Solomon's Mine (so back off)

Stop what you're doing! Get off the net! Head down to Queen of Sheba, a new and totally brilliant restaurant in Glasgow's St George's cross. Not hungry? Who cares, you'd be stuffed halfway through the main course anyway.

Me and Girl-e were going to get the usual Friday night takeaway, although we've gone through something of a local restaurant trial seperation since we last dropped in on our local Italian; instead of seafood spaghetti, they gave me a Carbonora which was actually a soup-based dish served in melted Lurpak instead of water. She still likes the pizza.

Last minute change of plan - we head to fast food powerhouse Asia Style in St George's road, but seeing as they're off ushering in the year of the Tiger, we go next door; stepping through a front door straight out of a B & Q sale and into a beautiful, but quirkily unpretentious interior with mushroom-like woven tables and cute stools which leave you only a foot off the ground.

Still reading? Get down there and give them your money before they shut down. The place was deserted but for our smily waitress wearing, presumably, Abyssinian national dress. No alcohol, (byob) so I sip some fragrant black tea with a spoonful of sugar and we order a starter and main.

I never see oxtail on menus; my starter is similar - a clear, oily broth with shreds of lamb on the bone. Girl-e has Sambusa parcels with lentils. Very nice, but the mains are the thing, and I'm disappointed that we don't eat them as intended - everyone present dining off the same giant pancake.

Why did we ever eat anything that was less than 100% meat? Meat which includes not-meat is a sickening thought when you think about it - I've just eaten a plate of raw beef, and now I feel I could fight a cow for more. It arrives on a delicious sour pancake the size of a Turkey platter called an 'Injera'. The waitress warns me what I'm getting, and right enough, it's a mere flash in the pan away from standing round, eating grass and taking few life-changing risks. Has it been seasoned? What is the taste of beef, anyway? Prepared this way, the blood and fat take on a flavour of their own; the texture is only as surprising as sushi.

We get a spoonful of fiery spice, as powder and blended with butter, which we dip as we go along, eating with our fingers. Girl-e orders a combination of lentil stew and spinach on fried onions and can't finish hers, either; excuse the bland description, it was nice when I had a spoonful of the leftovers just now. There are several vegetarian options to run through when we come back.

Why did we eat all those curries and pastas? Why do we even heat things up? Our idea of a guilty pleasure is a plate of meat slurry with mayo on a bun. I get through half of the main and get the rest wrapped up, and I'm still on a protein buzz.

I'm off to Google Ethiopia now, it's gratifying Glasgow finally has one of their restaurants. I do know the Queen of Sheba was married to the great King Solomon. I'm going back with friends, soon. It's the taste of ... civilisation.

What was your special V-Day treat?

'Special' days often seem to revolve around food - often, it's not so much 'did you have a nice day', but rather 'what did you eat (or drink) that made it a nice day'. Nothing wrong with this in my opinion; the consumption of food and drink can be tremendously sensual experiences and provide sensory memories that are very evocative of important and enjoyable moments in our lives - and what better day to highlight this than Cupid's own holiday? It's certainly as good a time as any for sparkling rose wine, luscious chocolates, long lingering brunches and aphrodiasic-laced dining.

Seems as if every restaurant in Glasgow seemed to be on this bandwagon with their special menus for lovers over the weekend - multiple courses for inflated prices says the cynic in me - but a lot of people enjoy this no-fuss, save your energy for other things approach to a romantic dinner out so these restaurants must be doing something right. Of course, for some, the important part of the night might not be the dinner but rather a show, a night of dancing, a film or etc.(!) and dinner is just something that you do when you are out for the evening. I struggle to frame the world in this fashion but I realise that this is just my perspective!.

For our part, we had our Valentine's dinner in. I always agree to cook our Valentine's dinner if we can agree something fairly simple that still seems a bit special - and the beautiful flowers I received for my V-Day surprise made me not mind cooking in the slightest. Yesterday's dinner was a lovely beef stew that spent the day in the slow cooker - such an easy recipe: brown beef (1 kilo), throw in chunks of carrots (around 6 medium), chunks of potatoes (around 6 large potatoes) and thinly sliced onions (1 large onion), add several tablespoons of chopped fresh rosemary (around 3 - less if you are not so keen on rosemary as we are) and a liquid brew comprised of ketchup (1/2 cup), boiling water (1/2 cup), red wine vinegar (1/4 cup - I acutally used closer to 1/2 a cup as Ilke the tanginess) and soy sauce (about 3 tablesspoons - could also be replaced with worcestershire sauce for those who can) and seasoned with salt and pepper. Sounds odd maybe but it's delicious - the resulting gracy is rich and tangy without any significant tomato overtones. I also threw in about a 1/3 of a bottle of red wine that was left from the previous evening and thickened everything at the end with a cornflour slurry (being gluten challenged) after about 5 hours on high in the slow cooker. Thickening could easily be have been done by dusting the beef with flour prior to browning the chunks as well. No fuss, little muss - and leftovers for at least one more day. Plus I had a happy hubby who got to dip bread into rich, tasty, beefy gravy at the end of the meal which won me the biggest kudos of the day!

Hope your V-day was as nice as ours...If you had something special, please tell us about it the comments - we'd love to hear about it.

Does it have to be Champagne...?

Well, sometimes it does - but not always. Being honest, I'm always going to pick a fine champagne, preferably a vintage offering or a prestige cuvee (think Dom Perignon or La Grande Dame), if I'm given a choice. But since the world is not beating down my door to pour me prestige cuvee and I can't afford to buy it myself on a regular basis, I'd rather make 'alternative' bubbly choices than drink mediocre Champagne. Now don't get me wrong, less expensive Champagnes can be wonderful, too. The odd supermarket bottle comes up trumps, such as Oudinot from Marks and Spencer or Waitrose Brut NV.

Winemakers around the world make sparkling wines that are wonderful - if not downright excellent - and I'd rather drink one of these any day of the week than suffer insipid champagne - or worse, never drink sparkling wine unless my budget allowed! Around the world styles differ; many climates for example allow for much riper fruit and therefore produce wines (if you will allow me to generalise) that are softer, more lush and less acidic. For many, this is perfect - my own other half much prefers sparkling wine like this. Some seek to emulate Champagne using the same grapes (Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier) or using the same traditional winemaking methods (Methode Champenoise) and many have their own long(ish) traditions of making sparkling wine with various grapes and methods of production being employed: to name but a few, Prosecco or Asti (Italy), Cava (Spain), Cremant (some other non-Champagne regions in France), and even Sekt (Germany). The 'new world' gets in on the act, too and countries such as the US (California, mainly), Chile, Australia and New Zealand produce a dizzying array of sparklers to suit many budgets and tastes. Califonia makes some stellar sparkling wines, notably in wineries owned by French Champagne houses for the most part - if you ever see Roederer Quartet, available from Majestic and Waitrose, I'd stock up as it is an absolutely lovely wine. It has the most 'champagne-like' characteristics of any new world sparkler that I've tasted but does not lack it's own particular charm either.

So, what made me think about this today - surprisingly (or not) it isn't the arrival of Valentine's day and the need for pink bubbles - but rather it was the most wonderful glass of Prosecco that I had the other day. girl-e and I went to Nick's Italian Grill on Hyndland Road to celebrate payday and treat ourselves to lunch and we started with a glass of Prosecco that blew me away. It may have just been the right wine at the right time - but I found its fresh lemony-creaminess immensely enjoyable. As for our lunch, it was fine (read: unremarkable) and service was pleasant if a bit clumsy (we seemed to have at least 4 servers). They seem to be going for a New York kind of vibe - but there's no way to replicate the buzz of New York in leafy, west-end Hyndland. It was, however, a nice place for a drink - and probably a nice addition to the neighbourhood. I may not go out of my way again (it's a bit gluten heavy and lacks much in the way of veggie choices to truly please the likes of us)- unless I crave the Prosecco, that is!

Could I have survived January without my rice cooker?

The sun is finally coming out.....! Ok, so we had snow yesterday...but today (at least the earlier part) is beautiful. This is the kind of day that re-affirms the notion that Spring will indeed arrive. I do find that Winter in Glasgow is a bit tough for me having grown up somewhere where there is rather more daylight (and sun!) during the Winter. This lack of daylight makes my personal circadian rhythms go haywire and I'm not much use for anything throughout most of January.

One of the consequences of this is that our diet goes out the window - and I don't even mean our good intentions or our January plans to revamp our lives here, but rather our descent into lazy cooking and processed food (which of course as we all know makes things worse!). If it takes longer than 10 minutes to either cook or to toss into the slow cooker, I can't manage it. I've eaten lots of microwaved plates of refried beans with rice, salsa and guacamole, scrambled eggs and rice, refrigerator surprise fried rice, etc. You get the picture - it only takes a minute to get a big batch of rice into the rice cooker - and I can take a nap knowing that it will click over to the 'keep warm' setting until I am ready. What would we have been eating if it weren't for the rice cooker? I dread to think....

As appliances go, the rice cooker is probably the one that I would be most unhappy to live without. Sure, I can manage the absorption method - which makes perfectly nice rice - but it's never as perfect or as easy as the rice cooker. And I don't really like the boil and strain menthod as the texture always seems wrong to me. There's also not very much like that first moment when you open the rice cooker after it's finished and you get that blast of freshly cooked rice smell - the very smell of comfort and warmth. It doesn't matter if it's white, brown or wild (as long as the liquid measurement is right) or even if it's another grain such as quinoa, millet or buckwheat, it's easy and it's always right. I've even made risotto in the rice cooker with a fair amount of success.

There are many different kinds of rice cooker on the market these days. Some are multi-use appliance that may double as slow cookers, steamers or even pressure cookers. Some are very simple with nothing save a button that toggles from 'on' to 'warm' to 'off' - and some operate using something called 'fuzzy logic' and have lots of buttons on the front. Mine is somewhere in the middle - no inserts for steaming or other secondary uses but has fuzzy logic (which if I understand it, seems to enhance the machine's ability to decide when the rice is done with more accuracy) and just the right amount of buttons to be understandable on the front.

If you have a rice cooker and haven't fallen in love with it yet, check out Beth Hensperger and Julie Kaufmann's book 'The Ultimate Rice Cooker Cookbook'. I have a lot of cookbooks, too many for most of them to live in the kitchen in fact - but this one does. I pop it open several times a week.

Do you have an appliance that you would hate to live without?