experiments with food 24-05-09

Unlikely phenomenon yesterday - Paul "WhiteWineandOrange" Harland attempted cookery and it went to plan. This followed the debacle last saturday in which I tried to cook an "ethnic" dinner for Gem and ended up in the wrong continent. Spaghetti bolognese should be straightforward even for a mummy's boy but it quickly emerged that I had failed to ensure spaghetti was available. That would have been fine, for one can use Penne, referred to sometimes incorrectly as pasta quills, but I then discovered that the jar of sauce I had just opened was also not bolognese but Lloyd Grossman's jalfrezi. To complete the fusion we went with wensleydale cheese in place of the regular parmesan. Remarkably Gem is still speaking to me. This is doubtless due to the thai-style star shaped carved carrots. We decided that although the dish would certainly never occur again in this or any other universe, it should take the name of Beef Jalfrensleydale...
And this gave me the idea for a cockup-cookbook full of apparently familiar recipes, but during each recipe it has amusing but non-catastrophic mistakes. This would almost certainly be successful but I haven't written it yet.
The next day concluded at Sarah's house with Sarah feeding me and her flatmates and her family, me sitting between her mum and dad, calling her mum 'baby' and playing a very brief and quite one-sided game of footsie with her under the table. Sarah's mum and I also share a total unawareness of Pinatas, which I find strange, if they really do exist - apparently the Spanish make them out of papier mache and hang them from washing lines. How could that be true? And if it is why has nobody ever told me about them? I had to lie down to make sense of it, and tried to control Sarah's family through the Xbox joypad. Further revelation on Smurfs, which are much older than I had previously thought, as apparently the footage dates from the late seventies, whereas when I was watching them circa 1998 I assumed I was watching it live. This is discussed in Donnie Darko according to VanWyk, which is a film I haven't seen. Gemma Copping then ironed 5 of my shirts, and in my consequent gratitude I made a small but telling donation to the IFS ladies race for life thing which is to do with running.
The kitchen despair continued when I tried to do Japanese rice a few days later using a steamer and a sheet of kitchen roll but this only ended with me burning Linda's pan. It is mostly ok but I may have to buy a new one to appease her anyway. I owe her one birthday present at any rate. Then I went to Yo Sushi on Thursday in Bluewater, on IFS expenses which is the best way to do it, and managed to only eat only pink plates, which is an achievement which I find pleasing. During a 147 break in snooker there is a moment when the commentator slightly nervously remarks, "that's 6 reds, 6 blacks, and I bet his mind's turning to the £147,000 available for a maximum..." and it's much the same when you've had 3 pink dishes in Yo sushi and start to wonder whether you can complete the meal without having an orange, or purple or a blue. Without the money I suppose.
Ambitiously I tried to cook again yesterday (incidentally it went extremely well this time) but in the car park I balanced a bit too much in my bag for life (as it's important to me when in a supermarket to be able to fit everything exactly into one bag) and sadly the chicken breasts fell out the front and under the tyres of the trolley. This greatly reduced my speed of motion, until the error was pointed out by my co-shopper and the slightly gritty chicken breasts were retrieved from the ground. My suspicion is that this was the first ever experiment into the effectiveness of chicken breasts as brake pads.