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29 March 2005: A good night's work 
I've got a stinking cold, but have part of the solution in hand: 10 healthy lunches to be stashed in the freezer and consumed over the next couple of weeks. Half are vegetable and lentil soup, the rest are a stew of sweet potato, chickpeas and tomato, spiced with cinnamon, ginger, cumin and a pinch of chilli, on steamed quinoa. Very definitely worth a couple of hours' pottering in the kitchen, even while snivelling. Comments (2) | Permalink 27 March 2005: Very late adopter OK, I've finally put together a basic RSS feed - click here or on the link way down in the sidebar. It's hand-coded, and I've never used RSS feeds myself, so although I validated it here I've no idea if it's more than basically functional. Could those of you who use it let me know if it works, and if it's more or less what you were after? At the moment each item is just a short description and link - does anyone actually want to read full entries this way? I could make a full-entry version if so. Feedback in the comments please! Thanks. Comments (4) | Permalink 26 March 2005: Small but tasty I can't remember exactly when I started writing this webpage. It must have been sometime in 1999, I think, because I began it when we were living in Highgate Hill in Brisbane, and I was working at the CRC. I'd had a crap day in the lab, and came home berating myself for having no useful skills. Perhaps my PCR had failed once too often? I can't recall. Anyway, once at home and most of the way through a beer, I decided that I was damn well going to acquire some skills, and would start with HTML that very night. I tracked down some tutorial pages on the web, and by the time Ted came home later in the evening I had produced a little web page with two paragraphs of content, with random words in italics or bold or enormous font. And then I promptly forgot all about it for a few weeks. Ted had previously written up two recipes in HTML (they were deep dish pizza and risotto with spinach and herbs), and a month or so after my first HTML experiment, I started to do the same. We had begun to cook more frequently and I wanted to remember the experiments that worked; I also wrote notes to remind myself what I'd thought about restaurants we'd visited. Sometime around then these pages became a website, hosted on Ted's workplace's server. Friends started to read the restaurant reviews, and I put up the recipes of the cakes I made to take into work when people asked for them; it seemed that what we had been calling, up until then, "the website" really needed a name. So Let's cook with Meg and Ted originated as a joke name for a joke website which was read by a dozen people, all of whom knew us. Since then, a lot of things have remained the same - I still hand-code the webpage with my pretty basic HTML, its primary function remains as my personal gastronomic aide-mémoire, my restaurant reviews are erratic and highly unprofessional - while others have changed. My recipe archive became a blog, page hits went flatteringly through the roof, and I started to think about giving it a new name. Problem was, I couldn't think of anything which wasn't dull or sappy. The current name was dicky, of course, but it had the weight of sentimental attachment and five years of use behind it. I figured I would probably leave it as it was. Then...... I stayed the night in Wicklow town on Thursday with some friends from work, preparatory to walking 20 km along the coast to Greystones the next day. For our last pint of the evening, we dropped in to a pub where one of our number ordered a coffee, which came with sachets of sugar printed with traditional wise Irish sayings (including some of these). For the sake of my blushes, I am going to pass quickly over my repeated inability that night to read aloud "Good men can often be found wearing worn britches" (I would get most of the way through and then be seized by hysterical laughter at the last two words - nothing to do with the earlier pints, I'm sure). Instead, let your mind dwell on the solace to be gained from this saying, which made the deepest impression on all of us at the time: Though small, it is tasty. What relevence does this phrase have to my earlier ruminations? It's smirk-worthy and ripe for double entendre. It reflects where I'm living now. Given the topic and brevity of most of my recent entries, it is also entirely apropos as a new name for the blog. Hope you like it. Comments (4) | Permalink 21 March 2005: Blanched gai lan 
Sometime soon I will write a proper review of the Oriental Emporium on Abbey St. Their range of Asian vegetables is beautiful to behold. Last time I was there I bought, amongst other things, a big bag of gai lan, which I then blanched and tossed with a mixture of soy sauce, Chinkiang vinegar and sesame oil. Served with a quick stirfry of tofu, flower mushrooms, fresh chilli and coriander, most excellent. The best part about this dish was working out how easy it is to cook gai lan. Fill a wok with a litre or two of water, and bring to the boil. Add the gai lan and return to a simmer. Immediately turn off the heat, and let the greens sit in the water for 60 seconds, then drain. Toss with sauce and serve at once. Comments (2) | Permalink 17 March 2005: St Patrick's Day 
St Patrick's Day parade, Dublin. Comments (0) | Permalink 6 March 2005: Scramble 
Herby, cheesy, scrambled eggs with brown bread and a salad of sharp, tasty leaves. The leaves were bought from the small vegetable stall in a corner of the Temple Bar market, along with a bunch of red kale, a bag of purslane, some spinach, and two pots of home-made apple and blackberry yoghurt. I really like the woman who owns that stall - she's got farmer's hands, the skin cracked and dirt ground in, and she fixes her calm and smiling eyes to yours as she tells you the best way to cook something. Comments (7) | Permalink 5 March 2005: Temple Bar Market 
One of my favourite parts of Dublin so far: the Temple Bar markets. The best bit is the main fruit and vegetable stand, which has all the usual produce, and always a bit more besides. A couple of weeks ago I picked up chanterelles for a risotto, the week before it was fresh samphire to blanch and eat with golden smoked mackerel. This week I was tempted by both the scorzonera and the hamburg parsley you can see above, but decided against them as I was trying to be sensible (which I now regret). Instead I bought carrots with feathery green heads still attached, charismatically twisty red and orange peppers, a big bunch of glossy fresh bay leaves, my first celeriac, and an enormous pile of other good but customary things like aubergines, zucchinis and garlic. 
Of course, there are lots of other stalls there too: several bakeries, two or three cheesemongers, two butchers, including one who sells excellent hot dogs with proper sausages (Ted says), purveyors of mexican food, vegetarian food, olives, flowers, and more. It's small, it's crowded, it's lovely when the sun's shining, and it is worth getting out of bed for on a Saturday. Temple Bar Market
Comments (4) | Permalink 4 March 2005: New Home 
PhD thesis submitted, settled into new home in Dublin, postdoc work begun, local grocers and markets explored; let the blog updating begin. Comments (7) | Permalink |
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