BREW//LDN – Beer Festival

With the new year here, it’s time to put yourself out there and part takes in some new activities and perhaps even pick up a skill or two on the way. After all, New Year new you right? Here at The Amazing Blog we researched and found an event to kick start your year in a fun, active and entertaining way! We’d like to introduce to you Brew//LDN.

Brew//LDN is an exciting beer festival on from the 27th – 29th February, 2020 at The Old Truman Brewery, London, showcasing the world’s best brewers, quality street food and a fantastic music programme. It is going to bring together three distinct aspects i.e. Brew//BEER, Brew//MUSIC and Brew//KITCHEN to give you the perfect start to your weekend.

At Brew// BEER is represented by the people who make craft beers, so you can meet and hear their story. With over 150 brewers, cider and spirit producers exhibiting you are sure to see old favourites and discover new ones and enjoy your day as you dance away all your worries while deeply relishing the perfect pint. It supports independents, ethical direction, promBeerotion of diversity in brewing, and we think will be a leading event in the UK beer calendar for years to come.

However, the fun won’t be complete with the sound of your favourite tunes.  Brew//MUSIC is all about the party, and they pride themselves on working with some great talent to create the right backdrop for their festival and giving you melodies to shake your hips and bob your head to.

Lastly, as a part of Brew//KITCHEN, they aim to bring together 8 gourmet street food vendors and 6 carefully selected premium drinks partners to your tummies nice and full as you load up on pint after pint. Brew//KITCHEN collaborates the very best of food and drink for your enjoyment. Missing out on this fun-filled and exciting event will haunt you until the end of time thus, go over to their official website to purchase your tickets online before they all sell out! The prices range from £11.28 to £28. See here.

The Cookery School at Little Portland Street

Still on our mission to hone and enhance our culinary skills, at The Amazing Blog we have been searching around for baking lessons, to make all your dreams of baking that perfect soufflé come true, which is when we found  The Cookery School at Little Portland Street. It is one of London’s leading and most sustainable cooking schools.

Founded In 2003 Rosalind Rathouse, who even prior to the inception of Cookery School, she has been fervently passionate about sustainability. Cookery School has the highest possible rating for sustainability from the Sustainable Restaurant Association (SRA) and has been virtually plastic-free since the beginning. From sourcing top quality, seasonal, mostly organic ingredients, to running the kitchens on renewable energy, what we like is that the school does everything possible to minimise its impact on the planet.

With a focus on the sustainability and education, they endeavour to demystify cooking, removing jargon and celebrating good home cooking skills. Their kitchen is run with the environment in mind, so they only use high quality, sustainable, primarily organic ingredients and equipment that can be found in most home kitchens

Cue The Ultimate Baking Course this takes you through the key principles of cakes, pastry, breads, macarons and meringue making, plus cake decorating. Quite simply, they will teach you the skills required to bake well. They have three options i.e. either the weekly course which includes 8 sessions, the intensive course which is a 4 day course or the Sunday course which takes place on every Sunday of the month thus giving you the option to best suit your schedule.

Priced at £880, The Ultimate Baking Course runs throughout the months of February, March and April and is worth both the time and the money as you will leave with the skills and knowledge of a professional baker. Browse through their official website to find a course best suited for you here.

Seamore – I sea pasta and I sea wraps

When we typically think of seaweed we either think of it as algae that washes up on the beach, or something that is deep fried on a Chinese menu. Perhaps, you might have even tried it as a dried snack, if we’re craving something salty and crunchy? But have you ever thought of seaweed as a tortilla wrap or even pasta? It might not sound super-tasty, but that is precisely the notion Seamore is looking to challenge. As regular readers of The Amazing Blog will know, we love finding new beauty products and superfoods, so you can imagine how intrigued we were to try two items from this startup.

William Sodderland started Seamore in 2015 after he went on a holiday in Ibiza and mistakenly thought his seaweed dish was pasta. This moment propelled him into looking into it as an alternative to foods we already love and ‘to turn seaweed into an everyday food’. Sodderland found that seaweed is a healthy food option as it is high in nutrients and antioxidants. He also discovered it is quite sustainable because seaweed doesn’t need land, extra water, fertiliser or pesticides to grow. However, all of Seamore’s seaweed is sustainably sourced off the coast of Ireland in small batches over two months.

The first product we tried was I sea pasta made of 100 percent natural and hand-picked himanthalia seaweed. While the seaweed is a black colour when you first remove it from the packaging, once it’s cooked it tastes and has the same texture as pasta. It’s not too salty and doesn’t have an overwhelming sea smell either. Unlike regular pasta, I sea pasta is low in carbs and full of minerals, vitamins, iron, and fibre. One serving also has 50 percent of the vegetables you need per day. We liked it paired with sweet Bolognese sauce and a glass of wine. The second item we tried was I sea wraps. They are the first seaweed wraps in the world and have 50 per cent himanthalia and wakame seaweed. I sea wraps contain more fibre and protein as well as fewer calories and saturated fat than ordinary wraps. They’re full of omega-3, iron, iodine, B vitamins, and fucoxanthin, which has been proven to fight fat. You can’t taste the seaweed in the wrap except for seaweed’s natural umami flavour, which compliments any filling. You can eat it hot or cold, but we preferred it as a way to give ourselves more vegetables with a cheese tortilla.

If you’re still not convinced, Seamore has many recipes to try here and you can find it here The starting price of the pasta is £6.50 for 100g (approx. 5 servings).  

Friday Favourite – Cookbook for Christmas

Whether you are looking for inspiration for this year’s Christmas catering or for a gift for a loved one, today at The Amazing Blog we’ve narrowed down three of our favourite new seasonal cookbooks just for you.

Having watched the series, and enjoyed the twists and turns of the Crawley Family on the big screen, we now have the chance to channel our inner Mrs Patmore and bring a flavour of Downton to our own humble kitchens in the form of The Official Downton Abbey Cookbook. Fans of the show will salivate over the sumptuous pages of their favourite series dripping from every page - not just full of tempting recipes, but also bon mots as can only be delivered by Dame Maggie herself, along with historical facts of catering for such a house in those times. The writer behind this surefire bestseller is Annie Gray, one of Britain’s leading food historians, who brings the stories of both the upstairs, and the downstairs to life for us in her detailed research of recipes of the period. Alongside  such mouth-watering options as ‘Veal Chops Périgourdine’, which would have appeared on the upstairs menu, we have the equally tempting ‘Toad In The Hole’ which would have been served downstairs in the Servant’s Hall, both with the relevant side notes of why they would have been popular, and how the ingredients would have been sourced.

Apart from the surge of culinary excitement to try favourite recipes out, this encyclopedia of food history and knowledge will be snapped up by fans of Lord and Lady Grantham, and foodies alike. Served up at £25.00, we can all secure ourselves a slice of this delicacy from all good bookshops including Waterstones and BooksEtc here.

If you or your guests diet is more plant-based, then a festive treat comes to us from Scandinavia, Karoline Jönsson who has put together the ‘Happy Vegan Christmas’ after the success of her online cooking blog which attracts 20,000 visitors every month, and the first all-vegetarian cooking show to air on Swedish television, of which she was the host. Karoline gives us five different sections to take us through the Christmas period, including the obligatory “Leftovers”, which is a definite ‘must read’ as it not only offers up the irresistibility of ‘Sun-Yellow Energy Soup’, but also craft projects to keep us all engaged over the holidays. Priced at £14.99, and published by Pavilion Books you can find it here.

Remaining on the vegan theme, we move onto the next course on today’s menu, which is the pudding section - ‘Incredible Plant-Based Desserts’. Written by Anthea Cheng, whose blog and social media account entitled ‘Rainbow Nourishments’ has inspired this fabulously colourful cookbook to give us all options on the desserts trolley from the vegan perspective with recipes including gluten and without gluten, with refined sugar and without. With mouth-watering methods to create ‘Raspberry and White Chocolate Cookies’, ‘Baklava Custard Tart’ or the intriguingly named ‘Rainbow Pear Tart with a Cardamom Coconut Cream’, this must be high on every vegan gourmand’s wish list. The colours of Anthea’s desserts jump off the page and are very effective in drawing us in to try our hand at making them - with such a successful online presence in the marketplace, she has a firm foundation on which to build a even greater fanbase. Anthea takes us through everything we will need - not just the best ingredients, but also the correct kit required, and her book is a joy to read - the fact we get to enjoy the secrets to her success is an added and welcome bonus. Available at £16.00 from Waterstones here whether you are vegan or not, the colours of this rainbow are for everyone.

Friday Favourites with CBD brands

We don’t know about you, but we’re intrigued by the wave of CBD products that have suddenly appeared. This is a topic often discussed at The Amazing Blog and something that we’re just starting to bone up on and today we hope to enlighten you a little too. We have three different cannabidiol (aka CBD) brands to talk about, and review. As far as we can gather the benefits of CBD are numerous and they need to be demystified in regard to the belief that they contain psychoactive properties – they don’t! The critical thing to look for is a brand that has good manufacturing practice.

As a rule of thumb, there two major types are of CBD which are either ‘full spectrum’ and ‘broad spectrum’. The full spectrum contains a tiny quantity of tetrahydrocannabinol (aka THC) which less than 0.2%; which gives the ‘entourage effect’, (meaning the benefit you get from ingesting multiple components of the cannabis plant) which is driven by all the natural cannabinoids and terpenes. These can assist with a range of conditions such as anxiety, inflammation and sleep disorders, whereas the broad spectrum has a process that reduces the cannabinoids and eliminates the THC. This type proves a popular choice with athletes or those in the public sector who may be subject to random drug testing, and don’t want to have any ‘false positives.’  Often there is a choice of 'filtered oil’ which is softer on the palate and easier to take, or a 'raw oil' which is processed by C02 extraction (no heat). The raw oil is best used for pain relief as it has an increased ‘entourage effect’ with the increased plant nutrients such as terpenes, flavonoids and phytosterols offering more plant matter and giving it a thicker consistency. The disadvantage of this raw version is that it has a very strong flavour (slightly more bitter and earthy tasting) and this extraction method is costly for brands. 

Let’s start with Brown’s CBD; founder Laurence Brown set up the company after experiencing the holistic power of CBD for the first time at university. This inspired him to forge ahead, start his own company and to offer great pharmaceutical quality CBD products at market leading prices. Brown’s CBD has a great select of CBD oils (full and broad Spectrum, filtered and raw) and they also have ‘water-soluble’ CBD which is ideal to be mixed with food, drinks or protein shakes plus up to 4 times more effective than the oil when ingested. 

We were sent their Golden CBD Hemp Oil 1000mg 10% CBD.  This is filtered oil and full spectrum made with organic hemp cannabis sativa CBD oil which is reliably sourced from in the EU.  It contains cannabinoids such as CBDA, CBDV, CBC, CBN, CBG & THC (0.2%). Although this is a filtered oil it is actually extracted by the C02 extraction method used for raw oils but this undergoes an extra filtration process which gives it a smoother taste and more of a golden colour compared to other filtered oils.  All of their bottles come in small dark UVA proof black bottles with a pipette. We strategically took this at night time to help aid relaxation and sleep. Using the pipette, we put 3 or 4 drops for sublingual absorption (under the tongue) and held it there for up to 60 seconds before swallowing. We have to say, from our experience, this is the first 10% CBD oil that we’ve found to be palatable and quite pleasant tasting. Did it help to take the edge off our day? Yes, I can confidently say that our tester’s sleep patterns definitely improved when taking it regularly.  You too can buy Brown’s CBD  Golden CBD Hemp Oils here starting from £39.99 for 10ml.

Next brand is CBD ONE  who have been at the forefront of launching CBD here in the UK. They offer a variety of CBD products ranging from oils, topical creams, and water-soluble products. They sent us their AbsorbPure+ this is a little different from the CBD oil and is in the form of a water-soluble paste that has a  mixture curcumin, vegetable glycerine, triglycerides, terpenes and bioavailable cannabis paste. Absorb has three products in the range, all of which are water-soluble and are for single daily use only. The key ingredient here is the ‘bioavailability cannabis paste’ which refers to how much of the active ingredient your body can use – here they say 99%. This product also contains THC with levels below 0.2% with the actual CBD content at 800mg making this Pure+ a high concentration paste with over 50 servings per 10ml syringe and delivery 16mg of CBD per dose. They claim that this is 10 times more effective than an equivalent oil-based product.

We used this by mixing it with water or fruit juice and have to say that the paste was a tad spicy and earthy and perhaps not the most delicious taste, but with the curcumin, it helps add a double whammy for those looking to aid from joint and muscle pain.  They also say that you can pump one dose straight into the mouth and swallow (we weren’t that brave!) One of us dosed up on this regularly in the mornings, prior to going to the gym. They have had various ongoing joint pain and did find with taking this regularly that there was a certain amount of relief. If you’re looking for a high concentrate water-soluble CBD then this is for you see here for 10ml £69.99amd 20ml £128.78.

Finally, meet Hemptouch a Slovenian brand that we’ve had our eye on for a while having first discovered the brand when they won a prestigious Wellbeing Award from our client The Beauty Shortlist for their CBD Spray Chocolate 300mg  and CBD Oil Amber 500mg. Silvija Špehar is the co-founder biologist and herbalist who has used hemp in her formulas to enhance, balance and nourish from the inside out with both the sublingual, ingestible formulas and her skincare. Ethical practice and sustainability are at the heart of the brand where they use locally sourced butter and hemp in their ingredients.

They very kindly sent us several of their products, the first of which is their Water Soluble CBD Spray – Lift & Inspire. Ingredients here are glycerine, water, matcha extract, hemp extract (cannabis sativa L) vitamins E, D and natural orange flavour. It is free from gluten dairy or sugar and contains no THC. There are 150 sprays in the bottle and each spray contains 1.3mg of CBD. This Lift & Inspire is designed to enhance focus and sharpen the mind. The CBD here helps to lower fatigue and protect from inflammation, the matcha helps to support energy levels and vitamin D is a natural mood booster.  We could taste the orange and matcha which takes the edge of the earthy hemp. It needs to be taken orally and we had 3 or 4 sprays daily under the tongue (they say that you can also spray on the inside of the cheek) and hold for a few seconds.  When we’ve been flagging, it gave us a much-needed spurt of energy and is perfect for keeping on the desk when you’re having a bad day and are in need of raising your spirits. For £31.99 you can buy this 20ml spray bottle here.

The other two CBD products are skincare and applied topically. We loved the Intensive Lip Balm, with its ingredients of raw hempseed oil, beeswax, vitamin E and cloves. NB: This raw hempseed oil has no THC. This tastes deliciously of cloves and is silky smooth on the lips, plus when applied we found that it lasts and lasts. Perfect for these winter months to keep handy in your coat pocket to protect lips from the wind chill factor. Available here in a 4.5ml tube at £7.99. 

The Balancing Face Cream is specifically designed for rebalancing oily and blemished skin and ideal for those who have breakouts or with very sensitive skin. It’s a botanically based with key ingredients of  CBD oil, hemp hydrolate, chlorella, orange flower hydrolate. The hemp hydrolate is a precious extract from the hemp plant, is and is what makes this cream unique. It improves microcirculation and leaves the complexion smooth and supple. With 2% in 50 ml of 5% CBD this gentle formula is dermatologically tested and proven to reduce the secretion of sebum. It has a subtle fragrance and when applied absorbs quickly barely leaving a trace. Great for using on face, neck and décolleté, morning and night, to help heal, purify and tone. Available here for £32.99.

We hope to have given you a bit of a starters guide to CBD. We’re certainly still learning, and in future weeks and months will be covering more from this extraordinary hemp cannabis sativa plant.