I couldn’t let the Jubilee go by without making a comment, especially given how much of an emphasis there was on celebrating with food – or maybe that’s just a reflection of the media channels I focus on 😉 And I’m quite unashamed to admit that this weekend has left me feeling surprisingly patriotic, and waving my wee plastic flag that was hidden in a bouquet I bought last week to brighten up the mantlepiece…
But well as celebrating, and thanking, Her Maj for all the hard work she’s done, the extra day off was a lovely excuse to get together with family. Hubby and I put together a cheeky finger buffet (mostly during the 3 hour Jubilee concert which made for a great soundtrack to cook to!) and carried it all up to my parents’ place today, where we were joined by my brother, his wife, and their beautiful 3 week old son.
Hubby’s EPIC sausage rolls and my Champagne chicken and tarragon vol au vents deserve a blog post of their own, but for now, I managed to snap a quick pic of the whole spread before my family of locusts descended on everything (I really should have taken an “after” picture… LOL!)
If you celebrated as well, I hope you had a marvellous time! Me, I’ll be eating plain boiled rice for the rest of the week to try and offset the damage done by today’s feast!
A break in the weather allowed fifi and I out this morning, and we decided to take advantage of the clear skies while they lasted. As it was a nice morning, and we were up early, we decided to take a trip to the Edinburgh Farmer’s Market.
I can’t say enough good things about the producers who sell and share their goods here, it’s all seriously good, top-quality, and best of all, locally produced stuff. From meat, fish and dairy, to fruits and vegetables, baking and sweets, juices, drinks, and other speciality products, there’s something for everyone. And don’t forget the whole hog roast while you’re there. Heaven on a bun!
But, I digress. I want to post today about a fantastic cheese I picked up at the market this morning. Let me preface this by saying that, while I love cheese of all kinds, I don’t tend to get excited about blue cheese. I enjoy it, don’t get me wrong, but it’s never grabbed me and said HEL-LO. Until now, that is.
I was browsing at the Arran’s Cheese Shop stall, and the lovely lady behind the counter was offering samples of everything she had on sale. Now, as fifi’s not a big cheese fan (she mumbles about it being a Chinese thing), I was certainly up for having a go. They had an award winning blue on offer, and I decided I’d try it.
Wow. Arran Blue – which I’ve since discovered seems to come from Arran’s Bellevue Creamery Cheeses, is one exciting cheese. It’s a rich, soft, young blue cheese with a reserved aroma that lacks a lot of the overly pungent (or stinky, as fifi would call it) smell of stronger blues. On the tongue there’s that first bite of salt that you expect from a good blue, and then it blooms with the wonderfully musty hint of the veining, and mellows into creamy happiness. Very moreish, very highly recommended.
I paired this with some fantastic oatcakes from Wooleys of Arran, but this would also be great in a salad, or crumbled onto a nicely-rare bit of steak. If you can find this, and you should, enjoy! It’s well worth seeking out.
So… It’s safe to say that I’m very much a newbie blogger, and as such have been a little shy about self promoting in the belief that there’s no point telling anyone this blog is here until there’s a respectable amount of stuff to look at (one recipe does not an interesting blog make!) After posting up my Haggis Spring Rolls recipe last weekend, I thought I’d tweet Macsween about it and hoped that, at best, they might like it enough to retweet me and I’d get a few more people popping by here.
Not only did the very very lovely people there retweet me, but they emailed me to say how much they liked the look of my spring rolls, and could they send me some of their delicious noms! To say I was giddy with glee at getting such a response (and offer!) is an understatement, the more so because I picked up the email after having a wisdom tooth taken out and it put a much needed grin on my poor sore face 🙂
And then the delicious noms arrived…
Look at the size of that box! And a lovely canvas bag too (Tim Minchin would be so proud!)
HOW much noms??
And a little bit of everything too! Variety is the spice of life!
Thank you again, Macsween! Like I didn’t already <3 you enough!
Hello there, and welcome to my little corner of the foodie blogosphere, and my husband’s wedding anniversary present to me! In all fairness, our anniversary was back in August, but I’ve been so paralysed by “first post anxiety” that it’s taken me until now to actually grab the blog by the horns and say my first something. That, and the increasingly sadder panda face that my husband turns on me when he checks here and finds it still unblogged…
So why another foodie blog? To be honest, I never set out to be a blogger, and I’m not sure that I will actually ever BE a proper blogger. What I am is a girl who loves to cook, and a foodie magazine addict. More than that, I’m a recipe-tearing-out foodie magazine addict! Only, torn-edged recipes are easily lost, not to mention easily splattered upon whilst following them. So the original fifigoesnom was less a blog and more a place to hold those recipes that the husband and I had tried and liked, or to share with friends the family recipes that I’d cooked for them and they wanted to try themselves. And then my very lovely husband decided to surprise me on our wedding anniversary with my own domain name for fifigoesnom so that I could actually try this blogging thing properly.
So here I am! And here you are! Hello! And welcome! Again!
The plan, as much as there is one, is to try out those magazine and cookbook recipes and see if they really taste as good as they look (because sometimes they really really don’t…) and to share the best ones with anyone who happens by. I don’t know about you, but I’m always on the lookout for a little bit of kitchen inspiration, and hopefully that’s what you’ll find here.
Tried and tested by fifigoesnom! That pretty much sums up this little blog’s raison d’etre 🙂
ps – “fifi goes nom!” is my happy shout out at home when my husband has made something particularly tasty, which is most of the time to be honest as he’s an insanely good cook and now that I think about it should probably be the one blogging about food, not me… the tricksy hobbit!!
