But then on our last day we stopped in a cafe for one last coffee before heading to the airport. On the drinks menu was Fresh Mint Tea.

It seems quite common in the Netherlands, and I needed to try it having previously only had mint tea from a teabag. My favourite is Three Mint Tea from Pukka.

It came served with a small sliver of ginger cake and a sachet of honey. Personally I didn’t think it needed the honey.

Of course I wanted to recreate this as soon as I got home.

The mint I have on my kitchen windowsill is a different variety from that of the tea we drank in Amsterdam but it seemed to work just as well.

Pro tip: If you cut mint earlier than you need it, keep the stalks submerged in water, it keeps the leaves perky.

Using fresh mint you won’t get as strong a minty flavour as say with a mint teabag, well certainly not with the amount of mint I could reasonably fit in my glass. But it’s fresh, tasty, calming drink which smells delightful.

To make mint tea grab a couple of stalks, the taste will largely depend on the thickness and number of leaves, my mint plant has long and spindly stalks so I used 3 or 4, if yours is stalkier with more leaves (like the Mint I saw used in the Netherlands) then one will probably do.

Submerge the stalks in hot water and leave to steep for at least 5 minutes. Sweetening with honey if you need it. It could be that at this point you can remove the stalks and drink it – I don’t, I like drinking it slowly so more and more flavour can be released as I drink.

I grow mint in a pot in the windowsill, which is pretty prolific, but without killing it I could only have one fresh mint tea every two weeks! This is not enough for my latest habit, so I am intending to step up my game with growing lots of different varieties in my garden.

Any tips for growing mint? What other herbs make great teas? Comments welcome.

Part of it was undoubtedly being on holiday for the first time since Christmas, but I think there was also more to it.

You can’t really beat a weekend of sunshine…

enough museums to fill your culture quota for months… (btw is it wrong that I still really love these boots?)

quality time…

and great food.

Dutch Split Pea Soup

Mexican Savoury Pancake

Dutch Apple Pie

However what makes a really good weekend a great weekend?

Friends.

Thanks to everyone who made our Amsterdam trip so much fun. Here’s hoping we can do it again soon

Don’t worry, I am not about to suggest that cracking open a tin of dog food is in any way going to help you help you find an audience and keep them.

However in the software industry the term “eating your own dogfood” may well have just that effect.

Eating your own dog food, in software is all about using your own products. It allows you to spot which bits are difficult to use, which bits need work and which are just downright useless…

However when it comes to food blogs there are many ways eating your own could be useful.

The most obvious being, how often do you follow your own recipes?

Writing recipes can be difficult, it’s so easy to forget to use an ingredient you have listed, or to forget one entirely. Often I don’t find these problems myself until I try to use my own recipes again.

Of course in a perfect world you make every recipe three times before you published, making notes and improving each time, but to be honest few of us have time for this – and even then during the writing process it is all too easy to make mistakes.

However the very least you can do is next time you make that meal, follow your recipe word for word. You might be surprised at what you discover!

Read more hints and tips for Improving Your Food Blog or follow me on twitter.

It’s weird the way naming conventions in food work, isn’t it?

Orzo is a type of pasta, it’s small, and sort of rice shaped – like a pine nut. One of the best things about Orzo is that like rice you can use it to make a very fast risotto type dish, called an Orzotto.

In Italian orzo means barley, so back in 2010 when I made a risotto using pearl barley, it too was called orzotto. While pearl barley cooks into a delicious risotto dish, you can’t say it’s fast. It takes longer to cook pearl barley than it does to cook rice.

Risotto is a firm favourite in our household, but the rice version takes a bit long for a week night meal. This is where Orzo (pasta) steps in.

This is an amazingly quick dish, and as versatile as a risotto, the variations are endless and all at the speed for a healthy week night meal.

Like most people I wanted to start to eat healthier and work out more. At both of these I failed miserably.

No salads eaten…

My eating habits have been extremely poor. First of all we had the mound of Christmas sweets to eat – and I rather mistakenly thought that eating through them as fast as I could was the best way to solve the problem. Not so, when we finished those we just bought more

This wouldn’t have been so bad had I not also fallen into a rut with cooking. When I say rut, I really mean, avoiding cooking altogether. I would pull meals together on the weekend that required some effort, but during the week we would have frozen pizzas, pastas and takeaways.

But resolutions don’t have to be just at the start of January, you can start (and keep) a resolution on any day in any month of the year. Don’t put it off.

However the 1st of February is a nice round time to start back into it. We’ve said goodbye to the most depressing month of the year, we are all firmly back into the swing of school and work, really there is no excuse!

So let’s re-kick off the new New Year. Remake all our resolutions. This time we keep them.

If like me, you are trying to eat better, here are some good healthy recipes to try.

Over the coming weeks I will be posting healthy recipes – to find out about them follow me on twitter or subscribe to my rss feed.

Back in May 2010 I made wholewheat hot cross buns and I got a pretty good reception on them.

It’s not exactly the right time of year for Hot Cross Buns but I gave them another go, but then breads and sultanas never really go out of season!

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So how can I claim these are healthier than my wholewheat 2010 buns? Well this time I substituted coconut oil for butter, low fat coconut milk for milk and Light At Heart sugar for, uhm, sugar.

I guess I should be up front about it – I was given Light At Heart sugar for free by Tate and Lyle, however I had been hearing about stevia based products for years and been dying to try them. Unfortunately until December 2011 they weren’t allowed to be sold in Europe! The good thing about Stevia based sugar is that it’s half the calories of normal sugar but it’s all natural. (i.e. Not weird Splenda type stuff that was invented in a lab).

If you don’t have or want to use the substitutions you can instead follow my wholewheat hot cross buns recipe instead.

See all photos for Even Healthier Hot Cross Buns.

I love these hot cross buns, I have had them for breakfast two days in a row and as a cheeky Sunday afternoon snack. While they are perfect warm from the oven, I almost like them more toasted with morello cherry jam. Yum.

For some reason calzone seems so different from a normal pizza, it’s a nice change when you get bored. I kept this recipe simple by using a bread mix instead of measuring the flour and yeast out myself.

You can choose which ever fillings you like for this recipe – but I have to say I love the way the kale cooks up in this dish – delicious! And how can you ever go wrong with bacon?

I thought I would try putting together a slideshow of the steps for this recipe, I’d really appreciate it if you check it out and give me some feedback!

For the best affect select the “Show Info” button on the top middle-right of the screen during playback.

Links in the recipe, take you to relevant pictures…

You can see all photos for this in the Bacon & Kale Calzone photo recipe.

I’d love to hear your feedback on the recipe? Or on the new photo recipe feature – what did you like or not like about it?

You can have a chat with me on Twitter anytime. I’m @coffeemuffins.

While this was necessity – you can’t plan a wedding while still working a 40 hour week and have time to keep up with the making, photography and posting cycle.

In 2012 I want to get back into pushing the boundaries a little. As much as Daring Bakers and Cooks was really great at pushing you to try new things, I did spend an inordinate amount of time pushing myself to make things that I would never have eaten if I had the choice. Like those marshmallow disaster cookies. I cried over those, tears of anger and disappointment.

While I am not sure I necessarily want to go through anything like that again – you don’t learn if you don’t push the boundaries. Learning new recipes is all very well and good, but really what you need to learn is new frameworks. Ideas that catapult you out of your everyday dishes, like learning to make bread – once you have the technique millions of new recipes are open to you.

Next year I will learn how to :

• Make my own pasta from scratch. Fresh pasta is so much better than dried, and the one time I attempted Ravioli it was pretty amazing. I would love to try this tortellini recipe.
• Bake, ice and decorate a cake. Obviously the perfect time would be Christmas – but I didn’t have time this year. I could use birthdays as an excuse to practice!
• Make my own bread. I loved working my way through the Bread Bakers Apprentice, but I haven’t made bread in ages. This year I want to :
  • Make this Rosemary and Garlic loaf.
  • Find the perfect sandwich loaf. I love toast and sandwiches but most of the loaves I have made so far just aren’t suited to this.
  • Making this pull-a-part cinnamon bread. Mr Coffeemuffins loves cinnamon and I have promised to make him cinnamon buns, but I think this pull-apart bread could be even better!
• Eat more vegetarian. After my brief dabble in Vegetarian Christmas meals for a friend, I would love to eat more vegetarian food, and get some really great dishes in my repertoire.
• Make a Soufflé. With their reputation of being difficult to make I have always avoided trying to make one. But you know what, it can’t be that hard. Can it?
• Be more locally minded. This can mean anything from buying locally, to making more traditionally Scottish recipes. Next step Haggis…
• Bake Profiteroles. Ok so after what I just said adding Choux pastry seems a bit wrong, but I have always wanted to try this. I even booked to go to a Choux Pastry class in 2011 – only to have it cancelled at the last moment. This year I have to try, while I love the idea of a Croquembouche, I might need to work up to it!

And of course I want to do all this while being and eating healthier!

What new techniques would you like to try for 2012?

• Matt and I would eat a more healthy vegetarian diet, at least a number of times a week.
• And next time I had my best friend (and vegetarian) over for dinner I would have a wealth of different recipes to choose from. Recipes that I know and love myself.

However it didn’t work that way and the book ended up on the shelf (in fact it was lost in the basement for a period), when I finally opened it up – I was in a panic.

Somewhat stupidly I had just agreed to do a Christmas dinner for my friends, for the first time to anyone ever. I had given myself less than one week to prepare. I’d had an entire year but my vegetarian repertoire was as pathetic as before. I read Plenty cover to cover, I scoured the internet, foodgawker, the guardian Christmas food sections, but found nothing that looked special enough for a vegetarian Christmas meal.

I saw some great tasting recipes, with layers of vegetables, that could with time and skill have been made to look quite pretty, but that level of care is not my strong point. Especially when I am stressed (and believe me I was S-T-R-E-S-S-E-D on the final day – but that is a different story…)

This roast aubergine dish ticks all the boxes for me. It is delicious, it doesn’t sound like it should work – but it does. Perfect with rice, which is how I served it for my trial run, but also could go with the traditional Christmas
veg I served at my dinner party. It’s pretty simple to make and large parts can be prepared ahead. And finally? It has the wow factor.

I am not going to post the recipe here, as it is perfect the way it is. Here is the recipe I followed: Aubergine with buttermilk sauce.

However I do have a couple of notes:

• Za’atar – doesn’t seem to be stocked in any of the supermarkets I tried, so you may need to try further afield. I found Za’atar Spice Blend Standard Jar 50g on Amazon, but with my last minute rush I couldn’t have received it in time. While I have no idea how authentic it is I did make a spice blend with what I had to hand: (roasted) sesame seeds, dried oregano, salt and pepper. It certainly added something to the dish and I wouldn’t leave it out. (My version misses out the sumac – as I didn’t have any, if you do, be sure to add some).

  

• Making this dish for a dinner party is pretty easy, you can make the buttermilk sauce and spice mix ahead of time and keep them in the fridge. I would definitely prepare the pomegranates ahead of time, because that can be fiddly. So all you need to do at the time is cut, score and roast the aubergine. While the roasting time is 35 minutes you don’t need to be in the kitchen for that time so you can relax be with your guests.
• In the recipe one half aubergine is quoted as a starter. As you can see I served it as a main meal with rice (on my trial run), this was quite a light meal, and with lots of veggies as a middle in a three courser! However if you are particularly hungry I would suggest bulking up with extra veg!

I love the fact that I now have a great vegetarian recipe, especially one that’s just a little bit more special than the typical.

Hope you all have a fantastic Christmas

Organising a wedding in November I understood straight away that I could not count on the weather. In fact I planned assuming the worst, ice, snow, rain and wind. No outdoor wedding for me, in fact the venue I booked allowed us to do all the different sections of the day under one roof. No taxis, or cars needed. In fact in the end I actually walked to the venue, dress draped over my arms (it was only 2 minutes).

Having photos outside was an option that didn’t seem likely at all. So when I woke up to see the sun shining on a crisp November morning – I was a little shocked. I hadn’t planned for this eventuality at all.

Thankfully the venue has access to Queen St Gardens, so after we had our first glass of champagne/ whisky as husband and wife, we walked along to the gardens for some photos.

Photo by Bryony Beckitt

I think this is probably the closest I’ll ever come to feeling like a celeb. Walking along the street with a photographer snapping away, people in cars staring at me (and smiling) and a little girl pulling on her mum’s hand “Look, mummy”.

Queen Street Garden’s aren’t open to the public, so I had never seen them before. Of course it was pretty muddy, and there was no path. While it’s hard to come up with a favourite picture out of them all, this one of Matt helping walk through the mud, certainly has to be up there.

Photo by Bryony Beckitt

On a more food related theme, on to the cake! There were three tiers of fruit cake, with small iced boxes to hold up the glass plates, the bottom tier was polystyrene as for only 100 guests I didn’t need quite that much cake.

Photo by Bryony Beckitt

I loved the cake, which was extra special as it was one of the big surprises on the day. I left the decoration up to my Mum and her friends. I thought there would be some form of white flowers on the cake but the snowflakes were just perfect. It added a touch of winter on what was a remarkably perfect November day!

Unfortunately I didn’t take any snaps of the meal, which was truly out of this world, and got some truly great responses from the guests.

In fact I may try to recreate some of the dishes and put these up on the blog However it may be sometime before that happens.

I won’t bore you with too may more pictures of my wedding – but if you are interested my wonderful husband as put some up on Flickr. See the Wedding of Gemmell set.