Happy New Year!!!

Happy New Year everyone! It's quite exciting to think that our blog now transcends two calendar years.

On the first day of a New Year, I find (as I suspect most people do) that thoughts turn towards hopes and aspirations for the year ahead. Here are a few of ours, if you'd like to share your own, it would be great to hear your food related ambitions!

1. Improve the quality of our wine intake whilst cutting back a bit. That means less casillero del diablo and more hunting out local independent wine merchants. It also means a camping trip through the Loire valley (although Jen doesn't know it yet).
2. Take more time over food photography, normally I'm so eager to eat that I don't get around to taking a decent photo.
3. To have tried all of the french AOC cheeses (so far I've had 29 out of a total 44 - I'm pretty sure it's 44...)
   
   And from Jen:
4. Be a smidge stricter about portion sizes, so that when we say 'oh, lovely, we've got enough for lunch tomorrow as well', we don't then go back and snarf it later that night.
5. Have a couple of unashamedly foodie weekend breaks to places we've not been before but that seem to be rising on the foodie radar (Sardinia is top of Jen's list at the moment).

This year our near and dear ones have been very generous and have provided a truly mountainous selection of cookery, wine and other foodie books which we can't wait to get into (I'm sure there will be many posts in the year ahead). In fact, there were so many that we couldn't carry them all back to London, so the monster wine encyclopedia is not shown below...