Chinese Nar-duls!

I'm a rice girl at heart but over the last week I've really craved noodles. But not just any old noodles. Chinese nar-duls! I've cooked chow mein dishes three times over the last week and am still hungry for more:

I haven't cooked chow mein for absolutely ages because it's just one of those things I never stock up on. The last couple of times I've eaten chow mein has admittedly been from Chinese takeaways and both times I was pretty disappointed with the result (I really don't know why I fail to learn from my mistakes). So after finally buying a 12-pack of chow mein, I've been chomping my way through them and each time I marvel at the fresh taste you get that you simply cannot find in greasy takeaways. None of that salt and overload of sauce please!

As my post-Aikido snack on a Tuesday night, I usually have noodles, because I am always so hungry after class. Since it starts at 8pm, I tend to eat some toast after work and nothing more, to keep me feeling light for training.

I don't even bother with my beans on toast ritual anymore - it's all about the noodles now! I always have a ready supply of good ol' Tesco's value noodles (8p a pack!) to fulfil my post-Aikido needs.

Back at uni, my parents used to stock me up with Chinese instant noodles - similar to the Tesco's ones (but better, obviously!). You basically just add hot water and the seasoning sachet and 3 minutes later, you have tasty, steaming noodles in soup. One of my old housemates Dan used to say that it smelt like dog food! Strangely enough, that was only when I had the seafood flavoured one. When I was younger, I called them 'Curly' because they are, well, curly. My friend Sam called them 'Curly wurly'!

The particular brand we used to have has different coloured packets for different flavours - I picked up the brown packet a lot (you guessed it, beef flavour)! It was so funny when we made trips to Wing Yip in London (massive Chinese supermarket). My sister and I would be rather bored following our parents up and down the aisles, but as soon as we got to the noodles, it would be 'our turn' and we'd grab all the noodles!

Mm, now I'm craving 'curly'! I will have to pick some up next time I go to Chinatown. Actually, I'm in Brighton this weekend so might pop into the Chinese supermarket there... Continue reading this post..

I talk about meat WAY too much...

...so I'm going to appreciate a nice veggie dish for a change:

This is the 'Mezze' from the Slug and Lettuce. Warm ciabatta strips with herby oil, served with olives; sun-blushed tomato; fresh Italian mozzarella; falafel; brie and red pepper crostini; guacamole; tzatziki – with carrot, cucumber and pepper dipping crudités.

Ok, I own up - I didn't eat this at all. My other workmates shared this between them and I found the description from the Slug website.

(I had a bacon and egg baguette.)

It's not as common as it sounds (maybe a bit, compared to the 'Mezze') - I'm sure it had a posher name but they don't do this anymore which is a shame. A real shame because I didn't get to take a photo of it to show you how beautiful and ungreasy-spoon-cafe-like it was!

But I'm so ignorant about veggie food, it's really starting to bother me. I've noticed it since writing this blog and looking through my photos to discover the lack of meat-free goodness. I'm no carnivore! (Well I am, really).

And it's not like I don't eat vegetables because I love them! I was in Hong Kong for Christmas 2006 and we went to 25 restaurants in 10 days (my family enjoy food too). The funny thing was that my favourite meal during the holiday was when we went to the Po Lin Monastery, where only vegetarian food is served. I think I was also just grateful because there was so much meat to be had at all the other meals!

So what I'm talking about is my ignorance towards proper vegetarian dishes - I've never really tried them. And to be honest, I've rarely taken them into consideration when looking at menu choices. I immediately skip over them. It's not good for me to do that really, is it?

This meat-ban is going to be good for me I feel. Continue reading this post..

Training course = free food

Some training courses are voluntary and really useful, such as the one I went to back in August for a public speaking course.

Other training courses are voluntary and make you wonder why you bothered signing up, like the 'Life Planning workshop' I attended, and realised I still can't get excited or motivated about pensions and wills.

Then there are large corporate meetings that are compulsory. You sit there wide-eyed with good intention, in the hope of absorbing at least a nugget of information that will help you to understand just what those numbers mean.

So guess what makes them all worth it, in any scenario?

The free food of course! Those cute triangle sandwiches, mini spring rolls, tortilla chips, cheese bites, little quiches, tropical fruits, and best of all, cocktail sausages on sticks :-)

And for some reason, the more mundane the meeting/course, the better the food. Or maybe that's because you are just grateful that there's a light at the end of the tunnel by the time it's all over.

Obviously, I've wanted to take photos of these delicious buffets that we are presented with at such occasions. However, I do set my limits of food-photo-snapping-frenzy when there is a crowd of people swarming over masses of food. I don't want to accidentally knock a plate out of someone's hands and, as I scrabble about to scoop up the food, look up to see the president of the company or something! Now that would be a career faux-pas.

But I seized my opportunity at last on Tuesday at a copywriting course for work. There were about 10 of us and I think half of them knew about my blog anyway. Of sorts. It still didn't feel right to shout to everyone to 'HOLD IT!' as they all reached out for the platters of food. So instead, I piled up my plate and snuck off to take these:

Of course, having all of those sarnies on my plate at once made me look slightly greedy but if you think about it, four of those little triangle sandwiches makes up one normal sandwich anyway.

You would have justified it in the same way, admit it! Continue reading this post..

Toby Carvery - Round Two

Not that I'm obsessed or anything but I went to another Toby Carvery yesterday - and yes, it was only £5 again! Wonders never cease. I don't know what it is about this place that makes me want to try the whole chain of them. I will accomplish this one day.

Well I didn't go out of my way or anything just to go to this one (though it was obviously what I was looking forward to the most). The other day, I received a text from Matt saying 'I found another Toby Carvery!' It turns out that his sister (who moved to Portsmouth recently), leaves practically next door to it.

So Matt and I decided to go shopping for the day in Portsmouth and sample the Toby Carvery for dinner. On the train, he told me it was actually in Hilsea. Eh? Now my geographical knowledge is about the same as what I know about vegetarian food. I like to think I have a vague idea but in all honesty, I just don't have a clue.

Hilsea is part of Portsmouth but a bit too far to walk to from the centre apparently. That's not what I like to hear - I don't get taxis in the daytime out of principal (I won't bore you with that!) and buses make me a little nervous because you just don't know where they're going.

Suddenly, the cheap-and-more-than-cheerful-dinner-after-shopping plan was looking like something I'm not a fan of - wandering around aimlessly looking for something that you really want.

We decided to get a train to Hilsea and hope people would be around to give us directions. A quick call to Matt's mum gave us a vague direction to head towards - West. And no, his sister didn't know where the station was from her house either!

Arriving at the quiet station, we saw a ticket man, and thought, great, we'll ask him! As we walked towards him, he suddenly hopped back onto the train - damn, he wasn't working on the platform!

So we headed West and looked out for signs. We passed a road called 'Green Farm Road' - ok, that sounded a bit like 'Farmside Gardens', the road Matt's sister lives on. But not quite. Then we found this:

Surely this meant we were heading in the right direction? Two minutes, we realised we most certainly were:

Of course, since Toby Carvery is a chain, you'd expect the standard of food to be exactly the same. And it was as yummy as I remembered from before:

One big difference I noticed was that they didn't give you much meat at all. (Well, by my greedy standards anyway!) I wasn't complaining though because I topped up on lots of sides as you can see. And I was so stuffed that I didn't go up for seconds! A first for me at a carvery I think ;-)

Continue reading this post..

New Look Hungry Jenny

Right, for a while now I've been trying to get a new logo designed. It was sort of finished a week or so ago but I hadn't done anything with it because I wanted to revamp the site to match it.



So the above is the original design but since I don't know CSS (and will never get round to working out how to do it), I didn't want to just stick this onto the original design of the site which was dark blue with spots. Would be quite a clash in colour scheme I feel!

Instead, I've just found another template which is what you see now. I'm still undecided about it and thinking it might be overkill with the pink. I'm going to leave it for a few days now and see how I feel about it.

This of course now has led me to change the colours on the logo, which just doesn't seem to have the same impact:

Okay, so what you see in the current header at the top of my site is not the above. I quite like the header actually. But this logo design here is for a different reason. This will be my new business card, once I've finished faffing around with the colours and what-not.

A Hungry Jenny business card? What am I going to do with that? Well, on the back will be:

or...

There's an ulterior motive for having a card (to be revealed another day when I get round to it) but for now, I'm wondering whether it will be okay to have a different colour for my card and another for my actual blog design. I'm not keen on the pale pink version of the card but don't think the fushia would work for the blog design. It's a bit of a weird circle!

Let me know your thoughts...





...but of course, if I've just confused you with all this pinkness, feel free to ignore me.

Continue reading this post..

The 8-THOUSAND calorie cake

Holy Mother of Oreos, is that a cake?

Now I'm no calorie-bible basher, reeling off calorie numbers when so much as a crumb of a biscuit enters someone's mouth, but I could not believe my ears when I heard about this 8,000 calorie cake. Yes, 8 THOUSAND. That sounds like rather a lot.

This is an Oreo version of the 'Ultimate Chocolate Cake' from the BBC Good Food website that my workmate Sarah made for her barbecue last weekend. I have never seen a cake so big.

Well actually, I have, because Sarah whips these big-boy desserts up all the time:

Of course, everyone knows that calories don't actually exist and are not really an accurate measure of how 'healthy' or 'bad' something is.

What? You didn't know? Keep up, it's all in the FAT and SUGAR. Ah, it all makes sense now doesn't it? And of course, no-one could manage to eat a whole cake of that size (if someone could, I would run away from them because they might eat you next) - so the fact that it's an 8,000 calorie cake isn't relevant really is it?

So eat away, my sweet-toothed friends! Continue reading this post..

Meat or Sweet?

My workmate Sarah had a barbecue last Saturday and it's starting to make me realise what I'm going to miss during that month before Christmas...

To be fair, the photos here of barbecued meat are not going to sway the minds of any vegetarian. But if you taste it like I can from the photo, you might see where I'm coming from.

What I'm looking forward to is having my eyes opened to what constitutes a main dish for a vegetarian. I've always had vegetables and the like to be an accompaniment to meat - yes, even consider these huge haloumi kebabs!

What I seemed to notice though was that once the food was served and everyone grabbed what they wanted, no-one really went back for more. Granted, most of the meat had gone but the conversations swiftly moved onto desserts.

Sarah had prepared some mammoth treats for us and started to clear the remains left on the table: 'Does anyone want the last burger?' In the midst of devouring my second hot dog, I turned to Matt and asked if I would appear lardy by saying 'yes' - but I already knew the answer and carried on quietly a-munching.

I'll admit, the desserts were so well presented (so much so that I've given them their own post), that they would beat this chargrilled meat hands-down in any photo contest. But I've always been a starters-and-mains person and so couldn't quite understand what all the fuss was about. In the end, I only managed a tiny bit of lemon tart (too tangy for my buds!) and two bites of chocolate cake (too sweet!). I'm not criticising the cook at all - I guess I just have a meat tooth, not a sweet tooth. Continue reading this post..

Hungrier Jemma

I realised this when my sister came to visit me but I've met my food-photo match. Even though she was still full from another roast we had that day (as was I!), she was scheming ways to sneak an extra yorkshire pudding onto her plate! She didn't in the end but it still made me laugh as I can totally relate to her thinking ;-)

People are starting to get used to me whipping my camera out wherever food is present. Some get embarrassed, others are unfazed. Though I don't hold up the whole table by taking a picture of EVERYONE'S dish. Except if they all look tasty and I know they won't mind. (The dishes, not the people obviously) I'm quick as a flash now, snapping a picture and then digging into the food.

But my sister has a different approach...

...and takes a photo at EVERY stage! Sorry that these images aren't very sharp, as they were taken on a phone:

I like how there is quite a lot of food on the plate here...

...then hardly anything here! Someone got carried away with eating I think...

And only my sister would wave off a good meal having consumed every last bite...

My sister, ladies and gentlemen, Hungrier Jemma!
Continue reading this post..

Too chicken to go veggie?

Okay, so it was over a month ago now when I announced that I would give up the mighty meatiness for a month to see what it would be like. Since then, I've eaten pies and roast meats of sorts and some people have now been asking if I'm still going to do it. Am I putting it off? Am I unable to face the prospect of a meat-free month? Or have I secretly changed my mind?

Woah, hold your horses! (And your pigs, cows, chickens and ducks) I have not forgotten or changed my mind at all...

I've been thinking carefully about the right time to do it and by golly I've got it - the 4 weeks leading up to Christmas. I'll admit, the first thought that led me to this decision was the vision of finishing the veggie madness with a gorgeous homemade meaty Christmas dinner. BUT, it is during this festive season that I'm more likely to dine out and thus it will truly test my ability to steer clear of the meat.

There's probably something quite wrong about ending a meat-free month with the most indulgent meal of the year but I still think this is the best time. I was having second thoughts when I realised the other day that there will inevitably be less choice on the festive menus during those work and social dinners for veggies. However, that will probably be the case anyway! I love reading menus and how the descriptions just make your mouth water. I almost always skip over vegetarian options though, simply because I like to try different meats. Also, at home, I tend to cook only chicken or beef mince (minced beef? No, it's BEEF mince!) so I like being able to eat a 'proper' meat dish when I can.

But hey, I'm pretty open-minded when it comes to food and am actually looking forward to only having the vegetarian options. I'm sure it will open my eyes to a whole new world.

Not for another 11 weeks though.

Continue reading this post..

Guest photo: The Real McCoy of Chips n Gravy

My old college buddy Jo recently sent me a photo of something that I really want to try:

Jo told me that this is 'poutine', which originated in Quebec and is really popular as fast food. Fries are put on first, then cheese curds, followed by a special gravy. Apparently, the mark of a good poutine gravy is being able to stand a fork up in it! Jo got hold of some poutine gravy mix in Montreal (this girl is always abroad!) and so was able to make her own version which is the pic above (albeit with normal English cheese!).

Ok, I'll admit, it does look rather questionable. But that depends on your thoughts on the whole chips and gravy concept. I loved it when I was younger - we used to live in a chip shop (well our house was joined onto it obviously, I didn't sleep on the shop floor or anything) and one of my favourite 'English' meals was my mum's steak with chips and gravy from the shop. Mm, my stomach just sighed at the memory...

The following picture I found of an authentic Poutine dish probably won't help sway those undecided to be honest...

Photo by Sjschen

It kind of looks like cut-up fried egg on chips doesn't it? But anyhow, I bet that if you just closed your eyes whilst eating this, it would make the perfect hangover cure ;-)

Jo has promised to save a packet of the gravy mix for when I come back to Luton at Christmas so that I can sample it. I'll be sure to post back my verdict! Continue reading this post..

When Dreams Don't Come True...

I had a very strange dream this morning. For some reason, there was a blackout in Chichester so I decided to go into town for dinner because nothing in my house was working. I went into this medieval-like banquet place (it has those long tables and benches). The place was quite empty and I was on my own, so just sat on the end.

Can't remember exactly what I had for my mains but there was a big turkey drumstick for sure! I ordered some apple crumble (the one you get in Zizzi/Prezzo), then wandered outside for a walk whilst waiting. Because it was pitch black outside of course, I had trouble finding the restaurant again. In the end, it was behind these massive black curtains.

When I went back in, the place was full of people eating away merrily! I got back to my seat, wondering where my dessert was. Everyone else was scoffing their faces infront of me - one man had three large rare steaks piled on top of each other, and was ripping it apart to eat! Another lady was eating garlic bread. Someone else had a plate of mandarins and was dipping them into chocolate - she offered some to me as she could see I was waiting for my food.

It wasn't enough though and when an apple crumble arrived for somebody else, I went over to the waiter (who was curled around one of the table legs) and asked when it was coming...

Then I woke up!

Now I'll never know if I was able to eat that lovely apple crumble...

Continue reading this post..

Here's the Mango!

For some reason, this has been in my head all day...



Now it's in your head too! Continue reading this post..