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Yesterday Mike managed to get us two tickets to a football game, Arsenal vs. Burnley.  It is only the 2nd football (soccer) game I have been to while living here for 10 years, and this one wasn’t a pre season friendly game, but a deadly serious Premiership match.  We had great seats. Although in the top tier we were in the very first row, so we had a fantastic view of the game. Things were a lot more comfortable after I got over the feeling I should be getting vertigo!

A football match is quite different to a rugby match and it was a bit strange to see the away crowd completely segregated by seating, entrance, rest rooms, food etc.  I understand this is quite normal in football matches due to the tribal nature of the games supporters.  But I still find it very odd.  However, when Mike asked me to go to the bathroom just before half time I was like no way I am watching the away crowd rile the home crowd and then the home crowd retaliate. The away crowd seemed way more vocal than the home crowd and there must’ve only been about 1,500 of them, and the total crowd attendance was 60,043 (to put it in perspective that’s more than the entire population of Nelson or Napier).

It was an exciting match with lots of action, there were so many shots at goal. Arsenal won, but they did make very hard work of it… I am not kidding. They missed so many opportunities! I think they must’ve missed at least 10 easy shots and at least 6 of those were ones that should’ve gone in. Apparently they are currently missing a view strikers due to injury… Or something!

Would I go again?  Yes and next time I would take some more socks and a blankey as it was very cold.

Bec was away tonight, so I got to cook a bit of a treat for dinner. RED MEAT!

But rather than taking the easy option and just frying up a steak I went for a restaurant style recipe for a Indian style rack of lamb on spiced spinach with a moilee sauce from one of the recent recipe books we’ve bought. Good call! Really good call!

BURP!

Although there were a reasonable number stages to complete before I was able to chow down, being able to spread them all over about 4 hours made it all seem quite easy. All except the trimming of the ribs. THAT was a long, potentially lethal task. And I only had one set to do!

Would I make it again? You bet! If I had another set of ribs I’d make another plate now!

Bec, you don’t know what you’re missing! (But don’t go away too often….)

Another weekend away in Italy last weekend. This time we nipped off to see what we thought of Florence and Pisa…

Again it was a weekend of walking, but Florence appeared to be a lot more compact than Rome so the walking did not hurt the legs as much (but they still hurt a bit), either that or we have just gotten used to it.  Florence has some very cool streets to walk around and it has a nice feeling to it. The pizza’s are pretty good too.  But for dinner one night (when we didn’t have pizza) the chef had over done it on the garlic, so lets just say there we quite a few mints required the next day.

What we’ve realised now is that Italy really shuts down on Sundays! Like really shuts down! You’d think that there might be a tourist office open at least in Pisa, but no! Heaps and heaps and heaps of tacky souvenir stalls, but no info! But not many people around either, which was nice.

I think the highlight for me ended up being the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and I suspect that for Bec it was seeing the statue of David up close and personal.

Of course the picture we have posted is one of the two replica’s of the statue, as you are not allowed to take pictures of the real one.  This happened in Rome to when in the Sistine Chapel  – no photo! (though only in the chapel – pretty much everywhere else in the Vatican gallery it was fine)   How do we feel about that? Mixed feelings really I guess.  I get that they are not sure what the infra red light does to things, but I am also sure it is just so people have to buy a postcard or a souvenir of it! But the statue is quite impressive, and it did not disappoint. The detail is pretty fantastic. And the tower really does lean! I was expecting to be underwhelmed, but it was much more impressive than expected. Especially as I wasn’t expecting all the other buildings and square around the tower too.

Another random highlight for Bec was the dinky small electric buses that tootled around Florence. So cute!

Oh and the ice cream we had too was worth it, there’s something about Italian ice cream, it truly is probably the best in the world (well from the countries we’ve managed to sample from anyway).

This is one of our favourite  dishes lately. White chicken curry. YUM!

I think we’ve made it about four times now, including on New Year’s eve. As always with these sort of recipes,  each time has been slightly different, and never as good as the first time!

It’s got really nice, subtle, flavours, doesn’t take too much work or weird ingredients. Max points!

There’s quite a few other recipes in the same book that we’ve tried and liked too, but this one is the best so far!!

January is normally a long, cold, dark horrible month here. So we normally try to do something to break it up a bit. This year we decided to go have a look at Rome for a couple of days. Not that Rome would be tropical, of course, but at least it’s not London!  I’d been before, but Mike hadn’t. In the end we couldn’t have had better winter weather for it, dry, crisp and sunny on day one and warm and cloudyish on day 2 – just as well with all the walking that we did.

Highlights of day one, would have to be the Vatican and Sistine chapel.  The Vatican is such a grand building and it even had a very large nativity scene in it with its own working water wheel!  But the Sistine chapel, always impresses me with the amount of paintings and art within the building.  It was funny this time as they were not letting you take pictures,  however, they are not so good at publicising this so we managed to get quite a few before we realised!   The rest of the day we pretty much just kept walking around and taking in all the tourist sites, including Spanish steps, Trevi fountain, Pantheon and I am sure there are more!

By the time we got back to our hotel and sat our weary bodies down it was very hard to get back up again and set off on yet another walk to find somewhere for dinner.  Eventually we ended up back where I wanted to go from the start, but only after doing a few circles around the local area. But it was a final choice of Japanese (yes I know its not very traditionally Italian) but it was fantastic (if you are ever looking for a good place to go when there and fancy Japanese, go to Taki)!  All that was left after a big meal was to sleep well and recoup for tomorrow. When we started walking again!

Day Two – pretty much started by heading as far away from our main point of interest for the day – The Coliseum, and then the train station.  But it allowed us to get some more exercise and take in a few other tourist sites.  But the Coliseum was worth a visit even after standing in a massive cue to get in.  It really is a massive structure that is still quite well preserved.  Oh and the pizza slice we had for lunch from what was probably more of a local shop than a tourist one was fan-bloody-tastic.  We were just gutted we couldn’t find another shop later in the afternoon before having to leave so we could have another piece, hungry or not (of course we didn’t need it)!

What’s my view of my second visit to Rome? The first time (about 8-9 years ago) I had absolutely loved it and it had become one of my favourite cities.  Now I’m a bit undecided I think… Parts of it did not have the same ‘wow’ factor as I remember the first time did.  However, I think the first time I went I really had not been anywhere else (or maybe anywhere for that matter) within Europe with such history or buildings.  But I got more and probably better pictures due to the quality of camera’s nowadays.

Google Earth paths of our 2 days walks are here: Day 1 walk, and Day 2 walk.

You must have seen a movie or read a book or something where a computer or robot or something is brought to its knees by a seemingly simple logic puzzle or something.

Last night that happened to me. Making couscous.

You have to be a bit careful making couscous. It’s all to easy to end up with something that’s just all glug and no  crunch, or all too crunchy and inedible. Or too oily and yucky. For something so simple there are quite a few potential pitfalls. So it really pays to follow the instructions on the packet, as they really should know the exact quantities of stuff to get perfect results.

The packet instructions: “Allow approximately 45g of couscous per 80g cooked serving. Place 250g of couscous in a large bowl with 400ml of boiling and 1tbsp oil”…

Ok, so there were 2 of us, so we needed to have 90g of couscous, so that means we need, um some water, so half what they’re saying is, um, 200ml but that’s for 125g which is still too much for just 2 of us, so we need a bit less, so that’s um, oh I give up!!! My brain’s overheating! Where’s the spreadsheet?!

Why don’t they just give instructions with a nice figure for each serving?! It would stop my head exploding anyway!

But for the record, after a lot of head scratching, the final result was probably some of the best couscous that we’ve ever made, doing us proud for dinner and lunch today.

I ended up using 300ml of water. I’ll leave  it to you to work out how much cous cous that was!

My new ‘puter had been giving me bit of grief the last couple of days. It would lock up completely, or just shut itself down and refuse to restart for a while and all sorts of other crazy stuff. All the symptoms would normally have made me suspect that the CPU was overheating, but I ruled that out based on the fact that:

• the motherboard is meant to have a temperature sensor on it that beeps if there is an overheat;
• the desktop temperature gauges didn’t show any temps high;
• the CPU heatsink wasn’t feeling hot at all;
• there was no hot, burning smell coming from the inside of the box!

So I tried all sorts of other things to narrow down what else it could be. Taking bits out, changing all sorts of settings etc, etc, etc… No luck. Still freezing now and then.

Today I finally gave in and took the whole motherboard out and prepared to replace it with another lower spec spare. Just before I put the other one in, I noticed that one of the CPU fan corner clips wasn’t fully locked down. Clicked that properly into place, put everything back in the case and connected everything up, and voila! So far today it’s been a nice, stable machine again. Fingers crossed, but it looks like it’s all fixed now. So it’s entirely likely that it was a CPU overheat issue after all!

For a hint at the moral of the story, see the post title!

I have to say though that I am absolutely amazed that the box is still functioning at all! Only a couple of years ago if the heatsink was as loose as this one was today then there would be lots of smoke and burning smells coming from the case. It’s happened to me twice before. Indeed it’s how I managed to come by the need to get a new PC this time around. Modern CPUs and motherboards are obviously just incredible! I won’t be trying to push them too hard just to see what they can take though… Stable is good.

Thanks to Lennon and/or Kim’s comments on the previous entry we gave the cauliflower risotto another go last night. And it was yummy.

This time I even managed not to burn the anchovy and bread topping, so that was yummy too. (Last time we had to scrape it off and shove it far, far, far away from anything we wanted to eat)… We still got things just a bit wrong with the recipe as we assumed we knew what we were doing, but caught things just in time and managed to get back on track pretty quick. It helps if you read the whole recipe first sometimes!
Next time I must remember that if the food’s whiteish, use the blue plates though!

I guess that’s what they do. Or something very similar! We seem to have to have one in the fridge at all times anyway.

I can’t think of any other reason why we have to have one on call, slowly turning a weird kind of yellowy brown in the bottom of the fridge. But apparently it’s vital we have one. Even pointing out the fact that out of the 6 cauliflowers we’ve purchased in the last year we’ve thrown out 5 and a half didn’t stop one being added to the trolley in the supermarket….

What do you do with a cauliflower anyway?! I think it’s been almost decade since I cooked cauliflower cheese, or any of the more traditional cauliflower dishes. We’ve occasionally made a bit of a cauli curry, or cauli risotto that haven’t been too bad (especially the curry), but cauli hasn’t really been a kind of must have, store cupboard ingredient in my head at least.

But I’m determined that this one isn’t going to join the others in the great big rotting brassica heap in the sky. Or on the ground even. What it’s going to become I have no idea yet. I’ll try to remember to let you know. But in the meantime, if you have any great ideas, let me know. Please!

Because I know you’re dying to know, I can confirm that I now can indeed scan a CD, DVD or BD disc barcode and get any details I consider relevant.

You can breathe again now!

Now to work out what to do with the info!…