Category: Food

Recipe Time!

Today I’m going to share my (well, KLS’s) recipe for french fries, aka ‘chips’. Here’s a preview: 

 
To start, grab a couple of these: 

 
Wash and cut them then soak them submerged in water for 20 minutes. 

 
Take them out, dry them off and they’ll look like this: 

 
Now things get interesting. You’ll need to get your hands on a fancy-shmancy ‘air fryer’ like this one KLS got for Christmas: 

 
Put the chips in the drawer, sprinkle with a tiny bit of vegetable oil, salt and pepper like so: 

 
Close it up, set for 20 minutes and walk away. Here’s when you play with a cat, or complete a few levels of P&D, or even do a quick blog post. Before you know it: 

 
Delicious! 🙂

Spaghetti a la Supertaster

Over five years ago I introduced the world to my personal spaghetti recipe. Since then I’m sure you’ve all been wishing I’d given more detail and today I’m happy to oblige!

I present therefore the step-by-step pictorial recipe for my delicious version of spaghetti bolognaise!

  
Start by cutting about 1/3rd of a yellow onion into small pieces. 

 
Sweat the onion in a light sprinkle of oil. If it gets clear (or even worse brown) you’ve gone too far!! You’ll want to put a big pot of water on high heat now as well for the pasta.

 
Add half a pound of 93% ground beef. 

 
Stir it up with the onions, and cook on medium heat until it looks like this: 

 
Have a nibble at this point. If it’s delicious and meaty you’re on the right track! 

 
Next you want to add a single beef stock cube and stir it in. Let it simmer for a minute or so and taste it again. Unless you’ve ruined it, it should taste a bit like Vegemite now. 

 
The water should be boiling now, so put in a decent portion of spaghetti. The exact amount is up to you, but you’ll want to have enough so you won’t be sad but not so much you’ll get fat! Leave the spaghetti cooking and return to the meat. 

 
Open a small tin of tomato paste and remove a small amount. There are two important notes here: the paste has to be unflavoured, and you need to add less than you expect! It’s more for colour than flavour! 

 
Stir it in well until it looks like this: 

 
And last but not least, add a pinch of salt, ideally from a Rilakkuma shaker: 

 
Now cover it and let simmer on low heat while the spaghetti finished cooking. It will look like this once it’s al dente

 
Everything is ready! The recipe is enough for two portions, so plate half the meat and pasta with style… 

 
And enjoy with an adult beverage: 

 
This is an easy to prepare meal with a refined and manly taste. The delicate blend of salty and salty tastes is sublime to those with the unique palette of a supertaster and I’m sure if you give it a try you’ll enjoy it as much as I do 🙂

Summer In Berlin

I’m been experiencing the ennui of one not on an overseas vacation, so it’s time to remedy the situation. Therefore, with great pomp and ceremony, later this week we will be going to Germany!

neuschwanstein-castle

This is of course no sudden decision. This trip has been in the late-planning stages for some weeks, the early-planning stages for a couple of years and the distant-planning stages for a lifetime. I do of course have Teutonic blood in my veins, and it’s time to return to das Vaterland and reclaim my throne!

But this is no solo trip! I will be traveling with a company of four others: Kristin, Bernard, Jim and Alois. Starting and ending in Frankfurt, we’re going to do the whole country in style together – from castles to beer-houses – wearing our German last names (yes, even Jim) with pride. Here’s our route:

Screen Shot 2015-07-27 at 8.17.26 AM

Very little is planned! We’ve booked out hotels and our trains, as well as a coach trip to Castle Neuschwanstein (in the picture above), but the rest of the adventure is an open book. I suspect there’ll be a lot of this though:

german_food

I estimate there will be about 24 hours in total of rail and coach transport during our two week trip. To keep morale high as we ride the rails, I have prepared a ‘German Travel Quiz’ for Bernard. 25 fiendish trivia questions in five topics await him! He only has to score 60% per topic to win up to five prizes, but if he loses he will forsake his ‘escrow prize’ (in other words, I’ll keep it). If he gets at least 60% on every quiz he will win the ultimate prize, but if he fails even once he’s going to give me his handheld computer from the 1980s. Maybe. We’ll see 🙂

German-Trains-will-run-on-Renewable-Energy-by-2050-2

This promises to be a memorable and epic vacation. Needless to say you can – and should – follow our travels here on this very blog!