Birthday, Bristol and The Olive Shed...mmmmm

Birthdays are a strange thing when you get to your mid 40's, it's nice to open cards and presents in company, but it makes for a strange day when you leave the house 2 hours before everyone else and have to sit patiently through work and school runs and swimming lessons before your birthday can begin. So mine started about 7pm and it was worth waiting for - totally spoilt, a big box of Thornton's Continentals, the new Rick Stein book and a big surprise of a new i-pod touch...which as I said I didn't know I wanted it until I had it and now I love it! Also, got loads of cards and some money from friends and family, which has allowed me to finally get a grown up handbag which will safely look after said i-pod and my kindle, more on that later in the week when it arrives.
Truly being spoilt is being allowed to play with your new gadgets while someone else cooks you dinner and I wasn't disappointed when I was presented with a beautifully cooked rib-eye steak, new potatoes, tender stem broccoli and a succulent, superbly tasty grilled field mushroom.

Saturday brought about our long awaited trip to Bristol. We stayed at the Hilton Hotel at Bradley Stoke.We are not big fans of hotel restaurants, usually over-priced, average food. So we headed off to Bristol town centre to find something nice. Bristol turned out to be something of a surprise, I had heard mostly bad things about it and had only previously visited the Zoo, but the harbour area has all been recently regenerated, the SS Great Britain was docked there and a replica of the Matthew (the ship that sailed to Cabot Cove - isn't that where Jessica Fletcher lives?) sails up and down the river, there were lots of revellers enjoying the evening sun dressed as pirates. We didn't learn  until Monday that Bristol stretched a lot further than what we could know and that was why we walked a long way before we found somewhere suitable to eat with Lauren on a Saturday night and that was good old Bella Italia. On Monday we found Pizza Express and Las Iguanas amongst others, well we will know for next time.
We had some calamari and some dough sticks for starters and then neither of us could resist the Penne Marco Polo, you can only get it here and if I don't choose it I always feels like I've missed out on something. It's chinese pasta which I know is a bit weird - but I like it.

Penne Marco Polo £9.95 Bella Italia - looks a bit messy as I tucked in before I thought about a photo!
It's duck and spring onions and chillies and penne all in a plum sauce!

  

Saturday, we headed off for Longleat, it was a really good, very long day, the lions, tigers and wolves were all being fed, we held giant snails, saw giant butterflies, fed deer and lorikeets, stroked a snake and a rabbit, saw socks full of chipmunks, but the highlight had to be the monkeys, we count ourselves lucky that we only lost the rear water squirter and gained two very sticky and stinky poos, one of which has remained all the way up the M5!

Persistent Poo!

The food was quite good for a zoo, we had a reasonable lunch of roast dinner and lasagne. We bought some sandwiches for our supper, which we took to a beautiful overlook called Heavens Gate near Nockett Coppice at Crockerton near Longleat, I took this photo of Lauren eating a tuna and sweetcorn wholemeal sandwich - anyone old enough to remember the 70's coke adverts will probably also get "I'd like to teach the world to sing" in their heads when they see it too!

..in perfect harmony..!

So finally to Monday, we were going to visit the SS Great Britain but at least 2 school trips beat us to it, we were going to look round the Bristol Industrial Museum now known as" The M Shed", however, it was closed on Mondays, so we opted for a lazy narrow boat trip along the river and then lunch at the Olive Shed.

http://www.theoliveshed.com/

If you are ever in Bristol I can't recommend The Olive Shed enough. We both commented that we'd never been anywhere so Spanish outside of Spain.We sat outside, overlooking the harbour, with cars passing close past our table, the sun beating down, cyclist passing by, sometimes (not Mondays!) a train may even go by (though not chased by 3 legged dogs and Corgis with Alsatian's legs like in Spain!). The smell coming from the restaurant is lovely, it took me straight back to several fondly remembered holidays.

Once we had a table we ummed and aahed over what to get for Lauren, the staff couldn't have been more helpful, bringing us a taster bowl of Provencal sauce for Lauren to try before ordering Mussels and Squid in a Provencal Sauce, some olives,  some bread and hummus, some chips, albondigas (Spanish meatballs) and Galician squid with 2 very refreshing glasses of organic lemonade and some water.  The food was delicious as you can see below, Lauren was very pleased with hers and loved having a shell bowl and finger bowl. Everything else we shared amongst us, the chips were hand cut, the hummus was freshly made and full of taste and texture, the bread was light but full of wholemeal home baked taste. I didn't fancy the Galician squid when it was described but when it arrived it looked so beautiful it would have been wrong not to tuck in, the squid was grilled and served cold on a lightly dressed salad and paprika potatoes. The meatballs were moist and tasty, not too dense and in a lovely herby, tomato sauce. I even ate the olives! What a wonderful way to cap off our stay in Bristol, we will definitely be back, maybe not to the Hilton, but certainly to the harbour and the Olive Shed.

Delicious olives

Laurens Mussels and Squid in a Provencal  Sauce (tomatoes and fennel)

Galician Squid

Albondigas and Hummus and bread

Amazing hand cut chips

Tomorrow - Pollo al ajillo, tortilla and chicken stock......see you there