Monthly Archives: September 2011

Schwartz Meatball Pasta Bake

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Recently I was lucky enough to win a selection of Schwartz herbs and spices from @SchwartzCooking on twitter and I couldn’t wait to try out the nice selection they sent me. One of the packets they sent me was this limited edition Meatball Pasta Bake.  I love pasta so I thought I would give this a try, it certainly looked simple enough to make.

I following the instructions on the packet and gathered together the ingredients. I needed meatballs, an onion, a red pepper, pasta,  a tin of tomatoes, tomato puree, water and grated cheese. Luckily I usually have most of these in my cupboards anyway.

I preheated my oven to 200°C  (400°F, Gas Mark 6). I choose to use pre-prepared meatballs but you can also make your own using mince.  First you need to heat the oil in a pan, then fry the meatballs for a few minutes until they are brown. Add the onions and red pepper and cook till they are soft.  The contents of the recipe mix are then blended into 1/4 pint of water and added to the pan along with the tin of tomatoes, tomato puree and the pasta. The mix is then brought to the boil.  Once it is boiling you pour the lot into the casserole dish, sprinkle grated cheese over the top and bung into the oven for 25 minutes. I love the sort of cooking you can bung into the oven and leave, its perfect after a day at work as it allows you to get on with other things.

This is how it looked when I removed it from the oven and I have to say it smelled lovely.  I then put it onto plates and served it to the family.

The plates were cleaned and they said it was really nice. I have to say I really enjoyed it, the recipe mix adds a nice flavour to the tomato base and it was really simple and easy to make. I shall definitely be trying this one again.

For more information see http://www.schwartz.co.uk/

RRP 0.49 per packet

Other reviews you may be interested in:

Schwartz Slow Cooker Recipe Mix

Very Lazy Caribbean Chicken Cooking Sauce

Sacla Risotto Range

Stargazer Beauty Shake and Bling Challenge

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I recently saw on twitter that Stargazer Beauty had launched the Shake and Bling challenge aimed at bloggers. As I love a challenge I said I would like to get involved. They sent me four of their lovely nail products and the challenge was that I had to create a design on my nails using these products and show you all what I came up with. Please bear in mind that my artistic skills are limited but I did have a go.

I could choose the four shades of the products I wanted and this is what I chose.

Stargazer nail polish shade 130Stargazer nail polish in shade 130 which is a blue shade reminiscent of evening skies.

Stargazer glitter shaker in gold, which is glitter you can add to nail polish while it is wet to make a unique look.

Their nail art pen in black which you can either use as a brush or a pen to define interesting designs on your nails and finally Nail Gems

which can be added to your nail with a dab of glue to create a different look.

I had plans to create a look which featured a night sky with stars in the background  a full lit moon and a haunted house, which was probably a bit ambitious given my drawing skills.

This is how it turned out


The  black line at the top is meant to represent a bat flying over the house. I think it has ended up looking a bit more like a chinese symbol but I am happy with to for my first attempt. I can see I am going to have great fun trying out the effects to see what else I can come up with for the future. The nail polish so far as lasted really well and I am going to be rocking this look for a while.
You can find more information on the products on their website:  http://www.stargazer-products.com/

and they are on twitter @stargazerbeauty

Other reviews you may be interested in:

Nailene Ultra Adhesive Tabs

Nail Polish from Maison d’Anu

Samsung share an insight into the EuroGamers Event 2011

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Samsung have sent a video showing the Highlights of this years Euro Gamers Event At Earl’s Court and I thought I would share it with you. I know that some of my fellow mob!lers attended, although I was unable to, and they had a fabulous time.

Games for Christmas from Paul Lamond Games

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Paul Lamond Games have a load of board games which would be great for  Christmas so if you are looking for gift ideas this is a place to start. They kindly sent me a couple of these games to review which I will be doing shortly, but I thought I would give you a quick overview of the new games as they do look fun.

Games for teens and Adults

QI Board Game

You must have watched QI, the show on BBC 1 hosted by Stephen Fry, its a highly successful quiz programme, which has been a favourite amongst viewers since 2008.  This game brings it into the home, so you can take part in this hard panel game with your friends and family. The game is for 2-6 players and is suitable for ages teen to adult.

RRP £19.95

Fatal Attraction

Harness the power of magnets to outwit your opponents. Each player must fill the boards, but beware the force of the magnets can be used against you as well as for you. Can you use the magnetic force in your favour?

This is for 2-4 players and aimed at age 14 and over.

RRP £17.95

Perudo

A classic Peruvian dice game which will make liars of us all! This game was played in the Pirates of the Caribbean film and has celebrity fans from Stephen Fry to Sienna Miller and Richard Branson. Its a versatile and addictive game which means its suitable for family fun, drinking games and after dinner entertainment at dinner parties.

RRP £17.95

Games for Children

Meerkat Mayhem

The Meerkats are in danger, can you save them from the dreaded Cobra? You need to save your meerkat before the cobra strikes or lose them forever! This is a great game for improving co-0rdination and dexterity. It’s for 2-4 players and is aimed at age 6 and above.

RRP £10.95

Make-over Friends

This is a new addition to the Paul Lamond multi award-winning Chimp and Zee pre-school range of games and puzzles.  It’s a craft activity set featuring three dolls that need to be decorated and displayed on a doll house panel, it comes with colouring sheets, stickers, ribbons,beads and wool to help in this task.  Easy to set up and explain, it can be reused again and again. Suitable for age three and above and can be used alone or with friends.

RRP £9.95

On Safari

Another game from the award-winning Chimp and Zee pre-school range of games of puzzles, this is a safari craft activity. There are three jungle friends to make up and place on a display panel, plus colouring sheets, stickers, a palm tree andwool to help dress up and decorate. The animals can be reused again and again. Great for co-ordination, dexterity, imagination and colouring, it is aimed at ages four and above and can be played alone or with friends.

RRP £9.95

Pretty Ponies

Another craft activity set from the award-winning range of Chimp and Zee games and puzzles, this one introduces three cute ponies to style and display on a stable display. It comes with colouring sheets, stickers, ribbons, beads and wool to use in dressing up and decorating the Ponies. Once they have been decorated they can be played with again and again. Great for co-ordination, dexterity, imagination and colouring skills it can be played alone or with others. Aimed at ages three and above.

RRP £9.95

What’s up?

This is a “What’s on my head?” game which encourages the use of imagination. There are four categories of card – people, sports, transport and animals. These are shuffled and placed in the centre of the table. Each player wears a card holder on their head, and places one of the cards, unseen into the holder. They then have to ask the other players a series of yes or no questions to work out what picture is on the card on their head.  This is great fun and helps the develop questioning skills. The person who identifies the most correct cards wins. Aimed at age five and above and suitable for 2-4 players.

RRP £9.95

You can find more information on the website at www.paul-lamond.com

Other reviews you may be interested in:

Meerkat Mayhem

Meerkat Mayhem from Paul Lamond Games

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I was recently sent a copy of Meerkat Mayhem from Paul Lamond Games to try out and see what I thought of it. The game is based on the well know animal, the meerkat. They are tiny, tenacious and sociable animals who rarely face danger alone. Now they are facing the dreaded cobra and have to escape!

This game is aimed at children aged six and above and can be played by two to four players. The game will increase co-ordination and dexterity whilst being fun to play.

When you open the box you find the game board, the cobra and a selection of meerkats.

Setting up the board is simple, you just push the cobra into the two  holes in the green socket. This causes the  little trapdoors on the board close and the holes are then covered. Each player chooses a colour and is given five meerkats. Each player places a meerkat on the trapdoor in the colour they have chosen.

The players then take it in turn to spin the spinner on the board. If the spinner lands on a colour the person who chose that colour  gets to pull out the cobra. This causes the trapdoors to open and the meerkats to fall. The object is to catch the meerkats before they fall though the trapdoor and become the property of the person who pulled out the cobra.  If the spinner lands on a meerkat the person spinning can take one meerkat from any other player. The winner is the person who gains ten meerkats first.
The game is really easy to understand and you can get it set up and begin playing really quickly. Although the game is simple it requires a lot of co-ordination to catch the meerkats before you lose them.  All the family had great fun with this game, my son soon started pretending he was going to pull out the cobra when he wasn’t and having a good laugh when he fooled me. The game also came out when his friends came round and they played happily with it for quite a long time.  Overall it is better with four players but less can play successfully as well. We found this to be a really enjoyable and fun game.

RRP £10.95
For more information see the website at: www.paul-lamond.com

Other posts you may be interested in:

Games for Christmas from Paul Lamond Games

Mushroom Soup

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At the weekend I suddenly found I had managed to go shopping and end up with two large boxes of mushrooms in my fridge. I am not entirely sure how I managed that, I suspect I was having a senior moment.  Knowing that mushrooms do not keep forever in the fridge and since it was a cold day I decided I would make some mushroom soup. This is a recipe that I have used for ages, I am not sure where it came from originally, but it is very simple and makes lovely tasty soup.

Ingredients

  • 1/4 lb mushrooms
  • 1 onion
  • 1/2  pint stock
  • 1 oz butter
  • 1 oz flour
  • 3/4 pint milk
  • salt and pepper
  • one egg yolk

Method

  1. Wash and cut the  mushrooms, chop onion and cook in stock until they are tender. At that point they will look something like this
  2. Make them into a puree by either rubbing though a sieve with a wooden spoon or liquidising in a food processor. In the pan melt the butter and stir in the flour, gradually adding milk whilst stirring all the time.
  3. Add the mushroom and onion puree to the sauce and season with the salt and pepper to taste.
  4. Simmer for a few minutes, then remove from heat and cool slightly before stirring in the egg yolk.
  5. Reheat gently but do not boil or the egg yolk will curdle.
  6. Serve with crusty bread if you have some

This is the end result

Its a very simple, well worth a try now the days are getting colder.

Seriously Spooky Vimto Halloween Cocktails

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Prepare to be scared this Halloween as Vimto launch limited edition Halloween bottles, perfect for those Halloween parties and other fiendish fun.

The bottles feature a spooky haunted house design and you will find them across all the 2L bottles of Fizzy Vimto,  No Added Sugar and Cherry Vimto. You will find the bottles in all major supermarkets from early October, which gives you plenty of time to practice whipping up ghoulish cocktails to make your party horribly haunted.  To give you a helping hand and to make sure all the ghosts and ghouls do not go thirsty, Vimto have come up with a special range of creepy cocktail recipes for you to try.

Vimto’s Creepy Cocktail Recipes

Vimto Eyeball Surprise
A supernaturally simple concoction that every stylish spectre will be drinking this Halloween. What would Halloween be without a few eyeballs?

  • With an ice cream scoop make two ‘eyeballs’ of icecream and use jelly sweets to create the pupils.
  • Place at the bottom of a tall chilled goblet and recite a witches incantation.
  • Fill the glass two thirds full of devilishly delicious Fizzy Vimto and watch the fiendish foam froth

No Added Sugar Vimto Spooky Strawberry Heart
This is a great drink to serve to a scare to your guests.

  • Swirl some No Added Sugar Vimto in with some cranberry juice and pour into glasses
  • Make a bleeding heart out of a BBQ stick speared strawberry and dunk  it into the glass for extra fear factor.
  • Serve chilled

Cherry Vimto/ No Added Sugar  Cherry Vimto Blood Curdling Brew
The perfect cauldron concoction for witches and wizards everywhere!

  • Add the flesh of one chopped melon and ten crushed red seedless grapes into your cauldron  and blend to a pulp.
  • Strain into a glass and top up with fiendishly fruity fizzy Cherry Vimto

Here’s a witches tip, to make eyeball ice cubes to cool those drinks, half-fill an ice cube tray with water, add a halved grape to each section, press a raisin into the centre and freeze.

To help those Halloween Parties be spooky and bright Vimto have created a guide to having fun time. All you need is a bit of imagination and you can have a great time without it being too expensive.  Here are five tips to get your party off with a scream.

  1. Choose a theme. This can be anything from Murder Mystery, Ghost Town, Witches Party or Haunted House. If you have a theme you can choose your decorations to back it up and it will help your guests decide what to wear.
  2. Design your own invitations. Print pictures of bats, ghosts and pumpkins and trace silhouettes onto coloured paper. These can be decorated in glitter or painted with spooky colours.
  3. Dress up the front door, this is the first thing your guests see. Try splattering with bloody handprints and gore and placing a few pumpkin lanterns on the path.
  4. Use body parts, you can make eyeballs out of mozzarella & olives, severed ear skewers with prawns and turn those party sausages into witches fingers!
  5. Go for Gross Games – Put some slimy, squishy things into different areas of a box and have your kids guess what’s in it just by feeling around. Slimy things like jelly are great fun to guess and you’ll definitely get lots of squeals!

For more fun Halloween recipes, party tips and more visit the Vimto Facebook page at www.facebook.com/vimto or on Twitter @RealVimto.

I hope your party is ghoulishly good!

Other posts you might be interested in:

Funkin Hot-tails

Bella Vie Cocktail Recipes

Get sporty with Samsung

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If you have an android phone you may not be aware that in the android market place there are a host of applications that you can use to help you get fitter. This is brilliant as if you are like me, you usually have a phone on your person, and this way you can keep track of your exercise throughout the day.

As you are aware I have recently acquired a dog, so I was looking for an app that would help me track my walks with him and show me how long they were taking and how many calories I was using up.  If you visit the marketplace there are a number of different apps that will help you do this, but the one I chose to use was JogTracker. This uses the GPS in your phone and tracks the route you walk or jog.  It shows the distance you have walked in miles or kilometres and also shows you the number of calories you have used up. You can also upload your jogs to the internet so you have a history of where you have been.

This is a map showing part of one of my recent walks.

As you can see it makes use of google maps to pinpoint exactly where you are.  It is really easy to use, once you are outside you just go into the application and press start. You are offered the choice of walking or running and can choose the relevent one. Once you have done that then the GPS signal then picks up where you are and starts plotting your route on the map.  When you have finished you just press stop and it then asks if you want to upload your jog to the internet.

There are a number of different views, at any time you can look at live view which gives you a view of how fast you are going. There is also a nice summary screen that shows how far you went, how long it took you and how many calories you used.

Jog tracker screen shotThis is just one of many apps that are available in the android market. I think its great that you can use your phone to help you get fit and I know that using this app is going to encourage me to get out and walk more. I would love to know what apps you use on your phone to help you get more active.

Other posts you may be interested in:

Taking photos with an android phone

Games on an android phone

Phone and tablet applications for the under fives

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As you know I am a Samsung Mob!ler and our latest challenge is to think up idea for apps that could be used specifically for the under fives. Technology is becoming much more prevalent in everyday lives and has become much more intuitive and tactile over the years. Young children are becoming more and more exposed to technology, and while it can be argued that this is both good and bad, it definitely offers a learning opportunity. As long as children are supervised and their time on the technology is limited they can learn a lot. Problems may arise when the technology is used continuously as they are missing out from other real world learning opportunities.

So what sort of app would I design?

Firstly the app would have to have lots of bright colour. Children love colour, think of successful children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Where the Wild Things Are. These all use bold bright colours that catch the eye.  The same principle applies to children’s programmes like The Teletubbies, bold simple colours for the main characters.

Choose a cartoon character that the children will relate to to feature in the game, there are plenty to choose from, Scooby Doo, Postman Pat, Peppa Pig and many more.  My game is going to feature Scooby Doo who will have a mystery to solve!

We can make the game educational by introducing letters, numbers and the names of colours in a fun way. In this case an monster has stolen the letters and numbers from the school and the colours from the washing line, Scooby Doo has to solve the mystery. In the mystery dungeon Scooby will find a number of different  rooms  where a number of tasks have to be solved. These tasks involve matching numbers to the number of coins in a pile, finding the correct letter for the start of a pictured word and colouring in pictures. Successful completion of each task will result in Scooby getting a scooby snack and part of a key.Once all the keys are complete then you enter a bonus level where you can chase and unmask the monster and free all the numbers, letters and colours.

Hopefully with the addition of cheerful music this will result in a game that will translate easily to a phone and a tablet and be simple for the under fives to use as  well as being educational. As long as the interface is simple to use this could keep them happy for a while giving you a much needed five minutes to grab a cup of tea.

I would be interested in knowing your thoughts on using technology with younger children. Do you think it’s a good thing or a bad thing? It is obviously something that is very hard to avoid in the world today.

Other posts you may be interested in:

Samsung Mobile Challenge 2011

Games on an Android phone

What kids want for Christmas!

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It’s September and I just said it, the C word, Christmas! I received some information about the results of a poll that the shopping search engine Shopzillacarried out which is quite scary reading and I thought I would share it with you. Shopzilla surveyed 1,000 6-12 year old children to find out what they were hoping to get for Christmas and it seems they are expecting a lot! The top findings of the survey state that:

  • Kids are expecting high priced items such as laptops (bear in mind these are primary school children).
  • They anticipate that £167 average will be spent on each of them (generally boys expect more money to be spent than girls).
  • Most of them admitted they could not remember what they got last year and no longer play with last years gifts.
  • Electronic pets, computers and digital cameras are on the most wanted list.

What is really sad is that kids say that Christmas is like a competition at school to see who gets the best presents according to 56% of them. I have experienced that to some extent with my son coming home demanding an i-pad and saying that so and so in his class got one. Needless to say he still has not got one!

Strangely electronic pets are becoming more popular than real pets and have come higher on the wish list than real puppies. Interestingly girls are more likely to want a real pet than a boys, they came number seven in the girls top ten list but did not appear in the boys top ten list at all.  Top of the list we see high value items like Laptops, digital cameras and iPads, suggesting that kids are not aware of the real cost of these items. It certainly shows how much of a consumer society we have become and that we are placing more emphasis on giving our children things rather than spending time with them.

Neil McCarthy, Sales and Marketing Director at Shopzilla said: “Interactive gifts and costly electronics top our survey of most-wanted presents for kids this Christmas. With such demand for so many high-value items, Santa might be shopping online to get the best price and avoid the queues this year.”

Top Christmas toys, based on a survey for Shopzilla of 1,000 6-12 year-olds in the UK during August 2011

1. iPad or laptop or tablet

26.9%
2. Digital camera

8.30%
3. Electronic pet incl Zhu Zhu puppies and teacup piggies

8.20%
4. Nintendo 3DS

8.20%
5. Games console or Computer/console games (eg Wii)

7.60%
6. Cars 2 toy

5.80%
7. Lego

4.30%
8. Mobile phone/iPhone/Blackberry

4.30%
9. A pet (a real pet not a toy!)

3.60%
10. Moshi Monsters

2.00%
11. Money to spend

1.60%
12. Transformers

1.50%
13. DVDs

1.40%
14. Clothes or shoes

1.40%
15. There’s nothing I want, I have everything I want already

1.40%
16. Barbie/Sindy/girl band doll (eg The Saturdays)

1.30%
17. Toy gun (eg Nerf)

1.00%
18. Sylvanian Families Ambulance

0.70%
19. Ride in Dalek

0.70%
20. Disney Princess Kitchen

0.70%
21. Rock On Elmo

0.60%
22. CDs

0.60%
23. iTunes voucher or other downloads

0.50%
24. Chocolate and sweets

0.50%
25. Smokey the Fire Truck

0.30%
26. Moon Dough Magic Zoo

0.30%
27. Hexbugs

0.30%
28. Spyros Adventure toy

0.30%
29. Dance Star Mickey

0.30%
30. I don’t celebrate Christmas

0.30%
31. Iball3

0.20%
32 Monopoly Electronic Banking

0.20%

4.7% chose ‘other’ rather than one of the gifts listed above including 0.9% who want a bike or scooter.

I was pleased to see that some traditional toys still made it onto the list, like lego, and was also intrigued to see that a ride on a dalek was in there which shows that imagination is still alive!

If you want to search Shopzilla you can find them here: www.shopzilla.co.uk