The month that was: June

What happened:
We're halfway through the year, which is crazy! Olly and I celebrated our anniversary (we celebrate on two different dates - here's why), but we'll be heading to Duck & Waffle in July for our main celebration as we like to celebrate somewhere up high. (We couldn't get a reservation on our actual anniversary. And Paramount, where we had our first date, sadly closed down at the start of the year. Boooooo!) Isn't my anniversary card from Olly the cutest?

Other than that, I've had a pretty quiet month, to be honest. The glamour of being an author, huh? ;) I'm currently working on three different books, and I hope to have an update soon on when I expect Found to be released. (Definitely later this year.) Make sure you catch up with the first two books in the Arielle Lockley series before then!

What I ate:
At home I made buttermilk chicken (I cobbled together a recipe from three different recipes), prawn chowder, plus M&M and Oreo cookies (I used the cookie recipe in Lorraine Pascale's Baking Made Easy cookbook but substituted the chocolate chips for Oreos and M&Ms). Of course, I cooked a lot more than this, but these were the most interesting dishes!

     

If you want steak in London and don't want to go to the tourist trap that is the Aberdeen Steak House (now called the Angus Steak House) - shudders - and Gaucho and Hawksmoor are a bit out of your budget, try Flat Iron. I ate there for the first time in June; for a tenner, you can't go wrong! (The Denmark Street Flat Iron tends to be quieter than Beak Street; there was no queue for a table there, whereas it was a 90 minute wait at Beak Street.)

Rabot 1745 is part of Hotel Chocolat so pretty much *everything* on the menu involves cacao. Whilst it was nice enough, it was definitely overpriced. The dishes do sound incredible, like the "Yorkshire pudding filled with cacao glazed pulled pork, white chocolate mash and cacao red wine jus", pictured below right, but the taste was disappointingly average.

     

I've eaten at Bukowski a few times before, and it's awesome BBQ food. See that silver bowl in-between our dishes? Those are puck nuggets - yep, delicious pork and duck nuggets - and the side you can see next to the burger are tobacco onions. I can highly recommend these, plus my ribs which were *insanely* smoky and tasty.

What I watched:
I finally watched the second half of season 4 of Homeland (it's been on our Sky+ HD box for months). It's lost some of its charm, and the same goes for season 3 of Orange is the New Black, which we binge-watched in less than a week. (Obviously.) Season 5 of Game of Thrones also finished in June and, again, I didn't like this season as much as previous ones. Is nothing sacred in GoT land?!

June also saw the return of Pretty Little Liars - those girls(!) - and I started watching Switched at Birth, which is the polar opposite to PLL. It's about two teenagers who find out they were switched at birth (duh!); American Sign Language is used throughout, which gives it a really interesting dynamic. I also started watching Humans - it's creepy, but oh-so-good!

Films watched: Grace of Monaco, Lucy, Jurassic Park, Jurassic Park III, We Need to Talk About Kevin (the book is *so* much better!), The Giver, Edward Scissorhands and Beauty and the Beast. We also headed to the cinema to see Jurassic World, which was cheesy but enjoyable. £30 for two tickets to the cinema though... ouch! 

What I read: 

In June I read 20 books, and I abandoned reading 7 books (sorry). My favourite reads of the month were Evil Games by Angela Marsons and The Day We Disappeared by Lucy Robinson.

I also enjoyed The Martyr's Curse by Scott Mariani, Feed by Mira Grant, The Vintage Guide to Love and Romance by Kirsty Greenwood, The Perfume Collector by Kathleen Tessaro, Whatever It Takes by Adele Parks and The One You Really Want by Jill Mansell.

How was your month? x