Parishes in & around Morley

Over the years, I've been to quite a few of the churches in and around Morley - here are the details of the nearest ones!!


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St. Francis Of Assisi

Location: Corporation Street, Morley
Sunday Mass Time: 6:30pm (Vigil) 11:15am
Holy Day Mass Time: 7:30pm (Vigil) 12 Noon

Contact:
The Presbytery,
Westfield Road
Morley
LS27 9NF
Deanery: Leeds South
Tel: 0113 253 4881
Notes: Serves Our Lady Of The Nativity, West Ardsley

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St Brigid

Location: Elland Road, Churwell, Leeds
Sunday Mass Time: 9:30am, 6pm
Holy Day Mass Time: 9:30am, 7:30pm

Contact:
The Presbytery,
Elland Road,
Churwell
Leeds
LS27 7QR
Deanery: Leeds South
Tel: 0113 253 4894

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Our Lady Of The Nativity

Location: Westerton Road, West Ardsley
Sunday Mass Time: 9:30am
Holy Day Mass Time: 7pm

Contact:
St. Francis Presbytery,
Westfield Road
Morley
LS27 9NF
Deanery: Leeds South
Tel: 0113 253 4881
Notes: Served From St. Francis, Morley

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St Anthony Of Padua

Location: Old Lane, Beeston, Leeds
Sunday Mass Time: 6:30pm (Vigil) 9am, 11am
Holy Day Mass Time: 9:30am, 7:30pm

Contact:
The Presbytery,
19, Old Lane,
Beeston
Leeds
LS11 7AA
Deanery: Leeds South
Tel: 0113 271 6597
Email: 0113 277 4998

When Creme Brulee goes wrong...

...you get vanilla flavoured scrambled eggs! I never knew that.

I'm a first time creme brulee maker. I thought it looked lovely and simple.

Cream, sugar, vanilla, and some orange zest and Cointreau as this was going to be an orangey flavoured one.

Some whisking, and some bringing up to simmer heat. A bit of combining of ingredients, and in to the pots. Don't they look perfect?

The recipe I was using was an American one, and I quickly googled the phrase "convert 325 degrees f to celcius". If you click on my link, you'll see the results I got. The 1st link returned contained the snippet of a phrase "325 F to Celsius 169 C."

Aha, 170 degrees I thought.

In went the lovely creamy creme brulee pots. With Cointreau. And expensive Madagascan vanilla.

We set the timer for 20 minutes. The recipe said 40 but it's always good to go and have a look after a bit.

At 20 minutes, we could see the tops getting quite brown.

Well, I know they're supposed to go brown after the sugar gets caramelised on the top - but brown before leaving the oven? I wasn't so sure.

I had another check on the website for the recipe. I googled the temperature conversion again. This time I used 'Centigrade' instead of 'Celsius'. The results came back looking like this.

Nealy 10 degrees cooler.

Ooops.

By the time I realised the oven was way too hot, and had whipped the brulees out of there, it was too late.

We had Cointreau and Vanilla flavoured scrambled egg.

Note, in the pictures, the lovely gathering of Madagascan vanilla seeds in the bottom of the concoction. Imagine how nice it should have tasted. Weep for the cream, sugar and Cointreau which will now go in the bin.

Christmas Food

We've been cooking and eating all day.

No surprise there!

Obviously we've been documenting it with photographs - the picasa web album is here.

Culinary highlights have been

1. The home made cranberry sauce
2. The Kelly Bronze Turkey

We're stuffed. A bit like the turkey!!!

Comments working now!

Thanks to a fab post over at Webupd8, I've managed to fix the broken comments XML. It was a bit fiddly though - I had to use the rather marvelous Notepad++ tool (which colours your code in for you!) to get it right as Blogger kept telling me I'd missed a tag out!!!

I've also managed to sort out something else which was annoying me - in theory, when you're logged in to blogger, if you have 'quick editing' set on in your blog template, you're supposed to see a little pencil next to each blog post to allow you to go straight into edit mode on that entry.

This had never worked.

I was happy to live with it because I really liked the blog layout though. So for the last few days I've used 3 clicks (edit, edit posts, select post) to get into editing a post entry from the blog itself. Hey ho, I thought.

However, as I have now got a bit braver with fixing my broken comment XML, I thought, 'why not' and have got stuck in to fixing the 'quick edit'.

Again the internet came up trumps with a great post over on 'Free Blogger Help' entitled 'How to add Quick Edit Pencil' which showed me that it was just the image of the pencil itself missing from this template. How fab.

OK, now I'm getting really flash - I've been playing around with the text in the area of the comments and the labels at the bottom of each post. I can now make it display different text based on whether I have no comments or some comments!!!

Check this out...

Labels: techie Comments: I've got 0 comments why don't you leave one?

Cool huh???
 
 

Xmas cooking

Well we've both been quite hectic over the past few months so there's not been too much chance to prepare or even think about Xmas food. We did start a 'google document' about the menu for Xmas day but actually, rather than having complicated food on Christmas day, we were both up for quite a simple, traditional meal.

So, when I arrived home tonight at 5pm, there wasn't much we had to do in advance - a roast dinner for 2 is well within our capabilities to do on the one day (we've done it for 6 and 8 on Christmases past without prepping the day before!)

But tonight, in order to get into the Christmas spirit, we decided to get cracking with a couple of the elements of tomorrow's dinner.

1) The home made cranberry sauce...
2) The creme brulee for pudding

Yum. It's going to be a cracking Christmas!

 

Even more snow!

Just come back from a 9:45pm dash around Sainsbury's to find the last few obscure items for the Xmas repast.

Vanilla pods and chicken livers.

Came out to find it was snowing like mad outside.

Lovely!

On the way home Dan's car skidded twice but something magic in the breaks made us not actually skid. Clever!

The Gardner's Arms seemed to call to us on the way home. 2 pints of Guinness later we're now tucked up safe and warm at home.

 The pic doesn't really show how lovely it is, but it's very Christmassy out there!

Update! Some pics of the back garden in the morning after more snow had fallen!

 

Comments aren't working :(

Thanks to Simes over at Simes' Ultimate Blog I've been alerted to the fact that this lovely new blog template I'm using doesn't seem to allow comments. Ooops! Call myself a tester? I have to admit, I never tried to post a comment before 'going live'!

Anyway, I'm going to have a tinker with the xml and see if I can fix it first, rather than backing out the whole thing - mainly because I really like this template.

Yah boo sucks to it all!

It's c..c..c..cold out there!

I've just been out in the lean-to to get a bottle of wine. We use it as an enormous fridge in the winter as it's not heated and so tends to be close to the outside temperature.

The bottle was really really cold.

Because it's the sort of thing I do, I wondered how cold the wine actually was.

So, I measured the temperature of the wine in the bottle using my milk thermometer (the gadget that I use for making sure the milk doesn't boil when making my morning cappuccino). It's an American model so counts in Fahrenheit, (see photo) but nevertheless I was quite impressed to see the gauge read at 38 degrees F. That's about 3.3 degrees C. (Note, photo taken after the wine, thermometer and I had been sitting in the superheated lounge for about an hour!)

3.3 degrees is pretty cold on any scale, especially given that the wine was kept (a) indoors and (b) not in the fridge!

I then thought I'd check out what water kept at room temperature in the kitchen measured. (Nothing scientific here, it was just because I spotted a glass of water on the side which had been there all day!)

It measured 50 degrees F which is 10 degrees C. Brrrr. That's cold for room temp in our kitchen isn't it? My excuse is that we'd only just come in from work and the heating hadn't been on long!

Finally I thought, I wonder what the temperature is of the wine in the fridge? This is where the experiment was *really* headed.

I watched the needle go down, down, down, and then stop at 41 degrees F which is 5 degrees C.
 
1.3 degrees warmer than the wine out in the lean-to!

Amazing!

 

Christmas Shopping

I remember back to when I was a Saturday girl at our deli - I worked mornings and Janey did afternoons - and around Christmas time, we used to marvel at just how much food people used to order. We'd know, for example, that their weekly bread order was a vienna loaf and 6 white batch [1] and then on Christmas Eve, the order would be 15 vienna and 30 batch - or something equally ridiculous. Similarly, people used to order pizzas like they were going out of fashion. Why pizzas at Christmas? We didn't know! 10, 15 large pizzas - each different. Hundreds and hundreds of them on Christmas Eve. Mum would have to get extra 'pizza girls' in just to keep the production line going in Christmas week, with grated cheese, chopped ham, and all the trimmings!

Still, I've never really got it.

We have had 2 'at home' Christmases these past 2 years. One with Dan's family, and one with mine. It's been really lovely. But, although I know we had a few extra bits we wouldn't normally buy (eg extra puddings for the Aldridges, or extra wine for the Rossis) it wasn't an order of magnitude bigger than our normal shop for that week - maybe an extra 50 quid. On one shop. The one before they came.

So, I was rather dismayed to pitch up to Sainsblobs one night after work over a month ago - it was the 2nd week in November - to find that I couldn't get a parking space. The cars were actually parked all over on the pavement in spots not normally allocated to parking.

"What's going on?" I thought to myself. Was it a special event on at the White Rose shopping centre? Then I realised - it was a Thursday 'late night'. The first in the run up to Christmas. I couldn't believe it. 6 weeks before Xmas and already the shops were overflowing. Aren't we supposed to be in a recession?

So, we've not been anywhere near a supermarket since then. We've shopped for milk/bread/eggs at the local convenience market - they even do a line in fresh salad items and wine too. We've done one delivery order from the aforementioned supermarket chain (loads of fizzy water, bottles and tins, poor guy) but mostly we've been eating what's been stored in the freezer. I refuse to jump on the consumer bandwagon!


[1] That's "bap" for the southerners and "breadcake" for the Yorkshire folk

 

Athlete - again!

We've been to see Athlete a couple of times before - originally here Thoughts on Stuff: Athlete back in 2007, and then another concert more recently in July - the night before going to Venice (which, I'm ashamed to say, I've not actually blogged about) but we went to see them AGAIN, at the beginning of December, in Manchester.

They've just released a new album - Black Swan - which is album no 4.

As I said in the original post, I quite like their music when listening to the albums, but when they play live - they're really fantastic!

Can't wait until we go and see them again - I know we'll definitely be going to see them again.