You can’t stay mad at yeast pizza

Background:

I’ll be honest I wasn’t overwhelmed with the yeasty odour emanating from my homemade pizza, but it had taken me 4 hours to make, so I was going to enjoy it god damn it!

I don’t know what possessed me to make pizza from the dough up. Seriously, I have celebrity gossip to read, Youtube videos to watch and hair to straighten, but for some reason I couldn’t shake the desire to make my own dough and tomato sauce.

Well, maybe I do have an inkling as to why I Googled pizza recipes on my lunch break instead of pictures of Ryan Goslin shirtless. It might have had something to do with a little book I read, entitled ‘Not on the label: What really goes into the food on your plate’, but who can ever really be sure about these things?

I began my pizza making quest by visiting my local market. The grocers prices and knowledge of what those ‘green things’ were (notably parsley and coriander) made the experience much more enjoyable than schlepping around the local supermarket.  I’ll admit though, my grocer didn’t have yeast, flour or basil so I did have to venture to the supermarket for those. Which is where I got my basil bush from. Isn’t he cute? And he smells divine.

Basil Bush

Recipe:

I followed a pizza dough recipe from the BBC Food website, a tomato sauce recipe from Delia Smith’s website and a toppings recipe from a vegetarian book. The topping included cheddar cheese, red onion and roasted butternut squash.

Photographic evidence of my cooking skills:

Pizza

The benefits of making your own pizza:

The pizza felt lighter, tasted fresh and I could trust the quality of ingredients.

Tips:

The tomato sauce tastes so beautiful so be careful not to cover it with too much cheese or you won’t be able to taste it!

P.S

The yeast smell eventually died off.

How to make pasties better than Greggs

^ That folks is called a ‘Know-it-All’ headline, because it is a headline which offers practical advice or tips. Yeah, I’ve been brushing up on my writing skills as well as my cooking.

So, I love buying pasties from Gregg’s, but… god only knows what they put in them and they cost a pretty penny. So, I have taken to making my own.

The recipe I used is from the BBC food website.  A lot of the recipes I use come from the BBC food website, but have no fear, there are other recipe creators out there. It’s just that the BBC food website tends to be the first return from Google and the ones that follow it are usually from some no-name website that was abandoned in the late 1990s (I just checked and the internet was around then and so was cooking).

Now as you know, I do simple, non-fancy cooking so I cut out half the crap mentioned in the BBC  recipe. I mean, crushed walnut, they’re having a laugh, right? I just used:

• Flour, butter, and eggs for the pastry.
• potatoes (not new), cheese (certainly not smoked), and onions (just the good old-fashioned white variety) for the filling.
• And you can forget about the chutney. Ha! Chutney, as if!

So that is it! The recipe made 8 pasties. I put half in the fridge to eat that week and half in the freezer to eat at a later date. And if you are wondering, the pasties taste good cold or warmed up. And if you want to know what they looked like, you’re in luck, the camera my mum bought me for Christmas still works:

Pasty, I have a future in food photography.

I’m blogging about quiche; my life is so exciting!

Who knew quiche was so easy to make. I have made two so far and feel like a quiche queen! I like that, quiche queen, it features alliteration! My A-level English teacher would be so proud.

Quiche is easy. I know I already told you that, but it really is. I followed a recipe on the BBC website. Now, I don’t do the fancy stuff like crushing almonds or sieving. No, I do basic, simple, easy stuff like butchering an onion with a blunt knife. So, in keeping with the minimalist cooking school of thought I only use these ingredients to make a quiche:

• Flour (any variety I already have in the cupboard), butter and water for the pastry.
• Eggs, double cream, and vegetables (any I have that are on the edge of dying so I have to use them or lose them to the bin) for the filling.

There, easy isn’t it? Well, just to prove I am a real life ‘quiche queen’ I have added several photographs of the amazing quiches I have made.

The first quiche I ever made!

A slice of the second quiche I ever made!

Nigella Lawson’s Rock Road sets

I didn’t expect this to work. Lord I hoped it would; it included two bars of dark chocolate (insert a Homer “Mmmmm” here). But I have seen the desert turn into a sticky disaster before.  A colleague once made some and it didn’t set. Thankfully mine set, so I guess I’m better than my colleague outside of the office too; oh snap!

I followed the recipe from the BBC website and added 100g of raisins because I love them. Here is my rocky road:

Rocky Road

Rocky Road Slice

If you don’t like red onion step away now

I love guacamole. Especially the stuff I make. Here is a photograph of a batch I made on Tuesday.

Guacamole

The ingredients I used were:

Avacados
Red pepper
Red onion
Tomato
Lime juice

I can hear you shriek for quantities. I’m no mathematician but I’ll give you this much:

2 x Avacados
.5 x red pepper
.5 x red onion
2 x tomatoes
.5 x lime

Basically, if you don’t like red onion step away from this dish. It will kill you. Or just put less of it in and it won’t kill you. It’s up to you. But I’ll tell you this. Once you try the above you will never buy guacamole from a shop ever again. Can you handle that? If not step away now.

With a vegetable for a name, I should be able to cook

I keep getting moments of inspiration where I suddenly want to buy expensive ingredients to make things. Some call this cooking, I call it ‘more expensive than just buying the readymade version fool’.

It started about three weeks ago when I wanted to make cookies. God knows why, as cookies are always on sale. To my credit, I hadn’t gone completely crazy. I bought  cookie mixture in a box. Cooking mixture in a box is equivalent to the ‘An idiots guide to …..’ book series. You can’t go wrong with mixture in a box. You only have to add two table spoons of water. Well… you can go wrong. I made a cookie cake instead of 6 individual cookies. Apparently, you need to follow the instruction that tells you to space the mixture in blobs at specific distances. Oh well. It still tasted good, but it was hard to share.

Stand away from the edge and the fish

Click to enlarge

Public transport and I go way back. To bring you up to speed let me invite you to eavesdrop on a phone conversation I had with my mum in February 2007:

Mum: Guess what?
AFLM: What?
Mum: I’ve passed my driving test!
AFLM: What! I didn’t even know you were learning!!

You see, my mum had left learning to drive off her to-do list until 2007, when her first child, AFLM, was twenty years old. Now my dad, he could drive, but he couldn’t master owning a car. So I spent much of my childhood, early teens, late teens and early twenties sponging lifts of my friends and their parents, and using public transport.

Now, that might not sound bad, but here are two ridiculous facts to make you sympathise with my plight a bit more:

• I used four buses a day, for four years, to get to and from secondary school (isn’t that child abuse?)
•  I commuted 6 hours a day to get from Oxford to London to attend university (to make matters worse this was during the time when Facebook was not available on your phone!)

In fact, travelling by car was so foreign to me, that I used to get car sick every time I was in one. Thankfully, that time has passed and now my mum can drive me places. Well sort of, I can get a lift somewhere so long as: my mum isn’t tired, the destination isn’t too far away, I pay the petrol and I make my own way home. Who said parents were like taxi drivers? That’s only true  if taxis don’t show up on time, seize the opportunity to ask you annoying questions and cost you money. Ok, so it sounds like parents are synonymous with taxi drivers after all, but it was far from what I was promised.

I was lead to believe my childhood and early teens* would be filled with my mum and dad acting as personal chauffeurs taking me to school, birthday parties, theme parks and friends houses all day long. Well that never happened and because of it I have developed a wealth of public transport expertise which I could have frankly done without. I could write reams on the correct way to manage public transport, get on and off a bus, or how to wait for a train. I’m a public transport expert;  move over Norman Baker (this post will wait for you to Google that reference).

Unfortunately,  I can’t write reams right now, England’s decided to throw us a curve ball and produce a sunny day. What I can share with you is a graph. A graph I developed over the last five months whist standing on a train platform waiting to board a train to Waterloo to get to work. So here it is – drum roll please- the graph is entitled ‘I hate anyone sitting next to me so I go as far down the platform as possible to escape you fucks’.

 The math is simple. Years of public transport has taught me that seat hoggers, smelly, sneezing, coughing, loud music listening, newspaper holding, phone chatting, conversation starting , crazy people will all find me and sit next to me and make my journey all the more painful. As if the late arrival/departure, high fares, and congestion hadn’t pissed me off enough I get an annoying companion to share the experience with – thanks.

The graph is self explanatory but I’ll say this: the end of any platform will have a small number of people waiting there. They are the hard-core ‘I hate other passenger’ types  - leave them alone!  They cannot tolerate the fact that public transport, by its very nature, consists of other people sharing the same mode of transport simultaneously. I can’t blame them, in fact, I’m one of them and if I had more money I’d become one of the ‘I really hate other passenger’ types and shell out for first class. Alas, my wallet isn’t that healthy so I’m stuck with the plebs in cattle class – but trust me I do everything in my power to not have someone sit next to me, bar being obviously rude, e.g. putting my bag on the seat next to me. One day I will share with you the equation I created to get seats all to myself on busy coach trips between Oxford and London.

* I can’t say late teens seeing as I could have learnt to drive at 17!

P.S.

This graph cannot be applied to the hell that is a tube platform. I never use the tube even if I’m running late. It’s like kryptonite to superman for me; homicide. There is no theory applicable to the tube other than – it’s everyone for themselves.

Faux violence is cool

Hello ladies

I brought my brother tickets to a wrestling match for his birthday. I was concerned I wouldn’t enjoy the event much, what with not being a fan of  wrestling, but I was the only out of my family who would agree to accompany him.

When the event eventually rolled around I acted all enthusiastic, in fact, I think I over did it a little bit and came off more keen about it than my brother.  Needless to say, as soon as the show began I was captivated. The lights, the music, the announcer – they all added to the atmosphere. Then out came these practically naked, well toned wrestlers. I don’t know who enjoyed the event more, me or my brother.

The audience was encouraged to cheer constantly whilst the wrestlers fought; tapping into the side of me that enjoys being loud. Further, whilst the professionals do not admit to wrestling being fake, the acting as though it isn’t works really well. You can yell ‘smash his head into the table!!!!’ comfortably, because you know that the wrestler’s head won’t actually connect with the table and sustain  an injury. This faux violence allows you to enjoy the sport, as does the half naked guys. I will definitely take my brother to another wrestling event because I love faux violence and hot guys I’m a good sister.

Peace

Don’t I get a fancy necklace at least?

The equation is obvious, isn't it?

I’m addicted to Foursquare. You see it all began when a colleagues Twitter announced they had been overthrown as mayor of the office. Now I had already heard about Foursquare, but I was told it was simply  an app which announced where you were. Consequently I left it well alone, after all, I’m not interested in being stalked or revealing just how many times I visit Wimpy’s. However, upon discovering that the title ‘mayor’ was being handed out to commoners,  I thought I would investigate further.

Now let me tell you a little secret, well it isn’t news to anybody who’s ever played Monopoly with me, I’m really competitive. I mean stuffing one hundreds down my top so you don’t know how much money I have competitive. So imagine the determination I applied to Foursquare and how many points I collected in the first 48 hours.

There are of course, downsides to Foursquare. Since joining I have increased my journey time to work by 10 minutes, because, I’m forced to  stop and sign in at every location I walk passed. My journey used to be direct. A simple 25 minute walk from Waterloo Station to the office. Now my journey to work goes like this: Waterloo Station, London Eye, Thames River, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, the office. This makes my walk longer and also risks my health as I am usually looking at my phone whilst crossing the roads.

Anyway this morning I got told off, not by my boss or a pedestrian I mindless bumped into whilst signing in, but by Foursquare. Apparently I had checked into too many locations within too short a time period. Foursquare actually told me to stop and take a minute before signing into another location. I managed to resist Foursquare’s advice as it would have made my journey to work even longer, however, it did get me thinking. What is the point of Foursquare?

Foursquare describes its self as giving “you and your friends new ways to explore your city”. How I see Foursquare is: giving “you OCD about signing into places you are not really in, but are actually standing outside of, and another reason, in this case repeated lateness, for your boss to question your dedication to your job. Oh and that guy who keeps texting you, he’s now standing behind you thanks to the handy map we threw in. Oh and one last thing, you are only 49 days away from being mayor, so long as the current mayor doesn’t sign in again, then you’re 50 days away. See you later addict!”

In summary, Foursquare is in its infancy, aka the years when things are boring. It can’t talk, feed itself, toilet independently or play monopoly with you. Basically it’s the sibling you didn’t ask for who turned out to be a boy even when your mum promised you a sister*. My advice, based on experience, ignore it until it’s more fun, approximately on his its 5th birthday. Then get a good profile picture because when Foursquare goes mainstream you’ll want people to recognise you when you sign in as the mayor of the platform/ tourist attraction/ river, or won’t you?

*True story, his nickname is Batman.

I’m not censoring little me!

Recently I merged my ‘old’ blog with my ‘new’ blog. I started editing the old blog posts because six years ago, when I started it, I loved using all upper case lettering, hadn’t mastered the apostrophe and used text language outside of text messages. However, after editing several posts I realised I was permanently erasing my teenage voice. So despite the glaring spelling mistakes and the blinding affect of all caps I’m going to keep the remaining ‘old’ posts the way they are. I’m not censoring little me!