Guess what I bought on Amazon this week

No sooner did I say that I wasn't watching the Great British Bake-Off, than I get hooked on it. And it has made me want to do more baking myself. So, continuing my series on "things wot I do in the kitchen" here is a custard tart I made at the weekend. I made chocolate one too, that recipe is courtesy of GW and I may present some pictures of it another time.

I have to feel like I am actually experiencing the next iteration of the internet these days. Something beyond web2.0. Web1.0 was a load of static, non-interactive content. And web2.0 is that cunning auto-generated stuff where the people create their own content. The classic examples being facebook and wikipedia. You can write on your friends wall, or use what you learned in your anthropology course to correct the article on the history of zoophilia. And your input is immediately visible to the appropriate audience.

What I enjoyed this evening was that promised state where you actually work online. What you don't do is install software on your computer to edit pictures or make graphs of spreadsheets. (You certainly don't pay for such things. £85, really?!?!?) What you do instead is keep all your documents, and the software to manipulate them in a faraway datacentre, perhaps running on Icelandic geothermal energy. Perhaps not. Then you can access them from anywhere and never pay anybody any money (other than your ISP of course).

Specifically I have had to change my process for getting baking photos onto my blog as a result of being upgraded to a sparkly new phone. The bonuses are that I now don't need to physically connect my phone to anything to get the photos off. They magic their way to this far-away virtual environment. (I resist calling it a workspace as I am not pretending to work, I am essentially tossing it off.) I get to see my pie crusts and crop the images and what not. Then attach them to this post. And at no stage did I see a file called "pie1". I neither know nor care what "file format" they are in. Moreover I have no idea where the picture of my baking is or has been. I am pretty certain very few people have seen it.

Well done Google.

It's not without problems of course. It isn't the fastest process in the world, but I am sure that is governed by my internet connection rather than anything else. And I did get woken up with alarming frequency one night because Google really wanted me to know that my photos had been uploaded. That was probably my fault. I think getting a "500 - Internal Server Error" wasn't my fault. We are still some ways away from my cooker sending me a "512 - tart getting brown on one side".

Seventeen Minutes

I made a risotto this evening. And it was lovely. I was guided by a recipe of Jamie Oliver. (It would be inaccurate to say I "followed" the recipe.)

Let's start with the ingredients. The recipe called for raw prawns, which is fair enough. And having watched countless shows about all the amazing seafood our country produces I was happy to get prawns. However the only uncooked prawns I could find in the supermarket were from Thailand. Why?

I don't know much about wine, so when I saw a bottle that said "Good Dry French Wine," I thought, "That's the one for me." Ordinarily, I wouldn't know which wines are good and which are not. But this one said it was good. I couldn't find Parmesan, so I used cheddar. I don't have any olive oil in at the moment, so that is Morrison's own sunflower oil. And that isn't a real lemon either

Why didn't home economics teach me something useful, like how to chop finely?

At this stage it didn't really fit in the pan anymore. Then I had to add peas, prawns, cheese, butter and more peas.

Jamie says this is where the magic happens. Leave it alone and it will become creamy. Okay then.

A hearty portion.

Something to look forward to

Not just lots of rhubarb crumble. I have made a couple of discoveries this week, which might possibly brighten my life a bit over the coming months.

Since getting back from america, I have had a renewed enthusiasm for playing the piano. And I have changed the way I play in two ways, both motivated by my desire to amaze people with my fingers (and emotional swaying) should I ever get chance to play the piano to my friends. I plan to play music people will like (aka popular music) and, I plan to play it at any opportunity. This means learning some pop songs, and also, learning them so well that I can play them with no sheet music or aide-memoires whilst drunk.

This is not an easy task, and I have never been very good at memorising music. But with enough effort it might be possible. The hard part is remembering which songs I can remember. I think I am allowed to make a note of that in my phone. But I still have to learn some pop songs. I have been spending some time in the evenings in the last couple of weeks watching videos explaining how to play particular songs.  The frustrating thing is that it is often 18 hours or so later before I can actually play the piano. It is quite a memory challenge to watch a video tutorial and then try to play the piece so much later. I have so far failed to get anything more than the main hook for a few songs.

But then I made a real discovery. A professional pianist who "gives" away sheet music of the pop-songs she plays. (Turns out that gives means you are required to make a donation, but whatever.) So I am totally going to get a few and see if I can learn them. Also, watching all her videos made me realise that I don't object to keyboards (and digital pianos) as much as I used to.

Vika Yermolyeva getting a good sway on.

In a completely unrelated turn of events I started listening to my first ever podcast today. Not entirely sure when I am going to get to listen to it, but now I can get clued up on the weekends NFL fixtures before they happen. It features my favourite ever sports-pundit (it's not a long list): Mike Carlson.

Win a trip to Krispy-Kreme (cash value £10). Be the first to correctly comment with what Mike and I have in common. I will give you a clue, it isn't our taste in shirts. 

Another upcoming treat to look forward to is the new season of Masterchef: The Professionals. Featuring beard enthusiast Michel Roux Jnr and his dim-witted sidekick Greg Wallace, it is actually quite entertaining. It also has Monica Galetti in it, who glares at the contestants until they start crying. Masterchef random quote generator says:

There's no place in Masterchef for pink food. There's no place in the world for pink food.

Another poll about food

Am now back from a recent trip stateside. Which, in part, is responsible for the lack of blogging in recent weeks. I got to do both those things that Americans love to do: work hand and impose democracy on a far away country. Only kidding, the two things I am thinking of that Americans love to do are eat far too much and watch TV. I got to eat lots and lots, and I also watched a small amount of TV. Sometimes I even got to combine the two by watching TV whilst eating. Not only that, but on at least one occasion when I wasn't eating, I was watching the food network in my room.

Which reminded my of Rachel Ray.

Rachel Ray. Like really, what are you going to keep in those pockets?

Who is actually some sort of celebrity chef, who totally has a TV show and writes cookbooks and things. I like this acticle about her, particularly the sentence, "Objects derive meaning from their context".

Food shows are vaguely educational right? Although perhaps for TV purposes they get classed as entertainment. But the the thing that grinds my gears about Ray (or Rachel Ray as people like to call her) is that she can't decide how to pronounce endive. Every single time she mentions the vegetable she says "en-dive or on-deev" and makes a failed little joke out of it. I strongly feel she is supposed to be the authority on this recipe she is presenting, but she seems to be admitting her own ignorance. Just pick one and stick to it woman, people will follow you. And if someone writes it to complain about your pronunciation, then you can sit back and smile, smug in the knowledge that they are a tool, and you are far better looking and wealthier than the people that watch your show.

We all know sex and food make a great combination. And I think we should have a poll on the topic. Another celebrity chef who who likes to combine the two is Nigella.

I was about to try and write some words to express my thoughts on the her, but instead I will unashamedly quote from this blog.

When she leaned over to stir the batter for a chocolate cheesecake I swear I could see the cameraman waging a Herculean internal war to remain professional and not fill the screen with her magnificent breasts, and as my own febrile lust reached the boiling point Nigella pulled her wooden spoon from the creamy, russet mixture, trailing a thick bolus of sweetness to her slowly-parting lips and orgasmically sighed “Mmmmmm…” with unbridled sensuality, later punctuated with an equally erotic and drawn-out “Yuuuuuuum.”

I remember seeing a photo of Ainsley wearing nothing but a bunch of grapes. The internet seems incapable of finding this photo for me again, and so I am unable to share it with you. It will just have to remain a happy memory. It is also the sole reason why I think he deserves a spot in the poll.

Giada de Laurentiis is another american who, like Ray, clearly got a job on TV for her culinary knowledge and skills. Sophie Dahl on the other hand is some sort of ex-model who likes food. The rest are just in the poll to make up numbers.

Taco

Just been watching Mexican Food Made Simple with chef Thomasina Miers. I like shows about food, and this definitely ticks the box. I couldn't help but notice that every recipe she cooks he describes as "my favourite". Makes me think that she isn't being entirely genuine and is over-egging her descriptions.

However the best thing about the show is that she keeps saying the word "Oaxaca". Which is a funny word. I was enjoying how she kept slipping it in at every opportunity and repeated the sounds: wa - ha - ca. I have since discovered her motive for her comical overuse of this place name; it is also the name of her chain of restaurants in London. Perhaps she is trying to implant the name in people's minds so that she gets more business in these difficult economic times.

More Cookery Show Based Obvservations

It's the end of an era. Or maybe the BBC are just having a short break in their evening cookery show slot. Great British Menu has reached it's climax with a street party in London (where else?)  Through the course of the series they have really gone to town on their food based puns. Some were so contrived as to be unrepeatable. Some were so good they went completely unnoticed by mere mortals. Here are a selection of middle-of-the-road ones that I managed to jot down.

• Turning up the heat
• Upping the steaks
• More seasoned opponents
• Who has reeled in top marks? [In the fish course no less.]
• Made a hash of the corned beef
• Chickened out [with her chicken dish]
• Bitten off more than he can chew

The food puns were the most entertaining, but once I had started looking, I noticed them overusing these metaphors as well.

• Step up a gear
• Pull out all the stops
• Keep him in check
• Keep his head above water

In other news, I have a new favourite person. Or at least I did for the first 20 minutes of Portal 2. Now his character is really grating on my nerves. Here is a picture...

Stephen Merchant