Cooking, Christmas Pounces

Blimey hasn't it been a while since my last post - although nothing much has changed in that time so nothing to report, folks. What has happened is that I've devised a plan to get what I want from this job and have submitted it to the relevant people, so we'll see what we'll see, I guess.

The current phase of this project is due to end this week, and we've actually been reasonably productive despite it having been a rather painful process. I suppose it'd have helped to know more about what we were building before starting to build it but unfortunately that's sort of the nature of this project; it's defining itself as it goes.

On a more positive note, a brilliant weekend just passed, beginning with the Kaiser Chiefs supported by We Are Scientists at Earl's Court on Friday night, followed by an early trip to Borough Market (introduced the Kiwi to Monmouth Coffee) for breakfast at Maria's followed by unrestrained and enthusiastic food shopping. Once we'd ensured we were well and truly skint, we headed back, laden with pork, scallops, preserved lemons, cheeses, truffle oil etc and (once I'd installed BT Vision, which is ace) promptly fell asleep.

We cooked a jalfrezi on the Saturday night, which was brilliant, all vibrant, fresh flavours and a decent belt of chilli too. Sunday involved cooking what we'd bought the previous day, scallops with sweetcorn puree and truffle cream followed by roast belly pork with sage and lemon potatoes, followed by white chocolate torte with dark chocolate sauce. Two other Kiwis came over for lunch - a sort of pre-Christmas thingy. Scallops sounded odd, but worked really well, despite a minor crisis involving quails eggs.

Later that afternoon we headed up to the Green Man near Great Portland St tube to meet the Kiwi's cousin and new husband (although they've been together for ages) which was ace - they moved out to Australia about two years ago and we've not seen them since so was great to catch up.

This morning, back to work. I felt like someone had squeezed an extra week into the year without me noticing, and then I realised that we're headed up north this weekend to see the family and that sort of made it alright.