Author: minceandskirlie

Writer, poet, musician, and sometime IT professional in the North East of Scotland.
News

I’m back!

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The reason this blog has been so quiet over the last few months is that I’ve been kept busy with my impending marriage. Well I’m happy to report that on 20th October I was very proud to get married at Banchory Lodge Hotel in front of all our friends and family. It was a fantastic day, the hotel were superb. They’ve just finished doing a lot of refurbishment work and I don’t think they could have done anything better on the day. Top marks all round for the team at Banchory Lodge.

After the wedding we jetted off to New Zealand for a few weeks. Now we’re back and the jet lag is wearing off so I can start putting together some blog posts for the site. There’s definitely going to be a few New Zealand based ones going up in the next week and then after that I’m going to get fired into some new recipes and reviews again from home. Continue reading “I’m back!” →

Food and drink, Uncategorized

Tolbooth Restaurant, Stonehaven

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We were given a voucher for Stonehaven’s Tolbooth restaurant at Christmas and have waited for a sunny weekend all summer to use it. Our thinking is that it would be a shame to waste the trip to Stoney without being able to sit outside afterwords having a few speciality beers from The Marine. Well, summer came and went with barely a glimmer of sunshine on a free Saturday to get us over the hill so we decided to just book a table and hope for the best.

The restaurant lives right on the harbour in the upstairs of the old tolbooth jailhouse. Every seaside town needs to have a good seafood restaurant sitting right on the pier. Certainly every town with a fishing heritage like Stonehaven’s deserves one. Continue reading “Tolbooth Restaurant, Stonehaven” →

Food and drink

Chocolate Eclairs

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More baking! This post was inspired by an invitation to a new baking club in Aberdeen. It’s an invitation I sadly couldn’t take up as I’m too caught up in bits and pieces for my wedding but it put the idea into my head to bake something sweet for the weekend.

I think everyone’s got fond memories of chocolate eclairs filled with cream don’t they? The soft choux pastry filled with rich cream that goes everywhere when you bite into it. Topped with delicious chocolate. Yum. I consulted my pastry bible – Michelle Roux’s Pastry and found a couple of recipes for choux pastry and eclairs. I won’t post the full recipes here as they’re straight out of the book. In future I’m just going to post recipes that I feel are my own or I’ve jumbled together from enough sources to make them my own. Continue reading “Chocolate Eclairs” →

Food and drink

Strawberry Souffle

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I’ve probably mentioned before that I’m not much of a baker. Nor do I spend much time making desserts (although I spend a fair bit of time eating them). So it was with some trepidation I decided to chance my arm at that famously tricky creation – the soufflé. Continue reading “Strawberry Souffle” →

Health and fitness

Running year so far

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The main reason I’ve not been posting to the blog as often as in the past is that I’ve been incredibly busy this year. Between wedding planning, work (something that sadly gets in the way of fun all too often) and various other commitments I haven’t been able to find the time to come up with interesting blog posts. One thing that’s been taking up a huge amount of my time this year is running.

Now I’ve posted about fitness and running before but I thought I’d go into a bit more with this post and go over some of the training and events I’ve done this year. Continue reading “Running year so far” →