Looking Out To Sea

The domestic economy, like the one in the wider world, has apparently collapsed. We have both been ill to varying degrees since the weekend. I had Tuesday off, and Helen left work early this afternoon in order to keep an appointment with a large blanket.

In this time the house has filled up with dirty dishes and snotty hankies. It’s amazing how quickly entropy takes over.

We have not done any significant cooking since the weekend. But tomorrow we’ve got visitors so I hope we’ll be feeling up to it. I plan to start some dough tonight before going to bed. But now, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is on telly.

I had intended to write a long post about blackboards and such, but in the end decided no-one was really interested in my waffle. So instead I’ll just outline the process we used to make our own blackboards. Click through for the full details!

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We’re jumping feet first into the world of audio-visual entertainment. We looked at televisions on Sunday afternoon in John Lewis, and found a quite nice one. They didn’t have any in stock after we got home and checked reviews online.

Then today, one of my colleagues was selling a Humax PVR. His father had bought it before deciding he was too old for this new-fangled technology. (This was how my parents ended up with a microwave too, after my grandmother had been keen to get one.) It seems to be basically the same model as the one owned by Helen’s parents, with a few minor upgrades, so we should be quite familiar with it.

So at the end of Tuesday we have a DVD player (cost thirty quid about 4 years ago) and a PVR. But not television! Now they’re back in stock online but delivery takes at least a week. We’re going to pop in to the shop on Thursday evening and see if we can buy it there and then. We’ll just carry it home on the bus if necessary. We did it with a massive microwave so we can do it with a television. Twenty kilos is nothing.

I hope everyone that came to the party on Friday night had a good time; and everyone else is deeply jealous and/or regretful.

We had a couple of mini-kegs (5L) from the Stewart Brewing company: Number 3 and IPA. Helen made some lamb and beef kebab skewers and some chocolate gingerbread. I made three types of bread: spicy Moroccan rolls, a focaccia and bread shots with various fillings (cheese, two types of pesto, two types of olive). I made the focaccia and bread shots both the night before, which was horrendously difficult and I ended up going to bed much later than I wanted to. But they were excellent in the end. Actually, I never even got to taste the focaccia but I assume it was good because I turned round and it had all gone.

I don’t have any photos of the event, and it was all a bit of a blur at the time, but thanks to everyone who came. Our new sofa arrived that afternoon, and I assembled it straight after work with Helen’s brother. It was still fresh and new for the people arriving at seven. It still doesn’t seem quite real yet. Photos of the new front room when we feel up to it…

So we foolishly decided that we’d get the place redd up if we arranged for a whole bunch of people to come over all at once. Well, they’re coming over this week but there doesn’t look to be much happening on the cleaning-and-tidying front.

I built the final kitchen chair today, so that’s one fewer thing taking up space in the living room. But there’s still loads of boxes full of CDs, DVDs and books which don’t have a home because we have no shelving.

Among today’s minor successes are having a proper set of bathroom towels, and plugging my desktop computer back in. Still no internet connection, but I did put on some photos of my parents’ trip to China, so there’s more variety on the screensaver. I like watching photos as screensavers. (I’ve been teasing my colleagues at work lately by using some of Helen’s food photos as my screensaver. I got back to my desk the other day and they’d turned off my monitor to avoid seeing further tantalising food shots!)

Just now I’ve got some baguettes in the oven, but they’re too slim and are rather too much like breadsticks. But it’s all about the practice…

I popped out the office today to pick up some martini glasses — you know the standard shallow-cone cocktail glasses with stem. They also have a silver rim, like all those silvered test tube experiments from Standard Grade Chemistry that I never did. You can see the glasses here.

I got home and pulled out my cocktail-fu. Made up a couple of White Ladies when Helen arrived.

How to make a White Lady

You will need:

• 1 lemon
• Cointreau
• Gin
• Ice

I got a little over 50ml of juice out of my lemon, enough for two glasses, but I guess they’re all different. You will need to:

1. Squeeze your lemon.
2. Half-fill your shaker (or a sturdy pint glass) with ice cubes.
3. Add 50ml (two shots) of gin.
4. Add 25ml (one shot) of Cointreau.
5. Add 25ml of lemon juice.
6. Put a lid on and shake vigorously until the outside of your shaker frosts up.
7. Strain into a martini glass.

It will probably look fabulous, like ours, and taste it too.

If you’re a real pro (or have too much time on your hands) you can pop in a measure of egg white too, which makes a froth on top. This strikes me as being a hell of a faff and not worth it, kids.

After we ate — last night’s remake of Rapid Ragu, with a bit of rice to bulk it out — Helen decided to make some more with a slightly different recipe. Which explains any typos in this post, I think.

We’ve been fighting with Virgin Media for about 6 weeks now to get our net access transferred over to the new flat. The entire time we’ve been paying for a service we do not have. This will definitely require remuneration when we finally get a service.

We’ve been surviving thus far with a couple of open WiFi connections that we could pick up. Neither were very close to us — this requires careful positioning of laptops to maintain signal levels — but they were still usable.

Were usable. Past tense. On Thursday night both of the networks we used disappeared. One of them hasn’t come back and the other has but appears broken. I can occasionally get an IP address but it doesn’t forward packets past the router. :-( We are bereft, cast loose in a sea of microwaves, all encrypted… we’ve been really suffering!

We’re currently in Montpeliers, downing cocktails and jealously guarding access to the power socket that is powering my laptop. I can highly recommend their Whisky Sour, which is really delightful, and the Espresso Cocktail, which was apparently made with the wrong ingredients but tasted grand anyway. It’s pouring with rain outside and I feel no motivation to get wet.

Email and blogging may be rather light this weekend because we’ll be snatching whatever access is available in cafés and bars (carrying an Eee around is awesome). Please bear with us!

It’s been a busy few days here. At the beginning of the week I had a birthday (I can’t remember if I mentioned that). I made some cake for work, instead of buying something from Greggs. I got a lot of compliments for the Chocolate Gingerbread, so I’m glad I went to the extra effort. It was also a good excuse to spend Sunday using our new pans and putting the oven through its paces. In fact that day I made:

• Chocolate gingerbread (from Nigella Lawson’s Feast)
• Banana and walnut loaf (from Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course)
• Flapjack (from Katie Stewart’s A Young Cook’s Calendar)
• Pain façon beaucaire (from Richard Bertinet’s Dough)

It was quite a busy but very productive day. I’m just sorry I didn’t think to take any photographs. So instead I’ve posted a photo of the Ice Cream Cake that Helen made. If I was being properly critical I would say the banana loaf didn’t turn out very well (maybe the bananas weren’t properly over-ripe) and the bread looked a bit funny (but still tasted great).

On Tuesday we had our second last BSL class. Alarmingly I have to redo one of the assessments because (typically enough for me) I wasn’t participating enough. This assessment was a three person discussion/debate, with one of the participants a tutor to lead the discussion and introduce the topics. I’m quite nervous about repeating the same mistakes this week. We’ll just have to see.

By Friday we were both pretty tired. All week the weather had been hotter than expected. We spent the evening eating takeaway pasta from La Favorita and drinking wine with Emily. The throbbing sensation in my head the next morning was there to remind me how much more wine I drank than I should have.

Saturday afternoon we were at Lawrence’s for his birthday barbecue. Watched certified-fire-loon Rory set fire to things — marshmallows, slices of lemon, whatever else was to hand. Burning marshmallows quickly move between pleasant sweet, acrid sweet and oh-god-i’m-trapped-in-a-smoke-machine. It starting chucking it down later on, so we didn’t go back out to another party (guilty guilty). Also, we hadn’t put any thought or effort into costumes,

(Fascinating aside: I’ve just noticed that someone found my website by searching for the phrase “robert kilroy silk cannot die soon or painfully enough”. And indeed, I’m hit number two when I search for that without quotes.)

On Sunday Keith and Jo came by on a brief visit before heading back down to London. Jez came round for the afternoon too. I made more bread which was doubleplusgood. Jo also gave me a recipes for her grandmother’s Irish soda bread, which was typically folksy in its details: one loaf has “about 3 handfuls” of flour. It turns out that Jo and Jez, who were both staying for tea, are almost dietary complements of each other, since one is a pescetarian and the other doesn’t eat seafood. This makes cooking interesting, especially cooking from Nigella. There’s a lot of meat and a lot of fish recipes and precious little else.

Those are the highlights of my week. I’m ready to drop now.

This is just a quick post to show off bits of our flat. Nothing very comprehensive, just some random photos. More photos on Helen’s Flickr page.

I made a couple of baguettes and a couple epis on Wednesday night. This is me pulling them out of the oven.

This is my Eee PC on our coffee table, with a tiny wooden chair behind it to add to the confused scale. Also, the name plate for our door that we haven’t put up yet.

Filling the holes and cracks in the front room before starting with the paint. Helen proved to be quite adept at this, but I was crap.

This is how the room started off, with bright pink walls, but it darkened as it dried to something less shocking. Notice the classy “3 Sisters” t-shirt?

• The knife-sharpening blocks with the little circular grinding stones inside are very effective.
• Two of the fingers on my left hand would say “too effective”. Ouch, blood, etc.