Category Archives: Food

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Things I’ve been doing recently

Knitting hats

I’ve been practicing using double-pointed needles (dpns) and made another hat. This one also turned out smaller than I expected, but now I’ve realised that I had measured my head wrongly and it is actually much bigger than I thought it was. Haha. So this hat too has gone to a child of my acquaintance. The pattern is Meret, by Woolly Wormhead.

Small red Meret

Going to exhibitions

Well, an exhibition. We went to see the Ansel Adams exhibition at the National Maritime Museum last Saturday. It was very good. I didn’t really know anything about Ansel Adams before, other than that he was famous photographer, so it was good to learn more about him as well as seeing lots of his photos of water (unsurprisingly, given the location, the theme of the exhibition is “Photography from the Mountains to the Sea”). Going to the exhibition made me feel a bit better about my own photography. I’ve never been quite sure whether it is OK to edit photos after you’ve taken them, or whether this is really ‘cheating’; but Ansel Adams did this as a matter of course. He would, apparently, spend hours in the darkroom developing lots of different prints of the same picture, changing aspects of it until he was happy with the outcome. Obviously editing pictures in a darkroom takes a lot more skill than doing it on a computer, but Ansel Adams was enthusiastic about the possibilities of using computers in photography – there was a film clip at the exhibition of him talking about it. He didn’t live to see the ‘digital photography revolution’ (he died in 1984), but I think he would have been quite excited by it.

Pink rose

Rose at the National Maritime Museum, November 2011

Avoiding snow

We’ve had snow here again this weekend. While we haven’t had such awful weather as in other parts of the country, it is still annoying. I’m fed up with the cold and the grey and the damp…as I expect most other people in the country are. The daffodils have come up, and are struggling bravely on  - they must be quite hardy as they keep bouncing back, when the snow allows!

Daffodils in snow

Having Mr C’s friend to stay for a week

One of Mr C’s childhood friends from Malaysia has been to stay for a week. He just left this morning. It was good to see him again, and I think Mr C enjoyed catching up with him and another friend from Malaysia who actually lives in London but who he hadn’t seen for a long time. Mr C’s friend was quite intrepid, and braved the railways on his own – with varying degrees of success! He brought some Malaysian food over with him, so I’m looking forward to eating lots of noodles soon…

Noodles

Noodles! :)

Watching things grow

Despite the continuing cold weather things are starting to grow and blossom (see e.g. daffodils, above). The orchid has also decided to flower this year, after taking a break from flowering last year, which is nice. I was worried it wouldn’t flower ever again, but I was wrong.

Orchid in flower

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Trains, pie and resolutions

The old year lingers into the new in the form of a horrid cold-that-is-now-a-cough that we caught from Mr C’s sister (who  valiantly soldiered on to make us an amazing Christmas dinner!). Fortunately, it didn’t attack us until the end of last week, so we spent Christmas unscathed by it and had a good time with family, including our niece and nephew. It was the first Christmas our nephew was really aware of (he’s 2.5 years old) and he’s currently fixated with trains, which is a good thing, given that he received many varieties of train for Christmas! Once he’d opened them he didn’t need to open anything else, as he was quite happy to play with the trains all day every day. I think our niece also enjoyed Christmas. She’s a very cheerful baby who seems to enjoy most things, really. She particularly likes having flying lessons from her Uncle Mr C.

Mr C made a pie for New Year’s Eve, in the pie dish that he got for Christmas. It was a very good pie indeed: steak, Stilton, carrots and port and gravy. Yum. I’m glad to say that our appetites were sufficient to eat some pie, even though we weren’t able to do any other New Year-related activities. I went to bed before midnight. Mr C stayed up and then wondered why he’d bothered.

I am not sad to see the back of 2012. Yes, I know there were highlights (the Olympics, the Jubilee, I read lots of books), but I’m afraid these things were outweighed by all the bad stuff that happened to people I love and people I don’t know at all. I just hope that 2013 is better.

I’m only making two resolutions:

  1. Get more exercise.
  2. Be more positive.
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Building the Gingerzep

Building the Gingerzep wasn’t as straightforward as one might  have hoped. Having baked the components a few days

Sugar syrup glue

Sugar syrup

before, the next step was to prepare a suitable bonding agent. The first was sugar syrup and the second royal icing. Superficially, sugar syrup seemed to be the answer, as it was simper and cheaper to manufacture in bulk. Regrettably, lack of prior experience with this compound meant that its inherent weaknesses were not appreciated.

Gingerzep girders

Hull sections

The initial stage of the final construction required the assembly of the nose, tail and midship sections. This was accomplished in a gratifyingly efficient manner and without any obvious difficulty. Unfortunately, serious structural defects began to manifest themselves during the drying process, particularly in the midships section. Nothing could be done to arrest the increasing instability of the longitudinal framing and the only immediate recourse was the application of additional layers of hot sugar syrup. Ultimately, this proved to be of no benefit.

Despite this setback, it was determined that HMA 01 (Mayfly) would be assembled in RNAS Woolwich as originally

Tail pieces

Tail section

planned. The intact nose and tail sections, along with the pieces of the midships section, were transported thither by rail. This proved to be a grave error, for the nose and tail sections proved unequal to the journey. Despite the best efforts of the ground crew/engineer/curator accompanying the craft further structural failures led to the complete collapse of HMA 01′s hull somewhere in the vicinity of Dartford at 11 minutes past eight on the 10th of December 1912.

The immediate effect of the catastrophe was withdrawal of official support for the Gingerzep project and further designs were shelved. However, the important lessons learned proved crucial in the development of parallel projects, most notably Operation Ginger Dread [nought]. The details of this fascinating military project are still a closely guarded secret, but it is expected that further information may be released to the public in the spring of 2013 under the provisions of the Hundred Years Act 1899.

[As narrated by Mr C.]

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Construction begins

A short update on Operation  Gingerzep:

Gingerbread has now been made. Bizarrely,  it is gingerbread without any actual  ginger. Apparently it should make good construction material, though, because of the high sugar content.  Anyway, the gingerbread mixture was made,  then rolled and cut out into carefully  measured pieces,  which will be used to construct the airship.  There was quite a lot of dough,  enough to make an additional two dimensional outline template of a Zeppelin. The pieces of Zeppelin are now baked and  waiting in boxes,  ready for the next stage of construction. Watch this space for more Zeppelin-related  developments!

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PhotoHunt: Spicy

This is a curry I made with left-over chips from the chip shop, half a tin of chick peas, onions, a tin of tomatoes, some garlic granules and some curry powder. It was surprisingly nice. The chips were from the night before, but they tasted almost as good as fresh ones when I fried them up with a bit of oil. Much better than wasting them! (Or, of course, you could just buy fewer chips in the first place…).

PhotoHunt

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Garden notes: Raspberries!

Some friends of ours came to help us with the garden on Thursday. The back bit of it had been in a bit of a state for a while, especially since the lovely lavetera died after last year’s  cold winter.

The lavatera before its untimely demise

They (with Mr C assisting) took out all the dead plant, and loads of bindweed that had been growing over it, dug over the soil, added some fresh compost and planted some autumn-fruiting raspberry canes.

They might not look like much now, but hopefully these strange stick-like things (on the right) will produce some tasty fruit.

I’m quite excited about growing our own raspberries – hopefully I might be able to use home-grown raspberries in some cakes one day…or just eat them fresh! Yum.