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".

I'm Back

You know how you don't notice change when it happens slowly, but when you go away for a couple of weeks and get back you suddenly see everything. Now I am back from my little holiday I get to spot all the things that have happened in and around my house over the last two weeks. Fortunately it is not a lot. Not like previous trips to the USA, when the biggest tree I have ever had the displeasure of owning ended up in nextdoor's garden. (Well some of it did.)

The things that caught my eye were the moribund plants in the kitchen, the new stain on the carpet and the little bits of cat litter dragged all through the house. At least two of those are the responsibility of the evil cat. A more positive thing was that my crocuses are in full bloom now. They were just pushing through when I left. 

I actually took these photos last year, but the crocuses looks very similar right now.

We had Denby Dale pie for tea lastnight, fresh from the freezer. It is a lot like my favourite meal from childhood, my mum's meat and potato pie. The pasty is different though. And so is the filling. Then we watched a little TV. It was nice to see Paul Daniels on Harry Hill last night, doing a joke about a chainsaw. Quelle surprise!

Not a piece of a real Denby Dale pie, that would be at least 12 years old, and perhaps a little stale now. Instead from the supermarket freezer and having the name of, and perhaps a similar recipe to, the Denby Dale pie.

I have all sorts of things to blog about from my trip. Maybe I will do that when I have a little more time.