Sim-O

Mrs -O and I have been out for meal tonight. All I can say is, disappointed. In a ‘now what?’ kinda way.

Recently we’ve been to some restaurants in town and been let down with the quality of the food and/or service.
There’s the Italian place that was a bit hit and miss, but generally hit, but then started missing a bit too often. The familiar, kid friendly you-know-what-you’re-getting Pizza Express that suddenly decided their pizzas were too good and didn’t want to put the competition out of business and the Chinese that had a reputation like no other that could do with it being warmed in one of it’s microwaves. The rest, aren’t worth mentioning, apart from one, I am told, that we haven’t visited because once you’ve had the only vegetarian starter of mushrooms, you don’t really want mushrooms again for your main course*.

Where we went tonight is a little the pricey side, but then when the food is good you don’t mind paying. But it wasn’t. It was mediocre. We are also running out of decent places to eat out, too. As far as we see it, there’s a curry house and a Thai restaurant.

The only upside was, they forgot to put £15 worth of drinks on the bill. Oh and the pudding weren’t too bad either, if a little sweet…

*Thinking about it now, that was a while ago and I’ve just looked at their new menu, which we might have to give a go. There is still surprisingly little choice for vegetarians.

My employer outsources its’ IT stuff to another company and this dialogue box appeared this morning when I logged in.

Leaving aside the fact that I am not happy giving my employee number to anyone outside personel/payroll, where is the box you’re meant to enter the number into?

I’ve been with my company a few years now and seen a sword in the various display cabinets about, along with various awards for various corporate things, but only today looked to see what it’s actually for.

It is a Sword of Honour, awarded by the British Safety Council…

The Sword of Honour is the most prestigious international health and safety accolade that a company can receive, and it is designed to encourage and reward organisations that work to best practice. Inaugurated in 1979, every year only 40 swords are awarded world-wide, so winners can be assured that they are elite organisations that boast first class health and safety for their employees.

That’s all good and well, but didn’t anyone notice the irony of awarding a pointy implement, that has the sole purpose of killing people to companies for keeping people safe?

OK, just humour me, because I have been known to be wrong, believe it or not.

I wasn’t able to watch Stewart Lees’ Comedy Vehicle when it was on the telly the other night, so I recorded it and watched it last night.

When Stewart was saying what Amazon suggested he might like, after buying six Jeremy Clarkeson books, I had to rewind and watch that little bit again.

The first book Stewart says Amazon recommends is Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler. The little Amazon recommend bar graphic at the side of the screen schows a picture of the book, quite clearly, but the sound is edited so that instead of saying the title of Hitlers book, Stewart says…

mumph

I originally thought that, being shitty freeview, the signal when originally broadcast was a bit lumpy and my freeview box decided to just skip the bit inbetween the first and last sounds of the book title. But it wasn’t. I also thought it was because of what I had imbibed, hence the disclaimer above. But after several passes I can confidentely claim that the BBC censored the words ‘Mein Kampf’.

The question I have is this: Why is the BBC scared of giving away the name of an important Nazi book to blind people? It must be something to do with blind people as the cover of the book with the title clearly readable was shown on screen.
Are blind people especially sensitive to the thoughts of Hitler, so sensitive that even the mention of the name of his book reduces them to tears?
Are partially sighted people so easily seduced by Nazism, to the extent that if they hear the words ‘Mein Kampf’ they will become right wing fascist thugs, ready to blame their ‘different sightedness’ on immigrants and teh Jews?
Obviously the BBC thinks so.

I also believe that the BBC think blind people can’t use computers as the show on iPlayer (url will probably change once the BBC get wind I’m onto them) has not been doctored (3 minutes in).

I think I might be onto a big conspiracy here. I may be back with more later, if the Coporation doesn’t silence me first.

I cannot cook. Or at least that is the conventional wisdom so far.
Slowly, a little reluctantly, that is changing.

I can do bacon & eggs and beans on toast, they’re easy, but in the last couple of weeks have learnt how to make a risotto. That is about it. The sum total of my culinary skills.

Until tonight. Tonight omelette joined that very short list. And bloody good it was too.

Here is my recipe for beef and cheese omelette with waffles and peas…

The ingredients:
Eggs…
I wanted to make a mushroom omelette but didn’t have any mushroom, so then I thought I’d throw some hame in it. But I didn’t have any of that either so had to make do with some Tesco sandwich beef. Here, shredded ready to go in along with some grated cheese…
potato waffles…
and the peas…

The method:
First of all, Tim Almond suggested separating the yokes and the whites and doing a ‘souffle’ omelette. So I got the waffles going under the grill and separated the eggs. Piece of cake so far. See? …

As the waffles were going nicely I (intended) to whisk the egg whites until it formed foam peaks. I got a bit bored with the whisking and the waffles were doing a little quicker than expected so I gave up on that and chucked in some salt and pepper. Salt seems to go into everything and I dunno if it actually does anything so you may leave it out.

Here a picture of my (not very) foamy peaks…
It’d probably look better if I’d carried on a bit longer, but as I say, I the waffles were nearly done and my arm ached.

Around about this time I’d got me peas going.
I was canny and had prepared them earlier by pouring them into a cup covering them with water and then placed them in the microwave ready to be nuked. And I nuked ’em.

Here, I was going to take a picture of the big blob of margerine (margerine is underated. And I didn’t have any butter) but I dropped the camera right into the hot frying pan, which then bounced up, knocking the pan off the burner letting the camera land right on the gentle inferno of burning gas.

Once the camera was rescued, with no loss of life or injury I’m happy to report, I dropped the butter marg into the frying pan.
I think I may have had the pan a little too hot as it melted really quick and gave me no chance to fold the egg yolk in to my foamy egg whites before burning to the bottom of the frying pan.

I knew I was half way there. My waffles were nearly done on the second side, the peas were spinning gayely on their merry-go-round as the egg went into the pan. Hurriedly I dropped the beef (it says so on the packet so I am allowed to call it that) on to the omelette which was already starting to solidify.
Mmm. Nice…

It all started to pick up pace now as the waffles started to burn. The microwave dinged a ‘ding’ that gave no clue as to the flood of biblical proportions that had occurred inside. I don’t know how long they had been cooking, but I presumed they were done.
All I could concentrate on was not letting the omelette burn to the insanely-hotter-than-need-be frying pan as I eased the edges away with my trusty wooden spatula thing. At this point my heart started to sink as it looked like I would be having only waffles and peas for tea. The underbelly of the thing wasn’t looking too healthy.

But I pressed ahead. I sprinkled the cheese over the omelette trying to get a nice even coverage.
At this point, the waffles were done. Just right. So out of the grill and on to the plate they went and into the grill on full whack went the yellow lump of goo.

With my waffles going cold on the plate and the omelette finishing in the grill, the peas got drained. Fortunately I started with a large amount so I was comfortable about losing a few of the little fellas down the sink.

I then checked on the omelette. It was done! At last. I tilted the pan and delicately slide the omelette half on to the plate and then folded the second half over. It smelt pretty good.

I then finished dressing the plate.

Ta-Da!!…

The end result:
It looked a little, well, you can see for yourself what it looked like. Not too appealing for some reason. But it tasted beautiful. With a lovely texture too. The strips of beef were a waste of time, didn’t even know they were there. Maybe some bits of steak next time.

On the whole, not a bad first effort. Apart from the cold waffles.

Thanx to Tim, BigDaddyMerk and Hackneye for the tips and Mrs -O for putting me in a position of necessarty.

Well? Was it? What did you do then?
Buy your misses an overpriced bunch of roses? Or did you take her to your third choice restaurant because you lunched it and left it too late to get a table at the better gaffes? Were you seduced into paying over the odds for a some monkey metal and a piece of glass because some advert told you your beloved will be over the moon about it?

Me? Fuck all. I soon put a stop to that.

I show my wife I love all year round and don’t need to be told when to buy her a present.

Sudooli:

How am I going to protect my 4 decades of diary writing so that my kid’s kids can read them with the same interest I am my grandma’s? What happens when Twitter disappears. More importantly when it doesn’t give me access to all my tweets*. Or Flickr closes and I lose the photos therein? When the email I have sent over the last 10 years is consumed by the company I work for? What happens in 30 years when PHP and MySQL and Linux no longer exist?
…
How will my grandkids ever find out what I thought of their wedding day if Twitter is bought by AOL and completely buggered?

The kids are off school, and by 9 O’Clock had already built a snowmand and been sledging…

From my window

From the Kitchen

Bagley Wood

Minis at Cowley

email from Mrs -O…

bored

my reply…

join twitter

Mrs -O…

why

me…

I haven’t worked that one out for myself, yet.

Never mind the lofty battle of the gods/non-gods, here something a little more downto earth…

Get yours here.

Via Tim, amongst the many.