Cooking With Richard

Application BH2007/00516, Elmshurst, Warren Road - Construction of a part two and part three storey 75 bed nursing home. Provision of 19 parking spaces. (Re-submission of withdrawn application BH2006/01039).

We’re invited to a Thanksgiving day party with a ‘merkin friend of ours. For this I had to make the highly traditional green bean casserole, with thanks to both Hugh’s mum and the Campbell’s kitchen recipe — I combined these and other recipes to make:

The “French” friend onions are made by hand. Apparently in America they sell fried onions in cans. How strange is that?

But the main ingredient in this and about 70 other Campbell’s(TM)-invented recipes is this slightly nauseating tinned soup:

Despite that, the end result isn’t too bad, although I couldn’t see myself eating it regularly.

Our friend put on the whole feast:

Happy campers:

My banoffi pie:

I think the white duck’s wearing the trousers …

Previously …
Preeeeeviously …

All the ladybirds except the one at the bottom are evil invaders from Asia, the Harlequin ladybird:

The first Harlequin was found in a pub car park in Essex in 2004 and since then the ladybird is spreading aggressively throughout the UK, even as far as Wales:

We reported these to the survey and got back a nice response:

Dear Richard

Thank you very much for your ladybird photo. You have correctly identified a harlequin, Harmonia axyridis. This is a valuable record for our survey.

At the moment ladybirds are forming aggregations in preparation for winter - which they spend in a dormant state. This is why they are so conspicuous at the moment. Harlequin ladybirds characteristically spend winter in buildings and are particularly attracted to light coloured stone at this time of year. We think this relates to their behaviour in their native range (Asia) where they head for rocky mountains to overwinter.

In the spring the ladybirds will start to emerge and again this is a time when we see lots but not as many as in the autumn because quite a few will die over the winter time.

It would be great if you could record all your future observations on-line - www.harlequin-survey.org

You may like to know that we now have confirmed records of the harlequin from many sites across southern England, East Anglia and the Midlands. Further north there are a large number of records from Derbyshire and Cheshire and a few from Staffordshire, Humberside, Lancashire, Yorkshire and county Durham. The Harlequin has now also reached Wales, with records from Glamorgan, Monmouthshire, Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire.

If you would like to download a colour ladybird identification sheet, please click on the link at this website page http://www.ladybird-survey.org/UKladybirds/UKladybirds.htm

Thanks again and best wishes,

Conkers!

I’ve eaten polenta once or twice but this was the first time I made it properly. Wow, easy, it took about 5 minutes to cook this. In fact the hardest part was measuring out the water and maize:

This was a kind of southern US / Mexican “fusion” which I made basically from store-cupboard ingredients. It’s a creamy vegetarian kidney bean curry, and polenta fried in butter. Vegetarian food has never been so unhealthy.

A few days ago I made this parmigiana (aubergines and tomatoes, very tasty):

Fried oysters from Hiyashi HAYASHI in Miyajima — おいしかった！

Lunchtime kaiseki from a really excellent restaurant in Hiroshima called An. The first dish was a western-style chilli-prawn:

N-sama had this seafood dish with rich sauce:

Icecream:

In Miyajima:

Edible crysanthemum flowers. We picked the petals and threw away the bitter centres:

but the resulting dish (petals boiled with daikon and various enoki) was rather bitter:

Home-grown sweetcorn, really sweet:

Basashi:

Usaji:

Special OKONOMIYAKI from Hiroshima, with soba noodles:

“Please do not feed pigeons, crows, &c.”
The crow is saying plaintively “If you feed me, I can’t live without your help.”

Lady M took us to an Ethiopian restaurant tonight and this was the first time I have enjoyed Ethiopian food. The meal consisted of small lamb and chicken dishes surrounding a sourdough pancake called injera. To be honest the pancake was very sour and somewhat unpleasant.

The lamb and chicken dishes were pleasant enough once we’d ordered some rice to replace the pancake.

Notice my rather excellent ELER / Schneier T-shirt in the above photo.

I laughed out loud at this:

“Bruce Schneier generated his RSA key with the two largest prime numbers.”

Update

A short explanation on the above: There are an infinite number of prime numbers as is taught in any basic number theory course, so there are no “two largest” primes. But the meta-joke is that if Schneier had actually chosen the two largest primes then because the numbers would (presumably?) be close it would be wide open to a Fermat attack.

We spent a long time this weekend in the scarier parts of London — Hackey and Elephant & Castle.

These are tomatoes and a zucchini flower from Samara’s garden:

Tommy’s vegetarian chilli:

Natsco’s carrot cake:

and more time-lapse Tokyo photography.

Tring has a small but rather wonderful Natural History Museum. Actually it is more properly known as the Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum, which is now managed by the Natural History Museum in London. The collection is marvellously Victorian — 4000 stuffed animals, a spectacle rather than an education.

EOS 5D, lovely camera.

Click for large image

I counted 25 starlings in the garden today. There appeared to be two adult pairs, and the rest were juveniles. Noisy.

Here’s that famous video of Bill Oddie watching starlings:

This is what it looked like last year:

Shugendo:
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