The place where I document the stupid stuff I do
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
Excellent camera work by Oli, less than excellent pizza making skills by me.
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
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 ].
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.
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:
As is tradition after one cooks a Xmas dinner and has loads of food left over – one makes a pie!
Tasted fantastic. Well impressed.
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.
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
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.
Now all I have to do is kill it, pluck it, gut it, cook it and eat it. That’ll be for another day!
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!
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!