Laithwaites Wine Festival

It is that time of year again, when we at Tastes join the lovely people at Laithwaites for their Spring Wine Festival. More than 30 wines from around the world to try and lots of the wine producers to meet, plus some of my current favourite cheeses to sample, what more could you want on a Friday evening?

This year the festival is taking place at Beaumont House in Old Windsor, on Friday 14th May 2010 from 7-9pm. Tickets are available from the Windsor and Virginia Water Laithwaites shops or online and cost £15 per person. The first 5 people to email me will be given a free ticket.

UPDATE: This offer is now closed.

St George's Day

Today is Saint George's Day and an ideal opportunity to remind you of all the wonderful English fare on sale here, and to quickly mention...
we also sell Dragon's Blood!

Saved by the packet!

Last Sunday some friends of mine threw a party for their one-year old son, including lunch for fifteen family and friends. I said I’d help with nibbles to fill the gap between the 10am arrival of some of the guests and the 2pm lunch. I hadn’t really considered that to reach them by 10am, I’d need to leave home by 8am, and I wouldn’t be home from “work” until 9pm the night before. Fortunately, for me, “work” involves being surrounded by food, so grabbing snacks, nuts, dips etc wasn’t too tricky. And better still I could even make something fresh using the packet Pao de Queijo Mix. Within 90 minutes of my alarm going off I was up, washed, dressed, breakfasted, and had mixed, kneeded and baked 25 delicious chewy doughballs, wrapped presents, packed all my goodies and was on my way to Sussex. Thank goodness for packets!

Happy Easter Everyone

Hope everyone has an enjoyable long weekend. I’ve been meaning to post a blog entry about this year's Easter Eggs. But I didn’t order anywhere near as many as I needed and the delicious Italian chocolate eggs have all sold out. I didn’t even get a chance to photograph them, let alone put them on our web site. Oh well, in 11 months time I’ll do it all again (but order 3 times as many).