I seem to have been busy but shall get another post onto this blog, forthwith. I have a few things to report.
I have been cooking some quiches. Last weekend I made one from courgettes, mushroom and onion. For this I bought some ready-made shortcrust pastry from the supermarket. I can see that this saves time but I don’t really like to do that. After all, part of the fun of making a quiche is making the pastry. Although I oiled my quiche tine, I had a lot of difficulty getting the pastry out once it was cooked. I therefore bought a new non-stick version.
I made the second on a few days later. For this, I consulted my Delia Smith cookbook and went with her recommendation of 50-50 butter-lard combination for the fat (and then twice that weight in plain flour and water to mix). I made a prawn filling for this. Although I used raw prawns, they ended up being over-cooked and rubbery to bite on (obviously way too long in the oven). For this quiche, I followed Delia’s exhortation to go for double cream in the custard. The result was a little too rich for my taste.

I decided to make a third variation of the quiche to take to my friend Tony’s 50th birthday party, since they were having buffet food. Once more. I used the butter and lard combination for the fat in the pastry because I find it yields a pleasant crispness around the edge of the tart. I made a plain filling with eggs, single cream and yoghurt (50-50), together with some grated Gruyere cheese. As usual, I baked the pastry blind. While the filling was cooking, I cut out letters and numbers from a red and green pepper with a small sharp knife (TONY = 50). I had to wait until the custard had nearly set before placing the letters onto the surface of the quiche, otherwise they would have sunk in the liquid and disappeared from view (I had already established this in a previous experiment). So, after about 20 minutes I was able to delicately place the pepper letters onto the surface. It really did look lovely and the pic I have put up for you, here, does not really do it justice (it might have been better if I had not taken it from the bird’s eye view).
Onto another topic: I have found some couch grass in one of my borders in the garden. Fortunately the roots do not run very deep but they become densely matted. Now that I know where it is, I shall target the area and hope to have gotten rid of it in about a couple of month’s providing I keep checking regularly.

The dreaded couch grass
As for my Second Life internet shows, I have now played 530 one hour gigs since January 2008, so they are ticking over at a fairly regular rate of about 4 or 5 shows per week. For some months I have been working on a group of about 25 new songs to play on digital piano. It has been rather frustrating but I feel that some of them should be moving into performance over the comming month.
I am doing some preliminary work in terms of writing my autobiography with the intention of publishing an illustrated version through blurb.com. This has not been progressing as fast as I had hoped, but my mood is currently optimistic. It will be a long-term project and I would imagine that it will take me at least one year, possibly two, to complete.
The progress I had been making in getting my tracks up onto bandcamp.com has dwindled considerably. I want to get that kick-started again in the near future. So, lots to be getting on with, I feel. Bye for now… talk to you later, my dear blogophiles.