A salad and a Floating Island

I've found myself incredibly busy over the past few weeks and I haven't found the time to come back here and update. I'm taking a few minutes out now, my little girls are both down for a nap at the same time (yay!) - By the way, it's only midday, the time on my blog posts is always wrong.

I am always inspired by other bloggers, be it with food and recipes, fashion, crafts or simply good advice about self esteem and positivity. Not too long ago, I was reading a post about salads over at the blog "Apples under my bed" (http://applesundermybed.blogspot.com/2010/09/epic-salads.html. I like to think that I eat well, and when I truly do eat well, I simply love how much energy I have and how alert I am. Heidi who hosts the blog, talked about how to make salad tasty, satisfying and keep them healthy. After reading this post, I was inspired to create my own epic salad, which was greatly enjoyed by Mr SweetPea, SweetPea AP (2) and SweetPea EA (almost 1).

Here is a picture of my delicious epic salad

If you would like to re-create this lovely salad, you will need to combine:

• mixed lettuce leaves
• drained tinned tuna (I like the one in oil - which I drain, but this is probably not the healthiest option)
• red pepper
• baby corn
• soba noodles
• poached egg

From memory (which is very poor these days), I dressed this with a little soy, a little hoi sin sauce, salt and pepper.

I think that the addition of the poached egg to the top was particularly genius of me, modest aren't I!

In other cooking news, I was trying to come up with something sweet late one afternoon to serve to friends who were coming by for coffee that night. I wanted to make something a little different and special. There was no good reason, I just felt like it. I went on over to the Tartelette blog, which never fails to inspire (www.mytartlette.com). I found a recipe for strawberry and vanilla floating islands. My Tartlette makes hers, in the recipe on her blog, with a strawberry coulis. I noticed that she said that the traditional way to make these was with a creme anglaise and at that moment there was no turning back. After trying to make creme anglaise twice and ending up with scrambled eggs both times, I was almost out of eggs. So, I had to make plain old custard, which is still nice, just not as glamerous as cousin creme anglaise. At some point in making this, I also came across a recipe for balsamic toffee strawberries at Raspberri cupcakes blog (http://http://raspberricupcakes.blogspot.com/2010/09/balsamic-toffee-strawberries.html).

Forgive my food styling (aka rustic style or homestyle). This is what I ended up with. Was very yummy, although could have been much better with that glamerous cousin creme anglaise.

I hope that everyone has a lovely Monday. I'm off to do the dreaded housework. I'm forever trying to be organised and "on top of the housework". Who knows, maybe oneday it will happen...hahahaha