Today I thought I’d give you a roundup of my food and drink highlights from this week,now that I have just about recovered from my manic time and starting to indulge back into my little food world. And this week has been a time of rediscovery from champagne to coffee, bbq’s to home cooked meals. So below are my highlights…

Champagne celebration. What better way to celebrate completing a project within deadline and remembering what home looked like than popping a bottle of bubbles. And as you know I love my champagne… oh the smell, the taste, I savoured every mouthful. To be fair I indulged in some lovely cava as well this week, including one of my favourites – Fleixenet – don’t forget to let me know if you have a favourite bottle of bubbles you think I might like.

Captivating coffee. Although the coffee has been flowing recently I had forgotten how lovely the proper coffee shop style can taste. We spent a day in Exeter earlier this week and headed straight down to the quay-side to our usual café which was full! So we tried somewhere different and my latte was just delicious (and so was the toasted bagel with bacon) so if you’re in Exeter why not try out Mango’s, the café on the quay.

BBQ-tastic. Over the summer we treated ourselves to a Weber charcoal BBQ (fondly named Mark), but with the weather this summer we’ve hardly had a chance to use it so we took advantage of the warm dry evening we did have and let Mark entertain us. Good burgers are just so delicious, especially when homemade with your own ingredients added depending on mood. Any burger I love with some sweet chilli, blue cheese, bacon and pineapple. We were also lucky enough to  be invited out to a BBQ where we had the most delicious rib-eye steak.

Oyster beef. I also managed to get back into the kitchen this week and cooked Beef in Oyster Sauce for my favourite 2 men. Which went down a treat. I made sure I marinated the meet first in red wine, stock, oyster sauce and sugar. Then I cooked slowly on a low heat so the meat was really tender, finishing off by adding a little blue cheese – just because I fancied it! All served with roasted sweet and white potato chunks with freshly picked runner beans. You can’t beat eating in season vegetables.