friends - AnnaTheApple

April 8, 2015

Easter fun – part 2

Soo continuing on with my Easter weekend (catch up HERE for part 1).

After running 14 miles on the Sunday (and enjoying a very tasty smoothie) I zipped off to Winchester to meet up with a friend to have a mosey about the shops and have lunch (I suppose the theme of Easter for me really!). Not all the shops were open as it was Easter Sunday but it really didn’t matter as we just walked and walked chatting away – actually it was wonderfully quiet which is just brilliant for Winchester as it’s usually rammed. The weather was lovely and the scenery very pretty so it was rather pleasant!

When we stopped for air after chatting so much we realised it was probably a good idea to get some lunch (runger was attacking with a vengeance)! We stopped at CaféMonde which was surprisingly good as it looked quite small and non-descript from the outside. I went for a salad…surprise surprise! And not just any salad, but my favourite…the Caesar of course.

At first I was a bit disappointed as it wasn’t huge and from experience usually the main bits of a salad in restaurants are all on the top. However, on digging deeper there were just tons of olives, slices of parmesan and chicken, along with a boiled egg and pitta bread. This is up there with one of the best Caesar salads I’ve had in a while (and I’ve had a lot!). My friend had a crayfish and avocado salad which also looked very tasty. Very reasonably priced as well (around £7 for the salad and a drink).

We then did some more walking (and shopping). We also found Jane Austen’s house which I’ve never seen before, despite going to Winchester many times…

And we went on the hunt for cake of course. My friend chose a banoffee cheesecake slice to take home to share with her son, which I thought was immensely saintly and selfless of her – I however do not share cakes. I found the last slice of simnel cake in a little cafe and was over the moon because not only have I not had this cake before but because it was the last slice I got all the crumbs from the platter too!

It was pretty much like Christmas cake but without icing and perhaps not as dense. It was delicious! Big fat juicy bits of dried fruit, marzipan topping, moist sponge…oh it was delicious and I very much enjoyed gobbling this all as I sat watching Masterchef that evening at home.

At the end of the day I couldn’t believe how many steps I’d done! And my legs definitely felt it. I had that pleasant drained feeling of a very busy but good day.

This included a walk with Alfie when I got back from Winchester but I was truly shocked at how far I’d gone even knowing I’d run 14 miles. For the day of the Berlin marathon I ran/walked 55k steps!

And guess what I was doing Monday? More walking!! I met up with a bunch of friends to enjoy the Queen Elizabeth Country Park with Alfie. One of the couple’s brought their whippet, Willow, and I think Alfie felt a bit chunky alongside her 😉

Willow bounced along so daintily and was incredibly fast. Alfie was a little apprehensive (he’s a friendly but shy dog) and kept looking back to make sure I was there, bless him.

The walk was lovely – though tough at times for my friends who brought along their little baby boy in a pram. We all took turns to push the pram and I got nominated for the hilly sections because I “run lots”. I’ll accept that weird compliment I think!

The views were fantastic and the weather superb. I even took my coat off and walked in my T-shirt! I have every intention of going there again soon as it’s not far from me at all and Alfie loved it.And what a day for it! I even think I caught the sun! Beautiful 😀

Not as many steps as the day before (I think it was 25k which isn’t bad!) but Alfie was well and truly pooped. We settled down for the evening with The Imitation Game and though I really thought it was going to be dull and not my thing, I was hooked instantly. The acting was superb and the story was fascinating but tragic. It made me so angry about the way Alan Turing was treated, though I felt woefully ignorant to what had happened. I learnt about the Turing test during university when I studied psychology but knew nothing about his life. I also found out that Alan Turing achieved a 2:43 marathon time – how incredible is that?? Brains and speed!

Do you enjoy walking?

What’s your favourite salad?

If you have a pedometer, what’s the highest number of steps you’ve achieved in a day?

December 9, 2014December 9, 2014

Berlin Christmas markets

Well that’s my second Berlin trip this year done and dusted. And I must say I don’t feel quite as in pieces as I did after my last one, having not run 26.2 miles this time!

Though I’m still shattered. I left for Gatwick Friday afternoon and met up with two of my friends before flying into Berlin to meet the other two. We were staying in my friend Charlotte’s parents house so the whole trip was very cheap (let’s not talk about how my taxi there and back from the airport cost more than the flight itself…). We got to her house late that evening.

The next day was a whirlwind of Christmas markets, Starbucks, SO much food and lots of girlie chatting, as you can imagine. It was cold but thankfully we had no rain so we wrapped up warm and did lots of walking so it was fine.

The first Christmas markets we went to were on the grounds of a beautiful German palace in Schloss Charlottenberg.

Charlotte is German so having someone there who can fluently speak the language is just perfect. She knew how to get everywhere and where was good to go. Like our own personal tour guide 😉

There were so many Christmas markets all over the city and they were all such good value for money. The food and drink was very well priced and not extortionate like it can be in the UK for this sort of thing.

The food on offer was just incredible. Chocolate covered fruit, gingerbread, stollen, marzipan everything, cookies, biscuits, bread, cheese, meat, chocolate, sweets…I could go on. I tried as much as my stomach would allow. I shared a skewer of chocolate grapes with one of my friends (surprisingly refreshing) and later had what I can only describe as a marzipan teacake (bottom left). It was marzipan-flavoured marshmallow fluff covered in dark chocolate. Lovely but messy! Top left was a big blob of sponge filled with plum jam (sauce?) and covered in vanilla custard. I shared that with two of my friends but I only had a couple of bites as, disappointingly, it did nothing for me. A bit bland and not that sweet for my tastes!

One of my friends had a waffle with Nutella on it and it looked AMAZING.

We then enjoyed a nice walk around the palace grounds and then hopped off to the Postdamer Platz area for a bit of normal shopping and sushi lunch.

Berlin has so many sushi restaurants and we all love it so it was the obvious place to go. I do love a conveyor belt as well – you can be very choosey! 😉

There were a few markets here as well to mooch around which were also very good.

As evening was drawing in we headed to our final market in Ku’Damm, where the broken church is (I ran past this in the marathon as well). It was beautiful with all the lights. It did get busier as it got darker but it was still very pleasant. My friend and I decided to share a ginormous cheese pretzel and a ginormous sweet pretzel (covered in sugar and chocolate – words cannot describe jut how bloody delicious this was).

Cheese pretzel heaven right there

We later also shared a meat skewer. She was my partner in crime in trying different foods. We managed to get lost from our other friends when we became distracted by large meat skewers. These things happen 😉

Though we did find the problem with wandering off… we lost our German translator and struggled to work out what kind of meat it actually was. Turns out the guy just didn’t understand the English word “pork”. It was very tasty though.

We then spent the evening in PJs with our duvets and hot chocolates watching Love Actually. I think I’m pretty set on Love Actually being my favourite Christmas film now. It’s just perfect.

The next morning we left before eating breakfast so we could have a late breakfast/brunch out. Though it turned out we didn’t actually start eating until about 1pm due to the length of time it took to get somewhere good for restaurants and then the service was so slow! But it was worth it in the end.

We then did some more shopping and moseying around the sights and then headed for an early dinner (we had to leave for the airport at around dinner time).

I think my favourite sushi are the ones with butternut squash (the dark brown filling ones) and the egg ones. SO good. With miso soup I was literally STUFFED.

Then we headed back to Charlotte’s to pack and get ready to go. But first Charlotte’s mum had made an epically amazing sticky toffee pudding (funny to eat such a British pudding considering how Germany everything else had been!)

Just to tide us over for the flight, you know? 😉 As you can probably tell, it was delicious.

A perfect weekend of fun, catching up with friends and indulgent food. I fully recommend Berlin for the Christmas markets. Very cheap, lovely atmosphere, lots of home-made items in stalls selling clothes, jewellery, decorations, etc. and all the food and drink was to die for!

Have you ever been to Berlin? Or Germany?

Do you enjoy Christmas markets? What do you look out for the most? For me it’s all about the sweet treats!

October 27, 2014

Cake not children any day

Happy Monday, we’re here again. I don’t know what happened to me over the weekend but I was shattered! I even had an hour long nap yesterday afternoon, which is crazy for me! I’m back running consistently so this is probably the case. My foot seems to be fully OK now, whew!

Friday night Ben and me decided to go out for a meal to our recent favourite find (Zippers) and we invited my parents and Ben’s mum to join. Funnily enough my mum and dad had already booked to go to there after we’d raved about it! Happy days.

I went for my salad duo which, once again, rocked my world: salad bar starter and then chicken, avocado and bacon salad.

Apologies for the poor photos – it was dimly lit in the restaurant

And because it is the best chocolate fudge cake I’ve had in ages, I had it for pudding again. Consistently good – and I think I’m qualified to say that now having had it three times! I didn’t take a photo because I’ve already got two photos of it…

Needless to say I think we’re done with Zippers for a bit. We’ll be back for definite but we’ve OOT-ed it recently as you can imagine 😉

Saturday morning I finally got back to parkrun. I haven’t been for soo long due to being busy, injuries and marathons. I really missed it. I went down early to help set up and caught up with the parkrun crew. It was the Halloween special which meant people had dressed up in fancy dress for the occasion which was brilliant!

Skeleton morph suit!

The costumes were brilliant, from pumpkins to zombies, morph suits to masks. I love stuff like this. Sadly all I had to offer was a black sparkly tutu and my colourful RunMummyRun compression socks but it felt fun wearing it.

I took parkrun nice and easy and chatted to lots of people on the way round, which I always really enjoy. Unfortunately talking so much gave me such a nasty a stitch – that’ll teach me! I got just over 25 minutes which I’m happy with for a social run wearing, as it turns out, a rather itchy tutu.

Check out the costumes behind me – amazing effort with the face paint!

The rest of the day was spent just doing the chores, walking Alfie and watching some trashy television watch (*whispers* Made In Chelsea) which Ben and me embarrassingly like to watch and Gogglebox (I’m a new comer to this programme but I am fully addicted – it is HILARIOUS).

Sunday I got up and ran for 50 minutes (Kyle confusingly works in minutes not miles…this makes route planning quite hard!!) then rushed about getting ready to go to church to see my friend Louise’s baby’s Christening-but-not-Christening thing. Basically it was a “welcome to church” kind of thing for their baby, Jacob, but not an actually Christening because they want him to decide on his faith later. I won’t lie, I did not sing at all. No one wants to hear me sing especially if I don’t know any of the songs! Louise is an incredible singer though and is part of the church band so she rocked it.

After the service we headed back to Louise’s parent’s house for “nibbles”. Let’s just dissect this word for a moment…we thought crisps and snacky things, which were out on the sides when we arrived. We nibbled away and had some fizzy pop and were quite content. But Louise’s mum is just amazing at hosting these sorts of things and suddenly an hour later BOOM there was an entire buffet of food. Then after the buffet there was a pudding buffet of lemon tart, chocolate tart, meringues, jelly (all home-made!) and ice cream. Wowza. And of course cake afterwards!

I won’t lie. I went a bit crazy having a slice of both the lemon and chocolate tart (let’s call them slithers shall we? They weren’t huge…) and a couple of slices of cake.

All home-made by Louise herself. Vanilla sponge for the main cake and chocolate for the little trains and square blocks. My reputation preceded me as Louise came over after the first cutting of the cake and handed me a chocolate slice saying “I knew you’d want more”. Full sugar coma commenced afterwards (and an afternoon nap later).

Most of my school friends were there too so it was nice to catch up and have a laugh with them. Mostly taking the mic’ out of my fear of small people and how awkward I am around them. It was actually quite scary how many children were there – Louise has a HUGE family. Needless to say, it’ll be a few years yet before I have the desire to have one!!

Do you go to church? I’m not religious but don’t mind going to these sorts of things.

What are you doing for Halloween? We do nothing. Mainly hide behind our curtains and hope no small people come knocking.

Cake or dessert? I think I’d go with cake.

August 6, 2014August 6, 2014

Something different for once

I’m not a big drinker. It’s not that I don’t drink for a particular reason, I just never feel the need. I don’t go out clubbing or go to pubs to drink. I tend to go to pubs to eat! Ben loves a glass of red at the weekend but I just don’t have the taste for wine.

I like a crisp cold G&T occasionally, and an exciting cocktail on a special occasion but otherwise I’m good. Except last week sucked. I was stressed and had a few down moments and was looking forward the weekend like crazy. Ben finishes at 12.30 on a Friday so had planned a boy’s afternoon/night down the pub leaving me pretty much a spinster on Friday night. I’d planned to watch a film and just go to bed early. Humph.

Until he graciously extended the invite to me as well when he realised I needed a bit of cheering up. Go to the pub? Well why not! That’ll definitely de-stress me. We decided to take a day off from parkrun the next day and actually get a lie-in for once so I didn’t need to worry about what time to get to bed as I had no set time to get up. Perfecto.

After work I headed straight for the pub and joined the drinking wagon (which by this point was merrily trucking along). I ordered and drank my first ever Desperados. And it went down a treat.

We hadn’t eaten dinner yet so we ordered food. Two huge sharing platters of Mexican chicken, chicken dipper things and other fried goodies. Then on to the main event.

I was hugely surprised that the menu had quite a few salad options (you know how I love my salads) but even more surprising was that you could order a side of BBQ ribs. I mean seriously this menu was made for me. So I got my chickpea chicken salad with a side of ribs. As you do.

The evening was good fun and a lot of laughs. Ben got fairly drunk, which was hugely amusing. I must say I did get fairly tipsy (I managed 4 Desperados). My lie in until 9am the next day was blissful and entirely necessary.

We’d planned a walk in the New Forest and invited our friend Nathan with us (also in attendance at the pub).

All looking a little tired and delicate

Ben and Nathan was somewhat delicate but I think the fresh air really helped. Or at least I told them it would and stop moaning 😉

We took Alfie along as well and he absolutely loved it. Incidentally it turns out this was the same route we ran for the MarathonTalk weekend long run! We didn’t realise until we arrived.

We walked 3.75miles and stopped for lunch in a lovely little pub called the Royal Oaks. The menu was small and all home-made. No chips (fries) in sight. Just ploughman’s, dressed crab (!), fresh sausage rolls and pork pies. Nath and I went for crab with salad, Ben went for a sausage roll and we shared a cheese and gammon ploughman’s because we were hungry (and hello my name is Anna the food machine).

It was so tasty. Everything fresh and homemade (even the chutney in little mini jam jars – and there was an apple as well!).

My crab was amazing. The boys had salted caramel and honeycomb ice cream and we were raring to go again. It was funny because we’d all forgotten to turn off our Garmins when we first arrived which we was a bit annoying as our pace had been quite consistent and then we all had to keep clicking our watches every so often to stop them from power saving and turning off. So there was a lot of beeping during our meal.

A Ben selife

We continued on our set route which was actually quite tough. Some gradual inclines and deep sandy tracks. Glad I wasn’t running it!

The full route was 8.5 miles and we did it in around 2 hours 43 minutes. Not too shabby. Though obvious we had a break in the middle!

We were all shattered at the end, Alfie included. And stupidly thirsty. We had to stop at the services on the way home to buy drinks. I unwisely chose Diet Mountain Dew. The luminous colour of the bottle should have been a warning to me, it tasted so chemical and wrong. Bad choice. Not Fanta Zero for sure.

We dropped Nathan off and Ben and I promptly flopped on the sofa for some quality relaxing time watching How to Train Your Dragon (this film is AMAZING, I want a dragon!!).

Do you enjoy going for a long walk in the countryside?

What’s your favourite pub meal?

Do you drink? What’s your beverage of choice?

July 28, 2014July 28, 2014

Brighton, Ben’s nuts and nipple plasters

So things have been a little running heavy round here. Now I know the main focus of my blog is running but I like to liven things up a bit occasionally and talk about other stuff.

The other weekend Ben and I went to Brighton for a daytrip to see my uni friends and their partners. One of them, currently living in Brighton, had just recently got married…the cheeky so-and-so went abroad and didn’t invite anyone, how rude! 😉 We were very pleased for them regardless though.

We had a lovely walk to a local pub which serves the best monster pizzas, salads and Turkish-style pizzas. As it was the day before the Stansted half marathon I thought it best to go for a nice carby meal. For the good of the race of course.

Seriously that thing rocked my world. It was filled with lamb (not usually my thing), beef and chicken with a tomato sauce and vegetables. It was as big as my face pretty much.

No issue in finishing that bad boy. What did you expect?

After that we all went for a lovely walk in the hot hot sunshine along the seafront. I may have even dipped my toe in the sea. Or got ridiculously splashed by a ginormous wave.

This is the new dress I got from Oasis a few weeks ago (the only damn thing in my size). Suitably summery enough. Gotta wear these things as much as possible in Britain as you never know how long the sunshine will last!

We headed back to the flat and the new-husband brought out the most delicious blueberry white chocolate cheesecake known to man.

So thick and creamy. I do love a good baked cheesecake. I might have had seconds but we don’t need to dwell on that.

Speaking of food…Ben has been in a quandary recently about food and what to eat. He wants to lose weight but not lose the will live when he runs. It’s tough. I’d say he does eat quite healthy (for the meals I make him anyway…) but he doesn’t eat breakfast (the cardinal sin) and his lunch of choice would usually be a chunky white mayo-filled cheese laden vegetable barren sandwich at work. With no option really to buy anything else as his office just had a ‘sandwich lady’ and no shop.

I make myself lunch every day and it can be a faff but I do it because I like my salads and can go to town on all my favourite ingredients. But Ben, bless his soul, is not the type of guy to make a salad every day (show me the guy who is…).

As I’m a good, loving wife (no comments please, it’s true) I suggested I’d buy him a salad every day from Tesco as it’s just over the road from work for me (so is Costa and this is becoming an issue) and then he could take it the next day for work. A guess a better wife would make him a salad but let’s not push it here, people.

Salad selfie

Alongside this I would also buy him little portioned pots of nuts. But this was getting to be ridiculously expensive – how much for a 25g portion of cashews? Are you joking? So I bulk bought a load of mixed nuts, salted nuts, dried fruit and chocolate covered raisins…

Now each day Ben gets a little Tupperware box full of nuts etc. to take to work with his salad. I think I’ve earnt a few Wife Points 😉

Now to work on his breakfast…(*cough* and wine *cough*).

One of my other wifely duties is buying Ben his nipple plasters (he has mastered the chafe issue whereas I have not for my HR monitor). But we have serious issues.

Uh oh. We’ve got problems. Tesco do the best ones! OK that’s a lie, Tesco do the cheapest. Who charges over £3 for four blister plasters (*cough* Scholl, are you serious?)?

So you’re prayers are required. Our stock at home will only last so long. Dire times indeed.

If you have a partner, what do they have for lunch?

What’s your favourite nut to snack on? I love salted cashews. Or pistachios because they slow me down.

Ever suffered from the dreaded chafe?