Priceless Paintings from W7

There are too many children living around my house.

Too many, at least, to work in the garden of my house between the hours of 11:30 and 13:00, while delicious smells of cooked lunch come and distract me from various directions.

Nice to know that not every parent has surrendered to Microwave food, although the smells did make me struggle with my gardening work.

I gave them my revenge yesterday though, kick-starting a huge amount of oxtail soup mid day, and preparing a delicious liver pate in the early evening. Both are very smelly businesses, so I am confident that the smells from my extractor made a few bellies rumble.

Thoughts cooking, home, society

I guess the makers of Avatar never set out to make the world a better place, but with the news from the Oscars just in earlier this week, I can’t help wondering:

The movie cost between 240 and 300 million US dollars to make. Amazing, if you think about it. In terms of box office revenue, it made well over 2.6 billion US dollars so far (according to this site). That is US$ 2,600,000,000, and growing. Not to speak of merchandise and DVD sales.

More than a year’s pay, even including the bonus!

And this is just one of many big money-spinning movies. While the crowds enjoy watching the fate of the Earth-like planet Polyphemus in 3D, I can’t help thinking what all this this money could have done in our present, real and truly three dimensional world. $2,600,000,000. That’s enough to fix a lot of things in this world. Instead, we squander it away in 2 hours 40 minutes, accompanied by a bucket of sticky popcorn.

Maybe intelligent life exists somewhere in the Universe. On a whole, we don’t seem to have much of it on this planet.

Thoughts human, movie, society

This week, I’ve been mostly eating quite nicely, actually:

An Express Paella. Paella is one of my all-time top-ten favourite dishes. The express version is based on Churizo and deep-frozen mixed seafood; no lamb, chicken or pork, no fresh fish, mussels or shellfish. As such, it can be thrown together in a matter of minutes, all you need then is an hour of cooking time.

Roasted lamb chops with aubergines, topped with spiced and crumbled feta cheese and pine nuts. Served with roasted potato wedges, and a pudim flan afterwards. A nice blend of Moussaka with something else. Well, nice, that’s what matters. (See picture.)

A belated Chinese New Year Dinner at our friend L.-S.’s house, featuring Won-ton soup (all components made by hand and from scratch, of course), steamed dumplings, steamed chicken and mushrooms, sea bass, rice – oh, and the beautiful and delicious Jasmine Tea. I had only known Jasmine Tea as the Jasmine-infused Green tea variety. We admired and enjoyed tea brewed from real (dried) Jasmine flowers. Very beautiful and very delicious. I’d love to have some more of this.

Super-lazy Chicken with all the trimmings, as part of our lazy French Sunday (on account of our French friend C’s birthday). Spiced up with watching The Dish, but that’s a different story…

Food and Drink cooking, food, recipe

I used to think nurses were women,
I used to think police were men,
I used to think poets were boring,
Until I became one of them.

The BBC quoted this poem in their Mastercrafts program on stained glass, and the poem is now cited in a new stained glass featuring in a school in Peckham, south London.

I was intrigued and consulted with a popular Internet search engine, and thus discovered a poet called Benjamin Zephaniah. What a great guy! Well worded, non-boring, non-traditionalist, inventive, fresh. I also like Wot a Pair.

Read it for yourself, and read it aloud. It’s right here.

Books, Thoughts BBC, BBC Television, book

A back-breaking Saturday later, and another 500kg or excavation are removed from the garden (to the tune of £70-something pounds), and 800kg of gravel and slate have been laid to rest in form of our new path.

As rain washes off the dust a little, I think it will turn a little darker – especially when wet, which it probably will be most of the time.

Anyway. Another thing done and ticked off the list. All we need now is nice and warm weather.

home gardening, home

The cheapest workout is to have 800kg worth of gravel and slate delivered roadside, sign the receipt, then carry those 800kg into the back garden.

It always looks so much! As if I had ordered three times as much as needed, but it will only be a few buckets over, if anything, I know from experience.

Weather permitting, I’ll be digging and sweating and gravelling and making the new garden path this weekend. This will connect the patio area (railway sleepers, far back in the picture) with The BBQ Zone (granite pavement, front right) in a playfully meandering way such that your journey from said patio leads you through the kitchen garden and banana grove, then through the orchard and the decorative garden, past the shed and the camomile lawn. Unless you are in a hurry, you might require as many as seven or eight steps for that, and even more if you may a detour past the greenhouse!

Well. We can’t change the boundaries of our home and garden, but we love it, and the new garden is going to be brilliant.

Enough gravel and slate is here. I can feel it in my shoulders.

Thoughts gardening, home

I always thought of Nigel’s Lazy Chicken as one of those delicious dishes with the shortest preparation time. Today, I am proposing an even lazier Chicken. Not a quick meal, but hardly anything to do at all, and delicious:

Crispy (and very lazy) chicken

For two grown-ups. Multiply amounts as necessary.

Six nice free-range Chicken thighs. Two hands full of cherry tomatoes. An onion, a clove of garlic, one lime. Sea salt, pepper, balsamic vinegar, olive oil.

Preheat the oven to 190 C (375F). Go hotter if in doubt, but no less.

Get a roasting dish. A deep baking tray or a Pyrex glass dish are ideal. The dish should be just big enough for the thighs, if you lay them out, one next to another. Oil the dish lightly. Cut the cherry tomatoes in half. Add the finely cut onion finely and crushed clove of garlic. Add a good portion of black pepper, a little salt, juice from one lime and the matching amount of balsamic vinegar. Optionally, a little freshly ground nutmeg. Lightly toss about, then evenly distribute in the dish.

Trim and clean the thighs as necessary, then put them flat on top of the tomatoes, one next to each other, skin facing upside. Grind some black pepper over them and sprinkle a very generous pinch of sea salt over them.

Into the oven for one whole hour. Yes. Give it a mighty long time. It’s OK to go over, but not under. When black smoke develops after 80 or 90 minutes, you have been too lazy though and pushed it too far.

Serve with fresh white bread, or a green salad, or both.

Writing this recipe takes longer than the total preparation time.

Food and Drink cooking, food, recipe

…more box-standard home cooking. Nothing fancy, but everything nice in its own little way:

A freshly made Thai-style chicken soup with rice.

Freshly baked whole wheat bread (with lots of seeds and nuts), Parma ham, spicy feta cheese spread, and radish salad.

Good old rump steak with slow-fried onions, garlic butter, roasted potatoes and salad. Pudim Flan.

Freshly baked white bread with spicy feta cheese spread, followed pork loin medallions on courgettes, served with sage butter fettuccine, and finished off with a Clafoutis aux pommes.

Life’s hard.

Food and Drink cooking, food, recipe

How does one get from A to B these days?

Like almost everything else, you’d start by going online, and seek Google’s advise.

Google’s maps are superb after all, and their driving instructions excellent. Our collective blind reliance on Google as the world’s single source of information on almost anything is increasingly worrying. Not that I have reason to believe they do anything wrong, or filter or rate or present information in a way that I disagree with, but I grow increasingly uneasy about this whole thing.

Supersized media barons such as Axel Springer or Rupert Murdoch are tiny players in the information monopoly game, when you compare it to Google.

So, when it comes to journey planning within the UK, it turns out that there is an excellent, government-funded alternative: Transport Direct.

Unlike Google, Transport Direct only covers the UK.

Unlike Google, Transport Direct considers the use of sustainable transport (i.e. bicycles) and use of public transport in addition to regular use of roads and cars. They factor live travel news into the equation, compute the CO2 cost of a trip, know locations of car parks.

And, they aren’t run by Google.

Thoughts, Travel, Web/Tech Google, Internet, society

A convincing argument is something different than the comment my friend Nigel Bakhai, head of the local Liberal Democrats, produced in their February 2010 pamphlet.

The article comments on the planned closure of public toilets, and conversion of a couple of benches (typically only used by people holding beer cans from breakfast time onwards). Both are owned by the Lidl supermarket chain, who wants to replace the benches with trees, and probably assumes that the Hanwell Public Toilet Scheme (another Ealing Council brainfart) compensates for the removal of their own public toilets.

The Lib Dems’ article is entitled Inconvenient Truth. I was looking forward to find a good old rant over the fact that Ealing’s current conservative council is asset-striping the borough, failing to provide basic public services (such as road surface maintenance or, indeed, the provision of public toilets, trees, benches, or aid for those in need), yet find it fit to refund £50 “overpaid” council tax to almost every household in the borough.

A great opportunity to make a point in case. Sadly, Nigel knew nothing better to say than “It is a shame to lose the toilets and seats, but especially as this area is not being put to better use apart from a few extra trees.”

Trees are important, Nigel. So are public services, and so is the care for this unfortunate ones beginning their day with a can of extra-strong lager.

It is early in the 2010 election campaign. Let’s hope Nigel picks up sense, strength, speed and arguments on the way.

Current Affairs Ealing, liberal democrats, Politics

The advert carries a lovely tag line, which made me look it up: a new movie by documentary maker Michael Moore, called Capitalism: A Love Affair. This could be something worth watching out for, and quite possibly something worth watching.

I watched the trailer and wasn’t entirely sure if I liked it. Maybe not a case for £10 at the movie theatre (especially since our local movie house has been demolished, and reconstruction has come to a standstill ever since).

Out in UK cinemas February 26th, DVD release May 24th.

The tagline? Oh, yes:

Because it is not about what your C.E.O. can do for you, but what you can do for your C.E.O.

Yeah. That rings true.

Thoughts movie

Lily Allen, the caller sais, is slightly unsuitable for his young daughters. The caller rung the Radcliffe and Maconie Show on BBC Radio 2 (18-Feb-2010), so he was of course agreed and his call turned into another couple of minutes of inane babble.

These guys play all the right music, but really shouldn’t be allowed to speak.

Anyway. Slightly unsuitable. Right. A little bit pregnant.

A little bit stupid. Yes, that’d work.

Thoughts BBC, BBC Radio 2, life

…Nothing special, just an odd blend of food that we like, wherever it takes me on a day-in day-out basis:

A quick pre-theatre smoked salmon and grilled artichokes quiche. Also re-used some left-over Sauce Bernaise in that quiche, which wasn’t such a good idea. The flavours liked each other, but the quiche didn’t like the richness of the Bernaise.

A steamed leg of lamb, with roasted potatoes, green beans, and a rich fennel-and-thyme gravy. Clafoutis aux pommes to finish it off.

Smoked salmon spaghetti carbonara with Swiss Chard and cherry tomatoes. A great way of using left-over smoked salmon, but not a great idea to substitute Cavolo Negro with Swiss Chard. Maybe Savoy Cabbage would have done a better job here (as previously tested and approved); the good lord alone knows why this thought didn’t cross my mind while shopping.

A fishy Singaporean Laksa with egg noodles. We even managed to eat it without colouring half our clothes forever, that’s a huge improvement on our Laksa eating ability. 

Food and Drink cooking, food, recipe

Easy, Tiger, easy. There was no need for this pathetic tear-jerking grovel of a public apology.

I wished you had just advised the media about the fact that your private life is, well, private. You could have also added a comment about the hypocritical nature of all those reporters and commentators.

They all had sex. Most liked it. Many had sex in ways, or with partners such that they’d rather not talk about. Certainly not in public, and not behind closed doors in many cases.

The public uproar of high morals is hypocritical at best. I find it disgusting.

Current Affairs, Thoughts human, life, society

You might know that I drive very little. Working from home, regular use of public transport, and doing most of my day-in day-out shopping on foot means that my car is pretty stationary. I think I last used it in early January.

Which explains why I wasn’t surprised to find its battery flat. The car has seen little use and the battery got little charge thus. Add an unusually long and cold season, and it makes perfect sense. Inconvenient, but not alarming.

What’s next?

Find the old battery charger, and descent down onto memory lane just once again. I made this charger myself, back in ‘86, as part of my vocational training. When I say “made it myself,” I mean it: made the transformer from scratch (a hand-packed E-I core with self-calculated and wound coils), made the case from scratch (starting with a handful of screws, a welding kit and a piece of sheet metal). Fitted the electronics, engraved the front, – just about everything that one can make by hand in this thing is made by hand.

Which means that the charger must be worth an absolute fortune. I must have been working a week or more on it. To me, it’s worth much more still, and it is something I was immensely proud of when I took it out of the cupboard and brought it to good use on my flat car battery.

Prouder still when I re-connected the battery in the following morning. One turn of the key, and off we were.

Thoughts, Web/Tech car, human