I may rave in more detail about my Jellybean update at some point, but for now: I wanted to send a text to Dave saying "Did any shopping happen that I need to know about?"
I had to type the first two letters of "did" and "any", and the first four of "shopping". After that, it correctly predicted every word I wanted to type.

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Last night I cooked three meals. Well, it's easier to do all the chopping and prep in one go, then drop the results in the fridge.

So, we have black salsify made into fritter mix. A Hugh F-W recipe, and that's usually a good start

We have the aubergine meat-ball mix I made before

We have - "had", mostly - this Quinoa, fennel and sausage pilaf. OK, I cheated - I'd found packs of ready-to-eat quinoa when I was looking for lentils, and that saved some simmering time. That's the one I actually ate (most of) last night, and it was gorgeous! I'll have to use more quinoa, it's tasty and surprisingly low-point for the quantity, better than rice. Cauldron sausages, by the way, are good.

I had half the salsify fritter mix for breakfast, with crispy bacon as suggested, and while nice enough, it wasn't worth the hassle of peeling and grating the salsify.

I'll find out about the meatballs tonight - I'm going to do them as fritters, too.

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http://lifehacker.com/5965703/the-science-of-storytelling-why-telling-a-story-is-the-most-powerful-way-to-activate-our-brains

I haven't followed all the links yet, but putting it up here before I lose it.

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It may be a little complex for some of my audience, but this is what Dave requested for dinner tonight. In fact we left off the garnish so as to keep things simple. It's on the BBC Good Food site, and they have a good reputation.

Read it here, and read the comments for further advice and options.


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Yes, that's a referral link. It's another of these "live in Europe in the past, tend your fields and animals, fish, chop wood, make stuff" games, but with some interesting twists, and the advantage that you're getting in pretty much at the beginning. There's several character "classes" that no-one's tried yet, England only has about 20 players in total, no-one's got beyond middling level characters, no-ones' equipped to travel - it's all there to discover.

A lot of us there are from Renaissance Kingdoms, and are enjoying ourselves. The people running it are Romanian, but speak pretty good English - we're polishing the translations for them, but what they had was understandable.

You'll want to log in about three times a day, maybe two if you get yourselves organised. Not much RP in the forums yet, but we're getting there.

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So I thought I'd share. There's an article here that doesn't say anything particularly new, but says it well. Many of the pictures are good, but I particularly liked this one, by Michael Komarck


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When Dave's on nights, and I'm cooking for one, I tend to cook things that I like and he doesn't, especially if I've got them on the cheap. Tonight, that means kidneys - pigs kidneys. What I've always done in the past is Devilled Kidneys, and I expect I'll be having them for breakfast tomorrow. But tonight, there being two kidneys in the frozen pack, I am also eating kidney, and I wanted a change.
Googling produced more recipes for devilled kidney than you could shake a jar of mustard at. It also produced many for steak & kidney pudding, which is not something I have time to do after getting home from work. It found me a page where someone was asking for kidney recipes precisely because it's a cheap meat and they'd like to make more use of it - yes, this is about 80p for the pack, and I'm getting two good meals out of it. And leading on from there, I found this.

Fried calves' kidney with pancetta

Calves, pigs - close enough. Onion, celery, lentils - yes, got all of those in stock. Chicken stock, I don't have in stock (for once!) but I do have chicken Bovril. Lentils for bulk, parsley I grow myself - yes, I'm going to approve of this on Be Economical grounds.,  Pancetta? I'll use bacon.  Reading through... "Add the Madeira and flambé".

Madeira?

Yes, I'm sure anyone who thinks a 40p meal is a useful idea will have Madeira around the place, won't they?

In fact, due to going mad when making Dave a meal for Valentines Day, yes, I did have Madeira to use. And the result was very nice indeed.

By the way, one useful hint for people who don't know - it says "cooked lentils". So you get out the bag of uncooked lentils, and read the bit about having to boil them for a few hours. Then you laugh, put lentils and hot water in a microwave pot, and blat them for about 4-5 minutes. If I was going to eat them direct, I'd give them a bit longer, but these were going to have another few minutes simmer, and they were fine.

One other recipe I found that I'll save for next time:
Fry up chopped onion, add cut up kidneys and *frankfurters* (not sausages), season (dont forget the paprika!), add chopped tomatoes in tomato juice, some red wine and cook for a while.


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Work have sorted out the end of my probation period - this seems to have got lost for the last year, and no-one realised. As a result, I will soon have private medical insurance (not covering Dave this time, though), and my BCS membership fees paid for me.

Stunningly good writing from my Swords players. Two who'd dropped out a while back have come back to join us, and we're all sparking off each other nicely.

Weekend away in Bath coming up, and really looking forward to it.

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 I love my players, I really do. They're facing a terrible foe, a Recurring Villain, who has huge enchanted lead teeth and an ability of Combat Eating. He's beating them up, eating their magic, paralysing them with his Aura of Terror, blinding them with a Shade, So what does Our Hero decide to do? He's going to disarm him. No, not "destroy weapon" - disarm. He's trying to take the teeth away. "Combat dentistry" was my phrase, not his, but what else could you call it?
HQ has no such thing as "impossible", so I set up aims, consequences of different victory levels. Complete victory, he gets those teeth as a souvenir. Major victory, teeth destroyed to the point of being unusable. Complete defeat, the teeth eat the Hero's prized ultra-magical weapon, since it's being shoved in the Villain's mouth. We worked out resistances, and lead abilities ("blind-fighting 15W" is a good start), and augments. He spent a hero point, We rolled dice (well, a spreadsheet).

No more teeth.

I can't help it, I'm just going to have to give him an ability of "combat dentistry".

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 I don't often remember my dreams, but I remember two from last night.
The final one was about making another veg-based soda bread - courgette and carrot this time, using carrots from a pre-prepared salad that chops them julienne, not fine enough for bread. Not all that interesting, though I may try that mix at some point.

The penultimate dream was about queueing to buy tickets for four for a show, and making the most of vouchers and specials deals to get them with minimum queueing. Pretty boring really, until I woke up and remembered what the show was. Wallace and Gromit, live.
Yes, live.
I'd pay quite a lot of money to see that for real.

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