FOOD: Family Food Fun - Italy (YB)

Inspired by our Japanese sushi making fun last weekend, we decided to have a fun foodie weekend every week, based on a different cuisine of the world. But something we could all make together, as a family.

This weekend, we decided to go for Italian. I'm not a big fan of pizza myself, but Paul and David love pizza, so we decided to go for that.

We cheated a little bit and bought ready made Napolina mini pizza bases, but we decided we might try again in the future from fresh dough.

For our Saturday dinner and Sunday dinner, we had pizza both times, this is what we made and what it looked like.

Well, yesterday (Saturday), I had tomato & basil sauce base, topped with sliced mozzarella. For my toppings, I chose smoked sausage, turkey ham, mushrooms, red peppers, jalapenos and red onion.

Ready to go in the oven

Cooked & ready to eat

David also had tomato & basil sauce base, topped with mozzarella. For his toppings, he chose red onion, turkey ham, pepperami, red pepper, jalapeno and olives.

Ready to go in the oven.

Fresh from the oven and ready to eat!

Paul also had tomato & basil sauce base, topped with mozzarella. For his toppings, he chose meat free balls, red onion, jalapenos, mushrooms, red onions, olives, red pepper and extra mozzarella. As you can see, he really overdid it with the toppings (oink!) and it ended up looking more like a triple burger than a pizza! Paul's pizza is vegetarian as he is a vegetarian.

Before cooking

After cooking

Today, I had reggae reggae jerk sauce base, topped with sliced mozzarella. For my toppings, I chose smoked sausage, turkey ham, mushrooms, jalapenos and red onion. The jerk sauce didn't work well as a base as it resulted in all the toppings sliding as it cooked :(

Before going in the oven

Jerk sauce was too runny and toppings slipped during cooking :(

David also had reggae reggae jerk sauce base, topped with sliced mozzarella. For his toppings, he chose yellow pepper, smoked sausage, pepperami, turkey hame, olives and jalapeno.

Prepared for cooking...

Ready to eat, but the toppings slipped :(

Paul also had a half reggae reggae jerk sauce base and a half tomato & basil sauce base, topped with sliced mozzarella. For his toppings, he chose meat free balls, red onions, jalapenos, yellow peppers, olives, mushrooms and extra mozzarella. Again, he went crazy with the toppings (oink! oink!) and it ended up looking like a giant burger!

Before cooking

Straight out of the oven

We had fun making our pizzas. And there's no better way of making sure you get the toppings you like best in the right amounts!

TRAVEL: Venice - My First Ever Trip Abroad! (YB)

A little late writing my blog post about my trip to Venice, but I could not miss out a post on my FIRST EVER TRIP ABROAD! I won this from Manfrotto Imagine More on Facebook, so I owethem a very big "THANK YOU!" as it wouldn't have been possible without them.

We left at around 6am from home in Liverpool to get the coach in the city centre to Manchester as that's where our flight was from. We needn't have rushed really. The later coach would have only left us 1 hour to check-in, but we got checked-in really quickly and we I don't think it would have mattered in the slightest if we'd got the later coach. As it was, we had a 3 hour wait at the airport for our flight because we preferred to get there too soon than too late.

It wasn't Paul's first ever trip abroad, but he hasn't been abroad since he was 16 with his parents, so it was his first trip as an adult. But my first trip EVER. It was both exciting and scary!

We had to get 2 flights on the way - Manchester to Munich and then Munich to Venice.

I'm not that great with heights, so while I was really, really looking forward to my first trip abroad, I was also dreading how I would be on the plane.

I was nervous on the take off, but I must say, it wasn't bad at all. Not being used to the sound of the plane or when the plane turns, I was a little bit unnerved the first few times there was a noise or it turned, but I soon got used to it and knew what to expect. By the time we were getting on the Munich to Venice flight, I was much more confident.

We arrived at Marco Polo Aeroporto in Venice at around 4.30pm. We then had to walk to the vaporetto (water bus) station to get across to the main bit. It took a whopping hour and a half or so on the vaporetto and it wasn't the most comfortable ride ever, with them really thwacking the boat into the ports each time, that plus the diesel fumes were suffocating, so I actually had a really bad headache by the time we got there.

Once we got off the boat though and out into the air, it was very refreshing. We headed off to our hotel - the 5* Hotel Bauer - to check in. The receptionist was very warm and friendly and welcoming. She took us to our room and showed us around. Our room (room 225) was very nice - spacious, comfortable and nice amenities. There was an in-room bar, but we stayed clear of that as it was VERY expensive - €6 for a tiny bottle of water or €8  for a tiny bottle of Coca Cola for example!

We didn't stay at the hotel very long before venturing off into the night to explore Venice. We weren't there for very long overall, so we wanted to make the most of it.

Basically, we just walked around, we had no specific plans of where to go as we just wanted to see what the area around the hotel was like.  Here are some photo's from that night:

The next day was spent again wandering around, except the streets were less confusing in daylight, but much, much busier and we managed to cover more ground than just seemingly going around in circles like we did the night before! It was all over far too soon though as the day quickly turned to night (and the aching feet were beyond painful!). Here are some more photo's of that day:

The final day we didn't have time to do anything else as we had to leave pretty much right away to get the vaporetto back to the airport, had something to eat when we got to the airport and then it was time for our first flight home, Venice to Zurich, we had a short time at Zurich and then had the Zurich to Manchester flight back and then we had to wait around a fair while for our coach home which was full of roudy football fans all being loud :(