Best Rowing Coach on the Thames?

Getting back to training after a weekend end away certainly feels better when the sun is shining, the water is beautifully flat, the first baby goslings are bobbing around and.................our coach cooked us all breakfast!

And not just any old breakfast either - sausages, bacon, scrambled eggs, black pudding, grilled tomatoes and, after a special request from me - smoked salmon!!! How amazing is he?! No wonder our membership is growing (just a shame most of the girls are training to race as lightweights!).

Interesting too so see what others brought to the table - home-made rye bread from one, Nutella from another (has she not been listening to a word I say??!!) and obviously from me it had to be something to add a touch of health to the proceedings - a shot of Cherry Active drink to top

up their antioxidant levels after a hard workout!

Cheers George, you're a star!

When in Rome.......

Another trip to the beautiful city, but this time it was slightly different and much more like home - it rained constantly for four days - thunder, lightening and the most water I have seen running down cobbled streets in a long time!

But less like home was the great food available, as always in Italy. I arrived on Friday and was told that we would be having dinner that night with friends at around 10pm, with 'Happy Hour' aperitifs starting at around 9pm - a little later than we would normally start at home, but when in Rome...

After a large dinner another surprise - would I like to go for cornetti? Having just learnt in my Italian class that cornetti was croissant I was a little confused but agreed anyway as it seemed the thing to do. So, at around 12.30am we drive for around twenty minutes to the Africa District to a little cafe that is positively bulging with people eating croissants!! They are coming straight out of the oven and served hot, filled with custard or topped with icing sugar, some with chocolate and others filled with cheese. Even though my stomach was fighting against the idea, I could not resist - they were divine. And obviously the whole point is that you buy some for breakfast so the next morning began with a treat too!

After that the weekend was a whirl of driving to different areas outside of Rome, starting with attending Mama's birthday party in Bracciano where more great food was served, including panzanella, a wonderful country summer bread and tomato salad which includes the simplest of ingredients but as is typically Italian, those ingredients are the best that can be found; country style bread with a great crust, fresh tomatoes, garlic, basil leaves, virgin olive oil, red wine vinegar and olives.

The recipe is simple - just soak the bread in a little cold water then mix with all the remaining ingredients, season and mix well. Do not attempt this with pappy supermarket bread and unripe tomatoes - you will be missing the point!

Driving around Italy is amazing - not more than forty-five minutes out of Rome are some of the most beautiful villages, some built on cliff-tops, others surrounded by olive groves, or the another alternative is to head for the beach. Either way wherever you stop you are likely to find great food, even in the smallest towns and villages where there is one lonesome cafe - a plate of pasta with a rocket and Parmesan salad, or a beautifully thin pizza topped with tomato sauce and artichokes - I found it impossible to have a bad meal!

A Taste of Honey

I wouldn't normally attend work related things at the weekend, but the chance to learn about and taste gorgeous honey was too tempting to resist! So after a quick training session on the river, I scurried down along the Thames in the pouring rain, to Petersham Nurseries.

Now this is a place I would not normally rush too either, despite it being a beautiful location and despite the fact that the food is pretty good. My main problem with it is the outrageous prices, mainly I assume because it is the wonderful

borough of Richmond (who now have a millionaire MP which just says it all!), so they feel justified in charging rather over-flated prices to sit and have lunch in a greenhouse!

Anyway, back to the purpose of my visit, which was to attend a Guild of Food Writers talk, which are always very informative, and this one was certainly no exception.

We started with a brief talk by Skye Gyngell, who is the chef at Petersham, and who is very passionate about combining natural flavours of foods together, which she did brilliantly in serving a plate of cheeses matched with subtle cheeses - Creamy St Tola goats cheese with rhodedendron honey, and toma (Piedmont) cheese with herb honey - the combinations were divine. To finish we were served vanilla ice cream with chestnut honey and turron....despite it being a cold and rainy day I couldn't resist eating the bowl clean!

After that we were given a great talk by Hattie Ellis, who appears to have spend a large amount of her life travelling the world to learn about honey and bees. It certainly was not time wasted as she made everything sound such fun and so interesting. I have always wanted to keep bees and she made it seem such an easy thing to do, especially as she mentioned that local bee keepers may even be happy to 'borrow' your garden for one of their hives - thus giving you the pleasure of sharing them and sampling their honey, but none of the work!! And a great chance to learn more about it before you take the plunge and get your own colony. One great thing I did learn was that bees are banned in New York, in that you are not allowed to keep them there. But....there is an overground underground of bee keepers who keep them on their roof! Only in America!

My stroll back home after all that sweetness was made even sweeter by the discovery of Greedies on the river. Greedies is a cafe in Isleworth that is frequented by myself and a large number of rowers who need a good breakfast or brunch after a heavy morning's training. Over the years we had explored a number of local workman's caffs, where you can get a good fry-up and sit and recover from the mornings exercise in a nice surrounding. We were never quite satisfied until I came upon Greedies. They do one of the best breakfasts in West London - and not only a World Cup fry-up either. If you want something a little more up-market there is eggs benedict or smoked salmon and scrambled eggs, along with lots of other goodies. For a Sunday brunch with the morning papers it takes a lot of beating.

Bank Holidays were made for this.

What a life-safer my friend Guinevere is.....whenever I need to get away from it all and chill out for a few days, she insists I get myself down to Wales, to stay in her beautiful little converted chapel in Llangennith on the Gower Penninsula.

Forget all that flying abroad stuff (especially when there is volcanic ash floating around!), Wales can be absolutely stunning and luckily for myself and a couple of girlfriends, this weekend was exceptional. The sun shone for the whole weekend, so the surfers were out in force (giving us a little eye-candy for amusement), and we spent our days walking the beach, or over the hills, with pub lunches and the odd Welsh cake here and there! Unfortunately the local pub The Kings Head was very disappointing on the food front, with a very big menu, including lots of curries and the usual pub grub type food, but not very well done. Which meant we had to extend our search a little further, ruining our plan of spending the whole weekend not using a car.

Luckily after a trip to the local flea market on Monday morning we drove past the King Arthur Hotel, which was a different standard and served great food. Again there were lots of curries (is curry eating some old Welsh tradition that I've not heard of?), but these were much more imaginative and certainly more tasty - I had chickpea and vegetable Thai curry which was great and only let down by the addition of microwaveable rice!

But if cakes is what you like (and I do), then homemade Welsh cakes are a must. There is debate about whether you eat them with butter or jam, or just plain (I go for the plain option), either way they are one of the easiest cakes to make especially as they don't even require an oven. I have memories of making them for my father when he was living abroad and had no oven but was craving homemade cakes - I cooked them in a wok!

This recipe uses a griddle pan, but if a wok is all you have then get cooking anyway!

225g self-raising flour

110g butter

85g caster sugar

75g mixed dried fruit

1 egg

a little milk

1. Sift the flour into a mixing bowl and rub in the butter with your fingertips until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs.

2. Stir in the sugar and mixed dried fruit then pour in the egg and mix to a dough, using a little milk if needed.

3. Turn out onto a floured surface and roll the dough to a thickness of about 8-9mm. cut rounds with a biscuit cutter.

4. Heat a griddle and wipe with a little oil. Cook the cakes over a low heat until golden on both sides and cooked through the middle. Serve warm or cold.

Forced extended break!

I can't believe we are still here - we should have left on Saturday, it's now Tuesday and there is no sign of us moving anywhere. On Saturday we flew from Izmir to Istanbul to try to get a flight, there were none. We looked at taking the train via Bucharest, Budapest, Vienna, Munich and Paris, it was full for the next three days and anyway we were told it was not safe. So then there was the idea of flying to Rome (via Athens), to take a train or bus..............two minutes later Rome closed. Plan D was a bus to Munich, taking 48 hours, costing £230 and no sure sign of getting out of Munich. We spent a night in Istanbul, in a hotel that was not safe to leave at night. Dinner was a toasted cheese sandwich in our room. Breakfast was served in polystyrene trays on table mats of three-day old newspaper - very classy!

So finally we gave up and decided to fly back to Izmir and take a taxi back to the house in Foca.

At least we can sleep in our own beds and wait until the madness stops.

An easy routine.......

The only downside of having a property in another country, that you only visit occasionally, is that you spend the first couple of days cleaning and repairing and making it feel like home again. In our case it was two days of weed clearing - the garden looked like a meadow, when in reality it should be crazy paving (whoever invented that dreadful phrase and concept was certainly crazy). So, yesterday morning I cycled down to the local garden centre and tried to explain, in my non-existent Turkish, to a very sweet man, with non-existent English, that I needed weed killer. The killer bit was easy, katil. But when it came to weeds ise yaramaz ot, ayrik otu, I was a little stumped! Despite this, after 15 minutes of gesticulating, I had a coke bottle with some dubious looking liquid in it, that we had agreed needed to be topped up with water, 1:5. And after all this debate, he refused to let me pay for it! That is what I love about this place, everybody wants to help and there is no ulterior motive, ever. A couple of hours spent in the internet cafe trying to download lectures I have missed, came free with Turkish apple tea and a bunch of geraniums! Sometimes being female is just the best!

So, a routine is very soon settled into. I am woken by the local military base....my alarm can be anything from the morning drill being called (perfect for getting me out of bed!), a boogle, a round of rifles or a full brass band! The base is only about 500 meters from the house

and if the wind is blowing the wrong way it sounds like we have thirty soldiers in our back garden. A thirty minute run to the headland is followed by a swim in the sea (bit of a shock this time as we are here earlier than normal and it's pretty cold!). After a quick shower, a breakfast of muesli, fresh local strawberries and local natural yoghurt. Unlike the Greek yoghurt we get at home, this Turkish yoghurt is thick and creamy, but also very smooth. It also has a crust on top like that of a home-made rice pudding - almost chewy, and absolutely delicious. If I was cast on a dessert island and only allowed one meal it would be this yoghurt and honey....forever!

After that the day consists of laying on the patio, strolling into town to do odd jobs or buy more food, and walking the two minutes to the sea for another swim - it's hell!

The other thing that has to be mentioned is the cats. They are everywhere. And I mean everywhere - there are hundreds, all colours, and sort of semi wild - they will let you feed them but are unlikely to let you touch them. We have adopted a couple at the house in the short time we have been here and already they feel comfortable enough to sleep on our chairs, but not for us to get too close.

Tonight is our last night so we are going out to dinner. We will go to the same place we ate in on our first night, despite saying we would try different ones.......the problem is they are so nice and constantly give us more than we order or ask for, so it seems rude not to give them out custom. Obviously this is why they do it but what the heck!

Another week, another country.......

Back to my beloved Foca, to the house where my mother lived and has now become a retreat for my sister and I when we need to escape the real world.

We've only been here two days and already I walk slower, sleep more and eat more healthily than ever...........I think I am finally winding down. It's pretty hard not to.

Foca is a beautiful tiny fishing village on the west coast of Turkey, 70km north of Izmir. Totally unspoilt, there are no English people, no buildings above three storeys allowed to be built and best of all, great food to be had.

Our first night was a treat....we wandered along the seafront to one of the restaurants (although very small, Foca has an abundance of great restaurants to choose from). We ate freshly made houmous with dill (I would never have thought this combination would work, but it did), a salad full of local leaves (nettles, thick, strong rocket and lots of leaves I didn't recognise), plus a shrimp casserole - freshly caught prawns cooked with garlic, tomatoes, mushrooms and olive oil and topped with local cheese. It was delicious. We were both too full for dessert but then were told there was a surprise to come! A terracotta dish of halva.......not the way we would normally eat it though.........it was halva, cooked with milk and olive oil, served hot sprinkled with chopped hazelnuts, and was amazing (you do need to have a sweet tooth for this, as with all Turkish dessert and cakes).

After that there was more free wine and finally to top it all, a nearby table of men presented us with some of their red snapper that had been cooked in salt and then set alight as a birthday celebration dish - what an evening!

Tuesday morning is market day - another chance to eat great food as all the traders insist on you trying everything. And of course, we are a complete novelty, not being locals, so they have great fun making us eat things they suspect we won't like. But we return to the house laden with fresh cheese, local honey, herbs, local olives and olive oil and the best bit, thick creamy local yoghurt - I am in heaven.