Watermelon Smoothie Mixer Hack (and a cocktail)

I saw this on Facebook recently - someone had a brilliant trick with a whole watermelon (I don't know why these things are always called 'hacks') which enables you to turn the fruit into a refreshing drink in less than a minute - without needing to peel and cut it up and put it in a blender.

On Saturday I went to a barbecue at the home of Ros from The More Than Occasional Baker, who is a good friend of mine. She'd seen this Facebook clip as well and had tried it out, with perfect results! She had more than one watermelon so demonstrated again to a rapt audience, and allowed me to film it and put it on my blog.

All you need is a whole watermelon - putting it in a bowl to keep it steady like Ros does here is a good idea. Use a sharp knife to cut a square out of the top of the watermelon, large enough for the paddle beaters of a hand mixer. You can take one of the beaters out and just use one if you like.

Stick the mixer into the watermelon, and turn it on! Ros said you can tell when you've mixed it enough - then all you do is turn it upside down and pour out the watermelon juice!

It's brilliant and a real party trick. The juice tasted lovely, though was quite thick, so I mixed mine with lemonade and added a shot of vodka for a very refreshing cocktail.

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Meal Planning Monday Week 33

I seem to be permanently far busier these days than I ever was before, which makes meal planning even more important, but I haven't got the time to go through all my cookery books for inspiration. Instead, this is a rough plan, which I might change nearer the time when I see what fresh food is on offer in the supermarket or if I have more time to flick through a cookery book.

Monday - BBQ or houmous-topped chicken breasts

Tuesday - out with my boyfriend's dad for his birthday

Wednesday – at a BBQ event for bloggers, hope the weather is nice!

Thursday - fish for me, chicken kiev for him

Friday - curry

Saturday lunch- grilled cheese and bacon sandwiches (a half sandwich with salad for me!)

Dinner – BBQ?

Sunday lunch- beans on toast type of thing

Dinner - roast poussin for me, roast chicken breast for him

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Family Photo Letter Collage

It was a year ago this month that my boyfriend and I bought and moved into our lovely house. We spent a couple of months working all-out on the redecoration, taking 2 weeks off work and then using every available weekend to paint, oversee new flooring, assemble furniture and so on. We took a breather as it was coming up to Christmas, and then… never really started again. Most of the house is finished – we just need to paint the bathrooms – but some of the finishing touches haven’t been done. To me, that’s things like putting up coat hooks and mirrors – but there are also a few decorative touches left to think about.

Ages ago I bought some cardboard letters spelling the word ‘home’ and some others spelling out 'Love' from Hobbycraft, and put them away until I could decorate them to display in our new home.

I hadn’t really thought about how I would decorate them, other than with patterned paper or fabric. Then Snapfish, the digital photo printing people, came along with an offer of a voucher towards products from their site – as long as I could craft with them.

That’s not as easy as it first sounds – they have loads of gifts and ready-made products on their site that you can personalise with photos, like photobooks, canvas wall art, mugs, calendars, jigsaws and so on. Most of those wouldn’t give me much to play with in terms of crafting. Their main offering of course is getting your photos printed so I decided to take that as a starting point for my crafting.

I remembered the cardboard letters and hit upon the idea of making them into a photo collage. After all, it is family and friends that make a house a home. This is also a good way to display a lot of photos if you don’t want to have a frame on every windowsill or shelf!

The letters I had were quite small – only about 10cm high – but luckily Snapfish has a product that is just right for this. If you’ve never bought a collage print before I highly recommend it. You can select up to 20 photos, and a print size of 6x4, 7x5 or 10x8 and it will arrange the photos in a collage – making some of them bigger and some of them smaller. If you don’t like the arrangement, you can shuffle and do it again. The largest size is only £1.09 and looks really nice in a frame – I did one of these with photos from a USA holiday I took a couple of years ago, and I also gave one to my parents with photos from a day we spent at Chelsea flower show a couple of years ago. The smaller photos are only 12p for 6x4 or 22p for 7x5.

You can cut these up to make wallet-sized photos or in this case I cut them up to glue onto my cardboard letters.

The 'love' letters came in a cute little box but the 'home' letters were from a different range (they may not even have been Hobbycraft actually) and weren't in a box, and I couldn't find the letter 'e'! Rather than turn my craft cupboard upside down I decided just to use the word 'love'.

This was much faster to make than you might think - I actually did it on the kitchen counter while I was cooking dinner! I simply cut up the collage print, selecting pictures that would fit on each part of each letter and glued them on. I covered the edges with offcuts of photos as you won't really see these, but I didn't want to leave them blank. I didn't bother covering the backs of the letters though.

It looked even better than I was expecting and fit perfectly into one of the cubes of this Ikea shelving unit that we have in the living room. The letters really stand out against the black wood and this now has pride of place in the living room.

Thanks to Snapfish for a voucher code for their site.

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Non-alcoholic Drinks for Barbecue

When I’ve had friends over for barbecues recently the most popular drinks have been non-alcoholic ones. I put that down to a myriad of reasons: when it’s really hot, people want to quench their thirst with something they can drink quickly without getting tipsy right away; some people are driving; some people are tee-total (yes really!) and one is pregnant. Also, the drinks I made look and taste great!

 

I already posted the recipe for this non-alcoholic mojito; here are two other ideas.

 

Strawberry Iced Tea

 

I had some strawberry-flavour tea bags and made them up with a little sweetener (Splenda), waited until it had cooled and added more water, some ice cubes and some fresh strawberries.

 

Ginger and Cranberry Fizz

 

This one is also very easy to make and tastes lovely. I had a bottle of ginger beer left over that someone bought to a previous barbecue, and as I don’t like ginger beer I wasn’t suer what to do with it. I also had a carton of cranberry juice in the fridge so I mixed the two together in roughly equal quantities and added some fresh mint leaves. Delicious!

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Deliciously Ella Brazil Nut and Rocket Pesto Pasta

I was given the Deliciously Ella cookery book for my birthday and have already made a couple of things from it; I’m never going to be as health-conscious as she is, and certainly don’t think it’s likely that I will ever switch to a vegan or vegetarian diet, but it’s definitely good to switch things up and every now and then eat some super-healthy meat-free meals.
 

 

 

I liked the idea of her zucchini noodles with a minted avocado sauce but I wasn’t quite brave enough to make the zucchini noodles – at least not at this point, because I don’t really like courgette but I also don’t really like avocado! But I do have a spiralizer and I reckon if I made a different sauce with the ‘courgetti’ (courgette spaghetti) it would be OK, so watch this space!

 

 

I decided therefore to cook regular spaghetti but make the sauce as I have a lot of mint growing in my garden and love to find recipes I can use it in.

 

As Ella says, this is a very rich, creamy pasta –I left out the mushrooms as I can’t stand them though Ella does say they add a “next level of deliciousness” so if you like mushrooms then do add them in.

 

I chopped the nuts in a food processor and added the avocado, oil, lime, mint leaves and salt and blended until I had a chunky sauce. The beauty is that this doesn’t need to be cooked so it is so quick. It’s nice heated through a little so when I drained the pasta I returned it to the pan with the sauce. It was surprisingly good given I don’t really like avocado and I felt very virtuous!

 

 

 I'm sharing this with Meat Free Mondays, hosted by Jacqueline at Tinned Tomatoes.

Jen's Food is hosting Extra Veg this month on behalf of Helen at Fuss Free Flavours and Michelle of Utterly Scrummy; this is a great way to eat some extra veg almost without noticing!
 

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Restaurant Reviews: Guatemala

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Strawberry and White Chocolate Blondies

I had some strawberries that needed using up and it was that time of the month again where I was due to spend a whole day with the design agency I work with and I've got into the habit of taking cake.

I wanted something that would be easy to transport and thought that blondies - a bit like brownies, but without chocolate - would work really well as a way of incorporating the strawberries.

 

I found a recipe on the Good Food website for strawberry and macademia blondies but changed them to leave out the nuts. I also ran out of light muscovado sugar so used a mixture of half caster sugar, half demerera! They turned out well but I took my eye off the clock and overbaked them a bit which was a shame.

You need:
125g butter
200g white chocolate
2 eggs
50g caster sugar
50g brown sugar
130g plain flour
120g strawberries

Preheat oven to 180C. Line a 22cm square baking tin with greaseproof paper. Or if you have a brownie pan like I do, use that - spray with Cake Release.

Melt the butter and white chocolate in a small pan or in the microwave.

In a separate bowl cream the eggs and sugar then fold in the flour and the chocolate and butter mixture.




Chop the strawberries and fold in to the mixture. Pour into the tin and bake for 30 minutes.

 Leave to cool in the tin. Turn out of the brownie pan or if you have used a larger pan, turn out and cut into squares.

I'm sending this to Tea Time Treats as they have a theme of summer holiday baking; the strawberries make this quite summery and also this is an easy bake to make with the kids while they are off from school. The challenge is hosted by Karen at Lavender and Lovage and Jane at The Hedgecombers,

I'm also sharing it with the Vegetable Palette challenge, hosted by Shaheen at Allotment 2 Kitchen; the theme is 'more glorious reds' and she accepts fruits as well as veg.

 
These travel well so you could take them on a picnic; for that reason I'm sending these to Ness at JibberJabberUK for her challenge Love Cake.

In addition I'm sending this to the Food Year Linkup hosted by Charlottes Lively Kitchen. There are plenty of things happening this month and time of year that these blondies would be good for, but one stands out in particular, Breast Cancer Care's Strawberry Tea fundraiser.



Finally I'm sending this to We Should Cocoa, hosted by Choclette at Tin and Thyme; anything goes this month as long as it uses chocolate.

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