...
grovelling apology to Sainsbury's Chariman.Here's an extract
Thorry mither Thainthburyth Chairman, I actually think you're great, pleathe keep paying me my million poundth a year and I promith I'll never be nathty about you again. I think you're pucka, yeah?Disclaimer - I actually quite like Jamie Oliver, I just think he should grow some balls and put his money where his stupid fat tongued mouth is.
Monday, January 14, 2008 10:08 AM
...installed Skype. Frankly it couldn't be easier to set up and use on a MacBook, you download it, install it, create an account, and off you go - free calls/video calls any where in the world. The quality is amazing really. Liv gave her sister Meg in Japan a tour of the house and seeing Meg's face being carried around the house reminded me of Red Dwarf where Holly (or hilly) would be wheeled around the ship. If you want to contact us and can't find us from a search, let me know.
...bought a
Harmony Remote Control, one remote to control them all, replacing the 6 existing remotes I was using. Again, pretty easier to setup, though I'm yet to figure out if it's possible to create more advanced macros beyond the out of the box "Activities" you can create.
Sunday, January 13, 2008 12:31 PM
For some reason, I'd always struggled making hummus. I'd try this recipe and that recipe, but it would never taste right. It would simply taste like smashed up chick peas. It occurred to me this weekend that what I was doing wrong was following a recipe. Better, it turns out, to follow your gut and add ingredient/taste/add ingredient/taste until it's right and it's what you want. Hummus then becomes dead easy to make and is a dead cheap treat.
Here's what you do:
Soak your chickpeas over night. Easy this bit - put them in a container cover in plenty of water, and forget about them until the next day. When judging how many you need, remember that they will triple in size once they soaked/cooked.
Drain.
Boil for 2.5 hours.
Strain, reserving the cooking liquid.
Put in food processor with a little of the cooking liquid, a teaspoon of tahini, a clove or garlic, a load of olive oil and a tablespoon of lemon juice.
Blend them up good and proper.
Season with salt, pepper and if desired (I desire) paprika or cayenne pepper.
Then just keep tasting/seasoning until you've got it right, adding more oil or lemon juice or cooking liquid if desired.
When serving, I like to drizzle extra olive oil on top, and sprinkle on paprika.
Easy. Although there is a 12 hour time gap between starting and finishing what with the soaking and cooking time, the time spent actually doing something is only about 10 minutes.
If you haven't remembered or haven't time to soak/cook your chick peas, you could buy a can of ready to use chickpeas, but I don't see the point of that, as a can of chickpeas isn't much cheaper than buying a pot of ready made hummus, so you may as well just do that.
Monday, January 07, 2008 8:30 PM
This made me laugh, it couldn't have happened to a nicer bloke! Though if it were me, I'd have signed him up for £1000 a month to Greenpeace. Some people have no imagination.
1:54 PM
So, a new year then. This is actually the 7th year in which I've been blogging. Imagine that! I though it might be iteresting to go on a tour of key moments in this blog over the years. And by interesting, I mean "self ingulgent".
The first post was on 16th Feb 2002 and consisted of a link to "The Smoking Gun". I clearly hadn't found my voice back then as the early links were very matter of fact. "Here is a link of what someone has gone done on the internet.". But that was fine, that was basically what weblogs were for back then, they had yet to morph into a vehicle to bore peole sensless with your own opinions. Mind you, a high proportion of the sites I was linking to where quite political, so I was really using the site as a way of "Spreading the message". (The message, if you haven't figured it out by now, is that the world is a fucking awful place, and we're all scum for doing fuck all about it and instead coasting along in our cushy lives going "La la la, I can't here you, la la la" whenever they start taking about some massive new tragedy somewhere in the world. Or perhaps worse, shaking our heads and saying "That's terrible, someone should really do something about that. Not me of course, I'm too busy making lasagne, or playing Trumpet Hero 7." (or whatever the fuck it is we do to waste away our worthless lives)).
Things started to pick up over the next couple of years, and scattered among the single link posts were musings on
films I'd seen or
things I'd done. But this was apparantly all too much for me, as I ended December 2004 by annoucing that I would
NEVER BLOG AGAIN!!!111.
I started blogging again on January 4th 2005, possibly the worlds shortest retirement from blogging there's been. The real reason I'd stopped blogging is because I'd become uncomfortable with the window into my mind the blog had become, along with the fact that there were things I just didn't want to be open about on the blog. In an ideal world, I'd have a blog like
Richard Herring where you recount all the ups and downs of your life, but I self censored too much to do that, and I figured that if I couldn't be honest, there was no point in writing at all. I started off 2005 pretending that the site was just going to be a photo blog, but it soon degenerated into a frenzy of opinion (most of it wrong).
I found that an easy way to overcome my concerns at the end of 2004 was to a) write as an even more deranged version of myself, and b) go heavy on the irony. This something I appear to have perfected by my
first post in 2006, where I proclaimed Michael Barrymore a bum-wrecking murderer on the basis of a newspaper article that pointed out that he quite clearly wasn't. The problem of irony is of course that if people don't know you well, they take what you say as what you mean (which is fair enough I suppose). It's annoying though, I like irony. A couple of years ago my friend and collegue Hat Man asked me to raise my hand when I was telling the truth because he couldn't distinguish fact from fiction when I spoke. But that's because he's an American and they never understand irony (I'm being ironic there by the way, ironically). So I'm sure I've said things on here that have appalled people, because they assume that what I've said is what I actually believe.
In ended 2006 talking about how I was going to learn
Krav Maga. I haven't, I still want to, but it's really expensive. In the
first month of 2007 you can tell that I'd become more and more interested in food, and that's probably the way it will carry on, as in 2008 I'm going to try and turn it up to 11 in the kitchen.
So there you go, 2002 to 2008. I would go on to list what I hope to achieve in 2008, but I won't because I don't want to have to sit here in 2009 listing how little I actually achieved during the year.
Anyway, happy 2008 folks.
Sunday, January 06, 2008 10:51 AM
