“None of this would have been possible without…

So I’ve been very lax in the awards department and have now racked up three nominations!  Thank you so much to Poppy over at Poppy’s Patisserie | Bunny Kitchen for nominating me for the Super Sweet Blogging Award, to Cakey Kate for nominating me for the Best Moment Award and finally to Nell at I Need a Feed! who nominated me for A Very Inspiring Blogger Award.  Here is my acceptance of all three, and my following of the specific rules for each.  My reticence in dealing with them immediately is perhaps because it makes me talk about myself instead of the infinitely more interesting topic of food!  No excuse for my tardiness though really.

Anyway, having looked into what should happen next I find that for all I am to display the badges:

The rules for the Super Sweet award are:

1.Thank the blogger(s) who gave you the award and link back to their blog – See above!
2. Answer the 5 super sweet questions – See below!
3. Include the Super Sweet logo in this post. You see it above.
4. Nominate a baker’s dozen other bloggers for this award.  See below!
5. Notify my nominees on their blogs.

Super Sweet Questions

1. Cookies or Cake?
   My goodness this is tough question!  Um…. cookies – but only if they’re chewy.
2. Chocolate or Vanilla?
   Vanilla is more versatile but chocolate is so delicious.  I’m going with vanilla just because I think it is possible to get a bit sick of chocolate but vanilla is always good!
3. Favourite Sweet Treat?
   Since giving up gluten and lactose things have changed.  I would absolutely have plumped for a Danish Pastry a year ago and I’m still on a mission to recreate a decent gluten-free version.  In the meantime I’m going with anything salty and sweet, like peanut butter swirled brownies.  Thank goodness peanut butter is naturally gluten-free!
   
4. When do you crave sweet things the most?
   Right after I’ve eaten some savoury!  I absolutely could just eat a savoury thing, then a sweet thing, then a savoury thing all day if I didn’t stop myself.  It’s almost impossible for me not to order a dessert in a restaurant, even if I feel a bit full.  But there’s a different stomach for dessert, isn’t there?
   
5. If you had a sweet nickname, what would it be?
   When I was little I sometimes got called poppet, as I’m sure many people did as it is a generally used term of endearment.  But it always amused me because Paynes Poppets were a popular sweet at that time (I used to like the toffee or orange ones best) and they were the treat I had when we went to the cinema.  The double meaning for me of poppet is really quite sweet!

My Baker’s Dozen Nominees are:

1. My Favourite Pastime
2. Miss Chris Creations
3. Chaos and Cookies
4. gf and me
5. Eclectic Lamb
6. brickiepedia
7. angie and james do stuff
8. Daily in-a kitchen
9. the vegan kitchen of dr caligari
10. krumkaker
11. fudgingood
12. Sodapop’s Sweet Vegan
13. Penniless Vegetarian UK

And the rules for the Best Moment Award are:

• Winners re-post this completely with their Acceptance Speech – see below.
• This could be written or video recorded.
• Winners have the privilege of awarding the next awardees! – below again.
• The re-post should include a NEW set of people/blogs worthy of the award; and winners notify them the great news.

RESOURCES: What makes a good acceptance speech?

• Gratitude. Thank the people who helped you along the way – Humor. Keep us entertained and smiling
• Inspiration. Make your story touch our lives
• Get an idea from the great acceptance speeches, compiled in MomentMatters.com/Speech
• Display the award’s badge on your blog/website, downloadable in MomentMatters.com/Award

Acceptance Speech

This blog has come about for many reasons (future stories there no doubt!) but this would not have been possible without my parents.  Firstly, for obvious reasons (I wouldn’t be here) and also because of what they taught me about food.  My mum couldn’t cook when she married my dad but she taught herself from various cook books.  I remember Delia Smith’s Cookery Course most vividly (the accompanying cookbooks in the original three part format), and Farmhouse Kitchen (which as you’ll see from this clip, only taught Britain how to make brown food.  Ha, ha, ha!).  My mum cooked everything from scratch, which has given me an appreciation of using fresh ingredients wisely.  At the time though I found it a complete treat to visit friends to have tea, when delights such as chicken super noodles, fizzy drinks and smiley faces were on offer.  Oh the glamour!  When I was a teenager and living just with my mum we developed a chore arrangement she affectionately described as ‘Autochef’.  I certainly didn’t do this every day, but often I’d return home from school to find a recipe book open to the required page and the ingredients in the fridge.  I prepared the meal my mum had planned for us, and she returned home from work in the early evening to find dinner already made.  It was a marvellous system!!  By the time I went off to university I was able to knock up the food required to sustain myself, and various friends and housemates, without an issue.  I noticed many other students not so well prepared!  My dad wasn’t so hot at cooking at this stage.  His contribution in my childhood (as I remember it anyway) was a full English breakfast where he’d often swear at any eggs broken during it’s production.  He’ll be so pleased I remember this!  Now he’s quite the baker.  Bloomers, lardy cakes, pitta breads…  How unfortunate I am to be gluten-free.  But he also likes a properly decent meal and eating out at good restaurants is what we’ve done together.  There’s nothing like going to a Michelin-starred restaurant for lunch and have the valet park your boring 5-door saloon for you, alongside the Ferraris and Aston Martins.  To be fair I’ve not experienced snobby service from any fancy restaurant I’ve been in so full marks to the more expensive British restaurants for that.  Anyway, that’s absolutely enough of me rambling on about myself.  Thanks for the award, I very much appreciate it. and thanks again to my parents for helping make me the cook I am today.

My nominees for Best Moment Award are:

1. Based on a Sprue Story
2. Laptop on the Ironing Board
3. mygijourney
4. Celiac and Allergy Adventures
5. Traci Carver

Last but not least, the Very Inspiring Blogger Award.

The rules for the Very Inspiring Blogger Award are:

1. Visit and thank the blogger who nominated you.
2. Acknowledge that blogger on your blog and link back – see above!
3. Share 7 random things about yourself.
4. Select up to 15 blogs for the award, a link to their blogs in your post, and notify them on their blogs.
5. Copy and paste the award on your blog somewhere

Now I’ve had one of these before, which is lovely, so here are seven further random facts about me:

• I don’t have any tattoos (I can’t think of where I’d put one and not have that bit sag when I’m old) so I expressed my young adult rebellion in the form of piercings.  Nothing too obvious (I was a responsible member of corporate Britain for a good few years) so it’s just ears, belly button and….  no I won’t tell you where the other one is!  Needless to say it caused some amusement with the nurses and my mum when I went for an operation once and I had to tape it up.

• I’m not a fan of flying.  I don’t like rollercoasters either.  It’s not that I think I’m going to die (that is a bit extreme) but I really, really, really, really don’t like turbulence and it panics me.  I don’t want to be the person manhandled to the floor mid-flight because I’m hanging onto the door screeching ‘I just need to get off’ at 40,000ft.  That said I’ve managed Canada once (train to New York and flight home from there thus incorporating two countries in one trip) and various European countries.  I’d love to go to Japan (very do-able), and Australia and New Zealand but you have to stop and get off your plane, only to get on another one without much time to prepare yourself again.  The thought of that is just far too aaaarrrrgggghh!!!  Maybe I can get a boat there.

• My last supper would be: watercress soup, pan-fried fish (sea bass probably) on buttery mashed potato with baby vegetables, followed by a warm chocolate fondant.  And I have in fact eaten this exact meal on the basis of it being the menu of my last meal.  No, I was never in any real danger (although we joked a lot about the irony of eating the meals and then pegging out), but as one of a group of friends who had worked together at some point, we used to regularly meet up and cook each other dinner.  I was a later addition to this gang, joining when the others had nearly got all the way through the alphabet once.  I think we did it all again (so that’s a starter including ingredient starting with A, a main with ingredient starting with B, dessert is C – the next person gets D, E, F, and so on.  There was some licence around the trickier letters I might add).  I think we might have drawn scrabble tiles in later rounds, we certainly made origami fortune tellers (cootie catchers) and eventually got around to our ideal last supper and drew the cook of each out of the hat.  The lovely Laura made my last supper and it was DELICIOUS!  And in case you’re worried, we are all still in fine fettle.

• I was born in Sussex, lived for a few teenage years in Essex, and now I live in Berkshire.  This is the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere!  I guess this feels like my home now, but I guess I’m not actually wedded to anywhere particularly.  My family won’t stay put in any one spot, but that just means I’m as free as a bird (if I want to be!)

• I’m a bit of a science geek.  I did Psychology and Physiology at university, having studied for As/A levels in Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Maths.  I’ve also got an MBA (from the Open University Business School) that I got while I was working.  I wouldn’t recommend working, studying AND trying to have a full social life.  I remember getting up to study at 6am and falling asleep mid-note taking and springing awake (I was wise enough to set an alarm clock) to find I’d drawn a long line down the page where I’d drifted off mid-sentence.  This happened with some regularity.  Still passed all the exams though!

• My favourite alcoholic tipple is the humble gin and tonic.  At the moment I am favouring Hendricks gin with Fever-tree tonic and a wedge of lime.  Lush.

• I’m a knitter/crocheter and I have a large stash.  Any fellow knitters out there will know what I mean!  I’m pleased I’ve learnt both skills because choosing which one to use for a project means you can really play to their strengths.  Knitting makes good garments, as the pieces can be worked in a very flat stitch and seams are easy to do.  Crochet is A LOT quicker (meaning baby blankets can be knocked up in half the time) and it’s better for circles – no getting away from that!  I like to straddle the line between angelic knitting and the dark art of crochet.

So, here are my nominees for the Very Inspiring Blogger Award:

1. Little Bliss Book
2. The Sensitive Foodie
3. my road to balance
4. My Gluten-Free Life
5. The Great Zambini’s Blog

So please do check out all the blogs I’ve nominated for each of the three awards – there is much to enjoy about every one of them.  Some are foodie, some are inspirational, some are about the writer’s life, some are very, very funny (in a good way!).  Even the ones that haven’t been going long have a lot of potential so show your support, give them a visit, and I bet you’ll be adding many of them to your Reader if you’ve not found them already.