Month: April 2009

Cage 0, Mouse 2.

Posted on By admin

Remember Stumpy/Houdini/Pickle? She has sadly buggered off. How she managed it, I don’t know, but she has escaped from a completely enclosed and seemingly secure cage. Twice.

The first time was when we first decided to keep her and Katy went to Scottsdale to buy a cage. After setting everything up on the kitchen table, we put her in and shortly thereafter noticed that she was sitting in our fruit bowl grooming herself while sitting on an apple. After a bit of fun trying to catch her and put BenBen to bed at the same time, we borrowed a glass aquarium and put her in there until she got big enough to stay in the cage without being able to slip through the bars.

Last weekend, we put her in the cage again – mistakenly thinking that since she’d doubled in size, the bars would be able to keep her in. We were wrong. We hadn’t seen her moving around the cage for a few days yesterday so we decided to have a closer look. She was nowhere to be found :( Somehow she managed to squeeze through the bars and climb (or fall) down the wall shelf where the cage was. The cats haven’t been going batshit so she’s either hiding/dead somewhere well out of the way or she’s managed to make it back outside.

Godspeed to you Houdini, wherever you are, and watch out for the cats.

uncategorized

Holy crap, I’m British!

Posted on By admin 3 Comments on Holy crap, I’m British!

I’ve just received a phone call from the lawyer handling my immigration case. I am now officially British†. I’ll shortly be getting my certificate of naturalization, with which I will be able to apply for a full British passport. YAWP!

This means, of course, that more money needs now leave my poor, depleted account. We’ve just this morning transferred close to £37,000 to our solicitor to cover the house deposit and all the various fees that are the last step before the contract exchange, and then the house is ours.

Egads!

† Conditionally on calling up the Cambridge registry office and setting up an appointment to take an oath to the Queen, of course :)

uncategorized

Profiteroles

Posted on By admin

profiteroles!

Choux Pastry
75g butter, cubed
115g plain flour
3 medium eggs, beaten

Whipped Cream
1 vanilla pod, split
500ml double cream
3 tsp icing sugar
Cointreau, to taste

Chocolate Sauce
100g dark chocolate
15g unsalted butter
3 tbsp milk
Cointreau, to taste

Method

1. First make the choux pastry. Put the butter into a medium saucepan with 200ml cold water and bring to the boil, melting the butter. Once it has melted, tip in all the flour and a pinch of salt, then remove the pan from the heat. Using a wooden spoon, beat the mixture really well for about 20 seconds until it comes away from the sides of the pan and forms a ball. Leave to cool completely. You can transfer it to a bowl if you want to speed things up.
2. Preheat the oven to 200°C, gas mark 6. Once the pastry mixture has cooled, start beating in the eggs, a little at a time, until it is shiny and of reluctant dropping consistency. You may not need to add every last drop of the egg to reach this stage, so stop when it gets to the correct consistency. To test this, scoop some of the mixture onto your spoon: it should need a small nudge before dropping off and falling back into the pan. If it needs a flick of the wrist to help it slide off the spoon, then you should beat in a little more egg.
3. Line the baking sheets with the parchment. Pipe 20 walnut-sized blobs onto the sheets, spaced evenly apart or spoon them out and smooth into balls with a wet finger. Bake on the top shelf of the oven for 30–40 minutes. However tempted you are, do not open the door until at least 25 minutes have passed. The profiteroles should appear golden-brown; also, tap them to see if they are firm – they should sound hollow. Once ready, remove them from the oven and, using a skewer, make a hole, big enough to take the 7mm piping nozzle, in the side of each one. Bake for 5 more minutes to dry out the insides, then cool on a wire rack.
4. While the choux pastry is in the oven, make a start on the cream. Scrape the beans from the vanilla pod into a pan with the cream. Sieve in the icing sugar and whisk until strong peaks form. Chill it in the fridge until ready to use.
5. To make the chocolate sauce, first chop the chocolate. Using a double boiler, melt chocolate, butter and milk until smooth. Be careful to not scald the chocolate.
6. To assemble, fill the piping bag with the thick cream and squeeze a little into each bun. Don’t fill them any more than 2 hours ahead: they’ll go soggy if left standing for too long.
7. Pile up the profiteroles in a dish and pour over the hot chocolate sauce.

uncategorized

State of the Richard

Posted on By admin

Lots of things happened in the past week.

My folks came for a visit, which was excellent. They spent a week on this side of the pond, mostly cooing at the Benster. Katy and I managed to have some us-time and spent more money than we should have at Ikea, buying new furniture for the house, and going to see The Boat that Rocked at the cinema. I highly recommend the movie, it’s a blast.

BenBen’s cold took a turn for the worse near the end of the folks’ visit. He’s normally a very chilled out and happy baby. Not these days. He’s a cantankerous snot monster that refuses to eat anything. He went from eating around 35 oz in a day to anywhere between 15 and 20. He just does not want to eat. He’s usually a good sleeper in the night as well, but the last few days have been trying. On Sunday, when he hadn’t had anything significant to eat for his last two feeds of the day, he had a complete meltdown from 4pm and we had to just put him to bed at 6pm. He was exhausted and just didn’t want to do anything but scream and go to sleep. We thought that he’s be wailing down the walls in the middle of the night – because he’d hardly eaten anything – but it turns out that he had a decent night. He woke up around 3 am in a coughing fit, but managed to put himself back to sleep with a minimum amount of fuss. I, on the other hand, hardly slept that night. I was so worried that he’d be waking up that I was dreading it and ended up sleeping at most 5 hours that night, in fits and bursts of 30 minutes here and there.

We took him to the docs yesterday because he was seriously off his feeds and was running at a higher temperature than normal for him. They prescribed us some antibiotics and we went home. He was still fractious but had a better day than Sunday. He ate more, which is a good thing. We put him to bed at closer to his normal bedtime and things seemed to be going well, except that the coughing fit he had at 2:30 am kept him – and us – awake until 4am. He wasn’t crying, but was very vocal in his attempts to go back to sleep. In the end, we put an extra blanket on him, put his bedtime CD back on and Badger Badger’d him again and he drifted off to sleep. We managed to get a few more hours of kip, but I’m rather tired this morning. Katy and I have also caught whatever bug is plaguing him. I’ve been horking up yellow phlegm and Katy has a cough that would make a lifetime shag tobacco smoker envious.

Things might be progressing on the housing front. We had a phone call out of the blue from the estate agent on Saturday and, after a bit of phone tag, it would seem that the seller is “disappointed at having to reduce the house price but is going to be pragmatic about it”. Apparently, she’s had her own electrician do as estimate of the work that would need doing and the quote she got was about 1/3 of ours. We met somewhere in the “middle”. We’re still eating more of the costs than I’d ideally like, but I’m tired of waiting and I won’t quibble for a few hundred quid – even if we are morally in the right. Anyway, she wants to exchange this week, so we’re going to chase up the solicitors and see what we can do. Watch this space.

uncategorized

A good dose of Britishness

Posted on By admin

The Beeb was running an article this morning about how people were bombarding the Imperial War Museum about information on how people coped with shortages and rationing during the war in case there’s the Great Depression, part deux.

Keep Calm

Katy said, as a quote of the day, that she liked WWII propaganda posters because they were cheery and colourful. I like them because they’re sensible, down to earth and are a proper example of the British stiff upper lip mentality.

tea

uncategorized

Houdini, the stumpy mouse

Posted on By admin

Remember, a few days ago, when I mentioned casually that if the cats brought that same mouse in again for the 3rd time, we’d keep it as a pet?

They did.

Katy phoned me up at work yesterday in a fit of giggles, informing me that she and Sue had seen it when they moved BenBen’s play mat out of the way and had captured it in a cardboard box. Was I serious about keeping it as a pet? Hell yeah :)

I mean, come on. It’s survived Reen-pig’s TLC and managed to escape the (admittedly dim-witted) cat for the third time running. And if it comes where we think it’s from, her story is even more impressive. I just didn’t have the heart to chuck it back into the wild or dispose of it in a more permanent manner so Katy went to a pet shop in the afternoon and bought a hamster cage. We found out the hard way that she’s small enough to fit through the bars of that cage and spent part of the evening moving stuff around in the kitchen to re-capture it. In the end, we borrowed Donna’s old aquarium that she used to keep her tree frogs in. It’ll do until Houdini is big enough to not fit through the bars any more.

There’s still a chance she won’t survive the stress of the situation, so I’m trying (and failing badly) to not get too attached. Still, she touched her food during the night and seemed to be burrowed somewhere in her cage today, so those are good signs.

uncategorized