Pancake Day

It's the day of pancakes. Or shrove tuesday for many. Thing is pancakes came about as they were made of things that needed using up before lent right? Yet now people have to actually go out and buy the ingredients especially as they don't make stuff from scratch anymore; or even worse buy one of those shake it up ready mixes in order to have the 'traditional' pancake. Now is it me but isn't that a little out of keeping with the whole ethos behind it? Me as an aetheist - I get to have as many pancakes as I want (and I make them from scratch) but shouldn't modern day believers be eating up all their ready meals or something instead nowadays?
I would like to emphasize that I am in no way anti-religious but you get my point about capitalism hi-jacking an already hijacked religious festival in order to sell more batter mix yes?
 Anyway, apropos to this they had the annual pancake race at work today.

Enjoy yours if you have them - but make them yourself huh?  It's easy:
4oz flour - sift it into a bowl.  Make a well in the centre and add 0.5 pint of milk beaten together with one egg.  Beat it all well together to ensure there's no lumps and fry in a non-stick pan with the minimum of oil.  Expect the first one to be rubbish.  :-)

Oi Blogger people - fix the frigging comments!!

Since about May I have been unable to comment as myself on my own and a lot of other blogs.  Having checked the 'known issues' the other day this has now been tagged as fixed.  No it's bloody well not.  Unable to see any obvious place to report this I went in search of help on the forum instead and by swapping to a pop-up comment box rather than having it embedded under the post I can now comment as myself on my own blog.  Hoo-bloody-rah.  Not an ideal fix as I don't like the pop-up box much but it'll have to do.  However, having just attempted to comment on  Azza's Blather (pop by and see her - it's entertaining) it seems I still can't comment on some blogs - hers wouldn't even let me comment as anonymous.  I just got locked into a mobius loop of word verification - log in - word verification - log in so I gave up.  Rather that than heave the whole PC out the window!
Oh - and if you want to utilise the less-than-ideal fix of having pop-up box comments go to Dashboard-Settings-Comments and click the radio button to choose 'Pop-up Window' then scroll to the bottom and save.  Tsk.  What a pile of faff.

Random foodness

Brought back from China - Candied Haws. Apparently. They were a lot bigger than what we'd know as haws, more like cherries so whether this is down to different species or mistranslation I'm not sure. I liked the inclusion of 'food addictives' on the ingredients though, and the information that 'Usage: Bag open instant' which seems an elegantly minimalist was of saying it to me. :-D

Where we can forgive the 'food addictives' from a non-native speaker translating a box of sweets, this inclusion of 'Steak & Kidney Pudding Chips' on a Wetherspoon's menu made me unable to decide between laughter and a wry shake of the head at the appalling lack of standards written English seems to have sunk to. Whilst not wanting to sound like the punctuation police it did conjure up a somewhat bizarre mental image where Heston Blumenthal has got his hands on the humble chip and injected it with S&K pudding extract or something along those lines. Anyway, it does irk me that something that's been professionally printed has not been proof-read properly and spotting spelling mistakes and such like on menus is almost a hobby of mine. By that I mean that I don't set out to do it I just can't help spotting them. Not to say that I never make any myself but if it's for your menu, i.e. what diners first judge the food by, surely a little care is in order?

[If like me you weren't taught proper usage of apostrophes at school because evidently there's no point knowing stuff like that anymore (how old do I sound?) try here. It tells you pretty much all you need to know on the front page; which does make me wonder why they couldn't have spent an hour at school covering it...]

No holds barred rant - UtilityWarehouse.co.uk consider yourselves named and shamed

Now I'm normally careful to avoid mention of personal friends on here for obvious reasons but I must share this with you as my blood is absolutely boiling.
Dear friends of mine very recently lost their 12 year old beautiful boy in a tragic cycling accident. They are feeling like their world has ended as you can imagine. Today the mother receives the following email:
"We are sorry to here of your loss, that is hard to imagine let alone experiance, please accept our haert felt sympathies. now isn't a good time, but it is sort of, if you would like to know more about how we could help you help others just hit our site when you are ready and ring us on what it has to do with helping others and we will empathetically explain. our sincere best wishes J***& A***"
The site is: http://www.opportunityisnowhere.co.uk/
I must point out as well that all the shitty spellings are their own.
If you click the link it takes you to the aforementioned Utility Warehouse where I am making full use of the 'contact us' option. I encourage you all to do the same.
This is my message:
"I would like to register my intense disgust at you contacting a good friend of mine who has just lost her young son. Such incredible insensitivity is truly breathtaking. I think you can count on the fact that you've just lost a hell of a lot of potential custom. Not only is it on Facebook I'll be publicising it on my blog as well. Don't use other's tragedy as a springboard to advertise your services, it's disgusting behaviour and you should be truly ashamed of yourselves."
I know it's too much to hope such reprehensible people will get the message from this but perhaps if we all do it - people - I'm asking this of you but it aint for me.

A forgetful return.

I'm back! Not that technically I really went anywhere but it wasn't work so it's all a win as far as I'm concerned. :-)

Now I have many posts lined up from the past week but brilliantly (not) managed to leave the card adapter and my notes at home so we'll have to wait until tomorrow.

In the meantime a little rant - why on earth is the telly littered with such pap for the masses as 'Strictly come sycophanting', 'X factor', 'Big bruvva' et al and yet the odd interesting sounding thing is on at some totally random time of the day, and about as well hidden in the schedules as is humanly possible? I've just stumbled over 'Secret Britain' on the i-player, but if you search for it on there it doesn't come up. It's on a Monday morning at 2.30am but as I like you here's the 1st one - only available until the 18th though! Now - if only I could 'pay-as-I-go' for what I actually watch of the dismal offerings from the beeb I'd be quids in on the old telly licence...

A little autumnal pic for you today. :-)

The scourge of slugs

The whole irrational rage instilled instantly by the sight of those sadly denuded, stripped and bare stalks where once a lush young plantlet thrust it's bold head skywards & sang for the sheer joy of life, and the feel of the sun on it's leaves, and the gentle rain cooling & quenching it's roots.
Can I just say 'Argh!!' and 'Garn' and other such similar expressions of impotent wrath.
There'd be a picture but I couldn't bring myself to record such barren wilderness where once majestic brassicas marched horizonward... *sob*

Grey skies and gales

Ok ok - I know us gardeners were all bemoaning the rapidly browning vegetation in gardens and allotments across the land but really - enough already! You can stop with the whole rain thing now - at least for the weekend? Yesterday was St Swithin's day which apprently means that if it rains then, it'll rain for the next 40 days and 40 nights. Suffice to say that when I got home from work yesterday I actually wrung my trousers out. Clement it was not. Now I have a fair few tasks I want to get done at the allotment this weekend so a little break in the weather would be really kinda handy. Here's hoping!

The joy of teeny tiny pasta :-D

'Soup pasta' as it's known, seems to be ridiculously hard to come by here. There's the odd online company selling it but the ones I saw charged a lot for postage so when I knew some friends were visiting Spain recently on holiday I pleaded with them - "bring me Stellini" I cried, a-wailing and a-gnashing of my teeth. Ok so maybe I'm over dramatising a little (!) here but it is irritating that something considered so basic an item on the continent should be so scarce on the ground and exhorbitantly over-priced once you add in the postage here. [This company sells it at 99p a box - a normal price for the product but the postage is £6.50 on top!! Eek!]

I have an abiding soft spot for this pasta (tiny star shapes) having been fed it as a small child by my mother (nope - she doesn't know where to get it now either) and you can eat it as pasta on it's own as well as using it in a soup or broth.

On it's own you get something similar to risotto in feel but taking a lot less time to cook. Seemingly I've muppeted up and mislaid the notes I made when making this but it was very comforting, and the pasta was only 1.20 Euro a 500g bag - result! I added onion, garlic, spinach, sweetcorn and cheese. I'm afraid the pic is so bad as to be un-postable but basically - just because something is designated 'soup pasta' [or whatever] it doesn't have to only be used for that purpose. I think that's the point I'm trying to get across here...

*grump*

OK - a quick rant because I'm a tad hacked off today.
Why say you're going to do something then not? What is the point other than to spread a little more cackness around this already overloaded with rubbish life? Piss poor performance. :-(
Grrr...