That 'thyme' of year

slow and rainy Texas day 2-09-2011

I love the rain.

The rain loves me

Together we snuggle warmly

dreaming of things that could be

'thyme' spent watching the rain

s.kenney/2-09-2011

Man Size Mixed Grill with Side Order of Chips

A mixed grill is perhaps not quite in keeping with the reputation for healthier eating recipes I promised to acquire for this blog at the New Year. In my defence, I did say that I would include principally healthy eating options. I am also grilling as part of this recipe, as opposed to frying, and where I am frying, I am using sunflower oil rather than saturated animal fat. I hope therefore that you will consider giving this delicious recipe a try - perhaps on behalf of a hungry husband you may have coming in from work!

The chips for this dish are optional. For this reason, as well as the fact that I have included my chip preparation method many times before on this blog, I am detailing only how to make the mixed grill. My chip preparation method can, however, be found by clicking here.

Ingredients for One Man Size Mixed Grill

1 sirloin steak
1 turkey breast steak
4 rashers of bacon
2 beef link sausages
1 slice of black pudding (blood pudding/blood sausage in USA)
1 egg
1 slice of bread
1 tomato
Half a white onion
3 closed cup mushrooms
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Sunflower oil for frying

Method

This recipe will require two frying pans, one small and one large. The sausages will take longest to cook so it is important to get them on to fry in the first instance. Put a little sunflower oil in to the smaller frying pan and add the sausages. Put on a fairly low heat, as you don't want the sausages to burst. Turn them every few minutes and after about fifteen minutes, add the slice of black pudding. The black pudding will take about five minutes each side.

When the black pudding is on, put some sunflower oil in to the larger frying pan and bring it up to a medium heat. The turkey steak should be added to fry for five minutes each side. The sirloin steak should be seasoned with salt and pepper and added two minutes later to fry for four minutes each side.

The tomatoes should be halved, the onion half thinly sliced and the mushrooms simply wiped clean with a dry piece of kitchen towel. The tomatoes should be added to the pan with the steaks - skin side down - and the mushrooms and onions beside the sausages and black pudding. This is variable - I did it this way simply due to the available room in each pan.

When the meat is ready, the sausage, black pudding and the steaks should be transferred to an oven warmed plate to rest/keep warm and covered with tinfoil. The mushrooms and the onion should be transferred to the same pan as the tomato over a very low heat to keep warm.

A hole should be cut in the centre of the slice of bread with an egg cup. The small frying pan should be brought up to a medium heat (a little more oil may be added if required) and the bread added.

The egg should be carefully broken in to a small bowl and poured on to the bread that the yolk will settle in the hole. After three minutes, the bread should be turned with a fish turner and cooked for a further three minutes.

The bacon should be grilled under a hot overhead grill, started just before the eggy bread is turned. It will only take a couple of minutes each side. The dish may then be plated.

Place the bread on one side of the plate and the bacon rashers on the other. Add the onion, tomato, mushrooms and black pudding on top of the bacon. The turkey and sirloin steaks should be sat atop the eggy bread and the sausages placed alongside.

Life is too short to Stuff

So I'm feeling a lot better due to a hefty dose of anti-biotics - thanks for asking!  Back to cooking for me and them and tonight's offering was Easy Open-faced Chicken Cordon Bleu - Page 105.  Yet another one with no photo to guide me - boo hiss.  According to Giraffe life is too short to stuff and there isn't much difference between folding and stuffing.  So with that in mind off we go!

I'm not a huge fan of chicken breasts - find them a bit dry - I'm more of a thigh girl, so that probably isn't the best of starts.  You have to bash them out with a rolling pin which is quite theraputic so thats a bonus.  Stress relieved, you then "layer and fold" and shallow fry for 5 mins on each side.  You'd have food poisioning if you only gave them that long - I'd reccomend longer.  Perhaps even searing them in a pan and transferring to the oven to ensure thay are fully cooked through.  Raw chicken = not a good idea.

You are supposed to serve up with a lemon wedge the juices from the pan - but there weren't any (only gooey/crusty cheesey bits) so I opted for stir fried greens & bacon and carrott & butternut squash mash.

It looked odd, tasted good, but I still prefer my juicy thighs so if I were to make it again I'd use the same ingredients and adapt.  Stuff the thighs with the Gruyere cheese and spinach and then wrap in the parma ham to secure before roasting in the oven.  Not Cordon Bleu by any definition, but I think it would work better for me.

Hating the Past

Theodore Dalrymple makes an ancillary point in this tour of England's ghastly housing projects that is worth noting.

First among the reasons for this large-scale architectural vandalism was the prolonged revulsion against all things Victorian. In Britain this was particularly pronounced after the war because for the first time it was unmistakably clear just how far the country had declined from its Victorian apogee of world power and influence: a decline made somewhat easier to bear, psychologically speaking, by the consistent, unabashed denigration not only of the Victorians themselves but of all their ideas and works as well.

I witnessed a striking example of this revulsion in my own household, My father, a communist and therefore predisposed to view the past in a lurid light, especially by comparison with the inevitable post-revolutionary glories to come, had bought several Victorian paintings at Sotheby's during the war for ten shillings each. (Communists are not necessarily opposed to taking advantage of a temporary depression in prices.) He kept them in the loft of the house. Then, one day in 1960, quite arbitrarily, he decided that they were taking up too much space—unlike the tins of fruit he had stockpiled during the Korean War in the expectation that it would escalate into the Third World War, and which were now beginning to explode, but which he kept forever. He took all the paintings except one and put them on a bonfire, an act which I knew even at the age of ten to be one of terrible barbarism. I begged him not to do it to give the paintings away if he didn't like them—but no, they had to be destroyed.

This is an echo of the war against traditional morality, one that might achieve greater venom as the hip and modern crowd compares the world they've created - massive debt, higher child abuse, babies stabbed in their spines by abortionists, sex slavery supported by Planned Parenthood, rampant addiction to porn, etc. - to the one of our prudish ancestors.

It's easier to hate the past than to admit you made a mistake.

A new and glorious future awaits us.

Delicious iPhone App

I've downloaded a few necessary apps since getting my new iPhone, but I have to say that right now I am totally digging this app. Everyone hears it sometime during the day from their significant other "what do you want to do for dinner tonight"...in response..."I don't know, what do you want to do?"

I seriously HATE that question. Ever since I got this app I've been making recipes using it. It is simple and fun to use, I highly suggest you get it. Oh and did I mention its free?

 • Choose by Dish Type: Appetizers, drinks, main dishes, side dishes, desserts..the list goes on!

• Choose by Ingredient: Search for what you have on hand or what you are looking to buy.

• Choose by Desired "Ready In" Time: from recipes in under 20 min. to all day slow cooker

• Shake for Ideas: Not sure what you're looking for? Shake that phone to get a random selection

You can easily share recipes, email to friends (or in my case, husband) or save to favorites.

 

It's all about the spin action baby, its like playing the slots at the casino, you shake and you win a

recipe! haha Don't judge me.

The Price of Cultivating Paranoia

... is being paid by Arianna Huffington right about now.

She just sold the Huffington Post to AOL for $315M. Her readers have been marinating in anti-business paranoia for years and are reacting predictably.

Profit is evil and dooms free thought and ideas.

I liked coming to the Hufftingto­n post...It was a place of free thought and ideas. It saddens me about the deal and seeing how much the Hufftinton has change. I will be going back to Need to Know and The news Trust a social news network. Both of them are nonprofit and relay on the commuity and people to help them grow...Maybe you could build thier commuity the way you built the Huffington and help them stay a independen­t nonprofit progressiv­ely visionary news organizati­on and social news network.

Profit kills honesty.

Said it before and will happily offer it again.. Democracyn­ow.org is dignified, honest, and does not pull its punches.

Watch this video to get a taste of the level of awareness they are making available.

http://www­­.democrac­y­now.org/­20­11/2/7/­the­_empir­es_b­agman­_us_a­mbas­sador_­fra­nk”

The show is hosted by Amy Goodman and co-host Juan Gonzales, real heroes of the independen­t media world.

Money is evil.

CONGRAT$$

Corporations kill things.

Great. Another great media concept watered down and ruined by this particular large corporatio­n. Tragic.

It goes on and on and on. They took all this time to convince their readers that corporations were ruining the Earth, enslaving the poor, cheating customers and devoid of any sense of decency. How else could this have been seen other than as a sellout?

This a scene from the past as the nonprofit Huffington Post guard will no longer stand at the gate, defending the Proletariat.

The Muslim's 15 Rules For Life