Back In Blighty

Back from a brief sojourn to La belle France where we were shopping for supplies for the all too rapidly approaching Christmas cookery week, so now it's time for a brief roundup of the weeks events.

Wednesdays evening talk went OK, 54 people in total which is pretty good for one of these talks at the Palace. Most people seemed to enjoy themselves and they all got a glass of wine and mince pie at the end so it can't have been all bad now can it?

Yesterdays jaunt under the Channel and then to Boulogne went well....apart from getting absolutely soaked to the skin whilst walking to get some lunch.......oh and getting onto the train to go through the tunnel was a bit of a performance too! Everyone was getting stopped for security checks and so a large number of us missed our scheduled train. The next train ended up getting filled to capacity but just before we got on, so there we were at the front of a queue with nowhere to go, in the middle of the channel tunnel depot! We then had to follow an official van along the platform, up and out the other end, then round and down onto the next platform where they popped us all into a coach carriage for the journey over. It meant that we were about an hour later arriving in Calais than we would have been had we got on the correct train, so only time for the briefest of lunches then a quick trip round the supermarket for ingredients before heading home.......all day being permeated with rain, rain and more rain!

The trip home did give me a chance to play with some long exposure pictures though.....not perfect but you'll get the drift of what I was after......might be better if I try similar with an image stabilising camera??

As we're on the subject of pictures (what a segway!! eat you heart out Dave Lee Travis!) I've put a load more from last weekend up on Flickr, 19 of them in fact, some by be and some by Robert.

These are pictures of egges in moneshine, a recipe taken from the selection we will be working on next year but one that will be on the menu for the fundraising dinner. It's egg yolks cooked in a boiling syrup made from rose water and sugar, they are put into the sugar and we reckon 40-50 seconds of cooking is all they need, they taste odd at first but then sensational.......'expensive' is how Dave said that they tasted!

My favourite of the batch and possibly the best of the weekend is this one

Now that Robert seems to have got the focus 'thing' sorted he's more than back in form with superb shots like that one.....just goes to show you what's possible in terms of photographs I think.