Cooking With Richard

A gratin dauphinois, roughly from this Heston Blumenthal recipe:

Boston beer:

A giant steak. Very nice:

I totally enjoyed the Japanese film Paprika on the plane, and then bought it for N-sama as an anniversary present on DVD:

The bathroom is vaguely finished, 4 days late (double the original estimate). At least one can now have a bath, although not a shower:

This is what I’m eating at the moment … Reheated curry, peas and bread:

There’s about another 3 days of work to go, if they pull their fingers out (ie. unlikely):

• finish off the grouting and miscellaneous work in the bathroom (½ day)
• put up a new ceiling in the kitchen and plaster the downstairs (1+ day, lots of disruption)
• some electrical work (½ day)
• new carpets everywhere (1 day, but not really disruptive)

The plan you see above is actually the very first time that anyone has written down a plan for the work.

This blog needs a new category.

Forget best, we need worst …

Anyway, this is for Lady E.

In case you were wondering, it’s our bedroom:

.. And the worst thing of all is I haven’t seen my wife for days.

Photos from the Boston Skywalk, stitched together into a panorama using hugin in Fedora:

Click to enlarge

Click to supersize me (TIFF image)

Gyoza and pork ramen from Sapporo Ramen in a little Japanese mall in Cambridge MA. The noodles were exceedingly good:

This is something they call “bubble tea“, which is a sweet tea with tapioca balls. The one I had here was made with red beans and green tea, but you can have other variations. I think this has probably got about a million calories in it, but it’s pretty pleasant to drink on a very hot day like today:

Clam Chowder, essentially a clam/fish soup with cream, with oyster-flavour crackers. This is a Boston / New England speciality. Pretty good actually:

Smoked salmon:

A more posh clam chowder:

Strawberries covered in chocolate, and cake. The strawberries were very tasty:

Red Hat Summit in Boston:

Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox:

Bagels for breakfast:

Da boyz:

Ummaii!

Our crazy driving holiday around Scotland is now over. I drove 1,104 miles. Here are some photos:

Troooon

Booooat

♫♬listen to the song ♪♫♬

Arran and Lamlash

Home of the worst pub on Arran …

Lunch

Castles and shika

Shikatetsu …

The Lamb and Whisky

The Array Whisky distillery, home of some rather pleasant spirits.

Loch

Maggie the moggie

It’s my bro’s moggie:

These sausages were from the butcher on the high street in High Bentham in the Yorkshire Dales.

They were absolutely delicious. I finished them off with an improvised gravy constructed from the cooking fats, cranberry sauce, sage, rosemary, red wine and water:

I made this last Sunday, because the oven is the only thing I can use in the kitchen at the moment. I stuffed the chicken under the skin with butter and herbs from the garden. With a cream gravy, roast potatoes and carrots.

Snails:

.. and pants:

I think this is a brilliant concept. This artist called “SLINKACHU” paints snails and then photographs them in urban environments. Previously he was famous for doing these little people on ordinary city streets.

I really hope that the artist lets the snails “go free”, perhaps to be discovered by a bemused commuter, or a snail connoisseur…

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While I was looking at this snail art, I saw that the artist had painted a sadly familiar “tag” on a snail, “TOX.08“. If you regularly travel through London, you will be familiar with the depressing vandalism of this teenager. I found this 10 minute documentary on the internet about the culprit of this eyesore, it’s worth watching because it shows the people who have to clear this spam off tubes, and where tube trains go in the night …

… but great food. This was a pasta / tomato / mozzarella dish from Jamie’s Italy book, which was fab:

Buta-no-kakuni:

I used a slightly different recipe this time, from here.

Beer - The cause of, and solution to, all life’s problems.

- Homer J. Simpson

The garden is full of stinging nettles at the moment, vicious little bastards. What better way to show them who’s boss than to make nettle soup. I collected a large pot full of the shoots and heads, which turned out to be about enough for two people:

This is the soup, with a sprig of mint leaves (also from the garden). Very delicious — we should eat nettle soup more often.

This is the lemon from the lemon tree: