Stuff happening in my life
The course was billed as Indian cookery but the guy teaching us isn’t Indian, he’s Pakistani (well he’s British, but you know what I mean). The food we cook isn’t either Indian or Pakistani really, it’s like a honkey bastardized asian cuisine (Wasim put it a lot more delicately than that when explaining to me :)
Anyway, I’m well behind in my write-ups. This week we made Seekh kebab, Nan and Chicken Jalfrezi. Ingredients and method follow:
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Sounds like the great satan has more death planned, in the ‘recently signed off by Bush’ war on Iran.
As you’d guess we, the British tax payers, will be directly implicated in this. Blood on our hands and all that. Sounds like the big oil sponsored fun run begins in June. Is this why Tony Blair is trying to get the general election out of the way in May?
Sign the petition, dontate some money. None of it will help but we’ll feel good trying.
In the supermarket checkout queue today I noticed similarities between myself and the lady in front of me. We both obviously had loved ones we were purchasing goods to share with.
She had a bottle of wine and two chocolate whipped cream sundae things (I assume for this evening). Then for breakfast she had some lovely big rashers of bacon, nice bread and various fruit juices to enjoy. She seemed to have the first part of her weekend well planned and couldn’t wait to see her lovely partner’s face when she got home.
I had a bunch of tulips and a battenberg cake.
This is not to say I love my partner any less than she loves hers; their needs just differ. I spent twice as much on catfood though.
I upgraded WordPress, the software I use to make this blog. I took the opportunity to make a new theme too. It’s basically just the new default WordPress theme but with new colours and the random changing photo header thing you see at the top there. WAVE AT THE RANDOM CHANGING PHOTO HEADER THING YOU PHILISTINES.
In other news, I completed Turrican 2 and weined myself back into reading some news. Not much news, and not obsessively. Murder the government people.
I’ve been playing Rainbow Arts’ Turrican 2 now for perhaps 10 years or more. I started playing it on my original Amiga 500 and have recently taken it back up using the WinUAE Amiga emulator (running on my XBOX).
I’m embarassed to say that I never really made it much further than the first level. I wasn’t much of a games player back then (and could hardly be classed as one now) was often beaten by even my Dad. I was much more interested in programming games :)
Anyway, years later and with the aid of a spiced up joystick with rapid fire option and the save and load state feature of the emulator (allowing me to save and reload at any point in the game, read: just before a hard bits) I’ve managed to make some progress. I’m now up to level 3. I’ve had to stop because my hand has got tired hitting buttons.
Have a look at the screen shots so far. Note that these 304 by 216 pixel images are actual screen resolution. The tiny image you see on your super high resolution modern display is what was used to create the full size Amiga montitor or TV output. As you can imagine it was rather chunky.
This week Gosht (Lamb) Achar and Lemon Rice. Pretty easy and all went without major explosions or poisoning. The aluminium pans we’re using worry me, though I forget why.
I’ve included the recipes this week, and plan to go back and add the previous ones in too.
By the way, ghee is clarified butter. It doesn’t need to be stored in the fridge and keeps for a long time (so long as you keep it in an airtight container). It has a very high smoke point and doesn’t discolour or burn when heated up to it. It has a distinct flavour, quite different to butter.
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Our beloved government are planning new measures to combat terrorism. These new measures break Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the right to a fair trial. These measures of course apply to everyone in the UK, not just terrorist suspects. They include a “whole range” of measures they call control orders. Control orders could include house arrest, electronic tagging, denied access to communications (phone, Internet etc.) and denial of association with unspecified people. All of this without having to present any actual evidence to a court.
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obviously an old and often reused quote, but I’d like to publish it here:
“…it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. … All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.” – Hermann Goering, founder of the Gestapo and one of the main architects of Nazi Germany.
Our governments have just replaced the threat from communists with the threat from terrorists. They only needed to change six letters and already here I am exposing the country to danger.
We were sent home from work yesterday when it emerged that sewage, well, had emerged. Two inches of raw human output was pooled against the fire escape and was slowly seeping into our room. It didn’t really smell that bad but I found strength not to argue.
Today we’ve been relocated to a meeting room until things are sorted out. Apparently the main 1500mm poop pipe out of our site has been blocked for some time, and the “matter” had backed up all the way back into the building. It was blocked mainly with paper towels I’m told. That and shit.
This morning, as I grabbed my laptop, I noticed someone was making a cup of tea in the kitchen. They didn’t seem aware they were stood in a pool consisting primarily of fully digested food. Well, they were using Tetley’s tea.
update: I’m told on good authority, our janitor being the friend of a chemical biologist, that it’s perfectly safe to return to the office as he’s used some special disinfectant that, and I quote, “even kills AIDS!”. The first disinfectant to be able to kill a syndrome. I’m impressed.
This week we made vegetable pakora, sindhi korma and aloo bhaji. It actually all went pretty well. I didn’t burn anything, I didn’t forget any ingredients (that I noticed), and nobody died by my hand. This might have been something to do with working directly across from Louisa this time; being able to exploit her cookery skills. The food tasted good enought to eat two days in a row too.
I think there is a kind of rhythm to cooking; a beat to which ingredients must be added, flames are adjusted and mixing occurrs. Last week I was seriously out of time. This week I felt I was almost getting it. Imagine that it’s some groovy off-beat syncopated beat and I’m only managing to keep up a simple 4/4 with it.
I didn’t have time to deep fry my pakora, which I was kind of relieved about as the deep fryer scared me to death.
My mum now reads my blog. She’s explained very clearly that the swearing must stop and I’m no longer allowed to publish my opinions on religion.
I wonder how this blogging thing will change our relationship. When we see each other we usually talk about what’s been going on in our lives. If she gets to read it all here then that’s kind of a spoiler. If I don’t find new ways of entertaining my mum I fear she will stop cooking for me. note to self: do more things and don’t write about them all in your blog.
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