Birthday

Had a very nice birthday, thanks to many phone calls and sms and cards :) Got even a call from US from my godfather :)
In the evening we went to a nice restaurant on the lake, called Chez Fritz. The view was amazing and different from the usual because of a huge pine tree, which makes the atmosphere a bit more southern and holiday-like:

I ate monkfish and was wondering again how to get it so soft - when I tried cooking it, it turned out like a rubber.
Mark looked like he belonged in that restaurant :) He coordinated with furniture, tree and the lake

I was very happy to sit in the breeze after a hot and busy day in the office:

At home I found more flowers (mum, red are from you!) :


And here is a piece of birthday cake I brought to work, recipe will follow on my food blog:

A drive to Heidiland

Half an hour from our village there is a region of Heidiland, called so after a famous book about a little girl in the Alps, which then became TV series.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidi
It is a picture-perfect Switzerland! The lake (Wallensee) is dark aquamarine with white sailing boats, surrounded by high mountains, tidy pastures and lovely wooden houses.



And of course we took our new car for a photoshoot and drive :)

Our may holiday in Bandol

We spend last week in hot, sunny and very summery Bandol in South of France.
Our accommodation was half a house with a giant garden and a swimming pool.
A gate to the house from the street:

First level of the garden had a bbq and was our outdoor dining room:

Second level had a swimming pool and an abundance of mulberries falling from a tree straight into your mouth!

A medieval village of Castelet was our only day trip, as it was too hot for travelling on most days:



Not far away from where we stayed in Bandol, there was a little shingle beach, where Jacques Cousteau invented SCUBA diving! So we have been busy exploring the sea ourselves:


All in all one of our best holidays in years! :)

Our garden and other lazy sunday things

We have discovered that our street is full of belaja acatsija, which is apparently called "false acacia". This is our first spring here, so it was a nice surprise!

And here is my berry/vegetable garden!

First one on the right is tomato, then raspberry, strawberries, red currant and gooseberry, little pots have herbs in them.
The rest of pics show what we ate today on a bbq :)

A mini holiday in Spain

We flew to Malaga on Friday morning and came back last night, but it felt like a proper holiday, we had different weather every day, warm and cloudy Friday, rainy Saturday and very hot Sunday.
First thing we do when we arrive is to have lunch in the port in our favourite fish eatery

We always have mixed fried fish, or Fritura Malagueña, which consists of baby squid, baby fish, marinated snapper and calamari rings, all deep fried. This a picture from last year:


In the afternoon I went to read on the beach, watching little dogs trying to go for a swim in freezing water :)


Saturday started out sunny and here is me having a traditional andalusian breakfast, toasted bread with olive oil and tomatoes:


The coffee is half coffee half milk, it is amazingly tasty and we have never been able to reproduce it at home. Must be some secret - this cafe is making all this since 1944, so they had time to optimize the recipes!

Next to it is a very beautiful pharmacy. Look at those tiles!

More antiques are found along the beach, where old boats are used as bbq-s for fresh sardines:

The adjacent restaurants are full in any weather

The rest of our pictures are here

Rowing in the Constable country

Not far from Colchester is a pretty city of Dedham, which lies in the heart of Constable country - so called because of an English painter John Constable, who made the countryside in this area famous through his paintings.

We rented a little boat here and the girls rowed it mostly into bushes and scared some ducks :)

Japan March 2009

One of many amazing things in Japan is abundance of salmon roe and its cheap! (1800 yen is 13 euro) A rare Russian can walk past an enormous box full of inviting orange jewels. Even when writing this a month later, I have to swallow hard.



But we are not only thinking about food :) From an early age I was fascinated about japanese art, brush paintings in particular. I always thought how beautifully the artists stylize trees, branches birds etc. It was completely unexpected to find trees that look exactly like painitngs and to realize that paintings are in fact very realistic and not stylized at all!

Here is a brush painting :



and here is a tree.. most of the work is done by nature :)