Oh My! Britney Spears enjoys sucking the thick creamy head off a glass of Guinness. Hmm, also “Britney Spears can drink a liter of Jägermeister without getting a buzz” - funny, that just reminded me I had my first ever Jägermeister in Amsterdam this weekend (around 3am Saturday night). Very pleasant it was too.
Oh wow! This is just so much fun - Let Them Sing It For You - type in a song, get it sung back to you by a cut-and-paste selection of “some of the worlds greatest stars”. If only they had a few more words in the database (hey, that’s down to you lot!)
Mmmm…. just cooked a scrummy crusty Persian Pilaf for lunch, courtesy of Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian.
There are a few such pilafs in the book, and I’ve been eyeing them for a while but put off by their seeming complexity. But this morning I just went for it and… it wasn’t so bad. Basically, you just need to almost cook some basmati rice, then a layer of this goes in a large non-stick pan on top of some melted butter and water. Build a layer-cake of rice and whatever else you’re putting in the pilaf (in my case this was green lentils and sultanas), finishing with rice. Cover the pan tightly, cook for four minutes on medium-low heat, turn the heat to medium-high for four minutes, then take the lid off, pour a pre-infused mixture of melted butter, boiled water and saffron over the top of the rice, put the lid back on but this time with a tea-towel underneath it (mind you tuck those ends up… don’t want to go starting any fires!), turn the heat way down low and cook for another half-an-hour.
When it’s all done you need to get it out upside down - the graceful way would be to cover the pan with a plate and then invert it, but if you’re like me you’ll probably just end up digging out chunks - what you end up with is a kind of ricey gratin, nice casseroley bit underneath and gorgeous golden-brown crust of rice on top. A crust like that is worth killing for! I was surprised that mine came out looking absolutely perfect, even though I was a bit lax in following Madhur’s instructions, and was all out of butter so I had to use Olivio instead (yeah, lost a bit in flavour there, no doubt). And finally in the case of the particular recipe I was following, you sprinkle some crispy onions and butter-fried dates on top. Oh, and then don’t forget to eat it.
Nothing better to do so… might as well hop into a forum on flamebait mode. So I posted here (I’m gulch, responding to Madtownmatt).
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INTP - “Architect”. Greatest precision in thought and language. Can readily discern contradictions and inconsistencies. The world exists primarily to be understood. 3.3% of total population.
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but also
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INFP - “Questor”. High capacity for caring. Emotional face to the world. High sense of honor derived from internal values. 4.4% of total population.
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Recently, something strange has happened to me. I’ve started liking chocolate.
I’ve always liked chocolate - I mean, if you offer me some I’ll happily take it, and when I eat it I’m constantly surprised at how good it actually tastes. But recently it’s gone further than that. My chocolate-desire is at levels that I’d more normally associate with Gill. I’ve found myself lying in bed, trying to get to sleep, and suddenly realising that what I really need is chocolate. It’s even more compelling than Halva.
This all came to a head at the end of my trip to Amsterdam. There I was in the airport, with time to kill, and for the first time ever I didn’t feel the need to fill my house with more varieties of alcohol that I’ll probably never drink but definitely regret if I do. Instead, I bought three large bars of chocolate - some premium Lindt, milk chocolate with hazelnuts for me and Gill, white chocolate for the kids, and then another bar of cheaper but ever-so-slightly larger (all bars were around half a kilo) choc with hazelnuts for me to eat “on the journey”. And not only have I polished most of these off, I’ve even been eating the kids’ stuff.
This feels like an incipient addiction.
My oh my… I remember when the first archive of all the Internet was announced a couple of years back, you couldn’t get in for all the traffic. Well, things seemed to have calmed down slightly (it’s still very slow), so I’ve been delving in The Internet Archive and… hot damn! This wasn’t even our first home page, by a long stretch (in fact, I think it was done after we lost most of our staff and moved to Canary Wharf) but it still feels incredibly dated, and some of the copy is just cringeworthy. Nice critical acclaim though!
And there was I wondering whether it was a normal thing, in Amsterdam, to have a quarter of a moon one night and a full one the next. It was this weekend, apparently.