We love being back in Chiswick! It’s has such a lovely vibe, and the footpath on the high road is an absolute pleasure to use – simply because it’s just so darned wide compared to Putney!

After breakfast on Saturday morning, we had a couple of quick chores to do – I had to pick up a mysterious parcel from the post office (which turned out to be my new passport, yay!), and Kristy skipped on down to the library.

On our way back home, we stopped off at one of the fruit stalls on the high-road. Kristy explained to me that it’s very important that we go to the right fruit stand, as one of them has “nice” men, the other one has “nasty” men. I’m glad I know which is the good one, now.

Anyway, their stalls are great – heaps of fresh fruit and vegies, and all of it much cheaper than at the supermarkets. We filled a massive eco-bag for under £10! When I told the “nice man” to keep the change, he smiled and said, “oh thanks… I should give you a tip now… don’t drink too much tonight!”.

Good tip!

Next up in the £5 breakfast challenge was the Hot House Cafe, only a few doors down from the Blueberry cafe. It markets itself as an internet cafe, but with a Full English Breakfast for sale at only £4.95 including coffee, it’s definitely a contender for the breakfast crowd.

(It was raining quite heavily when we went, so I couldn’t take an outside photo.)

One of the first things that we noticed about Hot House was that it seemed to have a bunch of regular patrons; either that, or all the waitresses were psychic and were doing a lot of mind reading. I suspect it’s the former. This suggested to me that we were in for quite a treat!

Hot House’s “Full English Breakfast” consisted of two bacon rashers, a sausage, mushrooms, two fried eggs, a hash brown, baked beans, and two pieces of (heavily buttered) toast. Like Blueberry, I wasn’t given an option on the type of toast that I wanted, but their default option tried to cater for everyone with one piece each white and brown bread. Their breakfast also included a tea or a coffee which I thought was very generous, even though they charged me an extra 50p to upsize to a latte (instead of regular black coffee).

Overall, the meal was quite good, though everything was rather salty, most especially the bacon. Also on the downside was the hash brown which was a little soggy, and the baked beans which were quite bland – as if the sauce was there just to hold the beans together but not to provide any flavour. The sausage was quite good though; the mushrooms were even better, and the eggs were the absolute highlight of the meal – perfectly cooked with solid whites, but runny yolks. Yum!

My 50p coffee was acceptable, though I wouldn’t go there if all I was after was a coffee. They didn’t use fresh beans, and instead opted for pre-ground coffee from a tin in the fridge. And though the coffee didn’t taste bad, it was a little light on any. Perhaps a second shot would have helped, though not as much as freshly ground beans would have.

Kristy opted out of this challenge, and instead had smoked salmon (which was quite generously apportioned) over scrambled eggs, and a freshly squeezed orange juice. Bonus points to them for taking “freshly squeezed” very literally, with a huge orange juicer behind the counter!

All up we paid only £11.35 for both of our meals, and we both walked out with very satisfied bellies. I don’t think the quality of the food was quite as good as it was at Blueberry, however it wasn’t far off. Hot House definitely scores higher on both variety and value for money though, and given the choice between the two, I’d be hard pressed to make a decision. gerrod.com rating: 8.5/10.

Kristy and I went and checked out Gunnersbury Park, which we’ve been to before and loved. Now that it’s Autumn (or do they call it “Fall” here?), all the leaves have changed colour and fallen off the trees, which makes for some excellent playtime – especially in the wind!

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We also decided to check out if there were any caches in the park, and there’s heaps! We found The Wall, Potomac Pond, and The Boating lake. My favourite of these was The Wall, because of the way it was very cleverly hidden behind a brick in a hole in the bottom of… a wall.

We had set out to simply have a bit of a wander, but ended up staying for about two hours. Gunnersbury Park is definitely one of our favourites, and now that it’s just around the corner, I think we’ll be visiting it more often!

When we first came (back) to Chiswick to sign the lease on our flat, I noticed that between here and Turnham Green, there are at least 5 cafes that each offer some form of breakfast for £5 or less. Helllloooo… do I hear a challenge in the making? Yes I do!

Enter: The £5 breakfast challenge. Yes, it’s an extremely creative name, and I laboured over it until I was happy. I was also considering dropping the pound sign, and instead going for “The five pound breakfast challenge”, because I’m using a US keyboard and I don’t have a convenient button for “£”. However, I felt that our dear American readers may think I’m trying to eat five pounds of breakfast foods, rather than spending five pounds on breakfast. It’s an important distinction.

Anyway – the first cafe to unknowingly step up to the plate was the Blueberry Cafe. From the outside, it definitely looks like the swankiest of them all, but a rather unfortunately placed red statue blocks its view of the high rode. (Note: it may look like a mail box, however Royal Mail are on strike these days more often than not, so it doesn’t work like a mail box).

Blueberry’s £5 breakfast comes with two fried eggs, bacon, sausages, mushrooms, baked beans, and two pieces of wholegrain toast. Kristy and I both liked that wholegrain was the default bread – given the option of white, we both probably would have taken it, yet the wholegrain was delicious and nutritious! Still, some options would have been nice – I’m not really a bacon person, and would have preferred to swap out my rashers for sausages if I could have; and I love me some breakfast tomato.

A few points off for not offering any beverage with the meal – we each ordered a freshly squeezed OJ, which we felt was a decent size, and fairly good value for money. I also ordered a latte, which unfortunately was about the size of a child’s beach bucket, and far, far too hot for my liking.

The addition of three beverages to our meal drove the cost up to around £16, however I figured that if you’re going to go somewhere for breakfast, you’re likely to want at least one accompanying beverage, so they should be part of the review.

Blueberry suffers from “the first cab off the rank” syndrome – once we’ve been to each of the cafes, it may on reflection be the best, but until that point we can only rate it on its lonesome. The food was definitely well prepared, and high quality, but not quite enough variety to bring home the proverbial bacon. gerrod.com rating: 8/10.

With the arrival of internet sometime last night, our move-in process is now complete! Well, that’s not 100% true – we still haven’t unpacked everything, but we’re a lot closer to what we were at this time last week. We’ve even managed to assemble our two new pieces of furniture – a tallboy, and some cheap and cheerful shelves, which I cannot for the life of me find on IKEA’s website.

This is one of only two photos that we have from moving-in day. The other one we have is almost identical, except I’m not “smiling” in it. Ahh, the memories.