migrant|roo

I know, I know - it's been ages.

But i've got a half written blog post (and heaps of photos) about an awesome cycle trip I went on over 4 days:

Coast to Coast - riding from the West of England to the East.

It was beautiful, adventurous, difficult and solitary. Looking forward to posting properly about it with photos!

A few months ago a small team of us (Karen, Nico, Tom and myself) at POKE built a new website for the excellent Ottolenghi restaurant.

As a "thank you", Yotam and his team at Ottolenghi kindly invited a large mob of POKE food-heads across to Leith's Cookery School for a Saturday morning lesson in mediterranean and Isreali cooking.

It was really, really nice (but also a bit weird initially) to socialise with Pokers outside of their two natural habitats: the studio, and the pub! Everyone was buzzing and it was a brilliant morning - everything was perfectly organised and the recipes were absolutely delicious (I've cooked them all since the course at home).

I tried to get some decent photos, but it was a bit manic with all the cooking - here's the best of the bunch:

The hardware

Knife skills

Red onion, cucumber and dill salad

This might look plain, but it's far from it. We salted the cucumber after scooping the seeds out to get them to release a lot of water, giving them loads of crunch. The dressing was a mix of vinegar, sugar and dill - the vinegar really took the edge of the onions. This is going to be eaten a lot this summer :)

Chicken and courgette burgers

I've always been scared of burgers - no more. It was an extremely wet mixture before cooking, my nerves were jangling.. but the lesson is to trust the professionals; after 2 minutes in the pan they firmed up enough to flip and the rest, is delicious history.

The Meal

All together, along with my favourite dish of the day: the bulgar wheat, caremlised onion and feta salad. You can see it in the background, unfortunately I was too busy faffing around cooking to get a proper shot of the bulgar salad on it's own.

Messy dessert

Raspberry and passion fruit mess, made with the infamous Ottolenghi meringues! I managed to coax a few meringue secrets out of Yotam too ;)

A fully brilliant day, capped off with a few pints in a local pub and a sleepy, sunny, gentle journey home.

Like most London-workers, I've become a serial sushi eater. I've only ever tried to make sushi at home a couple of times before, enjoying limited success.

A couple of weeks ago when Monkey and Rob came to stay for the weekend I decided to give it another go, but this time I was going to buy the best salmon fillet I could find. After a bit of hunting around on that Sunday morning with Rob, it turns out the best we could find was also the biggest. So I made a shitload of sushi!

The salmon was an organic skinless fillet from Waitrose, and I picked up some nori sheets too. I didn't have any sushi rice so I used unwashed (don't laugh - not washing keeps the starch in making it more sticky) basmati rice.

One thing nobody tells you is that when making sushi (especially a lot of it) the rice gets absolutely EVERYWHERE. It sticks to your hands, gets trodden into the carpet, in your hair - everywhere. I find having wet hands makes it much easier to pick up rice without it all sticking to your hands.

Rolling was good fun - the first one was shit, the rest were good. My knife was just about sharp enough, but making sushi really makes me want to splash out on one of these bad boys :)

Big fish, sharp knife

Attempt #2 at rolling - looking good

All rolled

The spread (well, half of it..)

Cut rolls

It's rare that I eat so much sushi that I feel completely full. This was one of those times. We ate, and ate and ate and there was still a massive slab of salmon left over.

The World's First Race Across the Internet is over! It took an extra huge (have you had enough hyperbole yet?) effort from Mattias, Dezza, Igor, Greg and Mike and I over the past couple of weeks to pull this one out of the bag, and it's so hugely satisfying that people enjoyed it so much. FFS, I got 74 comments on a single post! All the well wishes and thanks is really appreciated by us all - it was brilliant watching the buzz around the race during the past week and I'm immensely proud to have been involved in building such a unique and fun piece of work.

Oh - have you checked to see if you made the top 500 on the Balloonacy Leaderboard?

So, with the past 3 months being so busy I can't believe it's the summer!

This weekend just gone I've finally got back into the kitchen, cooking:

• Asparagus with german smoked ham and chili and balsamic glaze
• Linguine with chorizo, king prawns, red onion, pepper and basil chili oil
• Barbecued mackrel with roasted Mediterranean vegetables

I've got heaps of nice photos of them, I'll be posting them on Friday or Saturday, hopefully whilst out in the garden in the sunshine drinking a cold one.

In the meantime, here are a couple of photos I've taken recently:

Welcome balloon racers! I work for POKE and I was lucky enough to be part of a very talented team that created the Balloon Race Across the Internet. It's been a long and in part difficult road, but I for one am so proud of what we've managed to achieve.

I love the idea of people dropping onto here, so please say hello! If you leave the name of your balloon I'll even give you a boost :)

A project I've been closely involved with at POKE has just launched - we're all dead proud and hope you enjoy Balloonacy:

We're hosting a balloon race across The Internets, - if your balloon floats furthest (you'll be able to control and push your balloon along, too) you'll win a week in Ibiza with a gang of mates.

As well has having a balloon, you can also be part of the map itself by putting your blog or website forward. It doesn't cost anything, the race lasts 7 days and you should get heaps of visitors during that time :) The little racoon in the bottom right hand corner means this site's signed up!

So, on 23rd June when the race starts and thousands of animal balloons are floating across the internet, now you'll know why.

Play Balloonacy here

I've just uploaded some photos of our trip to Centre Parcs with the lovely Monkey, Rob and Lotte.

Holidays should technically be restful and offer an opportunity to recharge, but I guess we needed someone to remind us of that because we've all come home more exhausted and broken than when we left!

5 days of: bike riding, wall climbing, golfing, ping pong-ing, badminton-ing, jumping off very high things, rapids swimming, pool shooting, drinking, BBQ eating, sauna sweating AND dance classing have taken it's toll - we're all feeling tired, beaten and bruised; yet somehow all extremely happy at having shared a truly awesome 5 days together.

I think we'd all forgotten how much fun it is to be around each other, and how mental we go when we are :)

A happy holiday and shitloads of happy memories - cheers Jo, Monkey, Lotte & Rob!

I'm now the proud owner of a Specialized Sirrus bike!

My bike got stolen from the station a few weeks ago, which coincided nicely with Poke joining Evans' very noble Ride2Work scheme, meaning I got a cool 35% off the price :)

Here she is:

I am so, so impressed! The ride is extremely fast, and the bike itself is so much lighter than I thought it would be. Riding on London's shitty potholed roads is a bit, ahem, jarring.. but I'm going to be using this mostly out around the countryside near Milton Keynes, so i'm not really bothered.

If you're looking for a fast, racey bike but that isn't actually a racer, look no further. At £400 you get a lot of quality for your money, and a bike that should cope really well with any kind of road riding.

It's something I've been talking about for a while, and today i've actually done it - I've permanently removed myself from Facebook.

I'd never really taken to it, preferring to use lots of the tried and tested methods to keep in touch with people I like, and found it was mostly useful for having inane twice-yearly "conversations" with people I intentionally stopped speaking to.

I've always steered clear of making pies and other items in the Pie Family (quiche, tart, flan, pastry), but I guess something spurred me into trying it because here's an apple pie I made this afternoon:

Closed

Slightly eated

Apple Pie Recipe

• 5 bramley apples, cut into sugar-cube sized pieces
• 2 teaspoons of freshly ground cinnamon sticks
• 3 tablespoons of caster sugar
• squeeze of lemon juice

I used some off-the-shelf shortcrust pastry and rolled it out into a bottom-up cake tin, and brushed milk and sprinkled sugar over the top before sticking in a medium oven until it looked wicked.

Look how taken with the pie Suki was:

Can naughty cats eat pie?