Dead Rosemary

After I planned the rosemary out, I completely forgot about it.  When I remember to look, it is very dead.  Maybe I should not bother with herbs.

Annual Nuts Sweep

This year's noticeable offerings were plain roasted, unsalted nuts.  They taste a lot different to the salted version, but they are nice.

Steamer Rack

On a recent Yam Cha, we were inspired to get some gourmet dim sums to steam at home.  My steaming rack finally get its chance to do its work.  Even without the bamboo steamer, they all turned out well, yay!

Flambé Christmas Pudding

I volunteered to flambé Sarah's Christmas pudding.  She was both scared and intruged as always.  So I did the flambé with Cointreau.  It went well, maybe it will become our tradition.

Supermarket Mushrooms

We have been getting mushrooms from the Oriental supermarket for hot pot.  Then I noticed in the recent vegetarian waves, supermarkets are offering a good range of mushrooms.  That saves me trips to Oriental supermarkets, and supposedly getting fresher mushrooms from England!

Grand Tour Venice - Day 5

On the final day, we did mostly travelling.

We checked out, took the ferry to the bus stop.  Because we were early, so we saw a lot of service boats doing deliveries, etc.

We popped into a supermarket to buy the final Italian goodies and lunch, ie bread. 

We got back to Manchester, and caught up with some Mancunians for lunch.

Grand Tour Venice - Day 4

On the second of the island hopping, we went to Murano - the glass island.  We walked around, didn't pick up anything except a shard of scrap glass.



On our way home for lunch, we walked past the fish market, and picked up 3 mantis prawns.  They looked very small, I chose the 3 largest ones.  And for lunch, we picked up a soup mix for Sarah and a cured meat platter for me, yummm.

I took an excursion to the Arsendale, they are quieter than the main tourist area. It is a bit like Lido.


We went to see the Basilica San Marco.



I didn't take any pictures inside, because I read the signs, but apparently everyone just ignored the signs anyway...

We popped to Giudecca, it was very residential and we went to an Italian discounter.



The Mantis prawns were very disappointing, they had hardly any meat on them, and the biggest one already started going bad.  I later researched about it, the lagoon mantis prawn are normally much inferior aka smaller than the sea dwelling ones!