Nigella’s Chocolate Pear Pudding

I’ve been aware that I haven’t been blogging about food recently, that’s because what with NaNoWriMo and well life really, I haven’t had much time for ‘proper’ cooking, but in the continued spirit of procrastination caused by the fact that I’ve recently entered a new part of my NaNoWriMo project and I’m a bit stuck, meant that tonight I cooked dessert, Chocolate Pear Pudding from Nigella Express. Now the recipe is for 6 – 8 people, how many people have to regularly cook dessert for 6 to 8 people? So anyway it was just me and Mr. Lacer so I divided by half but didn’t have a container small enough so the result was a little overcooked and although Nigella described it as ‘self-saucing’ it certainly wasn’t, maybe I should have reduced the cooking time, it was probably a little overcooked but it certainly wasn’t burnt. Anyway it was nice, but I’m still not sure about the whole marriage of fruit and chocolate, my last attempt at a fruit and chocolate cake wasn’t that successful either, maybe chocolate is like the colour black, best alone.

Lead Balloon

Mr. Lacer liked the last series of Lead Balloon starring Jack Dee playing a comedian (a stretch then), me, I could take it or leave it but I sat down and watched the first episode of the new series and I was more than distinctly unimpressed leading to faintly disturbed. This is meant to be a comedy right? What is funny about a guy trying to squirm his way around his Eastern European cleaner that he’s just insulted without apologising to her or buying a rural midwife a car that’s likely to break down within moments? Or a guy that is so walked over by his teenage daughter it’s unfunny?

Mr. Lacer has just (as I’ve been typing this) said that he reckoned he could turn into Jack Dee’s character, god I hope not, divorce courts would beckon. He then went on to defend Lead Balloon, arguing that it’s a comedy because the guy always fails, maybe but then he totally lost the argument by saying it was up there with Fawlty Towers, never.

Are you a male or female writer?

In the spirit of procrastination I was checking my e-mail instead of trying to get to that all significant 25,000 words on my NaNoWriMo (no chance, not today anyway) and I came across this link for The Gender Genie (thanks to Harlot - warning link links to just the sort of site you’d imagine would be called Harlot). Anyway The Gender Genie is apparently a web based algorithm or something or other that analyses your writing (blog, fiction or non-fiction) and tries to work out if the writer is male or female, so of course I had to try it out, I chucked in the first chapter of my NaNoWriMo and out popped these results

So according to The Gender Genie I’m a male writer and actually I’m quite pleased about that (I’m female by the way), I’ve always known that the sort of stories I write (or feel most comfortable writing) are the sort of stories that appeal (hopefully) to the opposite sex, in fact if I do ever get published my nom de plume* will be a unisex name, just so I don’t put off any male readers who don’t want to read a book by a woman.

*In everyday life I go by my husband’s name and even he says if he ever wrote a book he wouldn’t use his surname, it’s one of those sort of names that no one can ever spell properly or pronounce.