Crunched

I've been shocked and appalled by the price of things these days. After not really eating for three months, and not buying groceries during this period, I have returned to the world of supermarket shopping to be truly horrified by the escalating cost of living.

Here are some frexamples:

Antiperspirant: was £1.96, now £2.96

Chopped tomatoes: were 24p a can, now 33p a can

Lean minced steak (250g): was £2.19, now £2.69

I can't think of anything else, I never really look at the price of stuff, but those things really stick out.

All I can say is, fucking hell, things were much cheaper when I was starving myself.  But not as much fun, obviously.

I've now rekindled my fondness for messing about in the kitchen and seeing what I can make from my cupboard that includes the staples: onions, garlic, chilli, ginger, chopped tomatoes, chick peas, olive oil, herbs, spices, pasta (a variety), rice.  It's not surprising that I'm a whiz at dishing up a red sauce for pasta and chick pea curry.  Nice though.

I should be more adventurous, I have the skills.  I've threatened my good friends Taz and Pig with a lasagne.  It's not really a threat, my lasagne is usually fuckin' delish, even if I do say so myself.  Based on Mum's recipe, which she stole from a genuine Italian woman, so it's authentic and everything.  I even do a veggie version for my friends that uses Quorn instead of minced steak and it goes down a treat with them, and me.  Apart from the first time I made it....

Take yourselves back to the summer of 2000.  I was having a bit of a rough time of things for one reason or another and my dear friends opened their home in Leeds to me most weekends so I could spend some time away from the solitude of my life in Sheffield.  We did normal, boring things, like doing a bit of gardening, sitting in the sunshine, cooking, watching TV, smoking... lots of smoking.

One day me and David decided to make a lasagne together.  The red sauce was made and it was time to get on with the bechemel - easy peasy, I'd seen my mum do this a million times and it looked a doddle.  Using her method, I warmed milk in a pan and made an emulsion from cornflour and cold milk.  At least I thought it was cornflour, but I couldn't be sure because David had a habit of taking the labels off everything, it had the right powdery consistency, so I went with it.  The warmed milk was added to the flour/milk emulsion and returned to the heat to thicken.  Only it didn't.  So more flour emulsion was added without much success.  I found some different flour and tried that and it thickened a little bit, so I went with it - adding grated nutmeg, salt, pepper, mozzarella, parmesan, etc, etc.  The dish was assembled and cooked and we sat down to eat with the summer sun still relatively high in the evening sky, shining through their dining room window where it emanated a warming yellow glow.

We each took a mouthful of our meal, paused simultaneously and looked at each other with puzzled expressions on our faces.  Speaking over each other, the three of us uttered the words "Does this taste a bit sweet to you?".

So the moral of this story: don't take the labels off things in your store cupboard; icing sugar doesn't half look like cornflour to the clinically depressed.

Fag patches

Following my short-lived attempt to give up smoking back in October, I have decided that the time is right to make a proper effort at weening myself off the delightful weed and today, I am wearing a fag patch.

Apart from itching like a bastard and nearly falling off after just ten minutes, things have settled down and I've been OK today.  On a day when I have been looking at spreadsheets from the comfort of my own home, a day when normally I'd have been chain smoking to get me through the boredom, I've not wanted one.  Well, of course I've wanted a cigarette, but I've decided that I'm not going to have one, so I've been OK.

The problem with being a bored smoker as opposed to an addicted smoker is that nicotine patches don't really do much to substitute the punctutation of your day that smoking a cigarette affords.  Instead though, the slow and constant release of nicotine provides a different type of punctutation in that you find that you nearly shit yourself every hour, on the hour.

I'm looking forward to going to bed wearing my 24hr patch.  It'll bring nightmares and much grinding of teeth, and possibly a few emergency trips to the en suite.

All part of life's rich tapestry.

Yackety Yack

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