12 trains in 4 days and 1 human train wreck.

This week I ventured north from our lovely metropolis to bonnie Scotland. My mom always tells me that I pack too much into my time off. This time I think she was right....which I have to admit is annoying.  In 4 days I have taken 12 trains. None of them less than 45 minutes. I have sat in my reserved seat, someone else's reserved seat, the floor and in the luggage rack. While I would LOVE to say that each of the 12 trains was taken with grace and sophistication that would be be slightly off from the truth.

Lessons I have learned on the train(s):

1. When your gut instinct says "don't put your favourite umbrella that your sister bought you and you only use when you want to look gorgeous while trudging through the rain" in the luggage rack, DON'T put it in the luggage rack. You will forget it there are dwell on your lost umbrella for days to come. It will also pour for the rest of your trip leaving you looking less than gorgeous while trudging through the rain. 

2.  When making the inevitable dash for your train be sure you put the correct ticket through the barriers before charging through. They will not open with a very used and very old ticket. You will be stuck. People will look. You will feel stupid. 

3. Read the platform carefully. Very very carefully. 11A and 11B are two very different platforms with two very different trains. Sprinting down the platform 11 and jumping on the first train you see won't go as smoothly as you may hope. 

4. When attempting to run from one train to another in less than 30 seconds be sure to be the first person off the train. Do not get stuck behind an 89 year old lady with 2 walking sticks and a desire to have a chat with the ticket collector directly in the door of the train. It isn't the most time efficient way to exit the train. 

5. Don't assume that you correctly remember your departure time from when you booked your ticket months ago. Your memory isn't very good, not very good at all. You will end up being "that" woman running through the station shouting "excuse me, excuse me, MOVE" because there is no way you are paying for another full price ticket!

When you are tired of London you are tired of life!

Reasons why I love living in London:

1. There are so many people that when you do outrageously embarrassing things its fairly likely you are safe from having to see the people that laughed at you again. For example when you can't find the post-office even when you know the address and have walked up and down the street many times and then have to go into a store and ask if it is hidden in anyway only to have the man tell you that no, they haven't cleverly disguised the post-office to keep it safe from foreigners you are actually standing directly across from it the sign it just above eye level.

2. The sun. One has no idea the impact that sunshine has on a person! I used to believe that the great British outdoors was the place where you get soaked eyeballs to toes as busses drive by you instead of stopping as your clearly wanted them to.  London has taught me that the wondrous British outdoors is actually a place of sunshine and busses rammed full of stinky armpits just waiting for you to get a close inspection while looking for a place to hold on before you trip over a stroller.

3. Weekends have potential, amazingly exciting potential! Each weekend we can enjoy walking through perfectly manicured gardens, shopping in the most temptingly sparkly stores or relaxing in cafes and pubs (depending on who won the coin toss) decorated with treasures from hundreds of car-boot (yard) sales.

4. Weeknights possess hidden excitement as well! I'm sure this is the same across our tea-loving country I'm just luck enough to now have a job which allows me to enjoy my evenings instead of colour coding adverbs or researching how people in the Stone Age built their houses. Either way, London has intriguing exhibitions open late enough for the briefcase-bearing office workers to attend, shops which don't close at 5 and of course far too many delicious delicacies to enjoy...all on a school night!

5. London is pretty. It is beautiful, charming and delightful. I throughly enjoy my daily walks to work, drinking in my surroundings. Okay, I don't particularly enjoy my morning trudge while frantically checking my watch every 2 seconds wondering why I needed to try and braid my hair when I was already late but the walks home are rather pleasurable indeed.
   

Creative cauliflower croquettes

In our Veg Box (more on this later) we were graced with one of my favourite, versatile vegetables...cauliflower! Now I have had some cauliflower successes and complete and utter fails. Once I tried to make cauliflower garlic bread which was plastered all over Pinterest. A fail. A weird, wobbly, totally not wonderful recipe fail. Pinterest can make things look oh so beautiful online but end up oh so horrendous in real life. However I pushed through and pursued....okay not really. I gave up that recipe and tried another. I'm not a fan of trying things again when they fail. Chances are if I failed the first time I'll fail the next. Why beat a dead horse??? 

Always this time I read a few cauliflower recipes and combined them into my own version of cauliflower croquettes. Yum! And not a total fail, yay! Perhaps slightly overcooked but whatever, who cares. I served them with a salad and my homemade ranch dressing. 

Ingredients

1 medium head of cauliflower (mine was frozen as we couldn’t cook it fast enough)

1 tablespoon Italian herbs

1 clove of garlic

3-4 green onions

pepper to flavour 

flour

Method

1. Put the cauliflower and Italian herbs in the food processor and whiz until it resembles breadcrumbs. Because my cauliflower had been frozen and then defrosted I then used paper towel to soak up the extra moisture. Put the cauliflower into a mixing bowl. 
   
   
   
2. Use the food processor to chop the garlic and onion. Add to the bowl of cauliflower and herbs. Begin to mix in flour, a little at a time, until the stickiness is almost gone and you are able to form the croquettes (aka flattened cauliflower balls). 
   
   
3. I shaped mine into 1cm thick circles, about 3cm across, then put them on baking paper to allow for easy transfer to the fryer. I made the mistake of trying to fry them when they were still very sticky but able to stay in shape on the baking paper. They quickly made the deep fryer look as if it was a bowl of cauliflower cereal. Not good. 
   
   
   
4. Fry them on a low heat to ensure the inside cooks before the outside burns. This is a lesson I clearly needed to learn the hard way. Mine were in the deep fryer for about 5 minutes at 140ºC. They looked rather dark on the outside but I found this was the best as the inside of the croquettes were cooked through. You could also shallow-fry, cook them in a frying pan or in the oven as well. Enjoy while nice and hot!

I hope you enjoy! 

Can't live without my RANCH!

Growing up in North America I have a certain love for deliciously creamy salad dressings. Thousand Islands, Ranch, Caesar....yum! Used not only on salads but as a dipping sauce for almost anything, think of chicken nuggets, pizza crusts or your pinky finger. Since we have been trying to eat a more simple diet I haven’t been buying my favourite luscious dressings, not that you can find the exact thing in the UK anyways. We have a few staple dressing recipes, but as we eat salad almost daily they are getting rather boring. So I turned to Pinterest, duh, and found a lovely ranch recipe!

As always, all ingredients (okay as many as possible) were organic. I used my dressing as a dipping sauce for wedges, salad dressing and a veggie dip later in the week. 

Ranch Dressing

3/4 cup low fat mayo

3/4 cup low fat sour cream

1 tablespoon lemon juice

4 green onions

2 cloves of garlic

1 bunch of parsley (leave out the tough/thick stems)

1 tablespoon olive oil

1/2 tsp paprika

pinch salt

pinch pepper

1/4 cup milk

1. Put the green onions, garlic, parsley and olive oil into a food processor and ‘whiz’ until you have the desired consistency. I wanted the parsley to be a bit bigger simply to look nice in the dressing!
2. Either add the rest of the ingredients into the processor or, if yours isn’t big enough as  ours isn’t, I added it to the mixer with the whisk attachment. 
3. Let the flavours come together for at least 10 minutes before serving. 

Note: This makes a ton. Quite obvious when looking at the quantity one would assume, but I was just excited for my favorite dip! I also found that it went a bit runny by the next day so I would suggest making it the day you are planning on serving it. 

Home is where the crazy is!

Trips home are so valuable, creating memories which I hold very dear to my heart. They are also very enlightening. My family has always told me that I was the drama queen of the family…turns out they lied. My family is totally and completely insane. I am not even remotely unique in my ability to ‘stretch the truth’ for dramatic effect. You may question me, wonder if I am yet again making something more exciting than it truly is. I will let you decide, using our 2015 family photo shoot as your evidence.

Trying out the new Christmas presents.

Playing the classic family game of Monopoly.

Attempting to take a nice family photo while Mom adorns my hair with branches.

A regular cross-Atlantic Skype chat.

And if you were still questioning the insanity levels of my family...

this should clear up any and all doubts.

Ps. I love every last one of my totally insane family members!! After all, normal is just boring!

Let's fly away! (And arrive in one half-decent piece).

I’m currently sat on the plane, somewhere over the Atlantic. My guess is just past where the Titanic sank. Anyways, these plane rides are usually consist of trying to force myself to sleep, failing miserably. Now, because I fly this route fairly frequently I have a few ways of dealing with this. Rules, if you will.

1. Book an aisle seat. This way you don’t have to awkwardly crawl over the sleeping people when you inevitably hold your pee just long enough for you to be able to taste it. 
2. Sit at the back of the plane, where it goes to rows of two on the sides (if possible). Yes, you will probably get forced to eat the lovely plasticky food that everyone else has wonderfully denied however there are usually no children instead travelling business men. They like silence. This is key to travelling bliss.
3. Always take a drink when they offer it. That drink needs to be water. No more headaches, no more feeling like your brain is oddly smaller than your skull and therefore rattles around whenever you move. You may need to pee more often, but if you have followed rule #1 you’ll be fine!
4. When putting your luggage into the overhead compartment do so quickly and somehow without showing the immense pain it calls you when attempting to lift 25kg above your head. Otherwise the wonderful air stewardesses may insist that you put your suitcase under the seat in front of you. Hello zero leg room!
5. Look comfy but decent. Joggers, nikes, sweat shirts, headbands and ponytails may be mega comfy; however, upon your arrival you will be proudly walking into airport, excitement building, and you look like a mix of someone who travelled in a dog kennel and someone who rode on the wings. Just the impression everyone wants to make!

Now these rules have been carefully made. Through experience. Very embarrassing experience. Following the order above, these are the all to real experiences which caused my to write my groundbreaking rules.

1. I always booked a window seat…lovely views and the ability to lean across the wall seemed the best way to travel. Wrong. Almost peeing yourself because the massive couple sitting next to you refuses to wake for hours on end was not a good feeling. 
2. I began my trans-atlantic travels by trying to book the seats just past business class, so I could be off the plane about 2 milliseconds faster. Wrong. One trip in a row of 4, sat next to (of course in the window seat) a ‘lovely’ family with 2 children under 4 quickly impressed upon me the importance of avoiding all children at all costs.
3. One of my largest fears has always been bathrooms (all stemming from a infortunate event involving a Mandarin restaurant and my inability to find my table after using the toilet). So to avoid having to use the plane toilet I used to just not drink. For the entire day of my flight. Wrong again! This was very clearly a mistake. Using a plane bathroom is MUCH less painful than having a migraine. 
4. Due to my desire to take EVERYTHING possible back from Canada I usually stuff, cram and ram my carry-on as full of my worldly treasures as much as humanly possible. Only slightly wrong. I did this until a lovely air stewardess watched me obviously struggle to fit my bulging case into the overhead locker. When attempting to life the suitcase she glared at me and told me to place it under the seat ahead. Now I have very long legs. For 8 straight hours I could not move. NOT. HAPPY.
5. As many of you know when travelling solo I am being met at my destination by either my family or husband. I used to travel wearing all items mentioned in rule #5. Which was…you guessed it…WRONGO! Now while my parents are used to my less than glamorous side I would like my husband to live under the delusion for as long as humanly possible that I do have a naturally feminine side. I would like him to believe that I do not possess the ability to smell as horrendous as a farm-yard pig, have enough oil in my hair to help the North Sea keep up their production levels and have pores so large you can lose small children in them. 

Learn from my mistakes. Do not arrive at your destination with a bladder infection, migraine, legs with pulled muscles and looking like a prisoner of war. 

New flying tip JUST learned through experience:

6. If living in a country you are not a citizen of always bring your work visa with you when you wish to travel back home. They don’t like it when you leave it at home. It is also incredibly embarrassing when they put you in the holding area full of the other people not being let into the country. 

Rose-tinted memories

Do you ever wonder what you were like as a child? Like REALLY like, not what you think you were like.  Well this trip home as done a good job at showing me just that. Every time I come home my Mom tries to convince me to go through all of the random boxes in the attic I filled when forced to clean my room as a child. So my sister and I braved the mouse poo and dived head-first into our childhoods. These are the things I learned:

1. I used to read. A LOT. I had over a hundred Baby-Sitter Club books. I blame these prematurely responsible characters and their all too successful business for my life-long random get-rich-quick schemes. 
2. I used to journal. A LOT.  These journals could now by used by Mindy Kaling as examples for how to portray the emotional rollercoaster of adolescence and beyond. Reading these aloud had myself, sister and mother crying in fits of laughter. This was an opening line (I hate to admit it but from university), “I am so proud of myself! Today I went from lunch till supper without having a snack!”. Clearly I have led a rather simple life.
3. I have always enjoyed crafting. A LOT. We found so many insane “creative” examples of my ingenuity glued to the back of cupboard doors, under beds and inside boxes. All in varying degrees of completion. I think this was my favourite example, made after our family trip to the Big Apple. 

By the way….I thought this was completely amazing. This work of art was created before the advent of Pintrest so I am taking 100% ownership!

4. I have always had control issues.  A LOT of them. This became clear when my 

     parents were regaling for us of the tales of family camping trips. On one said trip my 

    Mom was in the back of the van so I could sit in the front and ‘read’ the map (a skill I 

    have yet to master). I was overcome by the desire to smell the fresh ocean air and  

    opened the van window, consequently sending our only map out the window for the 

    cars behind us to dodge while it blew across the highway. My bad. I also 

    remember budgeting my parents spending money this trip. I was ten. 

All in all I am so thankful I have such an amazingly patient family as it turns out although I may think I was a quiet, calm child I may have been more like Ramona Quimby than I wish to admit!