Editor's Blog - Tuesday, 21st October
| Author: Ken The Editor | Published: 21st October 2008 21:16 |
It's all quiet on the Gaz front - the November edition is due back from the printers this week ready to be distributed on Saturday and, at the moment, there's very little in for the December edition.
Did you see on the news that the UK is now the largest producer of wind energy? Apparently, we produce enough electricity from wind to power 300,000 homes. Now we could easily more than double that overnight: just put a turbine on top of the Houses of Parliament - there's enough hot air in there to heat half of London!
I'm going to miss this week's cookery lesson as I'm off to see most of the old Manfred Mann band (without Manfred himself!) on Thursday night. They are going to be joined by Alan Price (keyboard player with the Animals 40 plus years ago) and Maggie Bell (singer with Stone The Crows and then solo artist) who is probably the best ever British blues singer bar none. In my book she's even better than the legendary Janis Joplin. And for those of you not into blues, here's a couple of photos of Ms Bell - firstly from the 70s and then how she looks today...
Although I'm missing this week's cookery lesson, I did have a bash at the Pear Crisp at the weekend. It came out pretty well...
I served it up with Toffee Sauce, which we were also due to make on Thursday evening. It looked (and smelled) OK...
And the all-important verdict from She Who Must Be Fed: "Delicious!"
There are no cookery lessons next week (it's half term) - they start again in the first week of November. I have signed up for 2 courses: Round The World and Best Of British. And, as a bonus, the Round The World course is being held at the Priory School in Orpington - that's about 5 minutes away rather than the half-hour trek over to Kent House.
The recipe (actually, it's just a list of ingredients) for the first Round The World lesson arrived in the post this morning, and the first stop is China (or possibly Japan) as we are cooking "Tom Ka Kai". Now I bet you are thinking what I thought when I opened the post: "What the ****'s that!?" Well it seems like it's some sort of Chinese chicken soup concoction. I'm not sure either me or She Who Must Be Fed are going to like that, even if I get it right!
And getting the ingredients is going to be challenging, to say the least. What are the odds on Morrisons having "Lemongrass", or "Kaffir Lime Leaves", or "Shitake Mushrooms" (or "shit ache mushrooms" as Catherine Tate called them), or a "thumb-size piece of Galangal"??? I don't even know what some of the bloody things on the list look like, so I'll probably spend hours in Morrisons peering at labels. As if I haven't got enough to do already!
And in her covering letter, teacher worrying stated "The first week we will cook just one dish as there is paperwork to complete; the rest of the weeks we will cook a minimum of two, and often three, dishes." Can you imaging it? Three dishes like the Tom Ka Kai each week. I might as well take a camp bed down to Morrisons! "Bye dear. I'm off to get the ingredients for next week's lesson. See you in a couple of days!"
I just hope the Best Of British dishes are a tad more straightforward!
Toodle pip.
What do you think?
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