These are various kitesurfing photos from sessions to Longsands, Budle and Druridge.
Lots of pics from Becs in Canada, friends, family and some of the work done to our house.
Photos from a holiday to Florence (Firenze), staying at a villa up in the hills to the east above the city with Peter, Bridget, Grace, Warren, Carol and Daisy. We visited Pisa, Sienna, Lucca and Florence and drank a bit of Chianti 
Click here for the full photoset on Flickr.
Makes carrots a bit more interesting.
Peel the carrots, roughly chop and boil for about 15-20 mins until soft. Drain them, then add the rest of the ingredients. Mash well until you get a rough paste. Chill and serve with warm bread.
Becs has just booked us in for our Yellow fever jab. This one is a must for Kenya apparently.
We visited the Nurse at the local GP a couple of weeks ago, and the list of jabs and drugs that you need to take for the countries that we are visiting is unbelievable. I’d heard of most of them but not the Japanese B Encephalitis virus. It’s carried by mosquitos and is a serious infection of the brain. It’s also a very expensive vaccination! Here’s the list of what we need:
We’ve not worked out the total cost – some are free – but we think it will be £200 each!
Oh and that doesn’t include malaria tablets (of which you can choose from 3: lariam, doxycycline or the new and expensive malarone).
I could write a lot about diseases and stuff, we both did it on our zoology courses so it’s fun thinking about the havoc that can be caused by (eg) Plasmodium falciparum.
Kind of makes you not want to go!
We’ve spent a while thinking about what places we want to visit. There’s lots to consider: the world is a big place, and although 5 months seems like a long time, you quickly realise how little time it actually is.
Start date is going to be sometime between the 1st – 9th December. We will be returning around the middle of May for my sister’s wedding.
We’re starting off in Kenya, as this is where Dan and Pilar (who we met on the Cornwall camping trip in July) are now working/living, and they very kindly invited us to visit them there. They live in Nairobi but we also hope to visit Mombasa at the coast, and do a decent amount of safari’ing.
Next up should be Thailand, somewhere we’ve both wanted to go and a place which is well set up for travellers. We’d like to visit Chiang Mai (north – hills), the island of Koh Tao (for diving) and obviously Bangkok itself. We’d also like to ‘pop’ into Cambodia to see the temples of Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom etc, and I’d like to take the boat ride from Phnom Penh up to Siem Reap (which is where the temples are).
Next will be Australia, probably Sydney first (where our friend Tim lives) although we may try and fly into Perth (WA) as this is closer to Thailand. We both want to see leafy sea dragons, which can be found off Perth. The coastline also looks stunning, and the kitesurfing looks good. The Great Barrier Reef is also a must.
Then over to New Zealand, hopefully for a tour round most of the country.
The final leg of the trip will be in South America. It looks like it will be Santiago (Chile) first, then who knows. It’s a big place (a continent!) and we want to try and focus on 2 or maybe 3 countries; I’d like Brazil, Peru and Bolivia. Transport (other than flying) isn’t great and although we’re happy to travel by bus we don’t want to waste too much time sitting on buses.
It’s 2pm on Wednesday 23rd August. I went cycling at lunch and whilst out and about, I decided to get a blog set up on our web site.
It’s going to be used for logging our around the world trip; both the planning and the trip itself.
I’m using WordPress (http://wordpress.org/), which is an extremely easy to use blogging tool.
This is like hummous, except that it uses aubergines instead of chick peas.
Make some little slices in the skin of the aubergines, and oven roast them for 30-40 minutes (180C), or until you’re able to peel off the skins from the flesh. Let them cool, then peel them, and mash the flesh with some salt in a colander until most of the juice has come out. Put the flesh and the rest of the ingredients in the food processor and whizz it all together. Add more olive oil or water to adjust consistency to your liking. Serve with warm bread.
This recipe was made up by Becs after a moment of inspiration. Thin slices of aubergine are used instead of pasta to create the ‘cannelloni’, and the pate above is used as the filling. It does very well on the WeightWatchers points system.
Preheat the oven to 180C.
First, make up the tomato sauce. Fry the onion ’til soft, stir in the tomatoes, red wine, sugar and dried basil. Bubble down over a low heat until thickened. Toss in the shredded fresh basil at the end.
Peel the aubergine and slice longitudinally so you end up with long thin slices. Heat up a good flat bottomed frying pan and drop a bit of oil in. Cook each slice of aubergine (two at a time if the pan’s big enough) until soft and slightly browned. Set these aside as you do them and allow to cool a bit. Create the cannelloni by placing a dollop of the pate mix onto the end of a slice and roll the slice up. Place the roll in an oven dish (we use a lasagne one). Repeat until you’ve done all the slices. It takes a while but it’s worth it!
Then pour the tomato sauce over the slices. Top with grated cheese if you like (fresh Parmesan ideally) and chuck in the oven for 35 mins or thereabouts. Serve immediately with garlic bread and salad.
This is just one variation of many possible for this classic mezze dish.
Dead simple: put all the ingredients in the food processor and whizz it all together. Add more olive oil or water (or the stuff you drained from the chick pea tin) to adjust consistency to your liking. Serve with warm bread.
