Category Archives: Life

Peppered Steak

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Meat and two veg (one of which is McCain Microwave Chips) is pretty good for my diabetes (not for my heart, take it up with my GP).  To complete the lazy-ass setup I get the tesco microwave veg, it’s ok (it’s steamed).  My blood sugar is usually around 5 or 6 two hours after any combo of meat, veg and those chips.  However, it gets boring quick.  I quite like roast chicken, and steak and pork and all the other kinds of meat, but it still gets boring.

I can usually tolerate it for a couple of weeks before getting sick and wanting pizza and other high carb stuff.

Which means I understand why mustard and pepper are so important (and clearly, all the other spices).

Yesterday I had pork smothered in mustard before I cooked it, and today steak with crushed black pepper corns (fresh).  Nice change.

Eating without thinking

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It amazes me what you can convince yourself is ‘nice’ in terms of food and drink.  I like beer (english bitter or stout).  But honestly, it actually tastes like bitter dish water until you ‘acquire the taste’, which essentially translates to, ‘until you convince yourself that you enjoy it and appreciate the differences in taste’.

I think a lot of food tastes are the same, the question is not ‘do you enjoy this’ it is ‘are you prepared to invest in the effort to learn to enjoy this’.  Like blue cheese.  The younger you are when you start learning to appreciate these tastes, the more natural they seem.

So, anyway this post is nothing to do with blue cheese or beer.  It’s about bread (yes, you guessed it).  I like hot buttered toast, sometimes I like a sandwich, I enjoy bacon cobs, I enjoy French bread.  But I’m diabetic which means I have to be careful with bread.  Eventually I found some tesco’s fresh baked bread (Finest Rustic Multigrain) which I actually liked (didn’t have to acquire a taste for it).  It’s nice when it’s fresh and it’s nice when it’s toasted.  I still wouldn’t do bacon sandwiches with it (white bread!) but I could picture myself eating ham and peas pudding sandwiches with it.  I ate it for a while, I’ve no idea what the GI is, but while eating it my blood checks were fine and my average (Hb1Ac) was excellent, so it was ok.

And then our local tesco changed the recipe, or something and it started tasting like cardboard.  Really, it was dry, fine grain inside (instead of fluffy) and just like ash when toasted.  I was gutted, so I stopped eating it.  I searched for something else which wasn’t bad for my blood sugar and found a couple of seeded loafs from various companies which were ok, I could tolerate them but my sugar wasn’t as good.  They were also stocked in pretty low numbers so I was never sure if they’d have any in.  Then I found the Bergen stuff (I’ve blogged about it a little bit, search for Bergen or Linseed).  It’s low GI, linseed and soya bread.

I ate it.  I tried it with sandwiches and I had it toasted.  I managed to acquire the taste so that it was ok toasted (if I let it cool).  Anything else and it was a bit nauseating to be fair, but I got used to it.  Was great for my blood sugar.   I liked it even maybe.

Well no I didn’t.  Because tesco have switched their Finest Rustic Multigrain back to the old recipe, or the old baker is back, or they changed supplier, or whatever and I got some the other day because I was feeling a bit tired of the Bergen.  And it’s delicious.  Nice, enjoyable.  And I realised I don’t like the Bergen, I was just prepared to tolerate it and had convinced myself the taste was ok.

It’s not really ok.  It’s really off-putting.

So I’m happy, the tesco bread is back, they usually have plenty in and as long as this recipe stays consistent I can enjoy fresh bread again.

My epitaph

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So I’ve worked out my epitaph.

Here lies that dude, he was easily discouraged.

*Except on points of principal over which he would argue endlessly until everyone else died of exhaustion because he wasn’t sure you really understood the point

I’ll do some more painting once I stop looking at other people’s efforts.

An evening with Kevin Smith

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Grete got me a bunch of Kevin Smith stuff for Christmas (I hope he enjoyed the pay cheque, and I hope Joss Whedon enjoyed his pay cheque after I got Grete a bunch of his stuff for her).  That included the two ‘An evening with ….’ DVD’s (one, two).  I’d seen a couple of short clips on YouTube and then mentioned the DVD’s to her so I knew before I watched them the kind of thing I was going to get.  I just finished watching the two discs in the first set and it’s pretty good.

I was expecting Kevin to be funny, vulgar and entertaining and he was.  But I wasn’t expecting the audience to be quite so annoying in places.  I guess I should have expected it – he visits colleges (or whatever they call them in America) and students the world over are pretty similar.  There are fans and there are obsessive fans, and obsessive fans, alcohol and meeting their hero don’t always mix.

When the radio is on in the car, I always turn it over during any bit where real people have to phone in.  I’m sorry, but there’s something about the kind of people who phone in to the radio and speak, and the way in which they speak that makes me cringe.  During at least half of the questions on the DVD I was cringing, for two in particular I almost had to forward past the speaker because they were embarrassing themselves so much it made me hurt inside.  The rest of the time though, the questions were interesting and well presented.

In every case (except the two non-questions), Kevin’s answers were interesting and amusing and in a few instances they were long, detailed, really engaging and stomach-achingly funny.  I felt sorry for the girl who asked ‘Do you believe in God and why?’ and got a couple of one line answers (yes, because I have a career).  I found the answers funny but you could tell she was hoping for something a little deeper.  On the other hand in a few instances what start as simple questions lead Kevin into pretty long stories about his career, how he met his wife, working with Prince and starting a fight of words with Tim Burton.

The DVD is a two disc set, with about 100 minutes on each disc.  In the UK it’s released as region 2, but NTCS format.  It played fine on our player.  It’s filmed in front of college audiences in 4 maybe 5 different colleges and intercut. Kevin is personal, open and honest, and vulgar.  If you’ve seen his movies you know what to expect, if not, you probably should know to cover the kid’s ears.  I really enjoyed watching the two discs, although I had intended to ‘have them on in the background’ while I did something else, I found myself totally absorbed and unable to do anything but watch, listen and laugh (and cringe).

I recommend them to anyone who likes movies, Kevin Smith, or overweight bearded guys making college nerds feel bad.

The DVD description on Amazon says “DVD Description: Director Kevin Smith hits the college circuit with a series of humorous lectures. Through questions from the audience he discusses the pros and cons of movie making.” which is essentially tosh.  It’s “Kevin Smith answering everything from the stupidly inane to the blistering inciteful questions, from fans, stoned college nerds and people who wandered in lost from the cold”.

Zombie Plague Brain Mush Mish Mash

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Not a new set of figures, but in fact, how my head feels.  Back at work after a period of holiday always means my energy levels take a beating initially, add on to that the problems I’ve had with Gradwell hosting since Friday last week (fix going in tonight in theory) and I’ve not really written that much other than painting updates for a little while.

I’m behind on the movie memories posts too, I had four lined up straight off the bat to post once a week, but they’ve all posted now and there’s nothing ready to go out this week, so I need to get a few of those written up again ahead of time.  The last (or possibly penultimate depending on whether I decide to base her or not) Sasha diary post is ready to go out after some spelling changes.

Grete has a bunch of Pocket Dragon figures which have been exposed to the world (or rather, this room) for a long time now, and we were thinking of maybe getting a glass cabinet for them and any miniatures I paint that I feel proud of enough to display.  Anyone got any advice on cleaing Pocket Dragons?  I was thinking maybe just q-tips and soapy water, but wondered if there was anything better.  Don’t want to ruin the surface of them.

It’s early and cold

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Been awake since 06:30 when the cats declared war under the bed and spent the next hour fighting it out to see who could be the most annoying.  Finally unable to cope at 07:30 when I got up and let them out.

Boy it’s cold this morning. Yeh I know, curious during winter.

Gradwell’s shared hosting seemed a little quicker yesterday, maybe someone fixed something, although they still haven’t updated my support ticket (technically they weren’t in the office after 1pm yesterday but it seemed to get a lot quicker after 4pm, I just wish they’d update the bloody ticket so I knew what was going on).

The weekend already!?

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Been a bit of an odd week, was on holiday last week obviously, then working this week but from home every day other than Monday (the office would have been deserted) with holiday Thursday breaking the week up.  Was on call from Tuesday to today as well.  But didn’t really get started and then everything sort of fizzled out.

Which means it’s the weekend again already, got back from C&C’s place about 40 minutes ago after D&D, and we’re currently waiting for Bubbles to grace us with her presence after we let her out (she looked desperate) before we head to bed.

And it’s cold.

Back to our normal routine as of tomorrow with breakfasts and shopping and work and TV and life and stuff.  Hopefully more wii fit as well, and less carbohydrate.  No new years resolution from me, just a promise to myself to try and be more me, and more positive in general maybe and do the stuff I enjoy.

No more roasts!

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Thankfully the season of ‘huge roast dinners’ has come to an end and I can stop trying to cram eighteen types of vegetable onto our plates.  Don’t get me wrong, I love a good roast dinner with yorkshire puddings and nine litres of gravy, but they’re even better after a long break, we’ve managed to cram about four in during the Christmas / New Year holidays and I think we’re both pretty much done now.

On an unrelated note (er, no pun intended), I’m playing with a ‘related posts plugin’ but I’m not sure how much value it adds and how annoying it might be, so it may go away again.

I bought some cheese

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Nothing special, some Camembert which is wrapped and inside a thin wooden box.  It’s stinking out the fridge.  So I wrapped it in some tin-foil.  It’s still stinking out the fridge.  So I put the whole thing inside a sealed fridge food bag.

It’s STILL stinking out the fridge.

So I’m going to have to eat it for lunch.