Patience.org

We’ve been extremely lax in posting pictures of the kids over the past couple of months, but we’ve put a few up in the October folder. As usual you’ll have to log in to see them so if you need a password etc, email us.

As it’s been a while since we posted new pictures, you’ll notice quite a few changes in both of them. Unfortunately we didn’t get time to take any of them in their Halloween get-up today before we had to change them out of them. but one was a priest and the other the devil. We’ll leave you to work out which one was which.

So this week’s cooking effort – well last Saturday’s, but I’ve been away for a few days – was a Torta Milanese. Presumably even those of us with no Italian skills can work out what that means? But a feature if it is the inclusion of sliced boiled eggs atop what it is already a fairly substantial pie. The recipe is in the extended part of this entry – click ‘more’ to see it.

It’s the second time I’ve made it, and this time I decided to do the roasted peppers myself. But it adds about 20 minutes to the process and is really not worth the bother – better off buying a jar of the things from the supermarket.

This was one of those recipes that was better tasting the day after – but is very nice piping hot nonetheless – and in fact could be eaten stone cold if need be.

Maybe I’ll have to venture beyond the safety of my pie haven into something more adventurous this Saturday, we’ll see.
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Sitting here in Texas, where somewhat bizarrely, he started his radio career, I was so sad that the man who reared numerous generations on music beyond the mainstream has died – so young and so far away from home too.

I distinctly remember him playing ‘New England’ by Billy Bragg in about 1984, and turning the light back on to jot down the artist and title thinking, ‘hmm that was pretty good…’

At some point in 1987, Ray and I went to Radio 1′s building near Broadcasting House and left a tape for him to play.

Anyway, we went back shortly after the same night and the receptionist called him the studio. He answered and promised he would listen to it (man, we could be pushy when we wanted to be!). Friends subsequently told us that he did in fact play one of our songs – Razor Blades – one night soon after, but despite our drummer at that time being an engineer for the World Service, we weren’t able to verify that. There was no instant play-lists as there are now for every BBC radio show.

But hey, we spoke to the man at the height of his powers and given our relative position in the music industry, it was very gallant of him to bother. But that open-mindedness is what exposed him to what is continually new and interesting in popular music.

It’s difficult to imagine any other DJ would provoke as much affection as he did. Long may he R.I.P.

For the past year or two – in fact ever since we realized that going out every Saturday night was no longer feasible because of certain, ahem, restrictions – we have increased the amount of cooking we do. In fact I have made cooking on Saturday night a sort of weekly feature as well as trying to fit it in a couple of others time during the week (but this is New York, so not getting food delivered now and again would be a crime against the local economy).

The other reason for doing this to enable us to influence – and I’ll put it no more strongly than that – what the kids eat as they grow up, and hopefully to get them engaged and enthusiastic about cooking once they’re old enough to wield a knife. Thankfully we’ve got a few years to learn before that becomes an issue, and boy do I need that!

Anyway, that’s a long way of saying that I’ll be sharing my recipes – or to be more accurate, the recipes that I lift from various books and websites – and letting you know what we think of them. I will try to format them as well as my HTML skills will allow.

None of them will be exactly pushing the cullinary envelope – I mean I really was on baked potatoes being a major achievement about three years ago – and they will all be vegetarian, simply because otherwise they would just get cooked and tossed in the bin!

To kick it off, last week’s effort was vegetable savoury pie from the BBC’s website. The link is here, The recipe is also in the extended entry part of this post, so if you hit the ‘more’ link below you’ll find it. I apologize for not being able to make those pages look like this one, but there you go.

We have a running joke at home that whatever we cook, it always tastes better the day after I cook it. But in this case this actually was preferable on the Saturday night. The stir-fried vegetables were especially nice, but you couldn’t taste the blue cheese that much, despite me putting on more than the recipe suggested. That was probably due to the heat, as you could taste it more the following day.

One element that was missing was fresh cream – described as ‘single cream’ in the recipe. Such a thing is not sold in New York supermarkets. It’s so prevalent in the UK that even our cats only treated it as a minor delicacy. But the nearest I can find to it is whipping cream. If anyone knows anything closer to single dairy cream as they understand it, please let me know.

I’d rate this recipe at about 8/10 and one of the best savory pies I’ve had, although I know I have a better one or two that I’ll cook at some point soon.
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News that Madness has signed a one-album deal to do an album of ska and reggae covers will go down particularly well with one member of our household, that’s for sure. That’s because right now the little man’s favorite tune starts like this:

“Hey you, don’t watch that, watch this
This is the heavy heavy monster sound…”

I mean what 2 year old couldn’t like that intro?

(He knows the rest of One Step Beyond off by heart too)

From the blog of William Gibson

President Bush goes to an elementary school to talk about the war.

After his talk, he offers to answer questions. One little boy puts up his hand and the president asks him his name.

“I’m Billy, sir.”

“And what’s your question, Billy?”

“I have three questions, sir. Why did the US invade Iraq without the support of the UN? Why are you President when Al Gore got more votes? And whatever happened to Osama Bin Laden?”

Just then the bell rings for recess. Bush announces that they’ll continue after recess.

When they return, Bush asks, “OK, where were we? Question time! Who has a question?”

Another little boy raises his hand. The president asks his name.

“I’m Steve, sir.”

“And what’s your question, Steve?”

“I have five questions, sir. Why did the US invade Iraq without the support of the UN? Why are you President when Al Gore got more votes? Whatever happened to Osama Bin Laden? Why did the recess bell go off twenty minutes early? And what the heck happened to Billy?”