Tag: food

sausage rolls


sausage rolls
Originally uploaded by ramtops.

I’m a good cook, but I’m not great at baking. And I’m lousy at pastry.

however, inspired by this recipe which claimed to be “easy flaky pastry”, I thought I’d give it a go.

I had to get perlmonger to come and grate for a while – it was hard work. But *I* rolled out the pastry, and rolled out the sausage meat, and brushed it all with eggy stuff, and put it in the oven, and baked them. And they were *gorgeous*.

the sage plant in the garden had died, so I made do with some rosemary, and a hefty grating of nutmeg.

go me, I think. And we only ate three – the rest have gone in the freezer.

oink

sossidge samwiches for lunch, made with the chipolatas we bought to feed agc for brekkie on Sunday. Except he buggered off home.

tonight: simple roast chickie!, English asparagus, jersey royals. Fab.

in other most excellent news, I mailed www.tactilepro.com to tell them that the legends were wearing off my wonderful Matias clacky Mac keyboard.

and they said:

Thanks for your email. We did find out, after the fact,
that there was one batch of keyboards with dye trouble. Please email your shipping address and proof of purchase and we will get a replacement out.

which is pretty good, don’t you think?

of course, I can’t find the sodding invoice, but I’ve sent the notification of despatch, and the serial number. That’ll do, surely?

weekend

so that was the weekend – bit of domestic shopping on Saturday, brunch in the yuppie caff, lazy afternoon and Woodspring LibDem dinner in the evening. Guest speaker was Jeremy Brown, whom I had never realised was the LibDem candidate on that memorable 1997 evening in Enfield South (were you up for Portillo?).

I just had two things I wanted to do in the city on Sunday (where we were going only because it was the monthly decent food fair) – new bedlinen, and get the phones put on a business account. Sadly neither was achieved – the chap in the Orange shop (whose name badge informed us his name was Igor – MORE POWER, Igor) could do more than read bits out of the catalogue and witter on about purchase orders, so I shall buy the bloody phones online. And nowhere that I can find does unbleached cotton bedlinen of the sort that Ikeal used to do and that we love, and ours are all full of holes. Wah.

we managed to buy New Shoes – perlmonger bought new shoes, which is something of a historic occasion. He wears Docs most of the time, or black lace-up shoes for formal, and that’s it. He is now in possession of a pair of “Fly London ” shoes, much to my astonishment. I bought a pair of Doc Marten shoes which looked – and have proven to be – exceeding comfy. The girl in the shoe shop was about a size 6, and looked as though she was both catatonic and drugged to the eyeballs; stockroom visits took about 10 minutes a time …

we also popped into Waterstones to look at the Designing Interfaces book that marypcb blogged the other day; they didn’t have it. They *did* have lots of other books, and we now have another seven to add to the shelves, which will be the subject of another post.

Sunday lunch (belated) was roast duck, carrots in star anise, broccoli, and spuds roasted in duck fat, followed by a rhubarb and sponge made with ground almonds instead of flour. With custard, for those who like it (i.e. Pete). I bought a jar of orange and chili jelly at the market, and lobbed a couple of teaspoonfuls on the duck while it was cooking – that worked well. And I think it would work in a chocolate moooooooooose too; I suppose I’ll have to try [sits back and waits for gmul to arrive].

made a pot of lentil, tomato and tarragon soup for the week, watched episodes 8 & 9 of f West Wing so set BitTorrent running to fetch the last three (got ’em now).

that’s it – there is no more. Off now to make some spicy basmati rice to go with the crab cakes from the market.

“Black Horse and the Cherry Tree” |Eye to the Telescope | KT Tunstall

weekend


elephant bookmark
Originally uploaded by ramtops.

very quiet really. Saturday, did shopping in Bedminster:

  • greengrocer: spinach, hispi cabbage, four ruby grapefruit, mushrooms, baby sweetcorn, chillis, cauliflower, potatoes, pineapple. Forgot carrots, and we are out of lemons. Arse.
  • little gift shop: clary sage essential oil, satanic rubber duck, elephant bookmark as displayed here, card to send to kalunina, who seems to have forgotten we exist
  • health food shop: organic milk and cream, kidney beans, blackcurrant juice
  • Aldi: (or possibly Lidl – I always get the muddled up) waffer thin turkey for the Tribe, some stilton

brunch in the yuppie café. Home for slumpage. Chilli from the freezer for supper. Too much wine. Lots of West Wing.

Sunday: up to the Mall to return a top to John Lewis because it went all baggy when washed according to the instructions. Accidentally bought a DAB clock radio – thankfully, this works upstairs, where it was wanted, but it does look as though downstairs in the kitchen (where I want another one) is not going to work without an external aerial.

could someone move that hill, please?

cooked roast chicken, spuds, cauliflower, carrots. No wine today, after yesterday. However, drank tea and consumed plain chocolate digestives. More West Wing.

big pot of soup made for the week: carrots, onions, potatoes, lentils, passata, veg stock, spices (cumin, coriander, fenugreek) – smells gorgeous. Want some now.

bed now. Monday tomorrow. Bah.

nice weekend

that was a nice one – new minotaurs arrived at 10 a.m., and so of course were immediately installed, and we did some study tidying up too. Then rushed over to Sainsburys to get “a couple of bits” for Saturday’s dinner. Quite how that turned into £110, I’m not sure – but I suppose 6 bottles of wine, a mug rack, a bikkit box and six water filters might have had something to do with it. “Hello dear – did you get the things we needed?”.

dinner was simple – a rib roast of Dexter beef; just put it in the oven and leave it alone for an hour and a half. Served with roast potatoes, carrots steamed with star anise, brocolli and yorkies (obviously). Pudding was my killer choccy moose, with strawberries and ratafia bikkit.

we were joined by agc, who kindly brought a bottle of champagne – shame perlmonger doesn’t like it, but he drinks it just to be sociable. Also present were gmul and purple_peril, who we hadn’t met before, but we like, even though (or more probably, because) she’s entirely mad. She can certainly come again. It’s not every guest who hijacks your bedroom, and emerges dressed as a wicked queen complete with authentic medieval slippers.

purple_peril left us for a while to attend a party in Bristol, and returned about half past midnight, by which time perlmonger had retired to bed (wuss). She and gmul left sometime after 1 a.m., and agc and I sat up and set the world to rights till about 3.30 …

Sunday was therefore a bit of a write off, but I caught up with three episodes of Desperate Housewives (why did nobody tell me about this before?!) and some other schlock TV, and we consumed the remainder of the roast beef for supper, with baked spuds and pickles.

this morning, we find that the ADSL router is dead [sigh] – thank ghod the cable modem just keeps on going.

weekend

well, that was a nice one. perlmonger nobly volunteered to do the veg shopping yesterday, so I slobbed in front of the computer, writing code for *me* … yes, the recipe database is well on its way, and I think I might have a plan as cunning as a weasel to find a CF7 server to host it on (ours won’t be ready for a month or two).

somehow, Pete managed not to get to the greengrocer – I can’t blame him, I wouldn’t have gone either, as it was tipping it down. So we hurtled over to Asda at about 6.45 to get some bits, came back and Pete returned to his javascript problems, while I cooked dinner – prawns, shitake mushrooms, ginger, garlic, lemongrass, chili, fresh basil, oyster sauce, rice wine, served with noodles. We both drank rather more wine that we probably should have – not lots, but enough to leave me with a slight hangover this morning. Self inflicted wounds, no sympathy 🙂

this morning, I had a long soak in the bath, then we sallied forth to St Marks to do the veggie shopping, and had an excellent lunch in Maitreya – wild mushroom and gruyere omelette, with some of the best chips I’ve had in a long time. Then nipped (or popped, if you prefer) to Park Street, to get a new mySQL book, as something untoward (and feline) happened to ours last night. Waterstone’s had nothing suitable, so we decided to wander up to Blackwells. Unfortunately this meant going past Fopps, but we did quite well; just 3 CDs (Throbbing Gristle, Nitin Sawhney, Beck), and the Bill Bailey live DVD. Oh – there were four books purchased from Waterstones too, including Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell at £3.99 and on a 3 for 2 offer. I’ve been meaning to read it for ages, so I’m quite pleased with that.

now, perlmonger has buggered off to the gym, for the first time in three weeks. I’m going to go and slump in front of some rubbish tv for a bit, then turn 4 lbs of Dexter stewing steak into beef in beer.

Monday tomorrow … can hardly wait