Category: Food

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McRubbish

Quite a while ago it popped up on the newsfeed on my phone that McDonalds were reintroducing the McRib for a limited time only. I got really quite excited. I put an entry into my calendar for the day that it was to be relaunched and I told everyone that i bumped into that it was coming back.

The day eventually arrived and Amelia had a nail appointment in town so on a wet and rainy October afternoon I dropped her off to have her nails painted and headed to Maccys.

There was a sign outside announcing it was true and it really was back so in I went and made my order.

It was alright, at best. Like so many other write-ups I’ve read I too ended up absolutely covered in the sauce. Napkin after napkin was used to clean myself up and the patty seemed dry. It’s only after reading some other reviews I found out the problem. In the old days they used to dip the patty in the sauce so it got an even covering with not too much and not too little. It seems they changed the way they built this burger by pouring the sauce over the top of the patty and it’s not turned out for the better.

I wont be going back for another one.

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SoLo

One of our local Michelin starred restaurants does a rather fabulous lunch taster menu with wine pairing. It’s a trifle expensive, especially when you start with cocktails, finish with cocktails add the cheese course and two rounds of plum sake to go with the cheese…but it’s worth it. Probably wouldn’t do it every weekend though

The fallow deer course
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Ooni Pizza Maker

As you can tell from this blog I’ve been a bit of a layabout for nearly three years now. I’ve got stuff done – just not any paid employment. Well all that changed recently when I started doing a bit of work for Jason Coope to help him out with a few bits and pieces. I got paid. Paid some actual money. So the first thing I did was buy an Ooni Pizza Oven. My friend Aggy raves about his pizza oven and Amelia and I recently had a shockingly horrifically bad pizza takeaway. So I thought I’d make my own. We already have the Kitchen-Aid food mixer that can kneed the dough for me. We have the funky GBBO Neff slide and hide oven that does a 40deg dough prove. So all that we were missing was the thing to cook the pizza in

Gas powered thing of beauty

So after watching a few YouTube videos and reading a few blogs we were off making our own tomato and garlic topping.

Then we fired up the oven with annoyingly a new bottle of gas because the gas we have for the barbecue has a different connector.

Then about 60 seconds later we had our first totally home made pizza. Better than that piece of shit we bought from Sahara’s in Ormskirk [ ooops, I accidentally named them ].

Yeah, we’re one of them families that likes a bit of pineapple on their pizza!

I’m currently tracking how many pizzas we make and working out how much it’s costing us per pizza. But I can already state quite definitely that the quality is better than any take away pizza we’ve had for a long time. My dough making skills aren’t quite there yet but I’ll keep watching videos to try and improve.

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Magic Monday OK Chicken

The more observant amongst you will notice we don’t have a Magic Monday December post. That’s because I forgot to take a picture. In order to relieve everyone’s stress levels though I can report we had Crispy Chilli Chicken. Which was ace.

The OK chicken that we had this month was…alright….edible…not bad….I’d go with OK. So we’ll not be getting that again.

The league table currently stands at:

  1. Peking Chicken
  2. Crispy Chilli Chicken
  3. OK Chicken
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The first ever proper Magic Monday

My daughter tends to finish college quite early on Mondays so we decided to start a new tradition. Inspired by the Salt and Pepper chicken balls that we both love so much from Nana Pat’s Chinese takeaway we now intend travel to our local Chinese on the lunchtime of the first Monday of every month. The first Monday arrived the other day. The first ever Magic Monday. Every month we intend to treat ourselves to Salt and Pepper Chicken Strips [ not as good as the balls from Nana’s chippy but still pretty good ] and a main course with noodles. The hope is to try a different dish every month but I’m pretty sure we’ll quickly revert to Crispy Chilli Chicken.

The first ever Magic Monday dish was Peking Chicken – and it was fantastic

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Northcote

Back in time when I was in London every week a gang of us would often go out and eat in swanky restaurants. I still often go out to swanky restaurants up North but not with the London crew. Martin was one of the London gang and he now lives up North too but we hadn’t seen each other for absolutely ages so we decided to lunch at Northcote and have a catch up.

Definitely worth it

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DIY Killing Cone

The time comes in every chicken keepers life when some of the old hens have just got to go. My last attempt at this involved an axe and a chicken doing cartwheels around my garden with a broken neck and blood spewing everywhere. To avoid a repeat of that situation I have “created” a killing cone to hold the chicken safely whilst I slit it’s jugular. It’s one of the nicer ways to kill a chicken. Certainly better than hitting them with an axe.

This is how the killing cone began life
This is how the killing cone began life

Version 1 wasn't so good.
Version 1 wasn't so good.

Version 2 is much better. Braveheart was a tad worried at this point
Version 2 is much better. Braveheart was a tad worried at this point

Killing cone in place
Killing cone in place

Now all I have to do is kill it, pluck it, gut it, cook it and eat it. That’ll be for another day!

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Be still my twitching sphincter

They’ve arrived!!! They’ve arrived!!  I very nearly, but didn’t quite, poop in my knickers [ see earlier ] with the excitement of receiving a box of 40 portions of the best noodles on the planet.  Paul Simkiss dropped by for lunch and relieved me of a bowl before walking off with four packets.  Jason Howarth has taken delivery of five packets and I’ve already had some.  So my supplies are rapidly dwindling!  It’s making me hungry just thinking about them.  I can’t think of anything better to do with a bowl, a fork and 500ml of hot water.  Get in!

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So excited I may just crap

When Emma and I lived in Hong Kong I used to regularly breakfast on these spicy flavour Nissin noodles.  Everyone that came to visit was subjected to a taste of these wee beasties and nobody was ever disappointed. 

I stocked up on them during my last trip to HK for the rugby [ HK Blog ] but today they ran out.  It only took a few minutes of smurfing the web but I finally found them here.  So I ordered 40 packets of them.

Happy days are here again!