales to ease the passage of hard sharp object like giant squid's beaks and then vomited out by the whale if it is in too big a mass to go out through its anus. It tasted pretty nice, but at least one person was obviously a bit freaked out by it...