If you have children of your own, or work in a school then you’ll probably already know this. For the rest of you, cast your mind back to school. Specifically cast your mind back to dinner time.

I used to eat sandwiches at dinner time in secondary school, either in my form room or stood outside in the cold playground. My memories of actual school dinners are from primary school, way back in the 80s; we’d line up outside the hall waiting to go in, looking at the dinner board to see what today’s food would be. This was traditional school dinner, the type served by stern looking women from big wheely contraptions made out of stainless steel. You got a plate, it was filled with some sort of cheap tubular meat, a blob of mash, some things that were once peas and off you went for the gravy. No turkey twizzlers or chips here.

And you had to eat it all before being allowed to leave. And don’t talk too much, it’s eating time, not talking time. And definitely no taking your food outside.

Fast forward to the present day. At the designated feeding time, our students are released and they have quite a large number of options. There is a “fast food” canteen where they can buy a slice of pizza to chew on while running around the playground, or they can buy a tub of pasta to spill on the stairs inside the school. For students with a more leisurely attitude to life they can go into the canteen and get real food, or a sandwich, or some more of the pasta-in-a-tub. Our year 11s have their own social area that has its own mini canteen, so they don’t need to queue up with the little kids. And yes, there’s a bunch of students who would rather waste their money on a box of jaffa cakes from Tesco each day rather than a real dinner (but I used to do that too, and I seem to have turned out quite well).

And the real food is actually recognisable. Those of you who go to a canteen that caters for adults are eating the same sort of food. We’re not talking five star restaurant food here, but it looks, smells and tastes quite nice. The sandwiches look like something you could buy from Tesco and are fresh every day.

It’s really quite pleasant, even the mad kids seem to calm down a bit at dinner time. I guess it’s hard to cause havoc when you’re eating. I also suspect that for many of our kids, it’s the only decent meal they get each day, such is the home life of some of our students.

Dinner time is also a reasonably orderly affair – as orderly as getting 1500+ students fed can be. They know to line up tidily, there’s no unnecessary shoving or pushing, nobody queue jumps and everyone is free to sit and eat without being distracted.

The main difference though is that it’s a more relaxed atmosphere. Kids do actually like to sit in little groups and talk about stuff while eating. They save the running about and shouting till after their stomachs are full. There is a definite difference between morning registration and afternoon registration, but that’s the topic of a future post.

Fish Pie

This is what my nice and tasty fish pie looked like before me and Amy went at it. Here’s a picture of the pie after we’d finished. And here’s a picture of the pie in a bowl. (more…)

A McDonald's Festive Pie

Christmas must be here, Mcdonalds are doing a “festive” version of their notoriously hot pie things. After picking Amy up from the station we stopped off at the local lard-burger and I got one of these.

They’re reasonably edible, being covered in sugar, full of sugar and probably deep fried (yes, they are) in sugar too. And oddly salty. The filling is an odd mix of something that tastes exactly like mincemeat if it were made by aliens, and some yellow gloop that might be custard, if by “custard” you mean “yellow gloop full of sugar”.

If you’ve not guessed, it’s full of sugar. Do not eat if you even vaguely suspect you’re diabetic… you will die. Also do not eat if intolerant to salt, or where high levels of saturated fat might kill you.

According to McDonalds own menu website, this tasty treat contains:

• 340 Calories (17% GDA)
• 20g fat (30% GDA) (4g Saturated fat – 18% GDA)
• 0.5g salt (10% GDA)
• 18g sugar (19% GDA)
• 1g fibre (4% GDA)

It’s clever they can cram so much “stuff” into a bar of food that can be eaten in three mouthfulls, and leaves you with absolutely no feeling of satisfaction. It’s like a meal in a bar.

If Cthulhu made veg

Looking like something that’s crawled straight out of an HP Lovecraft novel, I found these living in the back of my veg basket in the kitchen. Once upon a time they were harmless baby new potatoes, destined to be brutally boiled in water and chewed to pieces.

And then! subject to nothing more than ambient daylight, a quantity of dog hair and cosmic background radiation they sprouted quite naturally mutated beyond all recognition into warped vegetables that Cthulhu itself would be proud of.

It seems the potatoes sprouted, using up all the energy in the main potato and then attempted to root into the air, put out some shoots and generally make a jolly good stab at turning into potato bushes of their very own. Then things went wrong and survival mode took over, causing smaller potatoes to be formed in some crazy sprouting fractal type mess. The result – potatoes for pixies.

Maybe I should leave them in a dish of water to see what happens.

Montpelier, VT

Armed with my DSLR camera dangling from my neck, and a VISA card that has to be full by now, I and my cousin, aunt, uncle and two interesting family friends set out for some hardcore sight seeing. I needed to get my sister and mum a birthday present too, so I was trying to buy any interesting looking tourist tat I could find.

We first went out to the Cabot cheese place just up the road, which had lots of free samples to stuff your face taste. I decided the 50% fat and other lighter cheeses were quite tasteless, but once we got around to the aged cheddar and the one with the habanero chillis in the cheese became tasty and much more pleasant to eat.

After that we went to the Ben & Jerry’s factory down the road, which claims to be the first of their factories ever built, and where it all started. The tour was the usual corporate cattle-hearding, but it was cheap and the tour guide had a suitably sarcastic sense of humour – “I’ll leave you to watch this video. Sorry, it’s just corporate brainwashing, but you know, sit back and go woo”, “In this section you’re not allowed to take photos. No idea what’ll happen if you do, maybe you’ll go to Guantanamo or something”. The free sample at the end was nice and proved you can have a fairly nice free meal if cheese and ice cream are your thing.

Montpelier state house

After that we drove into Montpelier, the capital of Vermont (and pronounced in a totally different way to the French place of the same name). This is a nice traditional looking town, full of traditional American town buildings and streets. The capital building was interesting to walk around, and that in itself was surprising, that you could just open the door, wander in and so long as you stayed your side of the red velvet barrier, and didn’t open any doors, everything was fine. I don’t think you can wander about our government buildings so easily.

For dinner we had crepes, but not the French style ones, these were savoury and pretty good. I might try and make some when I go home.

On the way back from parading around Montpelier taking photos of everything we stopped off at Morse Farm maple sugarworks where I discovered I like the B-grade dark syrup more than the best quality stuff. According to some more tourist video we consumed, the B-grade stuff is mostly used for cooking, but there you go it takes 40 gallons of maple tree juice to make 1 gallon of maple syrup, which explained why the 1 gallon bottles of it cost over $60.

I can’t decide now whether to sit around and read, or to go and lie in the hot tub outside. It’s such a hard life being on holiday

Did quite a bit of cooking today. First I made a rather nice curry, and to go with it some hand-made chapatis and some paneer. While all that was cooking away I set some bread dough off in my bread maker.

The paneer was very easy to make and quite surprising. All you do is curdle hot milk in a pan using lemon juice. As soon as the lemon juice is added, that most horrendous cookery mistake happens – the milk curdles and separates into white lumps and yellow liquid – the curds (lumpy bits) and the whey (runny stuff). All that remains is to filter the lumps out and press it into a solid mass. It has a very smooth and clean flavour, not unlike mozzarella cheese.

For a bit of variety the bread I made was made from malted wholewheat flour, with a handful of sundried tomatoes added. I would have included some pictures, but I was too busy eating it all Making bread in a bread machine is a bit of an art, trusting the mix to the machine and hoping you end up with a loaf, and not a solid mass of hardened flour, or a sloppy mess. I like to watch the dough mixing to begin with, just to make sure everything is correct. Sometimes it sounds a bit too sticky, needing extra flour, other times it sounds too dry. Other times bits of half mixed flour will stick to the sides and not get incorporated correctly, needing a bit of help with a knife. Pay attention to your bread machine at the beginning, it prevents bad bread.

S?odka Chwila

Feeling adventurous and random, me and Amy have just come back from the local Polish food store with a selection of mystery foods. We’ve had some apple pancakes which were alright, but seemed to lack any real flavour, I have a bowl of chilli popcorn sat by the side of my chair; where they might stay, having a flavour somewhere between the lid of a takeaway tray and packing foam. Nice idea, but needs more chilli and less salt.

The final item is some gloopy, mucouslike substance called ‘Slodka Chwila’, which tastes uncannily like Beecham’s hot lemon, but has the texture of the phlegm you’re trying to remove with the hot lemon. It’d taste so much better if the lemon was stronger and had a bit more sugar.

So tonight’s meal consisted of spicy packing foam, apple flavoured rubber and lemon flavoured snot. Yummy

Dilita Green Habanero Hot Sauce

This is a bottle of green habanero hot sauce purchased from the fine shop known as Morrissons. I have never heard of the brand before, or had green hot sauce before, but it’s really nice.

The flavour is supposed to be “very hot” but rates more as “fairly hot”. It’s spicy and builds up to a pleasant heat in the back of the throat, but isn’t so hot you feel the need to drink half a gallon of water to put out the fire in your mouth.

Goes well with steak and chips too

Amy made a roast chicken with garlic, butter and honey. I have half of it still to eat at work tomorrow.

Yum

It’s my birthday weekend and I’m having a party at my house In attendance is Postcardstohell, Kisschick1976 and amy20. Expected later this weekend will be Devlin and our friend Ryan (who appears to have no LJ or web page).

So far we’ve all been jammed into my car on the ride home from the station and eaten some Chinese.

I have boxes of chocolate