Joe's Kitchen is a brand new restaurant that's opening in the Intu Centre, Derby. You might have seen on Instagram that they very kindly invited me to sample the food and drink at their preview event on Thursday.

Firstly, they offered us a range of gorgeous cocktails and mocktails, all with fresh ingredients. I had a mango & ginger mocktail, which was lovely! Then they gave us a chance to explore our surroundings a bit. I love the design of the restaurant, and the attention to detail! A lot of the tables have little blackboards on them that have funny quotes on:

If you read last week's post, you'll know that I'm struggling to get my Masters application to a point where I'm happy with it. Turns out, ex-lecturers are pretty difficult to track down for references too!

At the rate that I'm going, I may never actually get my application finished, but on Monday, I thought I'd better start swotting up anyway. Hence all the books. 

I also found the notepad I used whilst I was on work experience with the BBC last year. Most of the notes above (if you can even see them) were taken when I was answering phone calls from the public and passing them onto the relevant producers. The rest were from writing cues for presenters; which is basically writing down what they have to say. (I still can't quite believe they trusted me to do that!)

Another thing... I feel the need to vent about this. Very sadly, last night, a 16 year old boy was accidentally hit by a train in my hometown. Unfortunately, some felt the need to write on Twitter about how this inconvenienced them, rather than expressing their sadness or sending condolences. This really annoyed me, because there's honestly no need to be that selfish. People like that make me feel misanthropic and disappointed in humankind.

So, seeing as some people can't be decent, I'll say this: My thoughts are with that boy's family, the train driver and the emergency services too. It's awful and terribly sad.

This is probably the easiest cake to make ever. Seriously, if I can do it unaided, so can you.

Ingredients:

Method:

1.) Pre-heat your oven to 180C,
2.) Pour all of your ingredients into a large bowl,
3.) Mix it all together with a whisk,
4.) Pour the mixture into two (non-stick) 7 inch tins,
5.) Place them into the oven until they're golden brown (around 15-25 minutes),
6.) Take them out of the oven and place on a cooling rack.
7.) Enjoy!
8.) Feel guilty about excessive cake consumption.*

*Optional.

It's not very often that I get to see my old school friends, so when we're all back in town, we try and pop out for a meal together. It's great to have a catch-up; even though they all hate my relentless obsession with photographing everything and everyone... Sorry 'bout that.

Firstly, we went to The Elaichi restaurant in Belper. It's an Indian restaurant (if you hadn't already guessed) and it was absolutely packed.

In a nutshell, the food was lovely. Despite being absolutely rushed off their feet, the staff at The Elaichi were really accommodating, attentive and lovely; even going as far as to hold the door open for us when we left!
(They weren't trying to get rid of us...)

After our meal at The Elaichi, we wandered a few doors down to Yardley's, which is a Cocktail and Tapas bar. We've been there a couple of times before and really enjoyed it; mainly because it's just far enough out of town not to get really busy.

A pitcher of Jessica Rabbit cost us £15, which we ended up getting about six or seven drinks out of.

I love the fact that you've got comfy leather sofas, candlelit tables and gorgeous cocktails. The atmosphere is so far removed from any raucous pub that you'd normally end up venturing into on a Saturday night out.