Because it’s really hard to write about a Thermos.

It’s easier to write about coffee or well, making coffee. So in many ways, the Thermos PR team were absolutely brilliant in coming up with this event. They chose a great location — Workshop in Clerkenwell — conveniently located down the road from me. They brought in a fantastic barista. And they served us some great coffee. (Or, well, we served ourselves great coffee after we made the coffee ourselves under the expert tutelage of the instructors.)

The Genuine Thermos Brand Beverage Flask keeps drinks hot (or cold) for up to 24 hours, thanks to the double-wall vacuum insulation. The team demonstrated this magic by filling our Thermoses with coffee the night before the event. I had a cup the next morning — 36 hours later — and the coffee was still pretty warm. Definitely drinkable.

The baristas at Workshop showed us how to use an Aeropress and a coffee cone — aka the V60. I like the idea of a coffee cone because it’s so low-tech. I like low-tech a lot these days. Life is too complicated already. Here’s a Vine I made of the coffee cone process:

This was a fun event. I learned a lot about coffee-making and left so caffeinated that I had to go buy a banana afterwards to slow myself down. (The potassium in bananas are good at absorbing caffeine, apparently.) And now I have a nice new Thermos.

I was invited to attend this event. I received a Thermos and a traveling coffee mug in return for my attendance and writing up the event.

The post Coffee Workshop at Workshop with Thermos first appeared on Passport Delicious | Solo Travel Blog | Solo Female Travel.

Billingsgate, 7 am. Things were closing down.

At some point in 2008, I had a brilliant idea. While I was on holiday, I would get other bloggers to write guest posts for me on my blog. I’d also force them to promote my site too because there was a prize for the guest post with the most traffic! The reward was dinner with me at Foliage in the Mandarin Oriental, overlooking the shipping containers and construction in the backyard. These were the days before Dinner and Bar Boulud. I can only imagine that those shipping containers were the early signs of what was to come.

Young Douglas Blyde won my 2008 contest and he joined me for dinner with his — if you can believe it — 5 megapixel camera phone! That was a big deal back in 2008. (Today’s iPhone 6s by comparison has a 12 megapixel camera.) Over our multi-course dinner, he ate his soup properly (away from him) and passed the salt and pepper together. He also used A LOT of big words. Big words have always been Douglas’ thing.

As part of my 50 Coffees with 50 People project earlier this year, I reached out to Douglas because I hadn’t seen him since some point in 2010. Too busy, too busy. We couldn’t find a date.

Delicious bacon and scallop butty

But there he was all these years later in 2015! At 5:30 am at Piggy’s Cafe at Billingsgate Market, serving us all bacon and scallop butties and steaming mugs of tea.  “I got dressed in the dark” he told us, when we commented on his amazing trousers.

We were there as part of an excellently organized social media event — #MuscadetMagic. A tour of Billingsgate, money to spend on seafood, and a prep session with CJ Jackson, CEO of Billingsgate Seafood School and author of Leith’s Fish Bible. Afterwards, we were shipped off to Old Street in minicabs and set loose on a prep kitchen with all of our seafood and a bountiful larder of produce. Ah, and a lot of Muscadet. A lot a lot. In fact, #MuscadetMagic had started a few days before, when this bottle of Muscadet arrived by special delivery…

I was totally down with the Muscadet elements of the day but I was a little worried about the food angle. When A Girl Has to Eat invited me to the event, I had warned her: “I just want to make it really clear. I really can’t cook. You should really consider inviting someone else if you really want to win.”

Her: “No no, you’ll be fine!

Me: “Really, I am not lying. My cooking skills are non-existent. I am not being economical with the truth here. I am really bad and my knife skills are non-existent too.”

But still, she took me on. During the day, I watched, mainly, as she haggled her away around Billingsgate, successfully securing A LOT of hand-dived scallops.

Do you know what I learned that day? Two things:

1. Opening scallops is hard work. Really hard. Surprisingly hard.
2. They call them razor clams for a reason. (Ouch!)

The Larder

At the prep kitchen, A Girl Has to Eat put me in charge of cleaning the razor clams, which sounds a lot easier than it was. I had to judge the shell (if it was broken, we had to throw out the clam), open the clam, remove the stomach, make sure the clam was still alive, and then if it was alive, cut off the top and tail. There were A LOT of razor clams. This took me forever.

While I was at it, A Girl Has to Eat whipped up a shellfish stock and cut up all the veg, the scallops and the (very in demand) chorizo. I was then put on garlic toast duty and managed to burn my hand by picking up a hot pan.  Like I said, I am not very good in the kitchen.

Our “Australian Stew”

Afterwards, we sat down for a big communal meal with the other teams while the judges tasted all our dishes and rated them. My only regret is that we didn’t make more food. We made a fairly small portion of what we dubbed  our”Australian Stew” and it was lunchtime and I was starving. (I picked up some Chinese on the way home.) Thank God for the team that made the stacks of oyster po’boys.

Plenty of Muscadet

Douglas kept the winning dishes to himself as he conducted our Muscadet tasting. We hit four wines in total, with #4 being the one that I would love to have with all my seafood and #2 as one I would consider as a more everyday kind of wine.

• Côtes de Grandlieu, Guérin 2014 (Waitrose, £7.99)
• La Nantaise Réserve 2014 from (Laithwaites £9.99)
• Les Gras Moutons 2013 from Domaine de la Haute Févrie, (Berry Bros & Rudd £11.95)
• Le Pallet 2010 from Les Dix du Pallet (Majestic, £14.99)

By the time we finished lunch and the tasting, we had been up for eight hours. At it was only 1 pm! Really, an excellent day out. Although our Australian Seafood Stew didn’t win, my thanks to Douglas for organizing #MuscadetMagic and to A Girl Has to Eat for taking a chance on me in the kitchen. And now that I’ve written this post, I’m going to crack open that last bottle of Muscadet…

The post Muscadet Magic, Billingsgate and Beyond first appeared on Passport Delicious | Solo Travel Blog | Solo Female Travel.

I was just over on the TBEX ’11 Web site and noticed that there are only a handful of tickets left for the year’s pre-eminent travel blogging conference. If you blog about travel and haven’t taken the leap and booked tickets yet, now is the time to do so!

I went to the first TBEX in Chicago in 2009 and loved it. It was a small and intimate event and a great way to meet some fellow travel lovers. Nomadic Matt was there, as was Gary Arndt from Everything Everywhere. (Truth be told, I had no idea who Gary was when I met him. I introduced myself, he shook my hand, and then he immediately turned around and walked away. Dissed!)

This year’s event looks like it will be much larger–500 people!–where I feel like 2009 was more like 100 people. But if you love travel and can grab a cheap flight to Vancouver in June–I used my United Airlines miles to swing a free ticket from Chicago–it’s definitely worth going to. Act fast though because as of this writing, there are only 13 tickets left!

I’m definitely interested in checking out some great restaurants in Vancouver, so if you’re a fellow blogger on your way to TBEX and are interested in a great meal out somewhere, please get in touch.

The post Travel Blogger Exchange 2011, Vancouver first appeared on Passport Delicious | Solo Travel Blog | Solo Female Travel.

The post Chicago Food & Drink Bloggers’ Meetup first appeared on Passport Delicious | Solo Travel Blog | Solo Female Travel.