I want to take this blog in a slightly different direction. Well actually, I want to take it in several directions all at the same time. I still cook, sew, bake and make, but lately I've been very busy and the only things keeping me sane are beauty products, fashion magazines, trips out etc, where once I'd devote a whole weekend to making a pair of curtains and baking bread, I'm at a point where I'm lucky if I get out of my pyjamas on the weekend. But I miss blogging. So I want to diversify a little. This is whatlozziedid, after all, and sometimes what I did of a weekend or evening is spend a load of money on shoes on Ebay or try out new foundation or what not. I'm not a fashionista and I'm not a beauty blogger. But there is more to me than my sewing machine (which I haven't used all year!).

So, with that in mind, on with my first beauty post!

I was a bit late to the beauty box party. Probably because I don't get sent them for free! I purchased the 'Farewell to Boudoir Prive' box as a one-off and I have ordered the Harrods limited edition GlossyBox but I do not regularly subscribe. But I remember seeing the January Carmine Beauty Box reviewed by a blogger I follow and I thought 'yep, I'll have one of them! I'm subscribed for now, and I do like Carmine a lot, but my financial situation will determine whether or not I continue, more than anything else.


I like the black exterior of the box and the shocking green interior is rather fun as well. I can take or leave the red sizzle but at least I can recycle it I suppose! I'm really glad I didn't get the rose shower gel as I already have a sample from Latest in Beauty so I'm glad to try another scent. Steam Cream sounds interesting definitely. I am sad enough to like trialling toothpaste and I received a very interesting coral-coloured sample of the Diego Dalla Palma lipstick, and I'm on a mission to get into lipsticks more so it'll be fun to try. Yardley's Royal English Daisy is my go-to scent at the moment so the Peony sample was very welcome. A little old fashioned when you first sample it but once its settled on the skin its rather nice! The Andrea Fullerton nail colour I got really isn't me but you can't have everything. I'll be sticking with Carmine until my bank balance tells me I have to stop for sure!

Now, onto my winnings! I should start by saying I rarely win anything. I should also start by saying I have a long-time online friend in the shape of Bee who has recently started up her own beauty blog, Bee Loves Beauty which I started following straight away and you all should too. Bee had her first giveaway of a gorgeous Clarins blush (Blush Prodige in 03 Miami Pink) and I entered because a) I'd have been MAD not to b)I don't own any high end make-up and every girl deserves some in her collection. And thanks to the power of a random generator, I won! This blush arrived ages ago but I only just got around to photographing it. Its LOVELY.

It comes in a fancy red Clarins box. The simplest things, like having goods that are boxed, are what pleases me the most!

Inside the box is a velvety pouch for keeping the gorgeous gold metallic compact in pristine condition! I rarely travel with makeup but at least if I do travel with this, it will be safe and well protected!

Here is the compact in all its glory. Its a mosaic of 2 shades from which you can select one colour or swirl your blusher brush around all four for a lovely effect.

Here is a sub-standard macro shot where you can see the colour in a little more detail.

I have to shockingly confess I haven't used this blush yet. In my defence, I wanted to photograph it in all its gorgeous untouched glory (I just know that I will get grubby fingerprints all over the amazing gold compact case as I'm just one of those people!). But I know its going to look amazing on me and suit my skin tone, eye colour and hair colour beautifully. Once I've used it I will post a review. I promise! I'm ridiculously excited that I've photographed it as now I get to go use it!

Would you like to own your own Clarins Blush Prodige? Head on over here to Escentual.com where they sell the entire collection. Bee bought my blush from here and it shipped extremely quickly and safely and I got a free emery board thrown in, hooray!

I'm not a very good blogger. This is evident by two key things. 1. I haven't blogged in months. 2. I go somewhere, do something, make something and only when I've finished do I think 'oh, I should have taken some photos and blogged about it...'.

So my return to blogging is half-hearted because I have come to share a recipe with you for a dinner I have just prepared and eaten. All without a single photograph. So, pictureless for now but as I make this dinner fairly regularly, hopefully I can snap the pictures at some point. Unless I forget again.

I'm here to share my recipe for BBQ lamb. Really, there's little about it that is BBQ-ey. I used to work in a student hall of residence and they made the dish there and it was always delicious. I managed to wangle the recipe out of the head chef. I've never been able to make it like he makes it, but that is probably because he is a brilliant chef and I am a sometime-cook and he adapted the recipe down from feeding hundreds to feeding 2-3, so I think some of the glory got lost in deduction. But if you can excuse the fact that its name is a bit misleading, I know you'll enjoy this dinner. This is my ultimate comfort food, and it reminds me of how far I've come from spending a year working in that kitchen, finally getting to be a food preparation assistant and soaking up as much food knowledge as I possibly could. Ok, I've not come far in culinary terms, but I've come a long way from the girl I was then. Anyway. You're here to snare a recipe, not here to hear me sound like a 75 year old.

I've adapted this recipe to suit myself, so the quantities etc are my own.

BBQ Lamb

Lamb neck fillet (fillet size depends on how many you'll need. At least 300g for two I reckon)
Butter
1 onion, diced
1 clove garlic, finely chopped or crushed
1 small bottle of red wine (those individual sized ones)
1 tsp brown sugar (I like to use molasses sugar or dark muscovado, but anything will do)
1/2 tsp mild chilli powder
a few splashes Tobasco sauce
2 tbsps Worcestershire Sauce
2 tbsps tomato puree (original recipe calls for tomato ketchup and I reckon using ketchup would make it taste much more BBQ-ey. But my OH cannot stand tomato ketchup, so we use puree. You can use either, I won't tell anyone)
salt and pepper
1 red pepper, chopped into chunks

To serve:
Brown rice
Green beans

Pre-heat your oven to approx 180 degrees or the gas mark equivalent.

1. Melt a decent chunk of butter in a saucepan (I use a cast iron casserole dish that can go on the hob and in the oven, but if you don't have one you can use a saucepan for hob top and an ovenproof dish for the oven). Add the onion and garlic and cook gently until soft but not brown.
2. Pour your bottle of wine into a measuring jug and top up with cold water so it reaches 350ml in the jug. Pour this on top of the onions and garlic.
3. Add the brown sugar, chilli powder, tobasco, worcestershire and tomato puree (or ketchup) to the pan. Season well with salt and pepper and give the whole lot a good mix. Throw your pepper chunks into the sauce. Leaving any lids off, bring the sauce to the boil and let it simmer and reduce a bit.
4. Whilst the sauce is coming up to the boil and reducing, slice your lamb fillet into 1.5cm thick slices, discarding any really fatty bits that you can cut off. Dip each slice into some seasoned flour. Heat up some ground nut oil in a frying pan and seal your slices of lamb, adding them into the sauce when they are beginning to brown.
5. Give everything a final stir. If necessary, transfer your lamb and sauce into an oven proof dish with a lid, or else put the lid onto your casserole dish and put it into the over for an hour (the longer the better).
6. At the appropriate time before serving, cook your brown rice and your green beans.
7. Serve and enjoy.

BBQ-ey it is not, but it is warming, comforting, soothing. The butter makes the sauce rich and a little oily, which generally I would hate, but in this instance I really like it. This is the only dish I eat with brown rice, I can't even remember why I ever tried it with brown rice but it works for me, its delicious. The lamb should be really soft from slow cooking in the sauce and the sauce should have thickened up nicely. Yum Yum!

Please let me know if you try this recipe, I'd love to hear what you think of it! For me, its a perfect Sunday dinner if you're suffering from the Sunday Blues, as I frequently am!

I truly hope this marks my return to blogging here more regularly. I have a number of ideas of things I want to post about, I just need to start being a bit more organised.

Every month the OH and I take it in turns to choose a 'date' that we go on. The first, in May was all mine, and I chose to take in some art in London. First, we popped down to the Southbank Centre to see Tracey Emin-Love is What You Want, which was absolutely brilliant. Emin is a genius, in my eyes, I loved it all. I love her quilts especially, but the neon, the films, the writings, all fantastic. No pics as it wasn't that sort of art exhibition, but I'd recommend you all go to this!

Outside the Southbank Centre were people playing in the fountains:


We then walked over the Thames to Somerset House to visit Circle of Heads/Zodiac Animals, an installation by Ai WeiWei. Again, LOTS of fountain fun to be had!



The sculptures were amazing.














Once we were done here we wandered up into Covent Garden and had lunch at Bistro 1, a favourite stop off of mine (although I normally pop into the Beak Street branch! We then headed up to Edgeware Road and the Lisson Gallery to continue our art tour, visiting the other Ai WeiWei exhibition in London. Again, brilliant. Loved the video installations downstairs. And the sculpture outside too.






We then headed home, after a very successful first Date Day! I'd encourage everyone to visit all three exhibitions (Ai WeiWei's are free), each is fantastic.

My Mum decided to put an extension onto her house, and when she told me that a part of the extension was going to be a small seating area, I decided I'd like to make her some cushions for the chairs down there. My Mum is a big dog lover, and I found some delightful doggy-themed fabric on Ebay (other shopping sites are available!), which I ordered. This was last year some time. It took me until the other week to make her the cushions, being that I am a bit useless/I always end up having other things to do.

I used this book, which I believe my Mum bought for me as a present! I can highly recommend this book, I've made the cushions and the door stops from the book so far and they are easy to follow instructions which bear great results. My other half said if he didn't know better he would have thought I had bought the cushions. Which is great as Im in no way talented with a sewing machine, I can just use one :)

They are an envelope style, with cute ties to keep them closed. Here's the envelope top (I didn't quite stuff the cushion pad in properly it seems!



I didn't want to share this post until my Mum received the cushions, as I'm not sure if she reads this blog or not (if you do, hi mummy!). Perhaps she'll send me a picture of them in her extension which I can share at a later date!

As I mentioned in my last post, I got a breadmaker from Monkey for my birthday. I've had conversations with some of the other women at work about how receiving items like that for your birthday or for Christmas would, to them, be the worst thing ever. To me, its BRILLIANT. I love kitchenware and kitchen gadgets. If the house was burning down I'd blatantly bail out my Kenwood mixer, my laptop, my sewing machine and now my breadmaker before I'd give much thought to anything else. A breadmaker is one of those things I always thought would be good to own, but I never really looked into it much and it seemed like the were quite expensive. Monkey was struggling to come up with a birthday present for me then chanced upon the breadmaker and the rest, as they say, was history! He bought it a little while before my birthday and then out of the blue, The Gadget Show on C5 reviewed breadmakers and mine was on it! Mine won out of the three, which he was REALLY relieved about!

I have this one, and I've used it most weeks since my birthday. To be honest, I haven't been that adventurous yet, I tried the 4hour white loaf cycle and then I tried the 1hr55min rapid bake white loaf cycle and I've kind of stuck with that the last three weeks! The 4hr cycle does produce a better loaf but there's nothing wrong with the rapid bake setting. The machine came with lots of recipes, some of them sound amazing so I'm looking forward to making a few different things whenever we get bored of fresh white bread (do you ever get bored of fresh white bread?!)

Here is my breadmaker in the flesh:


It couldn't be simpler, really. You pull the bread pan out of the machine and put the kneading blade in. You then chuck in the ingredients, putting the yeast on the very bottom and the water in last, like so (it doesn't look pretty!):


You then select the settings you want, which probably takes the longest time of every step in the process!


You then wait till it beeps and whip out a beautiful load of bread!

(today I was making some more curtains, so my bread and the cooling rack were relegated off the dining room table where my sewing stuff was and were instead put onto my craft table).

The only negative bit is you don't get that 'fresh bread baking' smell while its cooking. You do get it when it's out and cooling though, delicious. Im promising myself I'll splash out soon and try different loaves! You can make a ciabatta loaf as I have been asked to make my lasagne next Sunday, I should really bake a fresh ciabatta to go with it.

I've never tried any other bread maker before, but I can still recommend this one to anyone considering getting one!

(Please note, I've not been paid by Panasonic to review their machine and I'm not affiliated to them in any way, besides being a very satisfied customer!)