How Lamb Kofta Kebabs Helped Me Get Over Amazon.com

Rant time. It’s been a while. Do any of you shop on Amazon?

Is the Pope Catholic, I hear you think.

Or does a bear, so the saying goes, shit in the woods?

Well, my take on Amazon is that it’s great. Until it’s not.

I know many bloggers do not watch TV. But I do. Love TV. Sat through 180 episodes of ‘Lost’*. Watched all of Star Trek.

So when Amazon started ‘streaming’ (what a great word that is) TV and films from it’s website I said to myself ‘I’ll have me some of that!.

Now American TV is the best. A series on American TV goes on for ever. Episode after epidode. Not like British TV. Four episodes of ‘Sherlock’ and that’s it for a year. With American TV you got 24 episodes of ‘24’ (canny that) and it seems to take over your (some might say sad) life.

So I settled in to watch a TV show called ‘Once Upon a Time’. The premise is simple. Fairytale characters (you know, Snow White, Hanzel and Gretel, Red Riding Hood etc) get transported to the real world by the Wicked Queen and live in a small town in Maine, unaware of who they really are until someone comes along and messes with their heads.

And I was getting into it. Episode 10 (of about 40). Then suddenly Amazon tells me I will have to start paying extra for it. Well that got me on the customer complaints page quicker than you can say ‘Rip off’.

I got an automated reply ‘We love you and we are totally committed to everything…but tough luck buddy’.

So I cancelled my subscription. And tried Netflix. Which of course doesn’t have ‘Once Upon a Time’. But I showed Amazon. Amazon is quaking in it’s boots. Right now.

*turned out they were all dead after all.

And so I turned off the TV and went and did something less boring instead (I’m paraphrasing an old children’s TV show; see? TV on the brain) by making Lamb Koftas with Cheesy Stuffed Potatoes.

Goulash – Brain Food for PowerPoint Monkeys

For those who work in ‘Big Corporations’ you may well know that it’s ‘Strategy Season’.

You know when Elmer Fudd goes mad with a double-barrel shotgun during Rabbit-Hunting Season? Well it’s just the same in ‘Big Corporations’ during Strategy Season – little Fudds stride the corridors of power with PowerPoint slides in hand, hunting for strategies that will see them through to next year.

And what, you may well (and rightly) ask, has all this got to do with Goulash? Not a great deal, but given the amount of time I am currently spending on PowerPoint, recipes need to deliver results that satisfy my short-term strategic objective (that is: feed me, I’m hungry) whilst also satisfying the time-poor nature of the day-to-day.

My longer term aspiration (stop feeding me, I’m on a diet) will be satisfied in the second stage of the development cycle, which will begin when my waistline fails to align correctly with my suit trousers and I enter a corporate condition known commonly as ‘you fat bastard’.

Until this stage is reached there is Goulash.

Pork And Bratwurst Casserole – Cooking with an iPad and Dealing with the Cookie Monster

About a year ago we decided to purchase a tablet. Not the Ecstasy or Viagra type. The shiny look-no-keyboard type. Now the smart money goes with an iPad. For everyone else there’s the Samsung. We (I) chose the latter. It works. Just. It’s spent most of the time shoved in the bookshelf (right next to the Kindle) gathering dust. If anybody remembers it’s there they get it out and then ask:

‘Where’s the charger’?….’Don’t know’.

And then it goes back on the bookshelf. Well anyway one day I found the charger, charged it up and looked for a recipe for barbeque sauce. I found a Martha Stewart version and got bizeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Lamb Pittas with Mint Yoghurt Sauce

The children were demanding burgers. But I am sick of making burgers and as I try not to repeat myself on this blog I thought we’d compromise. They could have burgers. But made with lamb rather than beef.

It can be quite hard to think of new things to make that are interesting enough to blog about and also edible enough that it doesn’t all go straight in the bin. Lamb Pittas are quite good as party food and different enough to qualify for bloggage.

Mushroom Stroganoff – the Yin and the Yang of it

Its all very well producing massive meaty meals (or Triple M’s as we call them in, well I’m not sure, but I bet somewhere they do), but 50% of my marriage is vegetarian so if ‘Yin is to be accompanied by Yang’, then some meal times are meat free. In this instance we are producing Mushroom Stroganoff. (Shown here with mood lighting, not a dodgy camera flash).