Where stairs change colour...
Today was a good day.
Went shopping today, so the house now has vacuum cleaner bags, so parts of the house have now been cleaned for the first time in months. The stairs actually changed colour. Now I just need to work on the loos...
Having made inroads on the cleaning, I moved onto my share of the cooking for the House of Fail Christmas Dinner, which I'll witter on at length about, since it was the biggest culinary undertaking I've made in a while.
Since we had invited Centrillium3000 to join us, I actually went to the effort of putting together a half decent vegetarian meal. Nut roast (equivalent to my house mates' turkey) with vegetables (well, peas), lemon roast tatties and onion gravy.
The nut roast was amazingly successful given what I'd expected to get - it held together and everything (pretty amazing for a first try), and although I'd have liked to tweak the seasoning a little, it worked well enough, especially under the gravy - another success, since I don't make white sauces often. Even Wouter (who mocked it's vegetarian-ness) conceded it was half decent. The only downside was that I severely underestimated the amount of flour to use, so it was quite a small amount of gravy between five of us. 3-4 tablespoons, next time. The potatoes went well, all things considered - I forgot to cut them before parboiling them, so they took unexpectedly long to cook, and they hence didn't have the texture I wanted, plus some of the larger chunks never cooked at all.
And when you consider that my agreed contribution was buying the cheese for the starter, I did quite a lot. Speaking of the cheese, we ate some interesting stuff - I bought a range of fairly random cheeses from Lidls - nothing of massively amazing quality, but a decent rage of 'standard' cheeses (Gorgonzola, Shropshire Blue, Brie, Mature Cheddar) plus some interesting novelty cheeses (a soft cheese rolled in peppercorns (sadly not up to the quality that I had in Roscoff), another rolled in almonds and pineapple, a Red Leicester-and-chives). The most ludicrous cheese was 'Sticky Toffee Cheddar' - a crazy concoction with toffee and dates. It was much nicer than it sounds, if very sweet.
Alan backed a Genocide by Chocolate for pudding, which rounded off the meal nicely - although it lead to a crack cake fueled discussion about Imperial seceding from the UK (or possibly just London), and leaving on giant robotic legs to hide in international waters. While guarded by Sergey's genetically engineered Komodo Dragons. Cyborg Komodo Dragons. With breath weapons. Plus we had crackers.
Then we watched Appleseed, which was very enjoyable, and that was followed by Sergey and Smithers having an Evangelion geekout (also cool).
And then it was 2 am.
Today was good day.
Reeling back in time a little, I went to Icelandic Jon's farewell barnight yesterday (day before yesterday now) - I hope he enjoyed it - I know I did. And on Wednesday we completed the Abhorsen game - A great ending in the spirit of the books that was awesome from a player point of view as well. Although I'm a bit sorry I never did get to take a point of wound point damage (yet alone the 50% damage that would allow me to use my Die Hard ability), the whole run up to the end of the world was cool. Before that I can't recall, so I'll skip that.
No more lectures for a few weeks now. Huzzah.
Went shopping today, so the house now has vacuum cleaner bags, so parts of the house have now been cleaned for the first time in months. The stairs actually changed colour. Now I just need to work on the loos...
Having made inroads on the cleaning, I moved onto my share of the cooking for the House of Fail Christmas Dinner, which I'll witter on at length about, since it was the biggest culinary undertaking I've made in a while.
Since we had invited Centrillium3000 to join us, I actually went to the effort of putting together a half decent vegetarian meal. Nut roast (equivalent to my house mates' turkey) with vegetables (well, peas), lemon roast tatties and onion gravy.
The nut roast was amazingly successful given what I'd expected to get - it held together and everything (pretty amazing for a first try), and although I'd have liked to tweak the seasoning a little, it worked well enough, especially under the gravy - another success, since I don't make white sauces often. Even Wouter (who mocked it's vegetarian-ness) conceded it was half decent. The only downside was that I severely underestimated the amount of flour to use, so it was quite a small amount of gravy between five of us. 3-4 tablespoons, next time. The potatoes went well, all things considered - I forgot to cut them before parboiling them, so they took unexpectedly long to cook, and they hence didn't have the texture I wanted, plus some of the larger chunks never cooked at all.
And when you consider that my agreed contribution was buying the cheese for the starter, I did quite a lot. Speaking of the cheese, we ate some interesting stuff - I bought a range of fairly random cheeses from Lidls - nothing of massively amazing quality, but a decent rage of 'standard' cheeses (Gorgonzola, Shropshire Blue, Brie, Mature Cheddar) plus some interesting novelty cheeses (a soft cheese rolled in peppercorns (sadly not up to the quality that I had in Roscoff), another rolled in almonds and pineapple, a Red Leicester-and-chives). The most ludicrous cheese was 'Sticky Toffee Cheddar' - a crazy concoction with toffee and dates. It was much nicer than it sounds, if very sweet.
Alan backed a Genocide by Chocolate for pudding, which rounded off the meal nicely - although it lead to a crack cake fueled discussion about Imperial seceding from the UK (or possibly just London), and leaving on giant robotic legs to hide in international waters. While guarded by Sergey's genetically engineered Komodo Dragons. Cyborg Komodo Dragons. With breath weapons. Plus we had crackers.
Then we watched Appleseed, which was very enjoyable, and that was followed by Sergey and Smithers having an Evangelion geekout (also cool).
And then it was 2 am.
Today was good day.
Reeling back in time a little, I went to Icelandic Jon's farewell barnight yesterday (day before yesterday now) - I hope he enjoyed it - I know I did. And on Wednesday we completed the Abhorsen game - A great ending in the spirit of the books that was awesome from a player point of view as well. Although I'm a bit sorry I never did get to take a point of wound point damage (yet alone the 50% damage that would allow me to use my Die Hard ability), the whole run up to the end of the world was cool. Before that I can't recall, so I'll skip that.
No more lectures for a few weeks now. Huzzah.