The BBC web site went all web 2.0, today. The best bit about the web
site is the analogue clock in the top right corner of the screen. It
looks just like the clocks they broadcast back in the 70s and 80s when
I was a kid.
I had the idea of adding gently simmered garlic to an omelette earlier today.I thought the softened tones of slowly cooked garlic would work really well with the eggs and cheese. I can report that it was great. Probably not suitable for breakfast as it takes too long to prepare, but it would be superb for a small lunch, with a green salad and a mug of strong tea.
The garlic doesn't dominate. It's a soft, background flavour, which lifts the meal from a boring cheese omelette to something different and tasty.
You will need
2 or 3 eggs, depending on their size
4 or 5 cloves of garlic, depending on their size
1oz of a mild cheese that melts well
1 knob of butter or shake of oil
1 pinch of salt
pepper to taste
You may want to add
2 soft bread rolls, slices of toast or warmed muffins
some chopped parsley
Method
Bring a small milk pan of water to the boil, add your peeled garlic cloves and simmer them until they are soft and change shape when pressed with a tea spoon.
Remove the garlic from the water and let it cool on a chopping board. Chop the garlic into small pieces and then smooth them into a paste with the flat of the knife.
Chop the cheese into small pieces that will melt nicely.
Crack the eggs into a bowl or glass and beat them gently with a fork. Don't beat them too much or you'll get lots of air into them and your omelette won't be able to support the weight of the cheese and garlic. You risk a pan with fried cheese stuck to it and a lot of time cleaning up.
Heat the pan so that it's warm enough to melt the butter but not much warmer.
Melt the butter and then add the egg to the pan. It will cook slowly so you will need to wait a little bit before adding then cheese and garlic.
When it has cooked enough that you can draw the edges into the centre you can dot the cheese and garlic all over the disk of egg. You may need to continue drawing the egg mixture into the centre. Frankly, it depends on how runny you like your omelette.
When you're happy that the egg mixture is mostly cooked, fold it so that you have a half-moon shape, leave it for 30 seconds, so that it can seal itself and then deliver the omelette to the plate (which might already be covered in bread of some kind).
Season the dish with salt and pepper. Garnish with the parsley if you like.
Europe must look for and invent its own George Washington, says Valery Giscard d'Estaing, who led the team that wrote the treaty of Lisbon. Giscard d'Estaing, who is best remembered for being renamed Discard Gitanes by Willy Rushton, is going to have a hard time finding someone to fit the role.
- George Washington led his rebel army to victory over Britain.
- George Washington presided over the convention that drafted one of the most effective constitutions in history.
- George Washington signed the Jay Treaty, which gave his new country a decade of peace with Britain and gave rights to native Americans.
War hero, statesman and peacemaker. A man who has consistently been ranked as one of the greatest and best regarded US presidents. Frankly, he's a tough act to follow and there's no-one in Europe that could ever hope to achieve anywhere near as much as Washington.
I'm sure that Discard Gitanes would love the reflected glory that a new George Washington could give him. A statesman of hist stature would no doubt be good for Europe but let's be honest, it's not going to happen.
I'm not sure what's happened to Expatica over the last year. They used to use spell checkers and even re-read what they wrote before hotting the "publish" button. But over the last few seasons they seem to have changed their methodology. I'm not sure if all their good staff left or they were sacked and replaced by Babelfish, but the quality seems to have gone.
I'm sure that this headline wouldn't have slipped through without a significant rewrite in the olden days.
As I waited to pay for my groceries this evening, I noticed that the young girl in front of me was just buying six bars of dark, organic chocolate. You go girl! Chocolate is made from beans and so 100g of chocolate presumably counts as one of your five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. Beans can only count as one portion, though, so I suppose she'll need to mix the chocolate with something else to get a well balanced meal.
I was buying something a little different, though. I noticed these vegetable caviar things a few weeks ago, tried one and decided I like it. They all seem great and so I'm having some griddled veggies with a dollop of these caviar things on the top. Mmmm.
Our whole building was evacuated earlier today. Initially we were told that there had been a gas leak and so we hung around in the cold for an hour, waiting for the fire engines and gas engineers to arrive. Nothing.
We went and got some juice and came back to find we were still locked out. So we went for some coffee, which turned into a lunch that was followed by a long walk around the block and a visit to a poncy paper shop.
About three hours after it began we were let back into the building and it took another hour for our telephone and Internet connections to be re-enabled.
It turns out that there was never any danger of an explosion and we were just evacuated because there was a power
What should be done to improve the situation in the future? In my opinion, if the building management evacuates us
into the cold of winter for more than an hour then they should have to serve hot chocolate and Kahlúa. If the evacuation happens during the summer then they should have to serve mojitos or chilled rosé.
Updated
When I got home I found that there had been a power cut at my apartment, which is about a mile away. It must have been a fairly major power cut to affect buildings so far away in such a densely packed urban environment.
Lord Kitchener famously called millions of young men into the trenches to die saving "plucky little Belgium" from the Kaiser. It was a tremendously successful poster and led so many men to their deaths that when the Americans joined the wholesale slaughter of WWI in 1917 they just copied the poster and Americanised it.
That leaves the option that Belgium may be preparing for a land invasion of Luxembourg, whose population is just one twentieth of Belgium's. Luxembourg's population is the world's wealthiest, according to Wikipedia. Frankly, the pillage is likely to be very good.
Nonetheless, I am opposed to any potential Belgian military action against Luxembourg. Luxembourg is a fellow member of both NATO and the EU and ought not to be used in this way.
This afternoon I popped out to get Filiz some truffles, as we're meeting for dinner in Madrid, tomorrow. While I was out I saw two posters that caught my eye. The first one initially struck me a romantic comedy for family pets, or something like that. But apparently not, a little searching and I've found out that it's a documentary about the role of love in the animal world. So, a combination of Sir David Attenborough and a Nora Ephron romantic comedy script then.
The other poster was far more disturbing. Obviously, it's intended to provoke though - and it certainly does - but I'm not sure it makes me want to be involved with whatever it is is being advertised.
