Slug and Lettuce Winchester

January was a bit of a fail really! I’m sure I can’t be the only one glad to see the back of it. The whole month is notoriously thought of as the most draining and dreary month of the year. It even contains the least productive and downright depressing day of the year Blue Monday!

                A combination of Christmas and New Year excitement hangover and being the epitome of bleak mid-winter, ensures the whole month feels like one long early morning commute. It also hasn’t helped that I’ve had some rather distracting personal issues that have kept me from blogging. I won’t go into the details of my tales of woe, but let me tell you they are harrowing. If I’m honest though no matter how hard things got they weren’t the main cause of my lack of productivity.

Mostly harmless... unless I'm around!

                No, the main cause of procrastination and bad blogger guilt was the video game Ni No Kuni an amazing game for the PS3. I won’t go into a review for it here, partly because I have a review already in mind but mostly because I’m still trapped in its world at the moment! The one thing that I did manage to achieve is sorting out a place to live for next year, it was if I’m honest more important than defeating the White Witch. To celebrate our continuing home ownership, I and my house went out for a meal. Nowhere fancy, we are after all “poor students”, but a celebratory dinner none the less. Why however they are celebrating living with my madness for another year is beyond me (anyone who knows of the “Olive Incident” can attest to this!).

                We picked the Slug and Lettuce as our venue of choice and settled down to chow their food. I opted for a Jerk chicken salad, essentially two chicken kebabs with a bowlful of leaves I know but when you consider I had dessert in mind you’ll forgive me. Anyway the chicken was amazingly spicy and the salad allowed me to discover the delights of pomegranate seeds which are juicy and refreshing. None of this mattered really though as dessert was constantly on my mind. With such a good selection it was a tough choice let me tell you.

                I finally found my saviour in the form of the slightly sickly though amazing sounding Toffee apple crumble and picked ice cream for the side. I didn’t hold much hope for the toffee part and was expecting just your usual apple crumble (I say usual it doesn’t stop it being one of my favourite foods consumable in vast quantities.) However when it arrived and I breached its crispy crumble topping I found the filling to be a beautiful golden hue suggesting a toffee treat. It was great not at all sickly with a great combination of sweet sugary toffee and slightly tart apples that balanced each other out. The topping was really crispy and almost dented the spoon. I found the ice cream to be a good a compliment with a subtly sweet vanilla taste that helped achieve the balance.

                Overall it was a great night out, brilliant food, awesome company and generally a nice way to counter the January blues.