I always wondered why my middle name only had one ‘n’: now I know, it was to help us sell our house and save thousands of pounds.
When we were restoring our very nice mid-terrace Victorian house in Pontcanna a couple of years ago, the cleaning of the Bath stone revealed a name “Pendenis House”. Now we didn’t even know we had a name, or, it later transpired, that our street had changed its name either, but that’s another story. So when we decided to take on the estate agents and try to sell our house without their expensive help we decided to market it under the name pendenis.co.uk. And this week we’ve gone public and already have got a top Google ranking.
We actually launched the site late in August to avoid the dreadfully stupid HIPs scheme and had a few hits. But getting the last few pictures done took longer than we thought so we didn’t want to encourage an avalanche of enquiries ‘till now. If you need a nice house in this most fashionable of places then go see.
As well as saving money we also wanted to show the estate agents how to do it. You would have thought that for six or seven thousand pounds (top whack, cheap skates would do it for less) that you would get a web presence of some style and magnitude. Since we’re also trying to buy a house – even more difficult – we’ve had a stiff learning curve on what agents do – and don’t do.
Take pictures: in this age of digital technology you’d think they be doing movies by now. Oh no. (But then we haven’t either, thought it would be tooooo tacky!!) Four stills if you’re lucky. And don’t bother to tidy up or even make the beds (how gross can you get?) we’ll just take what’s there. And don’t worry about deception, they can’t have heard of Photoshop.
As for words: well it’s always been a source of fun to read estate agents’ particulars, but with so much legal stuff now they have become very, very boring. The measurements of rooms are laser accurate to a millimetre: “but we didn’t tell you about the motorway at the end of the garden?” Oops.
Spend so far? Nothing for the domain name ‘cos work buys so many (a perk a last); free web hosting ‘cos we have an iMac account; no expensive designer ‘cos we used iWeb (not great but ok for the job); £50 for a board; £135 for a house web site aggregator (backing all our options) at The Little House Company; and a few quid for the shop window posters. Say £200 max. The savings will buy a nice holiday.
PS No, I haven’t got hair suddenly, that’s himself, not me, posing as a sign pole.
Leek and potato soup with bits
It sounds like an oxymoron, cream of leek and potato with bits, but that’s how himself likes it: something to do with with childhood memories, which in his case ain’t so far away.
I’ve tried in the past to get to the blending stage and then to take out some of the cooked leeks and big bits of potato, chop them up and put them back in. It doesn’t really do it for me because they just end up mushy on reheating. A different technique is required.
First I cut most of the leek white off and sweated the rest in the pan. Then added some chopped potatoes and the home made stock from yesterday’s poached chicken, a handful of chopped parsley and seasoning.
All this took place in the giant steamer/spaghetti pot so there was plenty of space to lodge a large seive on the top, fill it with bite sized pieces of potato, and add the saucepan lid so the spuds could steam. Concurrently I gently cooked the chopped leek whites in a pan until they were sweet and sticky.
When the soup was cooked – 20 mins – so were the potato cubes. All that was left was to blend the soup, add some milk (cream would be better, but diet you know), put in the perfectly cooked spuds and leeks, and Voila, cream soup with bits.
It actually tasted better for the additional fried leeks and the cubed spuds made the whole thing very robust.
With cold roast lamb sandwiches, rather a good, doing the chores Sunday, lunch.
Retro fishpate with twists
Who – at least of my age – hasn’t made tons on smoked mackerel pate? And weren’t we so taken aback when they started doing fillets encrusted with pepper so that this good old sixties stand by could take on yet another life! All those cheffy variations too – adding fresh horseradish seemed positively cuisine minceur .. or not.
Fact is it’s good stuff, but it needs a bit of variation after fourty years. So I tried this one: the technique, as you all know, is simply to stuff the ingredients into the Magimix in order needing to be chopped. So start with some spring onions (half a red one would do nicely too) and a good handful of parsley (get of rid of the worst of the stems but don’t pick off every leaf – this is meant to be easy!); zapp. Pile in a box of philly like cream cheese (‘lite for us porkies) and a pack of smoked salmon pieces and two large or three smaller skinned smoked mackerel fillets (with peppers if you like). More zapp.
It should be spreadable, but with noticeable contents, not just a mush, so I use the zapp button rather than leave it to blend.
Put into brown dishes – yes, they have to be to be properly retro. If you are being posh and not dieting then there’s no doubt that a layer of clarified butter doesn’t do anything but good. Freezes great. But please, please don’t eat straight from the fridge …..
Mediocrity reigns when away
I spend a lot of eating time away from the kitchen and always wonder, “could I do better?”. Have to say the answer’s often a grumpy “Yes” and today was no exception.
Marooned in Taunton’s Holiday Inn – on the same car/park industrial/shopping/estate on the edge of the town as the Express by Holiday Inn – I had a least enjoyed the excellent pool. There didn’t seem much prospect of eating anywhere that wasn’t a
taxi ride away, and I have had not bad experiences at other HI’s including Bradford and Calais (well, I know it’s in France ….).
At least the blackboard of ‘specials’ suggested that some of it wouldn’t be boil in a bag, head office designed cooking. Wrong.
Ok, I chose ‘rough pate’ thinking no one can muck that up, and rough at least means it won’t be ‘Brussels Smooth and Pink’. Wrong. The three kinds of bread were interesting, but fridge cold. Butter, when provided, practically frozen. And the pate, well cold, tasteless and yes, Pink.
My chalky, handwritten special was described as “Whitby Scampi in a sweet and sour sauce on a bed of fragrant rice”. Now that sounds like a delicate enough thing, fresh pieces of scampi in a spicyish sauce with rice and a side salad.
Now imagine: a microwaved pile of rice that lost its aromatic qualities – if it ever had any – some time earlier; a pile of breadcrumbed fishy pieces of doubtful provenance – Whitby, not likely – deep fried to an inch of their existence; an even larger pile, a monstrous pile, of previously frozen peas; a tiny dish of sweet and sour sauce that had been zapped. And a typically thrown together side salad of wet lettuce, cold peppers and onions.
What’s to complain about? It was what it said – just. Each item was edible – just. It filled a hole – just.
So it didn’t meet my expectation, who’s fault’s that? Mine I suppose for imagining that £20 bought you a decent meal, not one that was just ……..
Could Wales be a world leader in computing for childrens’ learning?
Ok, so it’s not a new idea – one laptop per child, but in Wales it started to have political legs in February this year when Plaid Cymru announced it as policy. It hasn’t quite made it to the One Wales compact now they are in government, but perhaps it should, but with a twist.
I suggest that the Wales Assembly Government really think through this idea and connect together several important strategic goals:
- Wales wants to be a knowledge economy, creating wealth through ideas
- as a small country Wales can afford to be innovative in its policies, reaching out to parts where larger (eg the UK) governments fear to tread
- it could provide world leadership in the development of learning by children using ICT, developing skills amongst its teachers, software industries etc
- by supporting a world-wide programme to aid some of the most disadvantaged children it could be seen as a leading force for economic development in the third world
- it could actively support the EU policies designed to thwart the intellectual and technological stranglehold that Microsoft uses – often illegally – to cripple innovation and the development of ‘open software (see debate in UKParliament last week, and groan…).
All these things in one go? How?
Well, the famous One Laptop Per Child programme is designed to create a really low cost computer that can be used in the developing world. But this isn’t some crippled, hand-me down, second grade, or worse second hand, “not good enough for us, but ok for them” bit of opportunist commercialism.
No, it’s one of the most exciting pieces of technology around. It’s the iPod of computers for children, no less. Go see here.
One important aspect of the programme is that all the software being developed is open source, so anyone can help improve it. Much of those improvements could lead in other applications to commercial exploitation.
It’s designed, bottom up to be multi-lingual: well, that ticks the Welsh cultural box. And all the learning materials are being designed from scratch with the expectation that the work in one school will rub off on all the rest.
The founder’s original concept was that this idea should only be for the developing world. But it’s been a struggle – surprise, surprise – to get the volume of orders – it needs millions – to get it going. So next month Americans are being offered the chance to buy one of these extra-ordinary devices at a cost that will enable OLPC to make a free one for use elsewhere: at a price that’s still less than anything you can buy with Mr Microsoft’s stuff on it. It is called G1G1.
So: decide on OLPC for every child and young learner in Wales; create a learning infrastructure where our teachers, technicians, IT staff and developers are all part of a giant development hub; integrate learning with children overseas, share the experience of innovation with others, and benefit from theirs too. And, at one stroke, put Wales on the world map as a prime supporter of OLPC, not just in Wales, but worldwide.
The economic and learning paybacks could be immense.
The value in our children being part of a worldwide transformation of other childrens’ learning would be without price.
In the past Wales sent its teachers around the world (I had two Mr Davies’ in my London secondary school). They gave the country an enviable reputation for the quality of its teaching. Let’s do the same with OLPC.
The shame of food miles
From last week’s bargain shop a frozen half kilo box of prepared mussels for £1.25, all ready to reheat in their shells. The only problem – they were from New Zealand, half way round the world. And of course we have perfectly good mussels from just down the road in west Wales. So what price guilt?
In this case the only answer seems to be that we’ll go on eating them until they are priced in a way that makes us conscious of the real cost. There’s no way anyone can grow and prepare, package and ship these mussels 12,000 miles, and sell them at a profit for that price. £2.50, not likely; £4.50 maybe, but that would then make them competitive with local products so we might not buy them. In the meantime we just eat them.
I adapted an idea on the box: melted a large chunk of butter, added a couple of tablespoons of sweet chilli sauce, the juice of half a lemon, a finely chopped chilli, and a teaspoon of ready chopped garlic.
The mussels were placed in a single layer and the sauce spooned into each one. Under the hot grill for about eight minutes and ready to eat with a large salad and lots of bread to mop up the really delicious juices.
And the guilt?
Comfort pie and no work
It’s been a theme of the week, raiding the freezer, but then that’s what advance cooking and planning is all about.
So after a truly hectic day – all morning fighting a licensing application as the standard bearer for hundreds of residents opposing a 120 hour a week ‘social club’ extension, followed by a long telephone conference, a recording for a 30 sound bite for tv news, and then live radio for the drive home … phew I needed easy.
And I didn’t have to do anything, for which I was really pleased. The fish pie (previous appearance here) had defrosted overnight and was accompanied with steamed carrots and beans. And brown sauce of course.
Even the fruit salad was there, ready to eat. Perfect Friday. Plenty of time to think about cooking again at the weekend.
Observer status as beef stew hits home
A day rushing about ended by walking into a house filled with the smells of home cooking, for which I had not had to lift a finger. The day picked up no end!
In my absence a hearty beef casserole had been made from some really good looking chunks of English beef. I was too late to observe the work, so no recipe here, but what’s there to say about making a fine casserole? Leave yourself plenty of time so that cooking can be slow and easy, otherwise you just have to decide whether it is basically going to be based on a red wine and root vegetables mix, or perhaps more tomatoes and summer veg like peppers. Or, of course, a pragmatic combi of both if that takes your fancy, or you’re using up stock.
I was roped in to assist for a few minutes whilst a minestrone soup was being finished – cutting off the corn cobs and measuring the tiny pasta shells: these jobs I could be trusted with apparently.
Chilling down and boxing spares and leftovers was my job after we’d happily devoured the casserole – rich, tomatoey, and full of vegetables – with steamed potatoes.
Wrapping it easy
Turns out today was a double leftovers, so not much cooking involved, but non the less memorable for that.
We don’t normally do lunches together when I’m working – the office is just five minutes walk – as our body clocks don’t seem to say ‘food’ at the same times during the day. So my eye was caught by the two left over chapatis and the knowledge that there was leftover vegetable curry from last night. Wrap the two up and zap – scrummy indeed.
Supper, pasta and salad. Lazy is good.
Tuesday is Two Curry Night
Part of Monday’s mega shop had included bargain vegetables like okra and aubergine so a vegetable curry was well in mind. We stopped off at the Indian supermarket where they had run out of fresh coriander of all things, so it had to be a bunch of methi instead. We also got tinned chick peas, what turned out to be a great new pickle, and the odd spices we’d run out of.
The heart of the meal was to be lamb curry – yep, straight from it’s short rest in the freezer.
To go with it a vegetable curry of ochra, baby aubergines, a bit of onion and that can of chick peas. All the veg were put to sweat whilst I added some coconut milk to the base curry sauce that someone had already thoughtfully prepared from scratch. As soon as the vegetables were ready the sauce was sploshed on, the chopped methi and peas added and the whole left to simmer.
Even the rice had been precooked – seven portions of organic brown, white and wild rice mix, all ready for the freezer too. So all there was to do was to heat and eat: we just put a portion in a dariole dish and cling film for reheating in the microwave. The size of the dish btw helps avoid over large portions.
The ready made chapatis were unusually good, being reheated by placing directly on the iron heat diffuser we use on the cooker – a kind of mini griddle. The new chutney great. Plain yohourt to blob on and all is good.
