Zorac's LiveJournal

Seriously! Before Christmas I had a full wine rack with a dozen bottles on it (plus one chilling in the fridge). Despite acquiring more as presents, now that the family have departed, I'm down to three (and that's only because I picked up a couple more at Sainsbury's yesterday). Still, lots of really nice bottles, and we even tried to match wines to food, in a vague way - mostly going by what it said on the back of the bottles (although the cassoulet merited the nice Chianti, on account of being the closest thing we ate to liver with fava beans...)

I'm definitely feeling rather fatter than I did ten days ago, but all the left-overs are going to get somewhat in the way of starting any serious dieting for at least another week or so. On the plus side, most of my cooking in that time will involve pulling a tupper out of the freezer and reheating its contents - possibly in one of my shiny new saucepans, but most likely in the microwave. Lazy, moi?

Right. I'm off to Middle Earth for the rest of the day.

...for tomorrow we diet. And by "tomorrow", I mean in two or three weeks when the assorted left-overs, snacks and sweetmeats have finally met their demise. The past few days have, not unexpectedly, contained considerable amounts of both food and alcohol (although the former rather closer to excess than the latter). On the plus side, we have been out for a walk every day, and have spent little time in front of the goggle-box (although such sedentary pursuits as reading, playing board games, and wrestling with puzzles, quizzes, and crosswords are little better for the health).

First year with the new kitchen, and we actually managed to get the turkey spot on (after missing the mark in opposite directions the previous two years), so Christmas dinner itself was an almost¹ complete success. Alas, the traditional Christmas Eve ox-tounge was possibly even more over-salted than the previous year despite additional soaking, so it looks like that's off the menu next time. Today was the equally traditional turkey and left-over-vegetable curry - something that has very little danger of going wrong.

To add some educational merit to this post, here's a recipe for you. A rather fine pudding henceforth to be known as ( Collapse )

1) The "almost" part being due to the Mini Bagpuss Crackers (eight for a pound). These promised a hat, a motto and a sticker sheet in each one. After one cracker each, we had two hats, four mottos (one blank) and no sticker sheets. After the remaining four crackers, we just managed an additional two paper hats, a total of six mottoes³, and one solitary sticker sheet. Unimpressed.

2) I'm not aware of anyone suffering a coronary as a direct result of eating this cake, but proceed at your own risk.

3) On further examination, we discovered that all six were printed with the same joke, which I reproduce verbatim below for your amusement:

What's the difference between a railway shed and tree ?
One leaves.its shed and the other sheds its leaves.

Not quite right, methinks...

This is one I reached after a few variations. As served to the t00bs at Pund00mage.

zorac's House Special G&T

1½oz Bombay Sapphire
½oz Gordon's Sloe Gin
1 dash Angostura Bitters
1 dash Lemon Juice
1 dash Lime Juice

Shake and pour into a long glass, top up with Tonic Water.

Inventing cocktails can be fun, and it's hard to go wrong with lots of rum and citrus juice...

Three Colours Orange

1oz Navy Rum
1oz Morgan's Spiced
1oz Malibu
½oz Lemon Juice
½oz Lime Juice

Shake and pour into a long glass, top up with Orange Juice.

Last night we drank many cocktails. We then had fish and chips back here and dealt with some bad cases of Shrek virginity. Today, some of us arrived at the pub later than others - but lunch was better than at the Eagle and Child. After that, there was punting and Pimms. Nobody won the leiabelle Memorial Sweepstake - owlman fled after lunch, muttering something about work. In the end, I was the one who made a rather half-arsed attempt at falling in the river. Doh. Anyway, time for me to head back into town to meet up with the rest of the t00bs for PoA,

Examples of recent t00bularity:

1. Remember to check public transport availability before booking flights
   So, I booked my flights to the south of France to spend Christmas with the parentals around a month ago. Last night I got around to checking train times, and discovered that there are no trains from Birmingham to Oxford after my flight gets in. Arg! I am left with two options: train to London, coach to Oxford - this is doable and in fact gets me home at a not too indecent hour (provided everything runs on time) - or a taxi from the airport all the way home (I feel my wallet melting at the prospect of that).

2. The lid stays firmly on the cocktail shaker, but the cap doesn't
   A couple of days ago, I was experimenting with home-grown cocktails again. I know my shaker holds together well (indeed, it's sometimes difficult to get the bottom and top apart afterwards), but one does need to hold the cap that goes over the strainer in place while shaking. Can you guess what happens next, boys and girls?
   Corrollary: Experimenting with making your cocktails pretty colours does not necessarily result in tasty flavours. Curaco + grenadine does make a fine purple colour, but not a flavour I'm in a hurry to repeat.

3. When planning to make chilli, it helps to buy chilli powder
   Er... yes.
   Corrollary: The stuff in that strange bag in the back of the cupboard labelled "Chilli" is probably much hotter than the mild chilli powder you normally get.

The weekend so far: Friday and Saturday evenings were taken up by mini!t00b (which I at one time dubbed the anti!t00b on the grounds of having to refer to malachan by his real name instead of calling him Cygnus) with kay_taylor and Cyg's non-fandom, non-LJ friend Peter. On Friday night we started at Hollywood Cocktails - very understated, very pleasant, and very nice drinks - followed by Thai food at Chiang Mai Kitchen, then back to Hollywood for more cocktails (the Cinnamon Daiquiri is highly recommended). Topics of conversation included a brief history of the fandom, including the complete Fall and Fall of Gryffindor Tower and all the associated wank, and a completely unrelated discussion of Crime and Punishment. Much Kudos to Peter for being unfazed by the fandom wankery. Saturday, we met up again, with the addition of olympia_m, to watch Kill Bill (and not for the first time, for some of us), before having dinner at Meltz. There was (naturally) more discussion of fandom wackiness, plus plenty of discussion of movies (including theories for the upcoming Revolutions).

Some time this morning, the clocks went back. The Evil Time clock lived up to its name by being the only one I had to change manually (alarm clock is radio controlled, video picks it up from teletext, computers adjust themselves automatically). Unfortunately, the theoretical extra hour in bed didn't seem to have any actual benefit as I've still managed to feel strangely tired all day. This seems to have contributed to my coder's block - I'm trying to finish off so perl work I've been doing for RS but have been making painfully slow progress. Meh. Time to go and cook steak, methinks.