Author: jane

Ever since going to Calcutta, I’ve been experimenting with Indian cookery. I recently bought An Indian Housewife’s Recipe Book which has some great, and simple, recipes in it – current favourites are fresh spinach curry and also beef kebabs (which I use as burgers on the bbq). My only other Indian cook book is Indian Cooking Class which again has some tried and tested recipes in it. Today, Richard sent me a link to BBC – Food – Recipes – Indian essentials which seems to have some good background information, as well as links to some more interesting looking recipes to try one day.

An interesting article on This is Money today about a Cognitive Reflection Test. The questions are:

• A bat and a ball cost £1.10 in total. The bat costs £1 more than the ball. How many pence does the ball cost?
• If it takes five machines, five minutes to make five widgets, how many minutes would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?
• In a lake there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how many days would it take for the patch to cover half the lake?

I had a quick search around the internet, and discovered that I’d got 2 out of 3 right, but I probably wouldn’t have managed that in an interview situation. This might be the logic puzzles I was looking for to add to our interview pack.

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We took a cycle down to the Sand Sculpture Festival this evening. Nothing much visible from outside due to the high fences they’ve put around, but we did manage to get a glance from the main road. I’m sure we’ll head off during the summer sometime and pay the admission costs (£6 for adults, and £4 for children) to go and have a proper look around.

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Even after the activities of Thursday, we decided to go ahead with our plans to spend some of the weekend in London catching up with friends. We stayed overnight at Club Quarters Gracechurch street which was really pleasant – and somewhere I can see us returning to. We caught up with Neela, Ste, Ash and Mitül over in Greenford and got to visit both VB & Sons Indian supermarket (discovering all manner of new vegetables) and try some really wonderful Indian and Pakistani food at Five Hot Chillies in Sudbury (nominated for a 2005 restaurant award).

On Sunday, after a lovely stroll over to Tower Bridge, we headed off on the DLR and caught up with Suz and Greg over at their new place overlooking the Royal Victoria Dock in Docklands – a really spacious airy flat with a really relaxing view out over the water.

There are sand sculptures in Brighton apparently as part of a summer-long sand sculpture festival. I think we’ll have to head off down and take a look later in the week.

Update – found some better photos.

Kevan posted a link to an interesting MSG article from the Observer If MSG is so bad for you, why doesn’t everyone in Asia have a headache?. This is interesting, because I didn’t know that headaches are claimed to be a common symptom of eating MSG. I do get headaches when I’ve eaten too much (whatever, too much is) but a recent work meal at Cosmos, Tunbridge Wells left me with a headache and a slightly drunk feeling – and I hadn’t drank anything other than lemonade and water.

From the article: “Some of the names MSG goes under are:
monopotassium glutamate, glutavene, glutacyl, glutamic acid, autolyzed yeast extract, calcium caseinate, sodium caseinate, E621 (E620-625 are all glutamates), Ajinomoto, Ac’cent, Gourmet Powder.”

I’ve spotted E621 on a few things recently, and wondered if that was MSG as well…

I don’t really have anything to add to yesterday’s explosions in London. Neither Richard nor I were anywhere near the city yesterday but instead were safe and well in Sussex. At work we had Radio 5 streaming through the internet and like Jonathan we watched slow-loading news pages arrive through our browsers whilst emailing/texting friends and relatives to ensure their safety. Another day that won’t be forgotten in a hurry.

I’ve blogged before that I was supporting the London bid for the Olympics, so I’m amazed and delighted that London has won the 2012 olympics. How cool is that!

From del.icio.us/kevan an article about a photographer’s trip to Antarctica and some stunning photographs.

I’ve recently started listening to podcasts on my iPod Shuffle. I’ve been using iPodder to manage and download them, but the most recent version of iTunes manages them as well.

iPodder – is a separate application, but integrates with iTunes and creates a new playlist for each feed within iTunes. I can then just open up the playlist, and pick out the ones I want and move them onto the Shuffle.

iTunes – has a new option for podcasts, and has listed a lot on the music store. Subscribing is easy, and if you have a podcast you like but can’t find on the store, subscribing is as simple as copying the url into a browser window, and then dragging the url into the podcasts window (it took a while to work that out). iTunes doesn’t seem to put them into the main library, so instead I pick up the broadcast I want, and copy it onto the Shuffle.

For the moment, I’ll run with both and see which one works out better for me in the long run.