No wine, no chocolate

I didn't manage my dry January this year. So I have vowed to forego wine and chocolate for Lent. My poor colleagues are going to discover that I am not a ray of sunshine and am, in fact, a petulant little madam fuelled by the lack of antioxidants and tannins in my diet.

So, my friends, I will have to drink vicariously through you and just spend my days watching Mr T in those Snickers adverts. Laughter is a good distraction.

Is it a custard? Is it a yoghurt?

Working in Amsterdam regularly now affords me the opportunity of enjoying Dutch food. Whilst hotel food is pretty limiting, I have rediscovered vla!

A sort of light custard, this is a perfect snack and it comes in chocolate flavour or 'dubbel vla': a mixture of chocolate and vanilla. Miss SJ and I used to have 'vla o'clock' when we worked at Chello and topped it with chocolate sprinkles.

The only drawback? Due to the restrictions on liquids, the vla has to be checked in with the baggage and the flight back to the UK has a tendency to screw up the marbling affect.

A trilogy of scallops

This week I have been in Warsaw for work and I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the food at the hotel I stayed at: The Westin Plaza.

I ate a 'trilogy' of scallops with a Sancerre.

All were delicious, except the one in the middle. You can have too much jam. (Well it wasn't called jam, but it was very marmalade-esque.)




You can also rank your hotel based on the free snackage in the rooms. Fruit and chocolate = yum. Though the prospect of giving up chocolate for Lent now has to become a reality after consuming all of this.

Cock of wine

I had a lovely lunch at Miss SMBW's on Sunday. All the more comedic by the addition of this decanter:

To begin with, pouring a red liquid from the throat of a chicken seems like blood-letting. But then you realise how much hiliarity can be induced by offering people more 'cock wine'. Oh yes, purile playground jokes still get the most laughs.


Mr RF and Mr BB both stuck with white all day, but the rest of us consumed a sizeable volume of the following:







I promise to pop back and tell you all about them in a couple weeks. I need to find my notes. After an aspirin.