Lunch of champions

Combining the homemade with the breadcrumbed-from-the-freezer.

Roasted tomato and cumin soup from a Leon recipe, and fish finger sandwich.

As usual I didn’t quite follow the recipe to the letter – I didn’t bother to take the skins off the tomatoes because I was planning on blitzing them anyway, and I roasted some red pepper alongside the tomatoes.

The shops are currently full of leafy clementines, just like the orange-with leaf that the scantily-clad lady is picking. I don’t know why. Do leaves indicate freshness, like vine-ripened tomatoes? Or is it just to look pretty? All you do when you start to eat the fruit is pull the leaves off.

I have discovered the tastiest thing ever…

… other than MSG. The tastiest sweet thing, definitely.

Sainsbury’s Taste The Difference Elderflower liquer. Liquer. Not cordial. Booze. 20% alcohol. I got a some as a Christmas present (in a very nice little swing-top bottle) and have only recently cracked it open. It tastes magical.

Unfortunately I can’t find it on their website so I am now rather worried that it is a Christmas-only thing.

They do have Elderflower Cyder though, which I am now very keen to try.

Only 300ml, very disappointing.

Do you think it would be wrong to take the poshest-looking elderflower cordial I can find and cut it half-and-half with vodka? Then drink it on the rocks?

This one looks the poshest, definitely

Or maybe I just need to up my scavenging program to include elderflowers in the summer (is it summer? or spring? I need to know this stuff) as well as sloes in the winter.

I could (not) care less

Things I could not care less about:

• Big Brother of any kind (especially “Celebrity”)
• Football teams, the games they have played, and their relative positions in any “tables”

Things I could care less about:

• Having number 6 extra mature cheddar rather than number 5 quite-mature cheddar
• Free-range eggs

Things I probably should care less about:

• The correct folding of dry clothes
• Nail varnish co-ordinating with what I am wearing (yes, I am shallow)

Things that I care about exactly the right amount:

• The fact that “I could care less” means that you do care some, if you did not care at all then it would be impossible to care less

Sort-of book review – Hikkikomori

I admit it, I wrote the title from memory and it may not be exactly correct. But it appears at least once that the author did the same, so I won’t apologise too much.

There we go, a nice bitchy start, and now anything I write from here on can’t be as bad as that. I am reviewing a self-published book, and I’m afraid to say that you can tell. The “typos” (to put it generously) are not frequent but they do illustrate the reason why the world has editors.

I read a book because I followed the author on Twitter. I really don’t remember why, presumably he said something interesting, which was RTed by someone else who I followed for no-reason-that-I-remember, so I followed him and he wasn’t annoying and therefore I didn’t unfollow him. Then when he said that he had written a book, a horror-ish book no less, I thought “I like books, and I spend far too much time on trains with nothing to do, and it’s 77p, so I will read it and then maybe even blog about it”.

I’m writing this blog straight from my head onto the screen (via the keyboard of course) with very little plan so I apologise for any incoherency.

To summarise without spoiling (difficult) the book is written from the point of view of a man who is a recluse, he lives alone with his imaginary girlfriend and never leaves his flat, spending his nights (he is nocturnal) regretting the last words he said to his actual-human-being girlfriend: “And don’t come back!”. “Hikikomori” (I looked this time) is what his imaginary girlfriend calls him, a cutesey Japanese-inspired name meaning recluse or hermit. Neither of them is Japanese by the way, they are just the sort of people who think that everything is cooler if it is Japanese.

I fundamentally disagree with the front-cover blurb, by the way:

• The Sixth Sense – this is a big neon sign saying “there will be a twist” – I prefer my twists to be unexpected
• speed-written by Chuck Palahnuik - actually I can’t comment on this because I downloaded Fight Club and haven’t read it yet
• until all the pages blurred into one - one of the noticeable stylistic features of this book is the short choppy chapters, nothing “blurs into one” at all

Particular things of note:

• Practicalities of being a hermit are spelled out quite nicely – I am the sort of person who will read books and think “how did they eat/drink/go to the toilet” so I was quite pleased
• Uneasyness (if that’s a word) in tone works well, if your imaginary friend doesn’t behave as you expect then is there something wrong with your imagination?
• Not sure if “uneasyness” conveys what I meant correctly there – it is quite spooky in places and I want the first-person narrator to turn around or look in another room so I can see what is there
• The imaginary girlfriend is an incredibly shallow caricature of a human being – a reflection of the depth of imagination that the character is capable of, or perhaps the level of interaction that he requires from “her”
• Slightly spoilery I’m afraid, but parts written from a female point of view seem rather less fleshed-out than those from the male perspective
• Ending… hmm. I suppose it could be exactly what the author intended, but I feel unsatisfied and not in possession of enough information to come to my own conclusion

I suppose the main question when someone tells you about a book they have read is “do you recommend it?”. I’m afraid my recommendation will have to be not-entirely-wholehearted. If your reading time is precious and limited, there are probably better books to fill it. If you find that it is the supply of books that is limited, then go for it – there are far worse ways to spend a few hours. If your kindle is full of books that you “meant to read” but haven’t gotten around to, well maybe you don’t need another book or maybe you just don’t really want to read those books and should read this one instead. Who knows?

Note: I wasn’t sure whether I should write this as it’s not entirely complimentary and I feel that it is a bit more personal than if it were a properly-published paper book by someone who was actually paid for it. (this is probably wrong anyway) But Twitter told me to write it anyway so I have.

“Healthy” cookies

Yes, I do realise it is January and “everyone” is apparently on a diet. But I wanted to bake something.

I get the urge occasionally, and I generally blame it on being a scientist. Back when I used to do biology my job was to weigh solids, measure liquids, mix them together, spin them around, heat them up, cool them down, and generally poke them about to get them to do something interesting. Now that I have a job where I sit in front of a computer cooking is my substitute for when I get the urge to do some of that. Not much spinning-around in cooking but the rest of it applies. And at the end I get to eat something nice (hopefully) rather than think “great, only 4 more repeats to go”.

As it is, I happen to live with a man who prefers oat-and-raisin cookies to chocolate-and-more-chocolate anyway, so I can make cookies with dried fruit in and pretend that it is healthy and therefore appropriate for this time of year.

This recipe is adapted from Nigella’s chocolate chip cookies from Kitchen, which is the only cookie recipe that I can get to work, and even then I can only get it to work by not-quite  obeying the instructions.

Here we go:

• put the oven on first – quite hot – 190C maybe (you need it hotter than Nigella says)
• melt 150g butter (it really doesn’t matter if it is salted or unsalted)
• add 225g of sugar and stir it hard (ideally part white sugar and part brown sugar, but it doesn’t matter too much)
• add 1 tsp vanilla extract (the good kind, not vanilla flavour)
• add 1 egg and stir it hard(Nigella says 1 egg and 1 egg yolk but who can be bothered with that? What good is a single egg white? If I had a couple I could make meringues, but I just can’t be bothered here)
• stir in the things that are going to be in it – chocolate chips or raisins or in this case raisins and cut-up dried apricots and a couple of handfuls of oats (scissors are good for the apricots)
• stir in gently 300g plain flour and 1/2 tsp bicarb
• (Nigella says to put in the chocolate chips after the flour, but I find that makes it harder to get them nicely distributed)
• put onto baking tray with greaseproof paper on it – yes you do need the paper – I did golfball-sized balls and then squished them a bit – make sure to leave lots of room in between if you don’t want one big sheet of cookie (Nigella claims an icecream scoop is the way to go but she is wrong, unless you want cookies the size of your head)
• put in oven for as long as it takes for them to look brown at the edges but still feel soft when you poke them (best not to try to write a blog post about them while they are in the oven or else you may over cook them)
• take out of oven, lift the paper up and put it onto a cooling rack, put more paper onto the baking tray and do another batch

The cookies will get harder out of the oven. If you cook them at a lower temperature they will cook all the way through and be hard. We want them to be cooked at the edges but not-yet cooked in the middle when we take them out. That’s why you need the paper, so you can remove them from the heat. The stage that we want is too soft to be lifted off the metal baking tray without assistance.

Here they are... these may be a bit browner than yours becaue I used some dark muscovado sugar

Everybody loves a Wordle…

…don’t they?

I fed this blog’s URL into Wordle and this is what I got. I think it must only read the most recent posts, if it read everything then Christmas wouldn’t be so prominent.

Foody foody food

I’m not what you might call a “foodie”, but food is important to me.

I’ve just got home from visiting my family, and next week I’ll be visiting other families, and one of the things that I miss when I am away from home is being able to choose what I eat and when I eat it. This is a part of why I am very happy to be having Christmas in my house, with no extra people. One year we skipped cooking the “big Christmas meal” altogether and just snacked all day on all of the “nice bits” that I feel obliged to buy because it’s Christmas even when there are only two of us in the house.

Now I am home for a few days (especially since I am not at work) I feel the need to make and eat:

• something spicy
• something that takes a long time
• something that is not traditionally eaten at that time of day
• something that my dad wouldn’t know what it is

That fourth one could be a joke but the last time I made food for my dad it was pea and ham soup and his reaction (after eating it) was “That was nice Char, what is it?”. So not too difficult to achieve.

I can’t remember if I’ve blogged my Mexican-style breakfast before, if I have feel free to ignore it. This is very loosely based on the huevos rancheros that I had, no in Mexico, but in an airport one time. I’ve mentioned how I feel about authenticity before. If I had an avocado I would make some guacamole, or just have cut-up avocado on the side, but I don’t. Do you usually have ripe avocadoes hanging around? If so can I come to your house and borrow one?

Mexican breakfast consists of: tortillas of the kind that you find in a fajita kit (kit? yes, I said I wasn’t a proper foodie), scrambled eggs, and a mixture of gently cooked chorizo, onion, tomatoes, and black beans. (edit: I put in some chilli as well to fulfil my something spicy as well as something my dad wouldn’t recognise)

Om nom nom

You could put cheese on it too if you wanted.