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As all of the chilli plants are still in a bit of a delicate state, what with still being infants and all, I try to keep a close eye on them.  Every 2 or 3 days I give each one a bit of a check up, making sure there are no little greeblies on them.  Over the last couple of weeks I’ve fond a couple and squished them, but nothing major.

But on Friday after checking all of the chillis I thought I  may as wel check the little coriander plants as well….

AAAARRRGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!! What’s the next biggest thing after “gazzillion”? That’s how many aphidy things were on both them.  There was almost no plant material visible, it was all pretty much little green bugs!  Sitting right by the chillis! So straight into an airtight sandwich bag with them, pots and all…

I’m not sure if it’s a case of good “companion planting”, but luckily the chillis still seem clear, as do the other corriander that has just popped up from seeds I planted about a week ago.

I’ll be watching closely though!

We have a bought a few new cookbooks lately.  Strangely enough more of them seem to be curry ones, for some reason! So as we’ve got them, we thought we better try a new recipe.  Today it was something from ‘Madhur Jaffrey’s Ultimate Curry Bible’. First recipe we have tried from it. Gets a huge thumbs up.  Nice and subtle, not purely based on heat, but just gentle and all round yummy!

It’s was also really easy to cook, but as the flavours are pretty mild they almost get lost with a bit of cumin seed rice that we decided to have with it.  They only gripe I have is that I got all the cardomom pods and some of the cinnamon stick.  What does that tell you, that Mike rigged it that way? (Only problem is that I dished up, so must’ve been unlucky as he got none!)

Would we give it another go?  I think so!

This week the parsley plant has taken a bit of a beating.  We used a fair few of it’s leaves for 3 nights in a row, but luckily it looks like it’s coping with that.

I have to say that when we were chopping  it up there was a yummy parsley smell in the kitchen that we’ve just not had with the bought bags.. Now if the coriander would just get a bit of a wriggle on, we’ll be able to see if that does the same.

Apologies for the photo.  This was taken when we first used some, but it has needed some serious tweaking due to some sunlight issues at the time…

This morning I’d decided to give up on the sweet peas I’d planted the other week.  Mainly because I’d kind of decided that the pot that I’d planted them in would perhaps be better used for more herbs or something else that we could eat, rather than something merely colourful.

And just when I’d told my sister this on Skype I went out and checked the pot. And guess what. The first sweet pea plant had decided to poke its head up overnight!

Hey, ho. I guess colour it is then. I guess the edibles will have to go in some of the other pots that we’ve got stacked up.

Oh, and we seem to be able to grow parsely pretty well!  Hopefully the plant that’s now doubled in size since we planted it (it’s bigger in real life than it looks in the photo, honest!) will see us though the year…  Let’s just hope the coriander catches up soon!

The credit crunch or whatever you want to call it seems to have had a bit of an impact on the available supply of Guinea Fowl, or something.  The supermarket by work has them on special at the moment, so I thought we’d give one a go to see what they’re like.

So waddaya do with them?!  Only thing I seem to recall seeing reasonably regularly is piri-piri spatchcock Guinea Fowl, so thought I’d give that a go.

With a bit of help from some instructions for the internet, the spatchcocking actually went pretty easily.  The kitchen shears/scissors that we’ve inherited that can’t seem to cut anything else seemed pretty much at home chomping though the bones.  I was impressed! And I’d like to think I managed to do a pretty good job of it too!

Now to see what it tastes like when it finally finishes cooking…

The Register tech news site has been a great saviour for me, getting me through many a dull hour at home and work, but I think it has now indirectly made my brain explode.

One of the running stories on the site has been the continuing saga of the International Space Station urine recycling plant, and how it hasn’t been working that well so far. One thing they keep mentioning in the stories is how the station can obtain fresh water at the moment from the space shuttle’s fuel cells while it’s visiting.  My curiosity finally got the better of me tonight (might have something to do with having worked at home all day, in combination with Bec beign out tonight for a work function) so I thought I’d do a bit of internet research into this.

The first link I visited,  “Fuel Cell Power Plants On The Space Shuttle Orbiter” was more than enough, I think.  By the time I got half way through the second page, “For redundancy, there are two thermostatically activated heaters wrapped around the discharge and relief lines to prevent blockage caused by the formation of ice in the lines. Two switches on panel R12, fuel cell H 2 O line htr and H2O relief htr , provide the flight crew with the capability to select either auto A or auto B for the fuel cell water discharge line heaters and the water relief line and vent heaters, respectively”… I knew I was in trouble. Brain. Exploded.

I did keep reading though to see if it changed gear again to something slightly more… er… accessable, but no. I’m not quite sure why I put myself through the last 2 pages at all, except sometimes when you start something you’ve just got to finish, no matter what the pain.

So now I think I knew more than I did earlier in the evening, but I’m not quite sure what, and what use it is unless I get stuck on a shuttle and the yellow fuel stack temp C/W and the backup C/W alarm lights on panel F7 start lighting up.

Kids, you might want to think the whole astronaut thing through a bit more…

P.S. To give you some idea about why I follow the Register, their related headline was: New ISS piss-recycler still troublesome – Sweat and tears only for parched astronauts. Class!

For the last few weeks I’ve been trialling internet life using a “feed aggregator”.  What’s that?  It’s where a little utility runs away to all the web sites I look at regularly and grabs the headlines from them and alerts me to the fact there’s new stuff there and what it is.  It’s related to the Firefox live bookmarks I blogged about way back in 2006 (?!).

Now that’s great, and very useful, but it’s also made me realise just how much time I used to “waste” going to sites to look for new stuff when there’s actually nothing new.  Possibly like a few of you regular readers do with this site!

I have no idea what to do with that time! Well, that’s not true.  There’s a lot I could do , but browsing was a good way to aviod it.  No excuses now, I guess!

Or maybe just one fewer…

Yesterday I had a second call from an Indian sounding gentleman trying to tell me that he knew that my computer was running slowly and needed to be fixed. And he had something to do with providing “Microsoft services” (huh?!)…

“Oh yeah, right”, I thought,  “I’ve got nothing to do at the moment, so let’s see where this goes….”

Turns out he know my surname and address, but nothing else that would make his story even remotely plausible to me as something of a relative computer expert, but I could imagine others that don’t quite know as much being suckered in. He spoke in kind of technobabble that made no actual technical sense but might have almost sounded right to an untrained person. But he was very persistent in talking absolute rubbish. Long past where I thought he would have realised that I’d made him as a very dodgy caller indeed.

I dug around on the net afterwards, and the only references to the outfit, apart from their own website (which I wasn’t prepared to visit for safety reasons) were either on a whole lot of self-published press release sites, or on tech forums telling of how people had been ripped off by them.  And they seem to target anywhere around the world. Aussie, UK, Canada, the US. Anywhere.

I’m not willing to put the company name here, as I’m pretty sure they have related people searching the net for references to them and bizarrely trying to post a “oh wow this company helped me oh so much they were just great” message right in the middle of a whole stream of people proving just how much of a scam it all is.

So if you get a call like that, ignore it.  Or ask me first!! Don’t visit any site they ask you to, don’t give them your credit card details (duh!), and don’t type anything into your computer.

It’s all just a scam, but a clever, worrying one.

The worry levels have still been slowly rising this week as the remaining two empty rows in the planting tray have remained stubbornly empty of any little green things.

Until today.  A solitary Fresno plant has poked its head up.  Just need a couple of its mates to do the same for safety…

We’ll see if the Pimentos de Padron follow suit soon. They should do, if only out of embarrassment that they’re so late to the party.  After a slow start there are now 5 Prairie Fires up now too.

And on another related note, we went on a big expedition to a garden centre somewhere almost out of town and managed to grab a couple of tiny coriander plants and some little capsicum plants too.  Hopefully we can get that all settled and growing too.

I’m starting to have no idea of where anything else is going to fit!

Today I wanted to be posting my ‘just finished my half marathon’ entry…..  But I have disappointingly been sidelined by a calf injury.

I was really looking forward to running this one, and I can’t say I’ve ever been really looking forward to running a half marathon before  (have completed 2 already).  I had also never felt more ready to run one, as I have done quite a bit of training to get me there, and, it was going to be a marker as part of my training for the marathon.

So now I’ll have to sit around and take it easy for a few days to rest before I can get back in training. Problem is I only have 6 weeks to go till marathon day, but, that’s the one I really need to be injury free for!