Celebrating Chinese New Year

I feel like this post could be alternately called "Here are a lot of pictures of fireworks"

Last Sunday, my friend Kathleen and I met up in Manchester's China Town for Chinese New Year Celebrations.We weren't able to get there for the big parade but we had fun watching the fireworks and wondering around the stalls.
Snow  had been forecast, none actually fell in Manchester but it was bitterly cold, we had to keep popping in to cafés to have a drink and warm up. All the restaurants around China Town were really full so we ended up eating Korean food which was quite exciting.

 

 

Fire Safety workers

 

 It was a really fun celebration, very, very cold and busy but really nice to be with so many people celebrating and having a good time.

 

It's Pancake day!

I loved Maid Marion and her merry men and this episode is perfect for today. I'll be eating lots and lots of pancakes this evening because it's Shrove Tuesday.
I very much enjoy any festival that has a specific food connected to it!
What do you have with your pancakes? the traditional lemon and sugar? golden syrup? Nutella and bananas?
In case you want a bit of variety from very sweet pancakes, I'm sharing my spinach, pesto pancake recipe. We'll probably have these and then quite a few sweet ones too!


I'm a bit vague with my recipes, things usually turn out fine
Spinach Pesto Pancakes
(makes about 10)
125g plain flour
2 eggs
300ml milk
40g (ish) finely chopped spinach, frozen or fresh (I tend to use 4 or 5 bricks of frozen)
 2 tsp pesto
Oil or butter for frying

Sieve the flour into a bowl, make a hollow in the middle. Separately whisk the eggs with a small amount of milk, add this to the flour and combine. When this is fully mixed add the rest of the milk and whisk until smooth. Add the spinach (I tend to use frozen for this as it's usually chopped finely) and a couple of spoons of pesto, Leave to rest (if you've got time) for about an hour

Heat the oil or butter in a large frying pan. Each pancake will be 2 tbsp (about half a ladle) of batter as this is quite a liquid mixture, swirl the batter around the pan to form an even layer. The pancake should be thin and slightly crispy around the edges, flip it using a spatula to loosen.

Fruity February

I've finished my first week of 10 fruit and vegetable portions challenge.
In some ways it's not been too tricky, I do tend to eat quite a lot of fruit and veg and as I'm vegetarian there's always veg in all my meals. I have on a couple of occasions found myself eating a late night apple or pomegranate or spinach soup to try and make a better total though!

This is what I've been eating.
1st )   1 apple, 2 bananas, 1 portion of strawberries, 1 onion, plenty of spinach, half a courgette, home made soup (2 portions), celery =10
2nd)   strawberries, banana, raisins, soup(2), lychees, mushrooms, tomatoes, spinach, sweetcorn, spring onion =11
3rd)   soup (2), big salad(3), beans, lychees, apple = 8
4th)   strawberries, banana, raisins, soup(3) pomegranate, stew with kale, tomatoes, courgette, spinach, onions, beans and peppers = 11
5th)   2 apples, 2 bananas, soup(1), raspberries, courgette, pepper, tomatoes, mushroom, onion =11
6th)  2 apples, banana, 2 oranges, soup (2) veg noodles(1) strawberries =9
7th) strawberries, 2 bananas, raisins, 2 apples, soup(2) aubergine, tomatoes = 10

I eat a lot of soup, in fact I've had soup every single day this week. This is for two reasons, firstly I had a rather painful and not exactly successful trip to the dentist on the 1st that is still bothering me and secondly, it is very easy for me to put a tin of soup in my bag for lunch every day which means I don't have to do any preparation for my lunch. As I've been having tinned soup I've put the number of veg contained in the soup next to it, most of the soup we buy says "Contains 2 of your 5 a day" or sometimes 1 or 3, I'm not too sure about these claims but I'll count it here.

I am starting to feel fuller most of the time and I've noticed that I'm choosing to eat fruit a lot of the time instead of chocolate or biscuits, I'll how long that lasts though!

Bright colours and fun!

1)
I've been having lots of slightly daft fun recently, writing letters and decorating envelopes to send to friends. I rediscovered my stash of stickers from 90's pop magazines. I hope my friends are appreciative!
2&3)
Hanging strands of beads at the Creative Stitches and Hobby Crafts show that I visited this weekend with my mum. I don't really have a huge need for more beads but the beads looked so bright and cheerful hanging together in order that I may have purchased a few
4)
Here's a slightly fuzzy picture of me under the sea, under a knitted and crocheted and needle felted sea. This amazing installation is being used to raise money for the RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institution). I'll be sharing more pictures of this.

Raising Money

Fundraising events 2013 from Christians Against Poverty on Vimeo.

A lot of my friends work for charities. Quite a few for this charity, Christians Against Poverty (CAP). CAP is a debt counselling and financial advocacy charity that is based in Bradford where I used to live. They do a great job helping people to get out of debt and learn how to manage their finances. I thought this was a pretty fun video.
I also have friends organising climbs up Mt Kilimanjaro, running marathons, co-ordinating large scale collections for refugees and taking part in round the world sailing events.

I've been thinking quite a lot about Charity recently and I'll have more to say in future posts but I really love how many people are getting involved and doing things to try and change things for the better

My first Outfit post (contains hedgehogs!)

 

 I've been planning to take some outfit pictures for ages but it's a bit trickier to get pictures of myself than of anything else. These were taken using the self timer while having my camera cunningly placed on top of  our bin. They're not super perfect but I feel like it's a promising start, perhaps next time I'll manage to get my feet in?

 

 This heavy wool cardi was my Granny's. I love it. It's really warm and cosy and pretty awesome, it's actually navy not black as it looks here. I need to sew on some of the fastenings as they've come off
My hedgehog t shirt is new and from People Tree. I'm also wearing a plain black jersey dress from h+m, black leggings and brown vintage boots.
I tried to take a picture of my boots as they have a really sweet bow at the back but couldn't get anything to come out clearly.

Fruity (and Vegetabley) February

I'm setting myself a challenge this month.
I know I'm a month too late for a New Year's resolution but this is more of a month long goal and as February is the shortest month, it seems like good timing.
I've still been eating all the fatty, sugary, junky food I have as treats at Christmas all the time in January. This is not super great for me! I'm not particularly planning to loose weight or "drop a dress size" I just need to be a bit more mindful when I eat and not just inhale a "sharing size" bag of chocolate because I'm bored.

My challenge is to eat 10 portions of fruit and veg a day. 

 I know the usual advice in the UK is to have 5 portions a day but that's based on minimum recommendations of 400g of fruit and veg daily from the World Health Organisation. I wanted to make this a real challenge for myself, I think I generally do ok with 5 portions also, really I could still have 5 portions and eat lots of junk and not feel too full, 10 portions is the normal recommendation in France so I'm going to see how easy it is!( In Japan it's 13 veg and 4 fruit portions!)

Pictures of market stalls in Pisa and Rome taken while I was living in Rome in 2011

I'll be following these NHS guidelines to work out how much I need to eat and trying to get as much variety as possible. I'm pretty excited to see how feasible this is and to see if I notice any effects from increasing my fruit and veg intake.

Does anyone have any advice, recipes or feel like joining in? I'd love to hear from you.