Pimped Toast and Soft-Boiled Eggs

For several days now I've been craving soft-boiled eggs, so thought I'd have them for my tea tonight.  Except I didn't fancy just boring buttered toast with them.  So the easiest way to jazz toast up?  Flavoured butter!

After mixing, doesn't look too good but tastes 'Gr-r-reat'!

I made a seasoned chilli and garlic butter.  Sounds delish doesn't it!  To make it was very easy.  Take some butter, season well with salt and pepper, add dried chilli flakes and finely chopped garlic to taste.  And I mean finely, Michelin star quality chopping required here!  I ended up using a whole clove of garlic.  Mix thoroughly, and voilà  you have the perfect condiment to raise your hot-buttered toast to the next level!

Yum!!!

This butter was lovely on the toast, and went with the eggs perfectly.  Now I'm thinking what other flavoured butters I can try...

Banana and Almond cake

Today I noticed two, very ripe bananas, in fact so ripe they were weeping as they'd been left 'on the shelf' (cue tumbleweed).

Instead of being healthy and whipping them up into smoothies, I decided to make this instead (from the Great British Bake Off 'How to Bake' book).

I followed the recipe to the 't' except that I only added 200g of sugar instead of 250g and wasn't as fussy about adding and mixing - I mostly just bunged it all together!


The result?  My super hot oven slightly burnt the edges, but it's good!

New career?

I ran here!

It's been an interesting couple of days.  Yesterday I got to be a male model for the day for Trail Running mag!  Yes, they were desperate and were probably let down by some uber fit runners, so took a few shots of me with four other runners instead around Rutland Water.  Still it was fun.  The issue will be out mid-November, so buy it people and have me as your December pin-up!!

Hope Moors and Tors fell race

Yesterday I ran the Hope Moors and Tors fell race (8.5 mile) organised by Dark and White in the Peak District.  It was hard!  The weather was just about perfect, although it threatened to rain for the whole time.


The first 37 minutes of the race were pure murder, going up Cave Dale with a strong headwind.  It was here that was the location of the first checkpoint.  After that the route seemed to get easier - either that or my body had given up registering pain anymore!


After Cave Dale it was on up to Mam Tor and across the 'Great Ridge' to Lose Hill then back down to Hope to enjoy the tea and biscuits laid on by the organisers!  My time? 1h 33mins, not bad considering I've not been doing much training lately.

See the image above for the full route (click for larger image).  The bottom blue 'circle' is the route I did, which my GPS logged as 9 miles not 8.5.  The top blue bit was the extra that the nutters doing the 20 mile route did!

At the finish!

Posh Cheese Toastie

In the car this morning I heard Jamie Oliver on Radio 2 talking about making guacamole and how good it was with a cheese toastie, so decided to give it a go.  Needless to say it was yummy!!!

The guacamole was very easy to make - take 1 ripe (aka soft and squidgeable) avocado, add lime juice, salt and red chilli to taste.  Then eat!  I forgot to get a lime, so used lemon juice instead, which worked well too.

For an extra taste kick I used a frying pan for the toastie that had a bit of bacon fat in it.  It's fine, I'll run it off tomorrow.

Celebrity MasterChef final

Well I can finally get my life back now that Celebrity MasterChef has finished.  It seemed never ending...but in a good way.

Congratulations to Emma Kennedy who won this years final with some amazing food.  Thanks to you I am now craving meringue and custard.

The keen-eyed MasterChef junkie's out there like me, will quickly notice that the name of this blog is taken from what Emma said just after winning the MasterChef title.  It was so good I thought I'd nick it before someone else did!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-19681550