Chopping Up A Courgette

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There are two obvious ways to cut up a courgette: slice and dice. Unfortunately depending on what you are cooking both of these methods can be somewhat lacking.

For example, if you are making ratatouille, then dicing the courgette probably isn't a great idea as it just turns to mush in the sauce. On the other hand slicing the courgette tends to result in the middle turning to mush leaving you with polo mint like rings of skin. Surely there must be a better way?

When we were on Skye courgettes featured in one of the meals and I learnt a new and brilliant way of chopping them up. Basically you cut at 45 degrees to the courgette and between each chop you turn the courgette by 90 degrees. If that didn't make any sense then try the video which shows me cutting up a courgette for dinner earlier this week.

This method leaves you with chunks of courgette that have just about the right ratio of skin to middle and tend to hold their shape when cooked.

Lyon's Smallest Restaurant?

While I was walking around Lyon I stepped past what has to be Lyon's smallest restaurant. Unfortunately it doesn't actually serve food!

You can tell just how small the restaurant is by looking at the reflection of me taking a photo in the glass panel on the left of the photo.

Okay so it's not really a restaurant at all, but a miniature on display in the window of the Musée des Miniatures. As far as I could tell entry to the museum was free but unfortunately I didn't have the time to spare as I had to get across Lyon for my train. Next time I have to go to IARC for a meeting I'll go back and take a proper look.

Blog Comments

I often comment on blogs but I very rarely go back and read what others have then written in reply. I could subscribe by e-mail to those posts I comment on but for some reason I don't really like that approach much. It is, however, possible to subscribe to not just the posts on a blog but the comments as well.

What follows assumes you are using Blogger although I assume similar functionality is available with other systems such as WordPress.

You can subscribe to the comments for any Blogger blog using the URL

http://www.blogger.com/feeds/BLOG_ID/comments/full/

where BLOG_ID should be replaced by the (wait for it) ID of the blog. So for example, here is a link to the feed of all comments for this blog.

Knowing or finding the ID of the blog you wish to subscribe to is, however, a bit of a pain. If the blog is hosted by blogger (i.e. has a blogspot.com URL) then an easier URL to use is

http://BLOG_NAME.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/full/

where obviously BLOG_NAME is replaced by (yes wait for it again) the name of the blog.

A relatively boring post but hopefully it will help at least one person follow the comments on at least one blog!

A Year of Posts!

If you hadn't read this blog before and wanted to catch up by reading a post a day it would now take you a full year -- a leap year to get to this post. On reaching this rather arbitrary point I thought I'd look back on the blog in a similar way to the two posts I did marking the 100th and 201st posts.

As it turns out nothing much seems to have changed (other than the blog template). It still appears, from the labels, that the blog is all about photos (122 posts) of strange (76 posts) food (41 posts)!

Also based on comments the most interesting posts are still those about the random bits of software I've released into the wild through this blog. The post on embedding QuickTime movies in webpages is almost two years old and still regularly gets comments.

Since I last surveyed the blog I have of course stopped blogging about two things: books and recipes. I'm now writing a blurb for each book I read over on my Writing The Blurb blog. Recipes are not going on a blog as such, but on a custom built web based cookbook, although you can subscribe to the recipes just as you would any other blog.

I'm not sure when I'll next survey the blog but given the three totally unscientific surveys so far, I'm guessing that not much will have changed!

Coral Beach

The weather must have known that our holiday on Skye about to end as the last full day we had there was warm and sunny. We made the most of the weather and headed out to Coral Beach. Whilst it wasn't warm enough to sun bath it was very pleasant.

Whilst the beach looks like fine white sand it is actually not sand at all! Apparently the sand is actually the ground up bleached skeletons of a red coralline seaweed known as maerl.

One, Two, Three... Quadriga!

A quadriga is a chariot pulled by four horses abreast. It was a word that I had never heard before my recent trip to Berlin. One of the most famous quadriga sculptures sits on top of the Brandenburg Gate and the person who showed us around Berlin actually referred to referred to it as a quadriga. The week after I was in Berlin I had to go to Lyon with work and guess what I saw there? I doubt anyone will need to be told but the photo on the left is from Berlin and the one on the right from Lyon.

The quadriga atop the Brandenburg Gate is quite traditional and based upon the only surviving ancient quadriga. As you can see from the photo the sculpture in Lyon is very different; a piece of art rather than a model of real life. Apparently it was sculpted by Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi after he became famous for creating the Statue of Liberty and represents France as a female figure attempting to control the four major French rivers. It may not be classical but I definitely prefer the one in Lyon over the one in Berlin.

With a Toot and a Whistle

As some of you may know our garden backs onto the railway line that runs between Huddersfield and Barnsley. There are two trains an hour past the house, one in each direction, and you quickly get used to the noise. The trains are only small and from inside the house they pass almost unnoticed.

So on Sunday afternoon when I was out in the garden I heard a train approach. Firstly it was going the wrong way and secondly it didn't sound 'right'. Then I saw the smoke! Unfortunately because of the slope at the back of the garden and the overgrown shrubs the smoke was all I saw, but I heard the unmistakable toot and whistle of a steam train as it approached Penistone station.

After much hunting around on the web I found that it was the Tin Bath Extra pulled by LMS Black 5's 45231 and 45407, otherwise known as The Sherwood Forester and The Lancashire Fusilier. If the scenery around Penistone looked at all like that near Blaenau Ffestiniog and I had been able to see over the fence at the back of the garden then I'd have seen something approaching the view in the photo taken by Flickr user gazzajo. I'm going to keep watching the Steam Tours webpage so that next time I'll be ready with my camera.

Our house currently doesn't have a number plaque and we have been debating what picture might go on one for a while. As we live near a railway I'd always suggested a steam train but Bryony had said that as we don't get steam trains going past the house that wouldn't work. Well now I might just get a steam train on the plaque!