So I have finally made it to New York, which I have dreamed of going to since I was about six. My Dad promised me that he would take me when I was nine and I gave up asking after 17 years, so I booked a ticket to go for three months, with the presumption that I would love it.

I am one week in, and so far I have... had a slice of pizza, seen a rat the size of a cat, had lots of terrifying late night taxi experiences, been to the NYC Ballet, a gig, shopped, visited pretty much every touristy spot, seen celebs, shopped, had brunch at a diner…with portions which made me understand the American weight issue...been to markets, had my nails done, seen a man perform some sort of Star Wars saber knife slicing champagne bottle neck off trick, stepped on a cockroach, shopped, drunk lots of coffee, been to secret bars where you drink out of teacups and eaten in lots of trendy cool restaurants…and tomorrow night I am even going to a Yankees game, all far to much excitement!

Poached Pear Finacieres

This is a recipe I got from Paris and I hadn't tried it yet until this weekend. We had millions of pears in the garden a few weeks ago and my Mum manically poached them all so she was dying for me to use some up.

I decided to make them small in the style of petit fours to be tres French.

Makes about 24

100g Butter
100g Sugar

100g Ground Almonds

2 egg

20g Flour

Drizzle of booze, cognac, rum etc

Preheat the oven to 170˚C

Cream the butter and sugar with an electric whisk, when light and creamy whisk in the almonds and eggs then fold in the flour until all mixed well.

Grease a small cupcake tin depending on what size you want to make.

Spoon in the mixture ⅔ rds full and add any poached fruit like pear and apple. Or you could use any berries and just put them on top of the mix and they will soften in the oven.

Cook at 160-170 for about 15 mins until golden.

Guinea Fowl with Spinach and Pomegranate

This is a really simple and tasty recipe, great if you have people over for dinner as everything is pretty much done ahead.

Serves 6

6 Guinea Fowl breasts..can also use chicken supremes or pheasant breasts, must have skin on!
1 tub ricotta
Bunch of Thyme

2 Bags Spinach
1 Pomegranate, seeds only
1 Glass of white wine

Preheat your oven to 200˚C

Trim your breasts of any extra fat, peel back the skin on one side to create a pouch to put your filling in.

Take the leaves off the thyme and finely chop them, mix in with the ricotta, salt and pepper.

Stuff  about 2 teaspoons of the ricotta mix under the skin and smooth the skin down on the side to help stop it from squeezing out, season genourously.

Get a pan nice and hot and fry the breasts skin side down until they are a really good golden brown all over, then flash fry for a few seconds on the other side just to seal them. Place in a deep oven tray with the glass of wine poured over.

They take around 15-20 mins to cook, so when you think you have about 5 mins left, add the pomegranate seeds and place back in the oven.

Once ready, take the breasts out and leave to rest for a few minutes covered in a layer of foil to keep them warm. Put the oven tray onto the heat and chuck in your spinach. Check for seasoning and serve. It's good with any kind of mash, I did it with parsnip pureé since it's getting cold and wintery.

I ♥ Biarritz

I recently returned from a girls surf trip to Biarritz. I say surf trip but it was more of a food, wine, shopping, lying horizontally on beaches and perving on lots of incredible male surfers torsos trip.

We were six girls, and I think we scared the locals from our noisy behaviour talking loudly about all kinds of inappropriate subjects and drinking too much of the local Basque liquor Manzana, which they seem to just hand out and act surprised when one of you is spider pigging on the ceiling.

Biarritz is located in the Basque region next to Spain so the food has a massive Spanish influence with loads of tapas bars and Spanish meats, plenty of seafood and salt cod around the place as well as the famous spice piment d'espelette and the delicious Gâteau Basque.

We shopped in the market which is open everyday till 1pm to get all our food and cooked up a storm most evenings when we stayed in, however there are loads of really good restaurants and bars which we of course had to sample too.

We ate one night at La Tantina de Burgos which is a massive meat fest, they do enormous hunks of beef on the bone to share and huge racks of lamb. The beef is meant for two people to share but we had seen the size so got two between the six of us and still almost didn't finish, I am a total carnivore and the beef was incredible, once we had finally finished I thought I might start mooing. Thankfully as a little digestif they made us their house version of an Irish coffee which totally blew our heads off, followed by the local Manzana..then things began to get a little out of hand.

Most nights we managed to find ourselves in L'Artnoa a great little wine bar with a really good wine list and full of young, trendy, good looking Biarritzers. It just so happened that Antoine the owner was a total hottie so we would all dress up and go flick our hair by the bar.

Amazing two week holiday with probably the funniest group of girls, plans are already underway for our return next summer.

Wedding in Provence

I went to beautiful Provence last weekend for my friends Phil and Aneta's wedding in Tarascon. It was a gorgeous day and thankfully not as scorching as it had been the days before. They spent most of the service giggling with each other and then we all got stuck into drinking zee Pimms, playing games in the garden and taking ridiculous photos in fancy dress and then a great big feast of frenchie food...and of course wild dancing!