Kitchen disasters

A very quick update on challenge 10. I've been trying to expand my range a bit over the last month or so and have been having a go at cookies and flapjacks. These are supposed to be easy and as I've now been loaned a copy of "The Great British Book of Baking" endorsed by Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood of BBC fame I was pretty confident of making some quite nice things.

Unfortunatley even the King and Queen of TV baking can't stop me from making a bit of a hash of things the first time around (to be fair, the cookie recipies I tried weren't theirs, just the flapjack one).

Anyway the results can be seen below...........

Cookie attempt 1: chocolate chip cookies a little dry and doughy but ok (and a loaf of bread

on the right, which worked much better)

 

 

Cookie attempt 2: Crispy chocolate chip cookies - a bit too much sugar and they all merged into one big sheet - still got scoffed by the guys at work though.

 

 

Cookie attempt 3: crispy cookies take 2 - still spread out quite a lot but atleast they didn't all merge, still far too sugary for my liking.

 

 

Flapjack attempt 1: what a bloody mess! probably shouldn't have tried to make two different types in the same tray but was expecting it all to fall apart so easily - will see what's salvagable and take to work tomorrow.

 

Poetry

"The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese"
G K Chesterton

About a week ago I promised a blog post about poetry - I had big plans for reading a book of Poems cover to cover over the course of this week and then writing up the experience at the weekend. Fate has interveened and thanks to catching a bug on Monday I've had rather more time on my hands than I planned but also a lot less inclination to read a book of prose than I had thought I would.

I think it will help if I describe my first introduction to poetry when I was at school. I'm pretty sure we did read the odd poem when i was at primary and middle school but we only really started analysing them when I got to high school. My first impressions were " what a complete pile of crap!" though to be honest thanks to the efforts of the staff at Prudhoe County High I was turned off  all forms of english literature for years. When it came to choosing poems and novels for us to study the faculty had clearly got their heads together and thought "what is the most misserable and depressing collection we can assemble?" They clearly worked hard on this as my main memories of the texts we studied were..........

• Two books about missfit kids growing up in grim industrial towns - in each case novel ended with child having dreams shattered.
• A Seamus Heany poem about a hot summer/frogs and another one about drowning kittens (i'm really not joking here!).
• The Crucible - a play by Arthur Millar, dramatising the Salem Witch trials - where, suprise suprise, there was a miserable plot/ending (Laura has since told me that the play was wrtten as an allagory of McCarthyism - an important detail our english teachers neglegted to mention when we were studying it).

We did at least get to study one Shakespeare play (Romeo and Julliet) which made up for things a little bit but the whole GCSE experience turned me off any form of classic literature for the next decade. I have recovered from this a bit but my knowledge of poetry remains patchy at best.

Anyway, I've now started dipping into two books of poetry.... a Penguin anthology of Victorian Poetry and Rapture by Carol Anne Duffy (the poet laureate) both picked out by Laura at Tynemouth market a few weeks ago. So far so good, I've enjoyed some of the Victorian ones more than others, this makes sense with them being by a range of authors but the Carol Anne Duffy book is very easy to read and have enjoyed nearly all of it, this despite it being a collection of romantic poems - not something i thought i would have liked much.

Writting my own poem is still a long way off, and getting it published will be more difficult than i imagined (the evening chronicle does not have a poetry column!) but I'll report progress on this as it occurs.

 

my current reading list

A truth universally acknowledged.........

I've been working away on a few of the challenges (motorbike licence, new country to visit, poetry) in the last week, all research rather than action so have been drafting a post with my musings on poetry - to appear later i hope. However, this afternoon there was an incident which could/maybe have led to progress against challenge 2.

I'd just been to a bit of shopping and on my way home decided to drop into Blockbusters just to browse for 10 minutes. I bimbled round the place for a little while and was just looking at the TV box sets when one of the staff working there, probably wondering at my aimless perusal, came over to ask if I was looking for anything particular " i was just looking to see if you had the ITV adaptation of Pride and Prejudice" I replied. This was actually true - i recently completed reading the book (it only took me four years - long story), and had been chatting to Laura about adaptations on the big and small screen to be informed that the recent hollywood version is rubbish (i actualy quite enjoyed it) and that i should really try watching the TV one  (the one where darcy goes for a dip). "that was made in 1995" she replied, " it's fantastic but it is a little old and we're only a small shop so we don't stock it, i could order it if you like?". She was very excited to tell me about it - it's one of her favourite dvds and she's watched it loads of times, so we ended up chatting for quite a while about all things P&P - i also found out her name was Emma, she had an encyclopedic knowledge of actors, Jennifer Ehle is brilliant as Elizabeth Bennet, and she is sick of people asking her if Emma was her favourite Jane Austin novel (i hadn't asked this). As we were chatting i had a quick thought about challenge 2, the video store could be considered a strange place i suppose? and if this all goes wrong I can alway just join the 21st centuary and sign up to Netflicks!?

apparently you have to include a picture of Colin Firth in a wet shirt in any piece

about P&P, it's the law

So all was going swimmingly until the subject of Mr Darcy came up. Great, i thought, thanks to Laura's insistance on my finishing the book I can actual give and informed opinion on this! (big mistake). "Well, i think Mathew Macfadyen was excellent as Darcy in the movie - he did the shyness / arrogance thing really well!" From all smiles her expression suddenly hardened - "No - Colin Firth was the best Darcy and no-one else has ever come close!" . That seemed to finish the conversation - so i completed the order for mr firth's opus and left. Oh well, back to the drawing board on this one...............

much cooler- surely!?





p.s. please note - at no point in the conversation did i offer any sort of opinion about Keira Knightley! I have long ago learned that's always a bad move in situations like this!