Life lately...

Well hello there internet, its been a while! I've still been living an internet free existence, and I've resorted to spending my time in various coffee shops around Leeds, eating cake and catching up on important internet based things (mostly New Girl and GBBO...).

Since I've been without wifi for so long, some of the posts I'd have otherwise written seem a bit redundant now so instead I thought I'd do a bit of a whistlestop tour of my summer to bring all you nosy people out there up to speed with what I've been up to over the last month or so.

Harewood House

Mama and Papa T managed to squeeze a day trip to see little Kaz in a few weeks ago (anyone else's parents have a busier social calendar than them?). Considering I've lived in Leeds for 6 years with such a huge stately home and park practically down the road, I'd never taken a visit except when I did a Color Me Rad run there a few months back (but we were too busy throwing paint around to pay too much attention to the surroundings!). The weather was bloomin' beautiful and we spent hours and hours wandering about the grounds. I love a good family day trip, especially when we end it in one of my favourite pubs for tea.

Big Reunion

Its been three whole years since graduation now (although I still have difficulty coming to terms with how old that makes me...), and somehow it had been two years since the five faces above were last in a room together. We finally managed to pin everybody down to a weekend in August to meet up and catch up on the gossip from the many, many months that had flown by. We spent ages running around Asda picking up plentiful supplies of hummus, popcorn and any other picnic food we could get our hands on before heading off on a trip to Temple Newsam to see the animals at the farm. After eating our body weights in cocktail sausages, making a few furry friends and playing running around after a frisbee we headed back home to get ready before an evening of bowling and ping pong at Roxy Lanes and Roxy Ballroom. Normal bars just aren't enough for me anymore, unless there's some sort of drunken sport I can participate in I'm just not interested! 

Corfu

The big activity of the month was a well deserved summer holiday to Sidari in Corfu. We mostly spent the week eating unimaginable quantities of saganaki, drinking crazily cheap cocktails and gazing longingly at a God-like Greek waiter at one of the restaurants. All the stereotypes of a Greek holiday right there. My personal highlight of the trip was the waterpark as I have the holiday requirements of a 10 year old, the 25m freefall slide was one of the best/scariest things I've done before... mostly scary because my bikini top came undone somewhere along the way down the slide. The people at the bottom of the slide don't know how lucky they are that I had a sunburnt back and had put a t-shirt on to cover it up...

 Back home

The week after my holiday I had a few more cheeky days off work and headed home to see my parents. I did myself proud and managed my first solo mission on the motorway to anywhere further than Ikea (which is about 5 mins down the motorway from where I live...) all the way down the M62, through the centre of Liverpool and back to my Mum and Dad's house. I mostly just enjoyed being able to sing along to my driving playlist without fear of people spotting me at traffic lights! Whilst home I had a yummy meal out at Bill's, caught up with my friend about her wedding preparations and had a look at Liverpool from the top of the Cathedral before driving back to Leeds (and missing my junction on the motorway because I was too busy singing along to Biffy Clyro).

Leeds West Indian Carnival

My Bank Holiday Monday was spent in the rain, feeling grateful for my nice warm coat and many layers of clothes whilst watching lots of people in very minimal costumes parading down the streets of Leeds. The Leeds West Indian Carnival is one of the biggest in the country, and since I wasn't at Leeds Festival this year (sob) I was around to go and have a nosy with friend. The costumes were incredible, and despite the rain there was a brilliant atmosphere (which may have been partly due to the crazy amount of people I spied swigging vodka and rum straight from the bottle as they danced down the parade route!).

Alton Towers

My buddy and I took a trip to Alton Towers last week. I hadn't been for a few years and was bouncing around like a child (see, I really am a 10 year old...) the whole way there. Considering it was still the summer holidays, we didn't have to queue all that much, except for The Smiler where we spent 90 minutes queuing under the ride watching endless carts of people whizzing past us. By the time we'd got to the front of the queue my knees were knocking together and I was starting to question why I'd ever wanted to go on a ride with 14 loops in it, but I wasn't planning on letting an hour and a half's worth of queuing go to waste. And OHEMGEE it was so worth the wait. Well done Alton Towers, you did good with that one. 

Congratulations if you made it to the end of this mammoth post! Normal service shall hopefully resume on here once my wifi has been fixed.

So that you'd leave me alone in Leeds again

On Saturday, my buddy and I tried to have a little road trip to Ilkley lido to make the most of the rare outdoor swimming pool friendly weather we've been having. Alas, we got there to find out they'd stopped letting people in at 12.30 as it was so busy (it was 12.35 when we arrived...). Instead we went for a wander and an ice cream whilst we formed a back up plan to keep us entertained for the afternoon.

So we hopped back into Betty, my awesome new car, and drove to the fruit picking farm in Horsforth (with only a slight detour thanks to the satnav thinking that the farm was down a residential street in the middle of a housing estate...).  All that was left in the fields was raspberries as the strawberry season had just finished so we set off on our merry little way to the raspberry fields. The man at the stand told us that the raspberries were becoming harder to find but that there should still be plenty for us to fill our basket with. He was right, but we did have to keep disappearing into the depths of the bushes and branches to find anything worth picking- hard work when the weather was so crazily hot! We were very proud of ourselves when our dedication finally paid off and we wandered back to the man with a basket full of yummy looking berries. There's just something far more satisfying about picking your own fruit than pulling it off a shelf at the supermarket, and they definitely taste better too!

On Sunday, I realised I had a humongous box full of raspberries sat in my fridge as we'd not managed to make a real dent in them yesterday. Worried that they were going to quickly go past their best, I sarted plotting ways I could make something exciting and raspberry based.  I decided to experiment with ice lollies as it was far too warm to be slaving over a hot oven. With no recipe in front of me I tried to turn my lovingly picked fruit into tasty lollies. And actually, they seem to have worked pretty bloomin' well! And being the kind-hearted soul that I am, I'm going to share my secret recipe so that you have an excuse to go and pick your own fruit too!

Raspberry Lemonade Lollies

Ingredients:

250g raspberries

juice of one lemon

1-2 tsp honey

1tsp caster sugar

about 100ml lemonade

To make:

Weigh out your raspberries and mash them together until it forms a liquid. 

Seive the smushed up raspberries to separate the juice from the seeds (I then added some of the seeds to the bowl to make the lollies seem a bit more 'natural' without it being totally overrun with seeds but that's just personal preference).

Squeeze the lemon juice into the bowl of raspberry juice, add the sugar and honey and mix together well.

Pour the mixture into ice lolly moulds (I got mine super cheap in Primark!) so that they're about two-thirds full then top up each mould with lemonade.

Put in the freezer until frozen then sit out in the sunshine and enjoy :)

  

If anybody has any more summery ice lolly recipes then let me know- I'd love to try out more ideas!

Fallout- Catfish and The Bottlemen

I'm just trying to put the world to rights

Yesterday was a bloomin' beautiful day. For me it summed up what summer weekends are all about, wandering around, sitting in the sun drinking cider and spending quality time with friends. My lovely friend Coral bought me a voucher for Afternoon Tea at Harvey Nicks in Leeds for my birthday and we finally got around to using it (three months later!) this weekend and so we decided a day of fun around Leeds was in order to make the most of the celebration.

We started off the day in Roundhay, one of my all time favourite places in Leeds, for a nosey around the Farmer's Market, croissants in an awesome little deli and a wander around the park (complete with an ice cream too of course!). Roundhay is one of those places I've always turned to for a bit of city escapism since moving to Leeds as its easy peasy to get to from town (always a bonus back when we were poor students who didn't know anywhere else to get to via public transport!). It seemed as though half of Leeds had the same idea as us today as it was crazy busy, but its one of those places that's so vast that you barely notice the other people at all.

top: Topshop, skirt: Primark, sandals: Topshop, necklace: Primark

After a lazy afternoon we headed back into town for our trip to Harvey Nicks. We've eaten in the restaurant before and I love the atmosphere in there- its fancier than the sort of places I usually visit, there's no denying that, but its not snobby at all and the food is beauuutiful. Afternoon Tea was just lovely, we missed the explanations of what most of the cakes were as we were too busy admiring the pretty stand of treats in front of us, but wowee it tasted good! Plus they get extra points for letting me have a lemonade instead of a hot drink as I'm a peculiar sort of blogger who hates tea and coffee... 

Our final stop of the day after having a lazy wander around a few shops was to The Pour House in Granary Wharf for a cider in the sun. One of my favourite places to sit on lazy sunny days is a patch of grass right by the canal on the other side of the canal to this pub and I've spent many days gazing over there and vowing that I'll visit soon. It beats your average beer garden hands down as its a great place for watching people and the barges on the canal. I've already made plans to go back for food soon...

I love days like this (mostly because its largely revolved around food...). I feel like we packed an incredible amount of stuff into one afternoon but at the same time had the perfect relaxing day to unwind from the crazybusyahhh week I've had. Hope you've all had a good one too!

Eez eh- Kasabian

I want someone to be, and someone to drive around town

Whew, this feels strange. I've been stuck in the dark ages for the last few weeks as my faithful old laptop decided to throw a paddy and corrupt the entire hard-drive. I finally had to give in and buy myself a shiny new laptop this week and so after hours in PC world discussing the pros and cons of different models with the salesman (which ended in me just saying "look, I want this one because its purple") I'm back in the 21st century and back in blogland. Hooray.

This weekend, I had a lovely visit from one of my favourites. She brought her car down to Leeds so that we could do something other than spend the day in Topshop (aforementioned new laptop has ruled out shopping from my life until payday rolls around). We ended up in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park since it was a lovely, warm day. I'd been there once before with Mama and Papa T and really enjoyed having something interesting to look at other than a view as we wandered around so thought it'd be the perfect place to head to for a picnic and a bit of fresh air. 

Here's a few snaps of some of our favourite sculptures, we had a lot of fun pretending to be trendy art students trying to make ourselves seem knowledgeable and artsy to the people walking past.

We followed our trip to the Sculpture Park with a night out in Leeds which accidentally turned into an evening of watching the England game as even the most unsporty bars had big screens up. It was surprisingly fun, mostly because none of us had our glasses on so we spent the first 20 minutes or so convinced that we were a goal up... whoops.

Around Town- The Kooks

(Anyone else feel really nostalgic about The Kooks having re-emerged? I feel like I'm 15 again!)

Oh, my hair smells like chocolate

Eating out isn't something I tend to talk much about on this little slice of the internet. Which is kinda strange as its something I spend a slightly unhealthy amount of my life doing, I like to try my hardest to make sure any catch up, activity or day out fits around some sort of nice meal (or cake...) wherever possible. Leeds is spoiling my food obsessed little belly these days, there are so many new restaurants popping up all over the place so my list of places to try is getting longer and longer (perfect excuse to eat out even more!).

My foodie friend Coral and I went for a slightly fancier than usual meal earlier this week at Roast and Conch, a new restaurant run by Hotel Chocolat, as we'd been intrigued by the whole chocolate-food thing since it opened a few months ago. As soon as we walked up the stairs,an incredible smell of chocolate filled the room, so as far as I was concerned the night was off to a great start! 

Most people I've mentioned the restaurant to have greeted me with a confused look of "Why would you want to eat chocolate with a meal?" but its as far away from that idea as you could possibly get! Most of the dishes are infused with roasted cocoa beans and WOW it works- the cocoa is more like a spice when its cooked like this and it gave my meal such an incredible flavour! 

We were given a butternut squash soup as a bit of an amuse bouche (I'm definitely not posh enough to be able to say that normally!) which was really yummy. I picked the burger as my main course because there'd be something seriously wrong if Kaz went to a restaurant with a burger on the menu and didn't order it. Being a massive burger obsessive, I feel I can say with confidence that this was without a doubt in my top 3 burgers ever list (yes I have a list... don't judge me!). But the real showstopper with my meal were the onion rings that came with my burger and the chips we ordered as a side on the recommendation of the girl who showed us to her table who said they were by far the best thing on the menu! They were cooked in cocoa butter and OH MY GOD they were incredible and didn't taste anything like something that you'd find on the shelves of The Body Shop!

Given that I'd wolfed down my whole meal plus the chips we definitely didn't really need (but couldn't have lived without!) in record time, I was saddened to admit that I wasn't going to have room for dessert. It seemed like a crime against chocolate given the restaurant we were in as I can imagine the desserts would have been bloomin' incredible, but Roast & Conch have clearly thought long and hard about this problem so they created a 'Tray of Temptation' filled with every flavour of chocolate you could possibly ever imagine for £1 each. Funnily enough, despite my fullness, I still had room for chocolate and decided I couldn't narrow it down to just one either. I ended up with a salted caramel chocolate (which they gave me two of because it was a bit smaller than some of the others) and a raspberry and milk chocolate cup. Its amazing how quickly I forgot about having a 'proper' dessert.

If you're in Leeds and fancy somewhere a little different and a bit special (or if you've been sent a 20% off voucher through work like Coral had!), I'd definitely recommend a trip to Roast & Conch. It was one of those meals that I'll be dreaming about for months to come!

Chocolate- The 1975

The way is long but you can make it easy on me

I have a real habit of waffling on about pretty homeware that I've bought for my room on a pretty regular basis. I have a serious addiction to fitting as much of my personality into my room as possible. Somebody send me to interioraholics anonymous, pronto. As much as the idea of becoming a real-life proper grown up with my own scares me, there's a little part of me that's a bit too excited to one day have an entire house that I can decorate and put my own stamp on. But for now, fitting as much pretty stuff into my bedroom as humanly possible is enough to satisfy my cravings for cushions, frames and decorations.

My absolute favourite part of my room is my big display of photo frames. I'm so glad I'm not moving out of my house this year as filling all of the holes in the wall and reassembling everything on a new wall is no easy task. I've done it once before, not sure I'm quite ready to have to do it again anytime soon! Especially not after this weekend when I got my DIY on and knocked a few more nails into the walls for my new frames.

My old Uni buddies bought me this Leeds University print for my birthday. Its absolutely perfect as I've got plenty of Liverpool related pictures, but nothing to celebrate the other city I love. Who wouldn't want to wake up and be reminded of their Uni days every morning? Plus, it fits right in with the colour scheme I've got going on. My friends are awesome.

I got another beauty to put on my wall this week too, this time a little treat from Dotcomgiftshop who kindly offered to feed my homeware addiction and send me something from their beautiful collection. This couldn't have arrived at a better time as I'd taken advantage of a free prints offer from Boots and printed a bumper bundle of (largely drunken) photos of my more recent adventures but was struggling to find somewhere to display them.

I'm really going to try and call it a day with this big collection for now as I'm fast running out of wall space, but I can already feel a little part of me itching to buy some more little frames to fill the spaces in. SOMEBODY SEND HELP!

The Mother We Share- Chvrches

One thing's for sure, we're all getting older

Yesterday, I had the slightly unfortunate job of turning 24. I'm still struggling to comprehend why I'm not 17 anymore, but managed to stop myself from dwelling on this too much by spending a weekend with lots of my most favourite people, eating lots of food, drinking lots of wine and dancing like a loony (there really is no better way to spend a birthday weekend as far as I'm concerned!). 

On Saturday, we went to The Pit in Leeds for food- its one of my failsafe options in town for food, especially as it has a great atmosphere (and Rekorderlig cider on tap). Part of the reason we went there was so we could have a cheeky game of ping pong too. Sadly that didn't actually happen... it was definitely something we should have considered doing before ordering a table full of burgers, pulled pork and onion rings as we could barely drag ourselves out of our chairs; we might have been a tad optimistic thinking we'd be able to run around after a ping pong ball afterwards.

In the evening, my friends came over to my house and my lovely friend Charlie had put on an absolutely incredible spread of afternoon tea style cakes for the party. What a star! I'm really gutted I didn't manage to get a picture of it all, I was just too excited to start eating it all! Plus, my housemate Kathryn made a really yummy cocktail in a teapot to accompany it all! That may have been partially to blame for the hilarious dancing that ensued later in the night!

My actual birthday was a far quieter affair (there may have been a few hangovers in the building...) but it involved lots of food, eating lots of cake at Iron Cupcake (conveniently held on my birthday!) and admiring my looovely birthday presents. My friends are such a lovely bunch and gave me some lovely treats, they all know how much I love decorating my bedroom and so I was really excited to open lots of homey gifts (as well as some other awesome presents which will no doubt feature in future posts!). Here's a little selection to satisfy all of you nosy people out there :)

Pelican: The Maccabees

Whenever you want it, wherever you want it

Well, that was a fun weekend. Its been pretty non-stop but not being the sort of person who likes to sit in one place for too long, it suited me just fine! 

I had a jolly little time drinking cocktails on Friday night and then fell asleep on the sofa watching 500 Days of Summer (even though I've seen it about 782000 times, I'm still gutted that I slept through the end!). 

On Saturday I went into town with one of my buddies to book a holiday for us and one of our other friends... I think the travel agent was almost at breaking point when she asked us where we wanted to go and what we wanted to get out of our holiday as our answer was "Ummm.... the sun?". Eventually though, she did manage to establish that we didn't want to go anywhere that would likely feature on Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents and so we've booked to go to Corfu in August. Its my first proper holiday in a few years so I'm massively excited already. 

Saturday night was spent celebrating my housemate's birthday with lots of lovely people, then Sunday was largely built around a lazy day and a ginormous plate of cheesy chips and beans before I headed out again to see Bombay Bicycle Club play at the O2 Academy in Leeds. I've seen Bombay Bicycle Club a few times over the years (one particularly memorable show was at Leeds Festival in 2012, when Bombay somehow inadvertently became the band that had the most topless girls on people's shoulders in the crowd... surreal doesn't even cover it) and they're one of my absolute faves to see live. They manage to move seamlessly between super-chilled out songs and crazy guitars in others and bloomin' hell it works. The new stuff sounds great and the old favourites were still as awesome to hear as ever. Some bands I'll just never tire of watching, and Bombay Bicycle Club are definitely one of those. Absolute perfect way to round off the weekend. 

Roll on next weekend, its my birthday on the 9th so I've got plenty of birthday activities planned... hopefully it'll be even better than this weekend was! 

Hope you've all had a good one :)

Whenever, Wherever- Bombay Bicycle Club

If I could, baby I'd give you my world

After a lazy day on Saturday, my housemate and I decided that we needed to at least pretend to do something on Sunday. Originally, we'd had high hopes to go on an adventure on our rare weekend of being in Leeds hangover free, however the weather wasn't really on our side for a full blown outdoorsy day. 

Instead, we decided to take the scenic route into town along the canal. I haven't been down there since I moved out of my flat in town last summer so it was nice to get a bit nostalgic and revisit it. Plus, the rain kindly held off until we'd almost reached the shops, by which point we were too busy buying every remaining item in the sales to care (post New Year is the only time I can cope with going anywhere near the sale rails as all the scary shoppers have bankrupted themselves by then!).

shirt: Topshop, jacket: Topshop, scarf: Topshop, jeans: Topshop, boots: Topshop, hat: H&M, gloves: Accessorize

So, I joined the masses last week and bought one of those furry denim jackets in Topshop. And, seriously, its the best thing I've bought in months (although a small part of me wishes it had a lining in the arms too... then it really would be the best thing in the world and I'd probably only take it off to wear my new koala onesie...). 

I feel a bit like Topshop threw up on me when I look at this outfit, but I'm not sure that's such a bad thing really. Its the first time in ages I've found clothes I actually like in there so I'm going to bloomin' well embrace it.

Go Your Own Way: Fleetwood Mac