"I hope she'll be a fool--that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool."

I love a good floaty dress and Marchesa never let me down. This year they've really embraced fringing, draping and gorgeous silvery colours. I'm currently re-reading The Great Gatsby and these dresses make me imagine Daisy and Miss Baker with their white dresses rippling and fluttering in the breeze. I would have loved to have lived in the roaring twenties. These dresses are not exactly everyday wear but they are fanciful, ethereal and totally beautiful.

It looks almost like angel wings aww

I think this is my favourite one!

If you haven't read The Great Gatsby then don't worry, a new film is coming out this year with Leonardo Dicaprio and Carey Mulligan so you can catch up. Personally, I think the book will always be better than the film so I hope they do a good job of it.

Moules Marinières

First things first, I am not a really experienced cook. I normally do the basics things: lasagne, spaghetti bolognese, stir fry and so on but I'm more of a cupcakes kind of girl. I've been scared about cooking seafood before now, just because I've heard it can go so wrong if you don't do it well. However, I've been wanting to try out cooking mussels and it just happened that Le Bistrot Pierre (who I blogged about a week ago here) sent me a recipe for their Moules Marinières. Me and my boyfriend cooked it together but I will admit he did most of the work and I did some chopping and irritating photo taking! We added some extra things to the recipe just to make it more to our taste, so this is how we did it.

You will need:

3500g Fresh mussels
200g Butter – unsalted
500ml Cream – whipping
400g Shallots or onions
500ml Medium dry white wine
60g Parsley flat (but we used curled)
2 x Lemons (large)
2g Bay leaf
10g Thyme
1 Chilli
3 Cloves of garlic
1 Celery stick
A big crusty baguette to mop up the delicious juice

What we did:

First we cleaned the mussels. If you haven't done this before then this basically involves pulling off the beard (the small bit it uses to attach itself to rocks) and then checking they're all closed. If a mussel is open or cracked then don't eat it!

Then I chopped the lemon, parsley, garlic and chilli in preparation for later. Onion and celery was chopped on another board.

Next, we put the onions, celery, butter, white wine, half of the chilli and the bay leaves into the pan with the mussels and steamed them until they were about half opened. This takes about two minutes. Have a glass of wine while you wait.

Then we added the cream and some of the lemon wedges and let it boil until the mussels opened fully.

When done, we added the rest of the chilli, parsley and lemon wedges and gave the pot a shake until it looked like this...

We served it quickly and ate it immediately so there was no time for pictures! My favourite part was using the bread to mop up the delicious creamy sauce left at the end. I really enjoyed my first mussels experience, especially knowing that I can do that at home easily enough. The only lengthy part is preparing the mussels but after that it's a quick and easy dish to make. It's not really salty and fishy like some people would assume. If it's seasoned correctly then there are so many different flavours. I'll definitely be having this again!

Bag lady

To lessen the pain of not being at fashion week, I've been looking at the latest goodies on ASOS. These are my latest favourites. Can you tell I like satchels? I think my favourite of the bunch is the pale blue clutch on the bottom left. It may be £60 but it would be a good way to wear the spring pastel trend without having to dress head to toe in it. Failing that, the pale blue bag with gold bird on is only £20. I can't really justify buying a new bag at the moment seeing as I only just got my lovely little Mulberry Alexa. She will be number one for a while yet!

Fashion fix #20: Miranda Kerr in Australia

Just a quick post today. Have been very busy getting caught up on work and cooking a feast (which I will be blogging about later) so haven't had much time to ogle fashion or get too envious about NYFW and LFW. I've been trying to avoid twitter too because the pictures and excitement from other lucky bloggers (while wonderful) is also upsetting for poor little me who is stuck at home!

Miranda Kerr is my latest style crush and she has just done a catwalk show in Australia at The David Jones Autumn Winter 2012 season launch. I will be doing a more personal style post on her later but for now here are some of the pictures from her catwalk.

Above: Summery and fresh looks. You need a serious tan to pull off that shade of orange!





Here: Metallics

I love the dress to the left and the way it just floats.
















 Below: Evening style - Miranda is wearing a strong feminine look but also works the androgynous suit well! Is there nothing she can't do?

Personal style: She always looks like she has just stepped out of a health spa. All glowing cheeks and wide eyes. I like how simple this outfit is. It does make me want to eat lots of sweeties though. Spring candy colours are going to make my sweet tooth go into overdrive!

Images not mine... obviously!