This is the cookie making session the girls did.
10 Feb 2010
Meeting up!
Had a wonderful time at the weekend meeting up with Kate & Billy and their 2 delightful daughters! Their hospitality is immense and the girls are absolutely gorgeous!
My 1st Bento Attempts
Hmmm, I'm not very creative, so some of the pictures on the Bento Box flickr pool leave me astounded. However, I think I've managed to make a quite pretty lunch...
1/3 of the box is filled with basmati rice, into which I chopped a couple of spring onions. Carrot batons around the edges of the rice. The middle 3rd is salad leaves (underneath) with alfalfa and sprouted peas on top.
The final 3rd is split into 1/2 protein (chicken pieces, a baby bel and a slice of ham) and 1/2 fruit (strawberry, pineapple, and some melon)
I think it's quite appealing and certainly has lots of colours.
I've ordered some cookie cutter shapes so I'll update this with some more pics when I've got the carrot stars in the mix!
1/3 of the box is filled with basmati rice, into which I chopped a couple of spring onions. Carrot batons around the edges of the rice. The middle 3rd is salad leaves (underneath) with alfalfa and sprouted peas on top.
The final 3rd is split into 1/2 protein (chicken pieces, a baby bel and a slice of ham) and 1/2 fruit (strawberry, pineapple, and some melon)
I think it's quite appealing and certainly has lots of colours.
I've ordered some cookie cutter shapes so I'll update this with some more pics when I've got the carrot stars in the mix!
28 Jan 2010
New Obsession
Image courtesy of http://www.jbox.com/
How cute, I thought. What is it?
I love pretty boxes & containers of all sorts (don't ask) and wanted an excuse to buy one of these.
It was then I noticed that the 'accessories' actually were chopsticks! What was going on?
Reading a little around the subject, I realised what I was looking at is called a Bento Box and is, effectively, a Japanese lunch box. A beautiful Japanese lunch box. With matching accessories.
Nice. Pretty. Slightly boring. I have quite a few lunch boxes, so no real excuse for another one of these.
How wrong could I have been?
I started googling for Bento Boxes.
It would seem that, in the way that the Japanese people do with many things, they have elevated having lunch to an art form.
Image courtesy of http://casabento.com/
The boxes seem to be available in about a million different shapes, sizes, colours & designs. Some have layers, some come with a matching bag, some have chopsticks.
But, it's not just what they look like that's important, and they are gorgeous; what goes inside them is equally important and part of the art form.
There are 'principles' you have to stick to.
First there's the 3:2:1 principle - 3/6 of the content should be rice, 2/6 of the content should be veg, 1/6 of the of the content should be protein.
Pic courtesy of The Blogging Mum on Flickr
Then there's the colours - you have to have 5.
Next, if you're being purist, you should use 5 different methods to cook the food (boiled rice, fried wonton, steamed veg etc etc) which is being presented in the bento.
Then, and I'm not sure why, but this is the bit I like the best, you have to make the contents look as attractive as possible...rice shaped like animals, veg cut in the shape of flowers. Anything, in fact, that makes the contents look lovely.
See what I mean about the art form?
Pic courtesy of Bentobird on Flickr
I don't know what it is with the Japanese people and cute stuff - anime characters - dressing up - they get completely obsessed!!! It's fab. So, I was not so surprised when I looked further into the bento accessories and found ALL SORTS of gadgets to make your bento lunch contents as adorable as possible.
Gadgets which include...
o A thing which you put your hard boiled eggs in to change their shape into cars, bears, stars, cartoon characters - seriously - there are molds for Winnie the Pooh shaped eggs!
o Little silicone sheets printed with designs such as monkeys, octopus, rainbows, and cartoon characters which you wrap around the food to keep the flavours separate from each other.
o Cutters which cut face shapes into (and out of) anything. Ever seen a rice ball with eyes?
Pic courtesy of CasaBento.com
o And - a personal favourite - a weiner cutter (that's Americano for hot dog sausage) which makes your hot dogs look like a fish, a crab or a penguin. No, really. Look. Penguins made out of hot dogs. In your lunch box.
Pic courtesy of CasaBento.com
Isn't it stupendous?
Talk about creativity. This is ultimate foodie creativity. Check out the Bento Flickr Pool. Many people who consider their lunch pretty enough to be worthy of a photo. Imagine that.
19 Jan 2010
Gas Part 2 - Gordon is a Hero
The fist part of this story is here ---> 'Gas'
We were left, cut off from the mains, at 2am, snow outside, and the doors and windows having been open for an hour to stop us being asphyxiated!
What to do?
1) HEAT - run around looking for my little electric heater that I used to use in my two, previous, very cold, houses. I found it! We shut the door and cranked up the heat. Fortunately, it being a well insulated house, it only took about 10 minutes before we could take off our skiing jackets! Brrrrr.
2) EXTRA BEDDING - nick Dan's old (15 tog) quilt from the spare room to supplement the 12 tog one we already had on the bed. Done. Result was one cozy night's sleep!
3) SLEEP - it was after 2am. ZZZZZZzzzzzzZZZZZZzzzzzz!
The next morning we put out a call to Gordon - our friendly Corgi/Gas Safe guy. He's the chap who did our two fab bathrooms, and a family friend of the Aldridges.
It was one of the worst slippy-snow days and it turns out he'd already cancelled the job he'd been planning to do that day - because of its location, his van wasn't going to get up the hill to the place where it was.
Anyway, even with a sore throat, and a killer cough, he said, give me an hour to come to (it was 8am) and I'll be over to see what I can do.
An hour and a half later we get a call from him.
"I am coming" he said. "I've been trying to get off our estate for the last hour"
As with our road, their estate was unvisited by the gritters and snow plough.
He got here eventually, and found us sat in the lounge - cardies and jumpers and scarves on - with our little heater now moved in there, so we could work!
After a brief investigation he capped the pipe to the hob and got the supply turned back on at the mains. The heating was restored to us by about midday.
It was a matter of another couple of hours for him to replace the hob with a new silver one! It's lovely!
Thank-you Gordon - you're our hero!
We were left, cut off from the mains, at 2am, snow outside, and the doors and windows having been open for an hour to stop us being asphyxiated!
What to do?
1) HEAT - run around looking for my little electric heater that I used to use in my two, previous, very cold, houses. I found it! We shut the door and cranked up the heat. Fortunately, it being a well insulated house, it only took about 10 minutes before we could take off our skiing jackets! Brrrrr.
2) EXTRA BEDDING - nick Dan's old (15 tog) quilt from the spare room to supplement the 12 tog one we already had on the bed. Done. Result was one cozy night's sleep!
3) SLEEP - it was after 2am. ZZZZZZzzzzzzZZZZZZzzzzzz!
The next morning we put out a call to Gordon - our friendly Corgi/Gas Safe guy. He's the chap who did our two fab bathrooms, and a family friend of the Aldridges.
It was one of the worst slippy-snow days and it turns out he'd already cancelled the job he'd been planning to do that day - because of its location, his van wasn't going to get up the hill to the place where it was.
Anyway, even with a sore throat, and a killer cough, he said, give me an hour to come to (it was 8am) and I'll be over to see what I can do.
An hour and a half later we get a call from him.
"I am coming" he said. "I've been trying to get off our estate for the last hour"
As with our road, their estate was unvisited by the gritters and snow plough.
He got here eventually, and found us sat in the lounge - cardies and jumpers and scarves on - with our little heater now moved in there, so we could work!
After a brief investigation he capped the pipe to the hob and got the supply turned back on at the mains. The heating was restored to us by about midday.
It was a matter of another couple of hours for him to replace the hob with a new silver one! It's lovely!
Thank-you Gordon - you're our hero!
17 Jan 2010
Tree Preservation
I've just been chopping up the Xmas tree to put it in our wheelie bin - the 1st collection of the year is going to be on Tuesday.Not a single needle had fallen.
Well, not until I got the big snippers out on it, anyway!
I suspect, this was partly due to the fact that the tree went up pretty late this year. (Hey! At least it went up, thanks to Grace & Harry), but partly due to the fact that we have, over the years, developed a super technique for putting up the tree, and keeping it alive once it's up.
Since living in my own house, and putting up my own tree, I must have bought every single tree stand available on the market - but now we have the simplest method in the world.
It starts with a wooden half barrel - just an ordinary outdoor plant pot - then it's lined with a couple of the super strong bin liners which are used for rubble. Into the bottom of this we sit a plastic bowl which just fits inside and which was a new addition to the ensemble after last year's little water incident.
Bearing in mind what can happen when you let the water out, we then came up with this year's pièce de résistance which was the addition of an empty Vimto bottle, upside down, through the cobbles and into the plastic bowl at the bottom which would allow water to be easily topped up in the system! This was Grace's idea!!!
The final phase is that we use scoops to pour gravel into the gaps between the cobbles, and this makes for a very securely held tree and a heavily weighted one which isn't likely to tilt over!
It was such a successful method of watering the tree that whilst we've dismantled it all, I've kept all the constituent parts for next year!
Gas
We were counting ourselves lucky. The train we'd got - the last one from London - was due in at 01:18am and somehow it arrived 40 minutes early - at 12:40. Because of the horrible weather, we grabbed a cab outside the station instead of walking across town to the non-hansom cab office. This meant we were pulling into our road before 1am.
1st thing we noticed was that the alarm light was flashing on the house. After our previous experiences with the burglars (Break-in-Part1, Break-in-Part2) we were a bit nervous. We looked around the outside of the house but nothing looked disturbed or tampered with. Bizarre.
Still, we were a bit nervous when we opened the door, and we opened it very carefully and cautiously.
Something *was* wrong. There was a terrible smell of gas.
Fortunately, due to the recent cold weather, the hallway in our house contained a collection of torches which we'd been taking with us in the car just in case of any snow-induced breakdown incidents.
Dan grabbed a torch and we went through the house, opening all the doors and windows to get rid of the gas.
I rang the gas emergency number 0800 111 999 which is the number for Transco/National Grid. I placed the call at 01:06am and they gave us a list of things to do - don't switch on any electrical equipment, check, open the windows & doors, check, switch off the gas at the mains...errr....what? Where is the meter? I had no idea!
It took me a few moments to remember that the meter is actually outside - no wonder I'd not seen it before!
So we managed to get the gas turned off at the mains, and then waited for the gas board man to come.
01:46 he arrived - complete with gas detector sniffer.
He moved around the house with the detector, and due to our excellent fumigation techniques of EVERY door and window open in the house, he couldn't detect any that was lingering in the building.
He then went to turn on the gas at the mains to find out where the gas was escaping from.
It took me a few moments to remember that the meter is actually outside - no wonder I'd not seen it before! So we managed to get the gas turned off at the mains, and then waited for the gas board man to come.
01:46 he arrived - complete with gas detector sniffer.
He moved around the house with the detector, and due to our excellent fumigation techniques of EVERY door and window open in the house, he couldn't detect any that was lingering in the building.
He then went to turn on the gas at the mains to find out where the gas was escaping from.
The smell seemed to be coming from the kitchen, so he concentrated on the boiler and the stove. Bingo! It was one of the valves on the hob which looks like it had stuck open.
"Obviously", he said, "I'm going to have to disconnect you from the mains until your hob can be replaced".
"Well, obviously", I replied. "I'm not exactly going to turn the gas back on, am I?"
"You'd be surprised what people do" he said, and off he went to cap the pipe at the meter.
So there we were, at 2am, having had all the doors and windows open in the house for an hour, sub zero temperatures outside, and no heat!
"Obviously", he said, "I'm going to have to disconnect you from the mains until your hob can be replaced".
"Well, obviously", I replied. "I'm not exactly going to turn the gas back on, am I?"
"You'd be surprised what people do" he said, and off he went to cap the pipe at the meter.
So there we were, at 2am, having had all the doors and windows open in the house for an hour, sub zero temperatures outside, and no heat!
16 Jan 2010
Brother Dan
Dan was cold and so I wrapped him in my Snug-Rug blanket and took a pic - it looks like he's joined the Franciscans.
Amen to that!
Guilty Pleasures and Guidos
We've confessed before, in several posts on this blog about the fact that we quite like some trashy TV shows which allow us to switch our thought processes off when we've been at work with brains at full tilt, so it's probably only right we tell you about our new Guilty Pleasure.
There's a new show appeared in recent weeks on MTV called 'Jersey Shore'. It's a reality program about a group of 20 somethings who are put in a house (at the Jersey Shore) together and are filmed.
Photo Courtesy of MTV
"Nothing new there", I hear you say.
The house isn't shut off from the world, like Big Brother. The TV producers don't organise them or give them tasks. In fact, they all have to work whilst they're there. It's just normal life.
So, what is so compelling about the car crash TV that this has turned out to be?
Well, these youngsters self-identify as belonging to the group called 'Guidos'.
A "Guido" according to Wikipedia, is a pejorative term for a "working class Italian-American".
However, in an interesting example of linguistic reappropriation, where the insulted group reclaim the word for their own use, these people wear their Guidohood with pride.
Italian pride.
With gelled hair, fake tans and loads of gold chains.
And that's just the guys.
I kid you not.
It's kind of like the worst of the 2 cultures, smashed together, and it makes compelling watching.
First, there's the fashion sense.
I always like Italian men for being well groomed and looking good. The guido culture takes it one step too far - the guys are primped to the point of ridiculousness - daily gym sessions, tanning salons, waxing, not a hair out of place.
You'd think this was a good thing, right?
But like any subculture, certain looks are 'in' and that tends to mean they all look the same - check out these online images for guidos!
Guido girls, known as Guidettes, are no better. Fake tan, gold and loads of makeup. Usually fake boobs too, and lots of their body parts hanging out!
Then there's the egos. The guys & gals have typical HUGE Italian egos. It comes from being part of Italian families who worship you & tell you how wonderful you are, all the time.
I should know!
In Italy, this seems to work fine though, as the rest of the culture (respect for your elders and a sense of community) keeps the egos at bay. However, set that against a backdrop of American culture of excess and instant gratification, and somehow it spills over into aggression and means that the guidos & guidettes are permanently getting into fights and arguments with everyone around them.
We spend the whole show with our jaws open in shock at the things they say, do, and how they dress. And the fact that they seem proud to be who they are.
Like I said; Guilty Pleasure!
Guido Links
The Jersey Shore phenomenon has spawned a whole load of interest in the Guido subculture...
There's a new show appeared in recent weeks on MTV called 'Jersey Shore'. It's a reality program about a group of 20 somethings who are put in a house (at the Jersey Shore) together and are filmed.
Photo Courtesy of MTV"Nothing new there", I hear you say.
The house isn't shut off from the world, like Big Brother. The TV producers don't organise them or give them tasks. In fact, they all have to work whilst they're there. It's just normal life.
So, what is so compelling about the car crash TV that this has turned out to be?
Well, these youngsters self-identify as belonging to the group called 'Guidos'.
A "Guido" according to Wikipedia, is a pejorative term for a "working class Italian-American".
However, in an interesting example of linguistic reappropriation, where the insulted group reclaim the word for their own use, these people wear their Guidohood with pride.
Italian pride.
With gelled hair, fake tans and loads of gold chains.
And that's just the guys.
I kid you not.
It's kind of like the worst of the 2 cultures, smashed together, and it makes compelling watching.
First, there's the fashion sense.
I always like Italian men for being well groomed and looking good. The guido culture takes it one step too far - the guys are primped to the point of ridiculousness - daily gym sessions, tanning salons, waxing, not a hair out of place.
You'd think this was a good thing, right?
But like any subculture, certain looks are 'in' and that tends to mean they all look the same - check out these online images for guidos!
Guido girls, known as Guidettes, are no better. Fake tan, gold and loads of makeup. Usually fake boobs too, and lots of their body parts hanging out!
Then there's the egos. The guys & gals have typical HUGE Italian egos. It comes from being part of Italian families who worship you & tell you how wonderful you are, all the time.
I should know!
In Italy, this seems to work fine though, as the rest of the culture (respect for your elders and a sense of community) keeps the egos at bay. However, set that against a backdrop of American culture of excess and instant gratification, and somehow it spills over into aggression and means that the guidos & guidettes are permanently getting into fights and arguments with everyone around them.
We spend the whole show with our jaws open in shock at the things they say, do, and how they dress. And the fact that they seem proud to be who they are.
Like I said; Guilty Pleasure!
Guido Links
The Jersey Shore phenomenon has spawned a whole load of interest in the Guido subculture...
Do you know what your Guido names are? Our guido names are Connie Mortadella & Danny Salami.Take The Jersey Shore Nickname Generator today! Created with Rum and Monkey's Name Generator Generator.
TV.com interview Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino - the guy on the far left in the cast pic above
A funny sketch with little kids playing the characters from the Jersey Shore
14 Jan 2010
Cooking By Numbers
As Li has mentioned we can just about eat anything and enjoy working out what to put togther when we have a swede, stick of celery, mars bar and a dishcloth.
Well it seems there are other people out there who also do and i found this website . Enjoy
Well it seems there are other people out there who also do and i found this website . Enjoy
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