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More chocolate reviews, ready meal fun, and we'll talk more about Chinese food.

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Chocolate - Saveur Chocolat Auzou, Caraïbe

While I was in Normandy I bought a couple of bars of chocolate from a Chocolaterie in Rouen, chosen pretty much at random. I picked the 100g bar of Caraïbe chocolat noir (made with cocoa beans from the Carribean) for myself, and the Nougatine bar for Kate.

Both bars are packaged in a very simple plastic and cardboard wrapper, allowing you to see exactly what you are buying. Yup, 100g of sweet chocolatey-looking stuff divided into rectangular chunks.

This 66% Cocoa paste chocolate is described as dark, but is not as dark as the 70% Lindt you can find at almost any supermarket. The chocolate itself is not stamped with any designs, not even the maker's mark.

As for the taste...well, I love chocolate. This is just bitter enough to give you the chocolatey rush, and does not have the sweetness associated with Bourneville. However, it seems to avoid the sometimes unpleasant aftertaste often found after eating a stronger dark chocolate.

The Mandarin - Chinese Restaurant, Newcastle

The Mandarin Restaurant in Newcastle's Chinatown has a lunchtime menu, 5 courses for £5.60, excluding drinks.

For this, you get a soup, two starters, a main course (beware, rice or noodles are not included and must be bought for £1 extra, which gives a generous portion for two) and a dessert.

As you can see from the outside photo, the whole restaurant is decorated in a very traditional style. It was also listed in the Egon Ronay RAC Guide in 1996 and 1997.

As far as I am aware, this is one of the older restaurants in Stowell Street, and the experience has obviously paid off for the owners and staff. The service in Chinatown's many restaurants has never been less than very attentive and professional, and The Mandarin is no exception.

The Mandarin has a very large array of different "banquets", becoming more and more expensive as the courses become more numerous and extravagant. That being said, the lunchtime £5.60 menu is very reasonable, and is served between 12 and 1530.

El Torero

Yesterday, Kate and I visited one of our favourite restaurants in Newcastle, El Torero. You may be surprised to learn that it's a Spanish tapas restaurant. It's open from 12pm every day.

El Torero is definitely worth a visit. The dining room is very pleasant, especially if you wait until an hour or so after opening when the food seems to be slightly better and the atmosphere livens up a little bit. The decor might be a little cliché for some with its red and yellow theme, but it's nice to see the dark wood tables and the colourful walls with their bullfighting posters - you can hardly forget where you are.

There is a lot to choose from, even if paella and chicken aren't your thing. Each dish is a reasonable price, anything between £2-4, and some more expensive tapas and boards are available if they take your fancy. Good deals are available for groups with set selections of dishes. Even the drinks are a reasonable price, and you can always order a jug of water if you have ordered some of the more garlicky dishes. They make the best garlic mayo I've ever tasted, and it comes with many of the fresh salads and breads.

So if you just fancy a quick snack, or a full meal, there's something to suit everyone. Five Stars!

Luscombe Wild Elderflower Bubbly

Kate and I came across this delicious drink on Bettys Summer menu. It's a non-alcoholic fizzy drink. Once again it is 100% organic, and was produced on a farm in Devon. It cost £2.60 per bottle in the café.

This lightly sparkling drink is flavoured by wild elderflower and Sicilian lemons, and is both tangy and pleasantly sweet at the same time.

Luscombe Farm produces several similar drinks, such as ginger beer and cider. These drinks are all organic. A full list can be found on Luscombe Farm's website.

Coupe Matterhorn - Ice Cream Sundae at Betty's in York

Seeing as it was incredibly hot today, I spent £4.95 on a Coupe Matterhorn sundae from Betty's in York. For the price, you'd think I'd have been robbed for a bit of ice cream, but this was not the case.

I can honestly say it was the best ice cream sundae I've ever tasted.

The sundae was very simple, it was two scoops of vanilla ice cream, two of chocolate, some fresh cream and some warm chocolate sauce. The thing that made it so special was the quality of the ice cream.

Both ice creams were delicious. The vanilla had obviously been made with vanilla pods and real cream, and was of similar texture to chocolate truffle. The chocolate was of a similar texture, deliciously flavoured and again obviously made with real cream. It also contained some lovely chocolate flakes, of a similar sweet taste to the warm sauce.

The portion was generous, as was the quantity of sauce supplied, and the whole dessert was organic. Even though I am an impoverished student, I feel that this time I definitely got what I paid for. Yum.

Innocent Smoothies

I've never been the most enthusiastic person when it comes to fruit. Particularly fruit that comes in puréed form with the bits left in.

However...

Innocent smoothies have converted me. You may have seen the ads on TV for this delicious drink, which contains apples, oranges, bananas, mangoes and passion fruit (and no chickens). So far I've only tried the smoothies, but as you can see from their website they have a vast range of jucies and other fruity products.

The "mangoes and passion fruits" smoothie is totally gorgeous in every way, and is very refreshing. It's also one of your 5-a-day fruit and veg if you have 250ml of it, it's that fruity.

Welcome to Food!

This is a blog all about food, as you may have guessed. The plan is to update this every so often whenever we find something that we like. Tomorrow we're off to Betty's Tearooms in York, and a review should be posted about that soon.

Until then, you may want to take a look at the linked food sites in the sidebar, but please come back at some point, we do need the audience. This is a new thing for me so I'll probably get other things going when we actually have some proper content.