Showing posts with label cheese. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cheese. Show all posts

Sunday, 11 April 2010

Sunday Miscellany

Sunday afternoon, and I'll just get past the "What I had for lunch" bit: cheddar, smoked ham, unsalted butter and wasabi on crusty fresh white bread. With a 10-litre mug of builder's tea. Now just smacking my lips and twiddling my hands mid-air with a distant expression on my face as I try to remember if there's anything cake-related in the kitchen, and, if not, whether I can be arsed to make a whole batch of chocolate brownie cupcakes just to have one now. Or maybe four. Laziness will probably win out over greed, which is a good thing as I stopped being able to describe myself as "willowy" sometime in my 20s, and recently have wondered whether "approximately humanoid" is acceptable as a description.

Mr Fishwife is watching some rugby - I speak as one who knows very little about rugby, but even I can see that this is just rugby-for-the-sake-of-watching-rugby: The teams are both dressed like Where's Wally*, although for clarity one team is in red/white stripes and the other is in red/ivory, and although I can't read very well from here (short sight, damn it) it appears to be Whifflet playing Sproin, which can hardly be major league stuff. In fact it's so minor league I am probably down on the team list as a substitute prop-forward.

I, on the other hand, am doing something useful and worthwhile - frenziedly editing the Ocado order I placed yesterday, mostly at 7 pm but partly at 1 am. HOW did those family packs of Magnum choc ices end up in there? Has somebody hacked my Ocado account? That would explain the caramel syrup, the 4 packs of Chunky Peanut Butter KitKats, the clearance Easter eggs (half price!!). It is the work of seconds to high-mindedly remove them and replace them with fresh fruit and organic courgettes. If, you know, it wasn't vitally important that I wash my hair first. Damn, too late to edit. Oh well.
I should point out that I am deeply in love with Ocado - why has it taken me this long to realise that somebody else will not only push the heavy trolley round the supermarket but also deliver it? In a van painted to look like an onion? And send you a little text message beforehand telling you to expect Vladimir In The Onion Van??? Obviously my mind was on, er, higher things.

The author would like to state that she has received no incentive, financial or otherwise, to write a favourable piece about Ocado Ltd Online Retail. More's the pity. Although they did once sub me a free bottle of Macon-Lugny because they didn't have the bread rolls I was after, which in value for money terms was quite a result. I keep ordering the bread rolls, in a triumph of hope over experience, but sadly I mostly get bread rolls.

*Should just add : the rugby has now become an altogether higher-grade, Heineken Cup affair. Stade Francais are playing. They appear to be dressed as Malibu Barbie, in full head-to-toe sugar pink, with natty matching sugar-pink socks and scrum caps. The kit was obviously designed by Hello Kitty, although I probably won't be telling them that to their faces.

Tuesday, 27 October 2009

My Ears Were Not Made For This, an addendum...

"Hold on there, baby, while I hide the bicycle pump from thieves... mmmHHMMMMM..."

I had completely forgotten about this, but was reminded by Mr Fishwife yesterday: if you listen very carefully to Let's Get It On by Marvin Gaye, as it's starting fading out and he's crooning seductive words of LERVE to his lucky laydeee, there is DEFINITELY the sound of one of those parpy parpy clown bicycle horns. Seriously. Every time I hear it I imagine he's suggestively honking the horn on his Grifter as he parks it behind the garage and starts taking his cycle clips off. Thank you, Mr F, for actually making me laugh out loud.

Friday, 25 September 2009

Holiday Miscellany




Yes, this is the staggeringly photogenic village we stayed in for a week. Stunning, old-world charm, all that Guide Verte palaver. And, much to my surprise, at no point did we stumble across a Boden photo-shoot complete with toothily beaming blondes in casual slouchy moleskin trousers and jaunty Fair-Isle tanktop playing boules with toothless old men ("Amelia: My favourite colour is : The colour of my boyfriend's wallet!").
HOWEVER there are several drawbacks to the exquisite charms of a mediaeval village that the cautious traveller should know about. Firstly, I defy you to try manoeuvring any vehicle larger than a skateboard through those picturesque arches. I spent many a happy hour leaning out of the passenger side of our hired Renault Sardine-Tin tucking the wing-mirror in and yelling "You're fine... you're fine... seriously, you've got at least two inches here...". And this is a left-hand drive hire-car, so I'm feeling strangely empowered by sitting on the side I always think of (at home) as The Seat Of Power, and getting all bossy as a result. At one point as we went the giddyingly "wrong" way round a roundabout (yes, of course it was the right way for France, it just felt wrong) I said "Mind the kerb!" once too often, prompting Mr F to say (for the first time ever) "Oh please just leave me alone" in a tone of utter exhaustion.
Another drawback was the fact that, while it did indeed boast (yes, boast) two boulangeries, a butcher and a general store, all of these were MASSIVELY overpriced, because they were well aware that any and all visitors to their bijou hamlet were going to be not only well-heeled but also unable to get anywhere else in a hurry. We cheated our way round it by heading for the gigantic LeClerc supermarket every morning to stock up on reasonably priced loo-roll etc (I swear, around £1.25 in the supermarket, somewhere around £4 for four rolls of basic in the shop. For that price I'd want it hand-hemmed in lace by Belgian nuns).
I should point out we did, in fact, have a lovely time. Apart from the two days where it rained nearly horizontally, forcing us indoors off the sunny grapevine-bedecked terrace and into the tiny sitting-room, where the only TV channels were English (which in itself tells you a lot about the main holiday lets they do), and found ourselves watching "The Hairy Bikers Do Wales" or something similar. But apart from those two days of strangely deja-vu British-style cottage holiday-ness, it was fantastic. Our main concern (apart from the extraordinary muscularity of the Euro; HOW MUCH?????) was how to get through a bottle of Calvados in a week so as not to leave any behind or to make the concierge think we were alcoholics by leaving an empty bottle (we snuck it out and hid it in a bin).

Monday, 17 November 2008

Wot I done on my week off

1) had a fairly vile cold

2) went to Bletchley Park - humbling - next time I feel embarrassed by my nerd-dom I will think of the cryptographers, translators and early computer-developers of Bletchley Park (Alan Turing* to name but one) and hold my head high. Nerds arguably won the war. And certainly shortened it by at least 2 years! And without wishing to stand on a soapbox and rant, Bletchley Park receives NO GOVERNMENT FUNDING AT ALL. Not a penny**. Which I find frankly disgusting.

3) went to Westfield "shopping centre" (small town more like) - a gigantic, Swarovski-crystal-studded temple to consumerism, virtually on my doorstep. May be the death of Hammersmith as a shopping area, but Hammersmith is a fetid hole in the ground as far as shops go anyway. All I can tell you from my haze of capitalist wonder is: they have a Waitrose. And a Habitat. And a Paperchase. And a strangely tiny Gap. And a whole bunch of shrouded units saying "Gucci - opening soon" and "Prada - opening soon" - no skin off my nose as I'm no big fan of labels.

4) went on a whistlestop gastro-tour of London organised by John Murray publishers for "Eat My Globe" by Simon Majumdar (not out till April 2009 sadly)- Borough Market, jamon iberico, pork pies, Caerphilly, jellied eels, cockles, the perfect martini, the perfect tandoori lamb chop, and Marmite-filled chocolate truffles... what did I learn from this? That £20 per 100g is worth it for the best Spanish ham in London. That jellied eels are an acquired taste but nothing like as nasty as you think they're going to be. That if you're thinking of eating at the frankly stellar New Tayyab you'd better be prepared to queue for at least two hours - but the naan bread alone makes it worth it. That Marmite chocolate truffles are fantastic and barely taste of Marmite (Heston would be proud). Ditto port and stilton chocolate truffles. That the best martinis in London are to be drunk at Hawksmoor. And that snacking all afternoon can make you slightly tetchy but really make you appreciate a good curry.

5) still had a fairly vile cold at the end of it.

* An interesting if ultra-nerdy fact - Alan Turing committed suicide by painting an apple with cyanide and eating half of it. This is why Apple computers have a bitten apple as their logo.

** to sign an e-petition to encourage the government to give Bletchley Park the funding it deserves, go to http://www.savingbletchleypark.org/

Monday, 14 July 2008

Normal Service, or nearest offer.

I'm probably the only person I know who comes back from any holiday actually paler than before I went. I could offer all sorts of explanations (mostly, and correctly, to do with my lavish use of factor 1000 sunscreen) but I prefer to think of it as an "anti-tan" - the hotter the place I go to, the more the sun bleaches me. Possibly, by my own argument, if I spent a week or two in the Arctic Circle over winter I might develop a tan. Stranger things have happened.
Not hugely pale this time, as most of my sun exposure took place in northern France (see sidebar ONE MORE TIME before I take it down with a sigh of regret) and was just a fleeting but celebratory weekend's worth before returning to rainy Blighty. After which I spent a blissful week doing precisely nil, apart from visiting family and reading books* and stuffing my face with the food we had brought back from Rouen**. Am now back at work - and will write something worth reading in a day or two.

* "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" by Stieg Larsson - a housebrick of a Swedish crime thriller but very, very worth reading. Dark, complex, and scary.
"When Will There Be Good News" by Kate Atkinson - one of the perks of working in a bookshop is the availability of proof copies. This is a sequel to her two previous Jackson Brodie novels and worth waiting for.
"Ten-Second Staircase" by Christopher Fowler - I got cross with him a few years ago for rewriting his mad lunatic-genius novel "Darkest Day" (now unavailable) into a rather more ho-hum format to fit the Waterstones-friendly crime series cliché- but this was original, and a goodie.

**walnut bread, garlic sausage, smoked sausage, goat's cheese, ham, duck confit, brief pause while I let belt out a notch or two, Roquefort, purée de marrons, unsalted butter, further brief pause while I lie down.