Monthly Archives: July 2015

Blogging 201, Day 10

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Blogging U.Wow, it’s the last day and the final task that’s been set is to create a poll and/or a survey to collect feedback from your readers on your site and its content.

I took a look at a Polldaddy account and it looks as if it is fully integrated with WordPress, which is great as it will mean it’s easy to set-up a questionnaire.

At the moment, as the site is only 2 months old, I think it’s a little early to get statistical data that would be informative.

It’s always a good idea to make sure that the base of respondents is a good cross selection of the  audience and that the sample size is big enough to be statistically valid in terms of quantitive Data – that’s stats in terms of numbers of people responding – e.g 50% agree, 30 percent disagree etc. For qualitative data, this is about getting feedback that’s either verbal or written and can be quite subjective. So having a combination of both types of data will give the best picture possible.

There is a free tool, which if anyone hasn’t come across it or heard of it is called Survey Monkey which is very easy to set-up. There’s a  great article on the site which explains statistics and what you need to consider for the results to be valid

As this is the last day of the course, there’s really just one final thing to say, which is to thank the lovely team at WordPress for organising these courses and giving me the opportunity of Blog meeting so many Bloggers. Thanks also to everyone for the Likes, follows and the feedback I got to help me improve the Blog.

I’ve exchanged my details in the Commons and hope to keep in touch to find out how everyone in the Class of July ’15’s Blogging 201 will progress with their Blogs 🙂

Blogging 201, Day 9

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Blogging 201, Day 9

 

Today’s task on the Blogging 201 course is to find a blogging buddy and If appropriate, plan to publish guest posts on one another’s blogs. The other suggestion if there are no buddies out there is to lean on them for feedback and support.

So here’s the thing, over the last week or so, I have met so many bloggers as part of this course, that I would consider everyone that has liked, followed or given me encouragement as a buddy in some way, whether it was the feedback on the site navigation changes that I made on Day 5 or the feedback about the blog’s design and the way I write.

Not one to pass up on the opportunity to find a blogging buddy, I came across Chow Kim Wan’s site from the Commons which mentioned about posts on music. Well, looking at the site, it’s so original, a mathematician who also enjoys music.

Could this be serendipity?  or just a wild coincidence. My husband is by all accounts something of a numbers person, having graduated with a science and engieering degree and worked in the Aeronautical industry and though we are so different in our tastes and preferences, we make  an unlikely combination that somehow just works.

So I thought about what I could write that would compliment both our blogs, perhaps it will be about an event from my days at school.

An event that I think is best put behind me, and yet was something I consider one of those transformational moments which can be called character forming.   It was both terrifying and exhilirating, but at the time I just wanted to get it over with.

I’ll be thinking about how best to approach this so that it can be published on a Wednesday to coincide with the Chow Kim Wan’s blog post publishing calendar.

Returning to the buddies and the bloggers that I’ve blog met over this course; I went blog surfing agin tonight, reading through my reader, comments and took a visit to the Commons.

Ravishing Roses has an excellent post on the Make your own Face Mask which she received as a gift – looks amazing to try and to create a home made facemask. Wait a minute, I have some Rosewater, which I can use – hmmm and some lavender honey as well.

The Planted Vegan has a new receipe for a wrap which will make a very tasty lunch this weekend (Our dishwasher broke today) so the fact that the receipe is for a wrap, means there’s little washing up, means I like this post very much.

Lela at inthenewhouse dropped me a lovely comment about visiting her Inspirational Thursday party, which reminds me, I will need to contribute to the Link Party tonight.

Saw the post on the new Erktop couch that Creative Gem has, which has got me thinking that perhaps I should save up for one too. Except it will have to come after the Dishwasher now that it’s broken.

Girl Independent has made so many improvements to her site, I especially like the way she has included text over the images, but in a way that doesn’t detract from the visual power of her photography.

I’ve been reading through  Cyn Franks blog Franklywrite which if you are ever stuck and think you have writer’s block is the post to read to get you back in the saddle again so to speak.

Finally, LeZoeMusings whose blog popped up as on my recommended blogs in the reader is so visually stunning. I think her blog raises the bar for beautiful, stylish and paired back simplicity. It has both style and subtance. Just in awe of her blog

There’s been so many other bloggers who have inspired new ideas and a fresh perspective over the course of the last 9 days, so another task that I’ll have to work on is to create a blog roll and post it on my site.

Thanks for viewing this post. Looking forward to the final day of Blogging 201.

Blogging 201, Day 8

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Blogging 201, Day 8, Make your blog a hub

Yesterday’s task was to create a page or section on your blog to display links to your online presence elsewhere. And to make sure your other presences reflect the brand style and tone of the blog.

I must admit I’ve fallen behind on this task and it is on my to do list.

Since starting this course, I have learnt so much in the process, for instance with the Google+ account, that I have, this is already indexing for Blogging 201. However, after speaking to a few colleagues, this new tool came up in conversation:

http://snippetoptimizer.net

A free tool that will help you see what Google will return as a search result of the page that you have written. So combining this with the Google search trends for keywords will help identify ideas for future posts.

For Google+ I will be looking for a way to include a snippet in the search description so that it features the web address for the blog, rather than just display the Google+ post.

The other information I found about how to turn a blog into a hub, is about how search friendly having a Tumblr account is for generating awareness. Just click the link to read the article.

I hope this post was useful. Do let me know if you’ve completed the task set for day 8.

Blogging 201, Day 7

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Blogging 201 day 7 make the most of events

Yesterday’s assignment: create a recurring blogging event on your site, and/or make plans to attend a blogging conference.

I think this task is about making sure you are making the most of networking and spreading awareness about the blog, whether that is attending real events such as the Blogging conferences or virtually through blog hops or Linky parties.

There’s a great post on the SITS Girls website about what Linky Parties are and how to set them up.

For now, I’ve joined a couple of sites on a regular basis to pin one of the posts to their Linky party/event. What’s great about these is that you get the opportunity of visiting other people’s blogs as they arrive/join the Linky Party and often I have found new ideas or projects to try.

The Link Parties I’ve joined are here at A bowl full of Lemons blog which is such a lovely site full of organising tips and projects; and at Lela Burris’ blog Inthenewhouse.com who got in touch with me after seeing my blog on ABOF’s site.

Since then I visit Lela’s blog and saw Project Patrol’s great post on making your own kindle cover out of an old book – Such a great idea to do with my daughter during the summer holidays.

For now, until I feel I’ve “earned my stripes” so to speak, I will look forward to joining some other Linkys or blog hops, and look to see if others would be welcome to me joining, before I venture as far as hosting a link up or blog hop.

Thanks for viewing this post. Do let me know if you are hosting a link up party and think my site would be suitable 🙂

Blogging 201, Day 6

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Blogging 201 - day 6, Digging deep into Social MediaDigging Deep into your Social Network.

The recent projects I’ve been developing at work means that I have been looking at the importance of Social Media and Search.

In fact, Social Media has such an influence on Search and getting content indexed and found through Search browsers, that it’s impossible to ignore it’s influence on getting traffic to your site.

The problem though is that I’ve never been very active on Social Platforms, in fact I’d go as far as to say I’ve avoided Facebook and Twitter, simply because I don’t think I have as many interesting or fascinating things to post up in a day.

I think I could be described as a passive observer in Social media, as it always amazes me how there are posts about bungee jumping, crossing off challenges on personal bucket lists, doing the Ice Bucket Challenges and all the other wild and interesting activities that my friends and peers get up to.

I feel a bit of a bore posting up things about what our family get up to – who really cares that we went to the dentist or got our hair cut or took our cats to the vets?

At any rate most of my daylight hours are spent in an office and there are lots of stories of people posting things they will regret later, such as calling their boss something unprintable and then shouting about it in social media, that I think writing anything that you may regret later is best avoided.

Blogging on the other hand is completely different, it’s a space to be creative. To express an idea, write an article about something that’s inspired you and can be drawn from your experiences whether they are in the present, past or the future.

So the prospect of having to connect up the blog to Social Media channels was somewhat daunting.

However knowing how important it is in terms of search, I’ve made a start.

Firstly, the most important step I made was just to set-up the accounts. The social media platforms that have the biggest in terms of audience size and reach and order of prominence are as follows:

1) Facebook

2) Twitter

3) Google+

Whilst Google+  is not as big in terms of audience size, I think G+ is more important than Facebook or Twitter, due to its relationship and direct impact on Search. Once you have a Google+ account, your profile, the content you post in Google+ will be indexed and ranked for search purposes.

Since Google’s Search Engine’s algorithm is based on a number of factors, posts within Google+ get indexed almost immediately, there’s a great article about it here .

I like things simple, so for now I have in WordPress Settings connected my Google+ account to the blog so that when ever I create a post, it will automatically get posted onto G+. At the time of writing, Google+ does not make the post public, so I go into my account about once a week and re-post so they become public.

4) Pinterest – similarly has a relationship and impact on search engines and rankings. This article about the relationship between Pinterest and Search provides a good explanation of the why and how.

I’ve set-up a Pinterest account so that I can pin images from my blog to Pinterest boards that I’ve set-up.  I keep back a few images. Once a week, I check the boards. I also use Pinterest for pinning images that I find interesting or inspires ideas for future posts, so it’s quite useful in that respect.

5) Instagram, 6) Tumblr

There are of course lots more beside, the above I think represent the core ones to focus my efforts.

I still have a long way to go in terms of social media and connecting and creating a community around the blog.

For now, I am focussing on getting the blog discovered through search and using the social platforms as a way to do this.

I hope this post was helpful. Do let me know if you’ve been successful in setting up a Social Media Strategy to help increase awareness for your blog.

Blogging 201, Day 5

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Blogging 201 - Day 5

Friday’s task was to integrate a feature to draw traffic to your older content like a widget, related posts, or a “Best of” page.

Adding the feature of including related posts to the blog proved impossible, I have tried a few times, but it would seem that this feature is not possible with the Adelle theme. I’ll see if anything has been written in the forums to see if there is a possible solution to this.

In the meantime the task was a good opportunity to review the site in terms of the overall UX (User Experience). When I started to create the blog, I had in mind some general categories such as beauty, food, home and of course Perfume, but since it would have looked a bit strange to have all the menu items showing with no content, I decided to add the menu items as content grew.

The purpose of defining user experience goes back to some general principles about designing a website, in that you should always have in mind an idea who the website is aimed at and what they would want from it.

In industry terms, a lot has been written about User Centered Design, which is all about making sure that the way the site is designed in terms of its structure, purpose and overall navigation makes it easy for the viewer to find their way around the site and spend time engaging with the content.

Adding features within the navigation, menus and the content itself to encourage the viewer to explore and click-through to additional pages.

I think this was the purpose of Friday’s task, to take a look at the features within WordPress and work out how best to include them in the blog, so that the audience can explore current content as well as older content.

I’ve since made some changes to the menu listing to the right of this blog to see if it will enhance the overall experience for the viewer, for instance, I’ve added the most liked posts as the first item, because it might help the audience to see previous posts that were liked by other bloggers the most.

I’ve added a new post, one which I was going to write earlier in the week, but didn’t get a chance to do this since I got a bit carried away with blog surfing during the week and completing the tasks set in Blogging 201 course. Since this post is about the Rosewater that I purchased a couple of weeks ago now, I have used the opportunity to relate it to the previous post on Rosewater as part of Day 5’s tasks.

The weekend has been busy with a visit to Carshalton’s historic lavender field to pick some lovely fresh lavender with my kids. The fragrance has filled our home with the most beautiful scent, reminiscent of, well a field of lavender in the gentle breeze. Best of all, the haul of lavender will be keeping us busy making all sorts of home-made things, wreathes, beauty treatments, candles, body scrubs, hmmmm which reminds me, I’ve planned a regular feature on Sunday night is spa night, I think I’ve got just the ingredient for tonight to try 🙂

Do let me know if this post was useful, I’d love to hear if you’re blogging whether you’ve made any changes to the features on your site.

Home made Rosewater, Witch Hazel & Glycerine Cleanser vs Micellar Water

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Rosewater & Glycerine Cleaner vs Micellar Water

I ran out of my favourite brand of Rosewater recently and since Edgware Road is no longer on my way home, I did not want to go out of my just to get a bottle of Rosewater.

I found the Cortas brand of Rosewater in a local store selling Middle Eastern, Continental and English food, on my way home,  you might have read about this in an earlier Post about a bowlful of Cherries, I also purchased a lovely bottle of Orange Blossom Water along with the cherries at the same time.

The bottle, although not as pretty as my previous brand, said Cortas was established in 1930. It wasn’t very expensive, so I thought I would try it out.

After some research, I found out that there are several types of Rosewater, the ones that include other ingredients and use Rose Oil, are used for skincare only and may often include artificial scent and preservatives.

The Cortas Rosewater lable had little information about what it was made of or how it was made but after a bit of digging, I found out that it is all natrual, and food grade, it is made from distilled Rose Petals with no additives. It has a lovely sweet Rose Scent, a little tangy compared to my last bottle of Rosewater. It comes from the Lebanon and is a very popular brand stocked by many Middle Eastern stores.

Since I am running low on Micellar water, it occurred to me that the home made Rosewater and Glycerine toner, I’ve been using was pretty good at removing make-up on the occasions I had managed to leave some on my skin after washing my face with a liquid facial soap.

Before getting some more Micellar water make up remover (I use it when I’m in a rush or need a quick freshen up) I thought I’d try making up a batch of a cleanser using Rosewater, Glycerine and Witch Hazel.

Micellar Water is made up of special molecules within the liquid that act like tiny sponges, absorbing any dirt or make-up, grabbing it off the skin and depositing it on the cotton wool pad that the water has been soaked in. There are many brands, some that promise not just the benefits of cleansing, but lots of other claims besides.

I thought that the properties of Glycerine were pretty similar, it’s a humectant, attracting and retaining moisture, it been used widely as an ingredient for skin cleansers. So after a few mixes and experiments, I got to what I thought was the right consistency for the cleanser (too much glycerin and it became too sticky and made my skin feel shiny, too little and it did not clean as well as the Micellar Water).

Glycerin, Rosewater, Witch HazelThe final mixture that is almost like the Micellar Water, a gentle liquid, great at cleansing the skin and leaving no sticky residue. It consisted of the following combination:

5 parts Rosewater

2 parts Witch Hazel

1 part GlycerineRosewater, Witchazel and Glycerine cleanser vs Commercial Micellar Water

The ingredients were simply put into a bottle and shaken to mix thoroughly.

To see if it would work as well the Micellar Water, my experiment involved a comparison test. I used the Rosewater cleanser to cleanse my face on one side, the other side with the Micellar Water.

I’ve been using the home-made cleanser for 2 weeks and my skin feels softer. Since both Rosewater and Witch Hazel have natural astringent properties, I’ve noticed that not only does my skin feel softer, my pores are much smaller too.

The fragrance and liquid are instantly refreshing. I like the fact that I’ve made it, I much prefer to know what ingredients I’m using and in what quantities. As there’s no preservatives, the ingredients are all natural with zero commercial chemicals or preservatives. It also means it’s more likely to be better for my skin.

I think this home-made version works just as well as the commercially made Micellar Water, best of all it smells heavenly, like taking a walk through a Rose Garden, hmmm,  I’m off to go and clean my face.

Blogging 201, Day 4

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Blogging 201

I posted this earlier in the WordPress 201 Commons page today, as it was liked by a few bloggers I thought it might be helpful to post it here.

For today’s task, as my site was started recently, (June2015) I have only 2 months worth of data from the WordPress Stats page. I wasn’t expecting a huge volume of visits as I started literally with 0, with a clean slate in terms of Social Media following. My plan for the blog is to see how much organic visits the site can generate from scratch.

For June there were a total of 150 views, 58 visits, 65 likes and 14 comments.
For July to date, 202 views, 117 visits and 45 likes, 12 comments.

(July’s data is skewed as this would also include traffic and data from the Blogging 202 course).

In terms of how I approached the content, I decided upon the subjects that I felt I could write about – family, beauty, skincare, home, food, travel, music and perfume. I guess in effect a lifestyle blog.

As I have a little knowledge around SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and used to looking at Google Analytics for clients, the stats within WordPress are a good starting point. Since this is a personal blog, I am using free search tools that would help me to generate topic ideas:

  • The free search tool: Wordstream (this is free for the first 30 search words) This shows other suggested keywords that are the top searched keywords, to help build up the content / articles.
  • Google Search Bar –  this is really basic and common sense. Since 93% of all website visits begin with Search through the Search Browser, (when was the last time you typed the full web address? I think all of us are so used to using search to find what we’re looking for on the web) the simplest thing to do is to enter in the search term you think you want to get traffic from. All the websites listed will give an idea of the type of content that is being indexed by Google and ranking. The top ranking articles/content pages are the ones on the top page, and I look through these to see what the content is about and how they approach the subjects. (BTW, it’s no good copying the content, Google will penalise against this in terms of search rankings)

That said, the tools are useful to provide ideas around what to write about. Most of the time, i’ve noticed that “Lists” work – eg. Top 5 reasons why…. or 5 ways to use…. type of content seems to work well in terms of search, though I haven’t tried this technique.

As I’m preparing a presentation on Search with a colleague, I had the opportunity to quizz him on some additional tools that could help with analysing site traffic.

Here’s his advice on Search tools:

SEM Rush, http://www.semrush.com as soon as you get to their landing page – you can type in a keyword. (this is free and a lot more sophisticated than Wordstream)

I’ve looked through my posts and the tags that I used for the posts – Skincare seemed to have the highest number of views both in terms of Category and Tags.

There’s a column of related keywords in SEM Rush – the results show “Skin care” as one of the related words. Now whilst I can include these words in the next blog post or create a series of posts around the topic of  Skin care, my chances of getting ranked high (1st page in search is desirable) are pretty slim at the moment because Google uses something called an algorithm to calculate what it considers the most relevant search results to present to you once you enter your search query. If you’re a Beauty writer, you’re in luck as this topic is among the highest in terms of search queries.

What Google is trying to do is provide a useful service to help users find a perfect match to their search query, so it uses information from websites to determine how many people have visited, the number of pages, number of images and so forth.

For now I will concentrate on creating the best content I can that I hope will be of interest to people. As more people find their way to the blog, the more relevant Google will determine the content to be; all in relation to the search query, so that’s how a blog post will rise up the search index. I don’t think there’s any short cuts to this.

The other invaluable piece of advice he gave was to look at Google Trends – this tool gives the top trending topics, and you can select by country as the trends will differ by country.

At the time of writing this post the lifestyle topic trending in the UK is “The British Bake Off”. Again, it’s unlikely that if I write a post about the British Bake Off that it will rank highly in search, but it may get picked up from within WordPress readers and the categories and Tags, if I set-up a tag around a post about Baking so that some visitors within WordPress will see the post.

Of course this is not an exact science – it is an approach that will help me work out a content plan based on the data from the WordPress site stats and some research using the free Search tools. It looks like I’ll be doing a lot of baking with the kids at the weekends 🙂

I’ll update this post in a month’s time and let you know whether this approach has helped. Thanks for stopping by and reading this post. Please do share any insights on what stats or tools you use to plan your content.

Blogging 201 – Day 3

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Blogging 201 - Day 3

It’s day 3 of the Blogging 201 course and today, the task is about making sure the blog can be seen through any device, whether it is a desktop, tablet or mobile device.

I posted a note in the commons about this task as I’ve not been able to look at my site on mobile Android devices as I don’t have access to one.

I think testing your site to make sure that it can be viewed the way you intend people to see your blog is so important. If for instance you’re looking at a site using different browsers – by this I mean if you are using Safari, Windows Explorer, Google Chrome or Firefox, each of these browsers have slightly different nuances in terms of how they present your blog to the world, and depending on who is looking, what operating system they are using (e.g. Windows, Linux, Mac OS etc) this too could make a difference if they don’t have the fonts installed. Generally speaking if you pick a font that is not “web friendly” the browser, or operating system will default to the closest they have, which means the viewer will see something different to what you intended.

I hope for anyone reading this post, this information is helpful.

When I chose the Theme for this blog, I picked “Adelle” which was described as Mobile optimised/friendly. I checked it across the devices I had available to me and I thought in different views, it looked great, whether I had the template in Portrait or Landscape orientation, the site adapted to fit the size of the screen. This is what is meant by the term “Web responsive”.

The other thing to look for is whether the photos or images scale correctly, by this I mean if the photo automatically re-sizes to fit the width of the mobile, tablet or desktop device you are looking at the blog from. Sometimes the resizing can throw out the text to move it to wrap around the image a little strangely. When ever I think this is going to happen, I simply add an extra line break in the closest paragraph under the picture or above, preview this on both my laptop and mobile before publishing.

There were so many responses to my request, each came back with a positive note about their experience of my site.

Girl Independent let me know the site looked great on ipad. She has a great site already, but wanted to know if she should change the theme. I think it has a lovely scroll through the blog, which felt as if you are going on a journey with her while she is travelling and experiencing all the different places she has been and goes diving.

Susie Lovell let me know that the site looked good in Mac OSX, Her site is lovely if you’re after some short reads, these are great. I think writing short pieces is much more difficult than long, because you have to fit in so much in so little, characters, plot, story telling, it’s a great art and skill that is very sought after in the world of advertising.

Deb323 looked at my site on her Google Nexus, she also uses the Adelle theme for her blog, I love the fact that her blog is helping a lot of indie authors and I’ve discovered a few titles that I’ll be taking on holiday for the luxury of a long read while sitting on the beach.

Dawnlizjones checked my site on her Android Moto G Phone, and let me know it looked good on this device as well. I had so much fun reading her post on Long Playing/Loving Parenthood which is about parenting and some of motown music of Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and then when I looked at a few more posts, I found she likes Prince’s music – ditto.

I am just enjoying blog meeting everyone, but back to the task and making sure the site is mobile friendly.

What’s great about WordPress is that if you have picked one of the newer themes, they are already mobile friendly.

I looked at all the blogs who commented, liked or followed me on my mobile devices during my lunch hour and at the end of the day at work and all of them adapted to the screen on my mobile, so I think WordPress is great as it’s automatically re-sized, re-scaled the blogs, it’s really, really great at doing this.

I’ve inserted music audio streaming from Spotify, a YouTube video and photos (I need to work on reducing the file sizes on the pictures I’ve posted) and each of these elements looked good in the blog posts, even looking at them on my little Windows phone.

So it turned out I wasn’t able to give much in terms of feedback on how different sites looked on different devices, because WordPress does such an amazing job on this. Instead I had a lovely time looking at the sites of people who had commented, liked or followed me.

It’s been a very inspiring day, I’ve added people to my Google+ and followed some blogs that I would never have come across. Thanks for reading this post.

Dinner awaits – Stir Fried Squid with Udon Noodles

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Stir fried Squid with Udon Noodles

Stir-fried Squid, Vegetables and Udon Noodles

This week, the kids have finished school and they are staying with their Nanny and Grandad.

We have to negotiate the holidays carefully, or else we don’t get to see them all summer as the kids like to spend as much time with their grandparents as possible.

I think it’s because they are a lot more laid back and spoil them, which I suppose is the right of any grandparent.

 

 

This week also allows us, that is my hubby and me, to re-connect and be a couple, pre-kids, a kind of whole week of date nights.

Except, that I haven’t done all that well in terms of making time for this. I’d forgotten about a work social event tonight which was one of those work functions where you are expected to attend.

Vegiables for Stir Fry

vegetables for the stir fry

We were meant to have a lovely quiet meal at home.

Patient as ever, when I texted my hubby earlier in the day to say I’d be a bit late home, he didn’t make any further comment.

When I called on my way home tonight, he laughed as I’d accidentally left my mobile on as I was asking for directions to the nearest tube station, I felt pretty guilty by now as it was getting late so made sure to say that I didn’t expect him to wait for me, but to eat before I arrived.

When I arrived home, he’d prepared all the veg and as if this wasn’t pretty cool, he’d gotten some fresh squid which he’d purchased earlier in the morning, my favourite seafood so that it could be stir-fried and ready as soon as I arrived home.

The photos really don’t do justice to this dish, it’s so simple but very tasty!

Fresh Squid

Fresh Squid

A stir fry medley of vegetables – any three veg combination of 3 colours, orange, green and yellow/red, with a little freshly chopped ginger and garlic, plus little fresh rings of squid. It’s not to everyone’s taste, squid that is – but it could be any little morsels of fish, chicken, red meat or tofu, all stir-fried with a dash of soy sauce and Oyster Sauce together with fresh Udon Noodles, Stir fried in just a few minutes in a wok.

A bowl of heaven awaited me on my return from work tonight.