What does George Michael say?

This is a game we saw comedian Rob Deering http://www.robdeering.com/  do at a Distraction Club a few months back.

 

I thought it was *hilarious* as it involved rhyming. But since George Michael has a new album out I thought I’d share it with the world so you can all play too!

 

The one snag is, you need to know the song Faith by George Michael in order to play. Actually you just need to know the opening line which is:

 

Well I guess it would be NICE….

 

It would also help if you could sing it to correct tune and know where to air guitar (at the beginning)

 

Here is a link to the video so you can join in properly. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Cs3Pvmmv0E

 

Go ahead and watch it. I’ll wait.

 

(twiddles thumbs whilst humming) Oh, you’re back! That was quick! Did you see it? Are we ready? Then let’s go.

 

Q. Hey George Michael, what do you call it when someone asks for your opinion and wants you to tell them what to do?



A: Well I guess it'd be ADVICE

Q. Hey George Michael, what do you call those cubes with dots on them used in gambling?

A: Well I guess it would be DICE

                                                 


Q. Hey George Michael, what do you call frozen water you put in your drink to make it colder?




 A: Well I guess it would be ICE

                                                   

 

Q. Hey George Michael, what do you call those creepy crawlies that get in your hair, sometimes referred to as nits?

A: Well I guess it would be LICE

Q. Hey George Michael, what do you call those little rodents that are smaller than rats and like to eat cheese?

A: Well I guess it would be MICE

 

Q. Hey George Michael, what do you call the word that means how much something costs?




  A: Well I guess it would be PRICE

                                                 

 

Q. Hey George Michael, what do you call the grain you might serve with curry?


A: Well I guess it would be RICE

Q. Hey George Michael, what do you call a word that means cut but also means a piece of cake or pie? 


A: Well I guess it would be SLICE

 

 

Q. Hey George Michael, what do you call when someone has to ask you two times?

A: Well I guess it would be TWICE



 

Q. Hey George Michael, what do you call that show that took place in Miami in the 80s and starred Crockett and Tubbs?

A: Well I guess it would be VICE

 

**And lastly, for my peeps who grew up in Alexandria--this one is for you (because no one outside of CENLA will get it)**

 

Q. Hey George Michael, what do you call that shop in the mall that went with Goldring?

A: Well I guess it would be WEISS

 

Isn’t that a laugh? I mean you could play for hours, right?

 Or until you run out of rhymes for NICE.

Which has probably already happened, unless you can think of some I forgot.

 So yeah.

Peachy keen

One of the first recipes I was keen to try from A Girl called Jack was the Peach and chickpea curry made with tinned peaches. While tinned veg made me feel skeevy, tinned fruit somehow seemed alright. I first tried to look a the cheapest value tinned peaches--but the ones that were 30p for a 400g tin were in syrup that contained high fructose corn syrup and so I put them back. I ended up having to buy 2 smaller tins of the Sainsbury’s brand peaches to get 400g worth of peaches in juice. It cost me 40p each (80p total) for the peaches.

 

I went to ASDA the other day and their 400g tin of peaches in juice was just 65p so when we do this again I’ll got there to buy my peaches as that is a 15p savings.

 

But basically this curry is a tin of chickpeas (I had fresh cooked chickpeas as I cook from dry beans to save money), a tin of tomatoes, a tin of peaches and their juice with an onion and some garlic.  I added a small sweet potato and a TB curry paste as I had some on hand (a £1.25 jar of Pataks Balti paste gives us about 6 meals making it about 25p a serving) I know curry powder is cheaper--but the curry paste adds richness and depth to the curry that powder lacks.

can you spot the fresh coriander on top?

 

I served it with homemade GF Peshwari naan bread (basically my regular GF naan bread recipe plus a bit of sugar, coconut and ground almonds and raisins--all stuff I had in the cupboard)

I've already nibbled on the naan bread

 

It was gorgeous--sweet and spicy and really filling. It made 4 big bowlfuls and 4 naan breads which could have feasibly served 4 people, but actually served 2 very greedy people. If I had been less greedy it would have made a lovely leftover lunch. 

 

I will definitely cook this again, perhaps next time over rice. I would also be willing to serve it to company--so if you are coming round--be warned!

Savings vs. Ethics vs. Health--part two

1) Jack also uses cheap strong cheese and bacon scraps to give a punch of flavour to dishes. Clearly for us, cheese and bacon are out of the question. The thoughts also of *why* they are so cheap and how badly and intensively must the animal have been reared to be sold for that price makes me want to cry. Animals are not vending machines to just give parts of the body, their children, their lactation fluids for us just because we want something. They are creatures with thoughts and feelings and emotions who can feel pain and loss and I would not want to cause them suffering, not for the world. One thing she does do in the cookbook that I find interesting is that in the very small meat sections in the back of the cookbook she refers to the animals as animals not the meat name for them (e.g. pigs not pork ) which is one of the ways people make the disconnect between the animal on their plate and the real living, breathing animal it once was. But the best bit about the cookbook is that she knows that vegetarian food is cheaper and healthier than eating meat. There are 92 pages of vegetarian meals and only 50 pages of meat recipes. But some of the meat recipes can be adapted. I’ve got some smoked tofu in the fridge that can substitute for ham in the ham, pea, mint and potato casserole  (using some of those fresh herbs!)  I’ve got homemade smoky black eyed pea and mushroom “sausages” in my freezer which I can make into the sausage and lentil one pot dinner.

 

2) One of the things she often uses is tinned vegetables because they are infinitely cheaper than fresh and don’t go off like fresh food does. I am  a bit skeevy about some of that. I’ve always thought tinned carrots were like  totally grody and tinned green beans-- Don’t get me started. The smell makes me gag. Gag me with a spoon. There is something about tinned veg that brings out my inner Valley Girl. But tinned potatoes I was up for if they were used in a soup. I’d be willing to try it. I wanted to try the  ham, pea, mint and potato casserole as I had some smoked tofu to stand in for the ham and I always have frozen peas. The recipe said I needed 500g of potatoes. I bought 2 tins for 15p each (total 30p) which would have cost me at least £1 if buying fresh potatoes.

Result: This soup was delicious. I had a momentary wobble when I opened the tins because a metallic sort of smell emanated out slightly, but a quick rinse under cold water cleared that away. I ended up chopping them and then putting them back in cold water to keep them fresh until Spiderman got home from the zoo. The soup is basically 2 onions, garlic, potatoes, mint and parsley, veg stock, smoked tofu (I did add a bit of liquid smoke to ramp up the smoked ham factor), white wine and peas. It came together really quickly due to the tinned potatoes already being cooked. Then you take out about half the potatoes and a bit of stock and whiz it in the blender and then pour it back into the soup to thicken it..  

 

Spiderman and I discussed it at length-- fresh potatoes would have been *slightly* better, but the tinned were nothing to sneeze at. They were not mealy (one of my fears) and had a firm outer texture with a soft interior. We both agreed they had roughly the same consistency of day old potato soup where the potatoes lose a bit of firmness and get a bit softer but still stay in potato chunk shape from being in the fridge overnight.  Score one for cheap and healthy and vegan!

 

3) Cereal is an issue for us. We eat it loads. As a snack, when you want more dinner but there isn’t any etc. We love cereal. The one we like the best is called Mesa Sunrise and is a fancy cornflake made with corn, buckwheat, quinoa and amaranth. It also costs  between £3.35 and £3.50 for 355g depending on where we have to buy it. We can go through a box in a week easily. Sainsbury’s Basics cornflakes cost 35p for 500g. But they’re just regular old cornflakes, not this wholegrain kind. Is there a way that we could marry the cheap and the healthy? I decided to mix in 100g of the cheap cornflakes in with the 355g of the brand we like. Just that little bit doesn’t seem to have made a difference in taste but will make it last just that bit longer before having to buy a new box.

Plus, the posh brand we love has 13.3g of sugar per 100g while the cheap cornflakes were just 3.6g of sugar per 100g.  The cheap cornflakes were higher in sodium (but so were expensive Kellogg’s version!) but came fortified with niacin, iron, B2, B6, B1, folic acid  and B12.

 

I had so many of the cheap cornflakes coming out my ears (not literally!) that I made the My Cakeys recipe from A Girl Called Jack. This was the name Small Boy gave these cheap and easy treats.  Basically you melt 100g chocolate and 1 TB peanut butter and stir into crushed cornflakes and then spoon into lumps and let cool and harden up. There were lovely and reminded me of ferrero rocher . Spiderman said he wouldn’t go that far, but he said they were quite good.

 

So I think I’m starting to prove that the cheap can go along with ethics and health.

Savings vs. Ethics vs. Health--part one

1) Part of the reason Jack can find things so cheap is she is not a vegan. I would *love* to find a 100g dark chocolate bar for 35p to be used for grating into savoury dishes like chilli and making desserts. But every single stinking one of them has milk powder in it as a cheap filler. The cheapest I can find is a baking chocolate that costs £1.50 for 200g. Making 100g cost 75p. I could be paying much more than that for some of the specialty chocolate I love like Montezuma chocolate chilli bar which costs more that £2 for 100g.

 

2) But sometimes she hits it just right. I have been using red wine in my cooking lately. There is a superb mushroom and potato stew from the cookbook Isa Does It that uses a cup of red wine that makes the flavour fantastically rich. Jack Monroe also knows how cheap wine can really enhance the flavour of the dish. I was buying a 250ml bottle of cooking wine for £1.10 but on Jack’s suggestion went to the proper wine aisle where I found a 750cl bottle of cooking wine for £2.50. Her cookbook also talks about freezing leftover wine if you can’t get through that much in a week or so. The alcohol doesn’t freeze so it always has the consistency of a Sno-Cone. You just scoop out what you need and put it back in the freezer. I already do this with so many other things where you only use a bit at a time like smoky chipotle peppers in adobo sauce. Thanks Jack!

 

3) She buys white rice and white pasta because it is by far the cheapest. I struggle with this. Nutrition is where I’m at. I buy the cheapest brown basmati rice I can find which is £1.70 or there abouts for 1 kg.I think she pays less than 50p for a kg of white rice.  One thing she does do is use rice 100% of the time. I usually like to mix it up with other grains like quinoa which is great for you but ridiculously expensive. It had been the cheapest at Waitrose, but our last shop revealed that it was now over £3 for 500g. It got me thinking that we could have rice 90% of the time and the occasional quinoa to make it really last. No one says it *has* to be quinoa several times a week. Brown rice is rather nice! She also uses regular rice for risotto instead of expensive Arborio rice so I’m keen to try that as well.

 

4) She also bakes with cheap, plain white flour. I have a wheat intolerance and so 30p for a bag of Basics Flour is out of the question. Making GF flour can be really pricy. But I’ve been experimenting with making my flour mix out of healthy, but less expensive grains like buckwheat, brown rice and chickpea instead of really more expensive bags of teff and quinoa and millet (all around £5 a bag) So far the flour has been fine.

 

I’m sure I’ll be looking at more of her money saving tips and seeing how can we can adapt them making sure that cheap and healthy and vegan all coincide. I’m sure it is possible.

How does your garden grow?

I got really excited and impulsively made the investment in 3 herb pots from Sainsbury.

I bought parsley, mint and coriander as those were the ones I thought I’d use the most. I set them up on the kitchen window on a matching saucer and felt all smug with myself.

 

Fresh herbs.

Anytime I want some.

Just pluck a few here and there and sprinkle artfully on our food.

Won’t it feel posh?

 

Yes, I felt smug for about an hour and then Spiderman came home and gave me the look.

 

You know the look. It says:

 

What have the poor plants done to deserve this?

Are you a serial plant murderer?

Why do you never learn?

 

Because he knows. He KNOWS. I can’t grow anything. In the United States, it’s called having a green thumb, in the United Kingdom it is called having green fingers.

 

I have no green appendage at all. None. Which is a shame as my Mum is so green she’s practically a Martian. She just walks by and plants voluntarily perk up. I walk by and the commit suicide. FACT. She’s always had this gift. When I was about seven, I wrote a book entitled The New Story of My Family (although in my handwriting it looked a bit like thehewstoryuvmyfamilet)  Her page included the line,

 

This is my mother. She likes to plant everything in the world.

 

But I am determined to make this work. Every time I go into the kitchen I get all excited and shout,

 

I did it!

They’re still alive!

I don’t believe it!

 

It has been five days since I brought them home. That must be a new record for me.

I have used them a few times--particularly the coriander. I’m beginning to wonder if I’m going to pluck the poor thing bald before it has a chance to grow any more leaves.

 

Spiderman is still dubious, but wait until we have A Girl called Jack’s carrot and onion falafel with parsley and coriander on Wednesday night. Then he’ll see.

 

You’ll all see. (laughs maniacally)

 

Let’s just hope they’ll  be alive come Wednesday Morning.

A Girl Called Jack

I don’t know if Jack Monroe has reached the other side of the pond, but she is a hot commodity over here.

She is the face of poverty for the UK and her blog http://agirlcalledjack.com/ really made everyone think about what it is really like to live below the poverty line. In 2012, she was desperately trying to find a job--any job-- while being a single mum to Small Boy, trying to keep the roof over their heads and food on the table. She had cut their heating off in the dead of winter to save money and was trying to feed herself and her son for £10 a week.

 

Her angry young woman blog which describes in heart breaking detail feeding Small Boy the last bit of food in the fridge while she went to bed hungry. In the morning while Small Boy ate one weetabix with water instead of milk, his two year old concern asking, “Where’s Mummy’s breakfast?” and her replying she wasn’t hungry, but her rumbling tummy calling her a liar.

 

She ends with:

Poverty isn’t just having no heating, or not quite enough food, or unplugging your fridge and turning your hot water off. Poverty is the sinking feeling when your small boy finishes his one Weetabix and says, “More Mummy? Bread and jam please, Mummy,” as you’re wondering whether to take the TV or the guitar to the pawn shop first and how to tell him that is there is no bread and jam.

 

All the while she was posting recipes that used the Sainsbury’s Basic brand products on her blog. She discovered early on that she could make cheap nutritious meals for far less than processed food. A tin of spaghetti hoops might cost 50p, but a packet of the cheapest pasta costs 34p and would feed them for many meals. Add a carton of chopped tomatoes  for 35p and you could have a home cooked meal. She grew herbs on her windowsill so she’d always have fresh herbs for cooking (a £1.25 investment if you bought the pot at Sainbury) and could go for months of meals if she could keep the plant alive.

 

This prompted a journalist from the Daily Telegraph  to come over for lunch--a delicious Moroccan Tangine that cost 49p a portion using a cheap tin of chickpeas, a cheap tin of tomatoes, a tin of carrots, a tin of potatoes and some dried fruit. Mix in an onion, some garlic and some fresh herbs and a chilli pepper she grew on her windowsill and you have a meal . Read the article here: http://agirlcalledjack.com/2013/03/03/my-49p-lunch-with-a-girl-called-jack-the-telegraph-2nd-march/

 

This eventually led to a cookbook deal and a regular column for budget food in the Guardian newspaper. Now that she has more money she is not vulnerably housed, she is able to care for Small Boy better, but she still eats for around £10-15 a week.

 

I am fascinated by her life and ability to eat so well on so little. I doubt we will be able to get our  budget that low--but I wouldn’t mind shaving off a bit here and there and still eating well.

 

I bought her cook book on Friday and am really looking forward to seeing what I can do. Stay Tuned for A Girl called Spider!

Tiny Dancer

On Monday morning, when I was in the bath, Spiderman came to give me the sad news. Little Pirouette, our tiny dancer, had shuffled off this mortal coil and gone to join her sibling Tibia in the great big web in the sky.

 

We brought her home for my birthday in 2008 and she has been a joy to watch her climb about. She was one of two arboreal spiders (Polychrome being the other) that we own when means that she was a tree dweller not a ground dweller.

 When we first brought her home she was in a small, round fish bowl- like container that contained, among other things, a plastic red apple that she loved sitting on.

 

Soon she began to outgrow that container and we upcycled an old plastic sweet jar by using a wood burning tool to melt breathing holes into it. In true arboreal fashion, she climbed to the top and hid herself in a mass of webbing for several years.

 

She was difficult to see, but you could often hear her thumping about as she leapt from top to bottom then climbed back up to leap again. Silly girl. She earned the name Lid Hugger when after a moult Spiderman carefully opened the lid and saw the old skin resting in the hammock web--but where was Pirouette?  Why nestled in the underside of the lid that he had carelessly lifted! If she hadn’t just moulted and been feeling exhausted it would have been a perfect chance to run and escape! Lucky for us, she was a good girl who stayed put until we got the lid back together with the jar.

 

Pirouette was a Peruvian Pink Toe (Avicularia Avicularia) which is how she earned her ballerina name. Those tiny pink balls on the ends of her feet looked just like ballet slippers to us; the pink hairs on her tiny abdomen like a tutu! A Peruvian Pink Toe and a painting by Degas are virtually indistinguishable. FACT.

A spider

A Degas dancer

 

So how did she die? We’re really not sure. She was a juvenile when we brought her home based on her moulting patterns of every 6 months for her first three moults with us. After that it moved to one moult a year which is right for an adult spider. We had wondered if she was male--it is very hard to sex a spider, but particularly this type--the three key signs were not clear. She always did keep a little abdomen--often a sign of being male. There were no visible tibial hooks used for holding a female at bay while you deposit your sperm. Her palps had a bulbous quality--but then all her feet did. Those bulbs could have just been the shape of her feet, not sperm pouches.  We always hope for a female spider as they live longer, but judging from what we know about her--she was probably between nine and ten years old. Which is a good life for a spider. If our estimation of age is true, then she was most definitely female as males would not have lived that long.

 

It was a bit of a mystery finding her today. I kept holding out hope she was just moulting as spiders do not die on their backs. A spider on it’s back is in the process of growing by shedding it’s skin. But as Spiderman gently pointed out--she was found on the floor of her tank and she has never, ever moulted down there. She always lived in a hammock between two branches. She lived, slept, ate and moulted in that web hammock. He thinks she died, fell out of her web hammock and landed on the floor.

 

Poor baby. I once had a bird who did that. It was too poorly to be on its perch and was found dead at the bottom of the cage with its little bird feet curled around the ladder. We had to bury it with the ladder as we could get the feet unattached.

 

So the cause of death is a mystery. We’ll need to call Incy Wincy Quincy the spider coroner to come and give us a verdict.

 

Unless he’s stuck in a bathtub somewhere.

 

So goodbye to our little pink toed ballerina. We will miss you, my little dancer.