Grocery shopping K-E stylie

We first started buying our groceries online when we didn't have a car and it was hassle getting our shopping back to the flat. Although we have a car now, we still do the bulk of our shopping on-line.

Our local Sainsburys is quite big, but at the weekends (esp Saturday mornings) it is packed and you spend half your time manouevring around other peple's trolleys. Also I can think of better things to do at the weekends than push a trolley around a supermarket.

This morning our Sainsburys shopping arrived.

I used to get annoyed because they use so many carrier bags (a pack of butter in a bag by itself!) but now the delivery driver will collect bags for recycling so it's a bit better.



Food!

Yes, we eat too many ready meals :)

I don't usually buy meat from the supermarket as we have is a good free-range butcher nearby. We also tend to buy vegetables weekly, so they are fresher.

Mr K-E is still trying to kick his coke habit.









Assorted bread products.













I had a weak moment when I was ordering the shopping...

We don't normally order crisps, honest.








We get our other household goods at the same time.











This delivery cost £108 (including £5 delivery charge). Yup, life in London is expensive.

Poetry that makes me smile.

You know you are busy when it gets to Thursday and instead of thinking - great, two days to the weekend, you think - oh crap, why isn't there another day in the week?

Haven't done anything blog-worthy so I thought I'd share one of my favourite poems with you:

Candy
Is dandy
But liquor
Is quicker

(Ogden Nash)

No silly emo teenage poems about "being alone in a crowd/misunderstood genius/streaming petals in the wind" etc for me. Well, I guess we've all been through that the-world-is-against-me stage, but it wears off by the late teens I think. I cringe when I think of my teenage "journal", complete with deep thoughts about love and Erasure song lyrics. ('m really showing my age now, hahaha, Erasure!)

Ogden Nash is great - here's another one of this poems and Mr K-E's favourite:

The Wombat

The wombat lives across the seas,
Among the far Antipodes.
He may exist on nuts and berries,
Or then again, on missionaries;
His distant habitat precludes
conclusive knowledge of his moods.
But I would not engage the wombat
In any form of mortal combat.

He has written lots of long poems too, but obviously I can't type them all out and besides you have to choose your own favourites. Look them up here and here.

I can't resist another one:

Common Sense

Why did the Lord give us agility
If not to evade responsibility?

The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl

Excellent language and the narrator's "voice" really draws you in, but any interest is killed off by the boring plot. Nothing happens for vast stretches of this book. Zzzzz.

I finally got the end of this book, and it wasn't easy. Matthew Pearl has taught literature at Harvard and Emerson College, and it shows. I found myself re-reading phrases or paragraphs, simply because I really enjoyed the "voice" of the narrator. It's just a pity that his plotting is not as good as his use of language.

Quentin Clark is a handsome, wealthy, young attorney living in Baltimore in the 1850s. He has a stereotypical faithful best friend, a lovely-yet-chaste fiancee and he lives in a big house inherited from his loving parents. So far, so vanilla. Quentin is also a bit of an Edgar Allen Poe fan and starts corresponding with the poet, in the hope of one day meeting his much-admired hero.

However, in respectable society Poe is considered a bit of a dodgy poet/writer, penniless and an embarassment to his relatives. So when he turns up dead in mysterious circumstances, the newspapers of the day tut-tut and say I told you so.

Our narrator Quentin witnesses Poe's funeral (although he does not realise who it is at the time) and this triggers an obsession into finding out what actually happened during Poe's last days. Quentin, outraged by the insulting obituaries printed in the newpapers and other journals, is determined to clear Poe's good name. He soon becomes obsessed with the idea that Poe's character Dupin (a kind of French Sherlock Holmes) is based on a real person. And who else is better to solve the mystery of Poe's last days than the great Dupin himself?

OK, that's main thrust of the book. There are complications along the way - for example Quentin comes to the conclusion that the logician Auguste Duponte is the real Dupin, but another man, the flashy Baron Dupin, comes forward to claim that he, in fact, is Poe's fictional Dupin.

One of my problems with this book is that the plot is not that interesting. Is it Duponte or Baron Dupin, who cares? And since their detective work consists of reading newspapers and speaking to a succession of stuffy relatives and politicians, it was hardly exciting stuff. The most interesting character is Bonjour, Baron Dupin's murderous wife; Quentin himself comes across as being rather weak and easily led. In his obsession, Quentin neglects the other aspects of his life eg he abandons his job, neglects his family's investments and seems to forget about his fiancee. Frankly, I thought he needed a good kick up the backside.

There's some attempt to make the story more interesting by throwing in some suspicious French villains, a side-plot regarding the American Bonapartes and their attempts to claim rights of succession in France. I thought this was the weakest part of the book actually.

My other problem is that no-one really knows what happened to E.A. Poe, so it's mostly conjecture anyway. When I'm reading books like this, in the back of my mind, I'm always thinking - did that really happen, or did that the Author filling in the blanks? And it's never satisfying when you get to the end because unless you are a time-traveller or someone unearths some long-forgotten testimony, we will never know. OK, OK, I should know what to expect from a book like this, but damn, it seems I never learn.

According to the historical note at the end of the book, Edgar Allen Poe's death is one of the great gaps in literary history and there are original discoveries worked into the book that have never been published before. Whatever. I'm just glad it's over.

(Read more reviews here)

I'm reading Augusten Burroughs' Running with Scissors next. I haven't watched the movie, but the book is supposed to be good.

Run if you see Arnie.

British Skynet satellite launched

The British military's Skynet 5A satellite has been launched into space from Kourou in French Guiana.

The spacecraft is part of a £3.2bn system that will deliver secure, high-bandwidth communications for UK and allied forces.

Holy cow! Look what I read on the BBC website!

Skynet? As every movie fan knows, SKYNET is the military computer system that becomes self-aware and leads to the nuclear holocaust in the Teminator movies. Anyone who isn't a movie fan can read about it here.

But... but... there is actually a military satellite system called SKYNET? OMG! I had better start stockpiling tinned food and Evian now.

Sunday Lunch : Pleasant Pheasant

It's been a gluttonous weekend. Thai food on Friday night, giant burgers on Saturday and traditional (i.e. big) Sunday lunch today.



I started off early this morning with some of the ham that Mr K-E brought back from his snow boarding trip. Oh, it just melts in the mouth....







It's been a while since we have had a roast dinner, so today I thought I would perform the "good wife" routine and cook Sunday lunch. Yes, pheasant! Hahaha, I am a "good wife"! (Mr K-E's parents brought us a pheasant when they visited two weeks ago. They live in the countryside and often get given pheasants by their hunting-shooting friends.)






It's terrible how spoilt we are by supermarket culture. The pheasant had been plucked, hung and cleaned, but I was quite disgusted because it still had a few feathers on it and it was "bleeding". I remember my Mum killing chickens at the back of our house - I think if I had to kill and clean a chicken myself, I would quickly turn vegetarian.





I had to ask Mr K-E to singe off the long hairs that still remained on the bird.








I have eaten pheasant before but I have never cooked it myself so I looked online for some tips first. Apparently you need to add lots of butter or other fat to the pheasant to keep it moist during roasting as it doesn't have a lot of fat itself. So I pushed knobs of butter underneath the skin which seemed to do the trick.



When I cook roast chicken, I normally stuff the cavity with lemon wedges, onions and bruised garlic cloves; I thought it would work well with pheasant too. Then we just placed the bird onto a roasting pan surrounded by potatoes (semi-cooked already), carrots, onions and mushrooms. Add lots of salt and pepper, a squeeze of lemon, a drizzle of olive oil and then into the oven for 60-70 minutes.




While that was going on, I made gravy with the pheasant's heart and liver. I fried a chopped onion in butter, and added the heart and liver (also chopped up). Add some flour to thicken, plus chicken stock, a bay leaf, some lemon juice, salt and pepper plus a little bit of sugar. When the pheasant was cooked I also added the pan juices to make the gravy extra yummy. Mr K-E doesn't like "bits" in his gravy, so I strained it. Home-made gravy is delicious.




Ta da- Traditional Sunday lunch. Mr K-E says that my roast dinners are the best, better than anyone else's. Awww, thanks honey.



I still had room to squeeze in some ice cream with caramel sauce.


Then to complete the great tradition of Sunday lunch, we are now collapsed on the sofa watching Sunday evening TV.

Burgers and Buggies

It's Saturday night and I am bloated. We had lunch at the Gourmet Burger Kitchen and oh, I am still so stuffed. I had the bacon and avocado burger while Mr K-E went for the classic cheeseburger plus mushrooms. Mr K-E loves burgers - especially the "gourmet" burgers from places like Hamburger Union and Ed's Diner. It's not cheap, but the meat is lovely (Aberdeen Angus scotch beef) and portions are very generous. Mr K-E says it was the tallest burger he had ever seen.

After lunch we had a stroll around our neighbourhood to try and walk off the lunch, but instead we ended up in Cafe Nero.

It is unbelievable how many little kids and buggies there were in Gourmet Burger Kitchen! Mr K-E was not impressed by over-excited children running around screaming but I didn't mind. :)

All the yummy mummies were out with their trendy husbands showing off the latest in pushchair technology.

A good friend with kids told me that the mothers in our neighbourhood can be very competitive when it comes to baby accessories. It's not about the latest handbag anymore, but who has the most expensive buggy or baby changing bag. I was amazed to find out just how expensive these buggies are - £600 is a reasonable price apparently! What!?? That's more than our car is worth, hahaha.

Getting rid of more stuff....

Mr K-E is in a bad mood because he is getting rid of his computer stuff - i.e. old bits of computers stored in his "den". It's all part of the plan to sell our flat in the summer and move somewhere bigger.

Anyway, he is stomping around, destroying old hard drives and generally being grumpy. I sympathise; I hate throwing stuff away too.

Look at this old ATARI, still in its original case. I think you can buy them on Ebay for about £2.50, so hardly an investment piece. He is putting it out for the council to collect tomorrow, along other assorted computer parts.