Month: May 2018

Red’s Mum’s Cheese Pie

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Cheese Pie Filling.

Dinner last night was my mum’s cheese pie (possibly a flan, but we always called it pie). Mum used to make it a lot, and it’s dad’s favourite so I made sure I learned how to make it. I thought while I was making it, I should document it here. So here be my mum’s cheese pie recipe for those who enjoy that sort of thing.

Note: Trex is a vegetable fat and Stork is a baking margarine in the UK. Non-Brits will need to find the equivalent, or just use their own trusted pastry recipe.

EDIT: I’ve been informed that mature cheese is a term some outside of the UK are not familiar with. It’s basically aged so it has a stronger/sharper flavour.

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Ten days of Triffid evolution (or: Red’s been too knackered to take photos)

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Bearded Iris.

Didn’t intend to go this long without a blog post, but last weekend I was enjoying having the house to myself while Dad was in Brighton, and then the past week of work kicked my arse. I spent yesterday in a fog recovering, and I’m not pushing it when my body and brain say it’s too much. So it’s only today I had the energy to do Things, and potter around taking pictures. One advantage of the time gap is that things have moved on again in the garden, so there are different things to take photographs of. There’s a selection of triffids below, and more on Flickr. I’m also on Instagram now, so far posting pictures of Jake, flowers and food. Give me a follow if you want, let me know on Twitter if I know you and it’s not obvious.

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Cakey McRhubarbFace (or: more adventures with rhubarb)

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Rhubarb crumble cake slices.

Dad’s off to Brighton tomorrow. He’s taking fresh rhubarb. He’s taking Rhubarb’s Marmalade. I’m doing a last ditch attempt to send more rhubarb down in cake form.

As such, this evening I baked up Rhubarb Crumble Cake from Jane’s Patisserie. I’d never been to Jane’s site before, but the recipe randomly showed up on the news/links section of the Chrome homepage on my phone this morning. Probably not that randomly, really, as I’ve been searching ‘OMG, WTF DO I DO WITH ALL THIS RHUBARB, GOOGLE?!’ and lo, Google decided that it would provide. Anyhow, it looked simple and tasty, so I thought ‘who am I to pass on this sign from the gods?’ and I went for it.

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The Birbs (or lack thereof)

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Birds hate me taking photographs of them. They make every attempt to scupper pictures. They’ll turn their backs on me at the last second and flash their backsides in a series of continuous shots, then fly off. Or they’ll hide behind the bird feeder. Case in point.

Bird hiding behind a feeder. Bird hiding behind a feeder.

That’s just cheeky, to be perfectly honest.

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Cooking up a jammy rhubarb mess in the kitchen

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Rhubarb chunks in a sugary syrup.

Followers on Twitter will know that my dad has grown some rhubarb. Quite a lot of it. I’ve already stewed some for pudding and made some cordial, but that didn’t make a dent. We’ll be offloading some on my aunt and uncle at the weekend, but that’s also not going to use up a substantial amount. More cooking of the stuff has to happen, so I decided to make jam. Well, marmalade in this case. Actually, it might be jam for all I know, I’m not up on the archaic rules for what makes these things jam or marmalade, but we’ve always called it that for reasons, so we’ll stick with that.

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Changing it up a little bit with foliage photography

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Photography of oak leaves

No flowers in this picture set for a change (there are some in the batch I took today, find ’em on Flickr). Taking photos of leaves when it’s windy is pretty frustrating, I had so many blurry shots because the wind whipped up at the wrong moment. Indoor photography tends not to have this problem, so I might need to think about looking at some challenges to branch out a bit into other subjects.

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Photography of… Triffids. Of course.

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Tulips.

I’ll take some photographs of other things at some point. Maybe I should do some photography challenges? Right now it’s Triffids, because they’re rioting in the garden. Seriously. They’re just hiding the pitchforks and flaming torches when I get the camera out. There’s a whole bunch of new photos in my Flickr gallery, and a selection below.

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Triffid photography with the SX600

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Pink Aquilegia (Columbine)

I dusted off the SX600 to put it to photography use in the garden today (technically yesterday, but I haven’t been to bed yet) instead of using my phone. So much more versatile for taking photographs and better quality images. The SX40 has also been cleaned and battery charged for whenever I get around to it. Will have to find somewhere to go to use it.

I also went through the most ‘recent’ (ha! 2013-2017) folders to sort them out at last. I’ve uploaded a bunch of those to Flickr so that’s finally up to date. They include flowers, butterflies, some other wildlife and baby seals. How can you not love baby seals?

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Photography of Triffids in the garden

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Apple blossom.

If there are interesting things growing in the garden, I’ll dabble in some photography on my work breaks. I’ve been doing this on Twitter recently, but I figure I’ll switch it to here and post a link there. This set of photographs was taken with my phone, a Samsung Galaxy S7. I’m generally impressed given it’s a phone camera, but really should dig out my better Canon cameras. Probably the SX600 HS (the PowerShot SX40 HS is a bit overkill for quick garden snaps). Triffids is just the name my group of friends uses for plant life in general, on the basis you can’t trust them. We’ve all seen Day of the Triffids, we’re not falling for their planty schemes.

Usually I post up to four photos, as that’s the Twitter limit for one post. Today it’s eight pictures, because I happen to really like taking apple blossom pictures so did a set for them.

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Thinky thoughts on Avengers: Infinity War

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I’ve had a lot of thinky thoughts after seeing Avengers: Infinity War twice and discussing it at length with @abjectcheddar, finally gotten around to compiling and clarifying those thoughts.

Obviously, I enjoyed it. Very much. It was well-paced, fun, funny, tragic, and it’s frankly astounding that they pulled off juggling so many characters in two and a half hours without making it feel like anyone was sidelined. It also managed to do what a really good, long fantasy book does for me when it switches between different character story lines. I’ll get into the chapter, the characters and situation, and then be resentful when the next chapter comes along and switches to a different set of characters and plot points. After a few pages, I get sucked in, and get resentful a switching back to the set of the previous chapter that I was resentful about leaving. Infinity War did this for me, and with the mixup of characters there was at no point a chapter that didn’t suck me in or make me think I’d be skipping it when I watch again on Blu-Ray.

Anyhow, the rest of my thoughts contain spoilers. So if you haven’t seen the film yet and have miraculously avoided spoilers (I salute you), then you may want to come back late when you’ve stuffed it into your eyeballs.

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