Ginger and Sesame Rice with Poached Chicken

Oh, if I could saint Bill Granger for services to my taste buds I could. I’m still menu planning from his books and on the menu tonight was his Ginger and Sesame Rice with Poached Chicken from his book Holiday and boy was it soooo good. The recipe can also be found here (scroll down, it’s the top recipe). The recipe is really quick and simple to make and smelt so amazing when I was cooking it Girl Lacer (who was meant to be asleep), was calling from her bedroom going “What’s mummy making? It smells really nice!”. The rice tasted gorgeous and the chicken succlulant, I will definitely be making this again (probably for Girl Lacer!).

 

May very possibly have been put off chocolate for about 5 minutes

Is it possible to make chocolate rice crispy cakes badly*? I think I’ve just eaten proof that you can. It was cake sale day again today at school and I purchased two chocolate rice crispy cakes, which two be honest were the only two cakes I could reach, it being a weekly scrum of sharp elbows. But you can’t beat a chocolate rice crispy cake, supposedly. Unfortunately whoever made these had used really cheap and nasty dark cooking chocolate and it left a nasty taste in my mouth for ages. The best chocolate ‘insert cereal of your choice’ cake I’ve ever eaten, was at a birthday party recently, the father of the birthday boy was handing them round proudly (I suspect they were his sole contribution to the birthday party cooking), he proudly stated that they were made from Cadbury’s Dairy Milk and ohhh they were good, I confess to eating way more than one! Goes to show you should always use good quality chocolate that you’d be happy to eat on it’s own when baking with it. 

I should learn never to get over excited about cake sale cakes though, as they’re usually a bit dry after waiting round all day anyway and I can hardly criticise considering last time I had to produce cakes for a cake sale they turned into a disaster and I had to rush to the corner shop to buy a packet of ready made.

It’s my turn for the cake sale next week; Girl Lacer has already requested I bake something with lots of chocolate in, which means then that unless I make the whole batch with cow dairy free chocolate so that poor Boy Lacer can eat one (I always feel for him, that he can’t eat normal cake sale cakes, so I always make my cakes cow dairy free at the cake sale), so that means two different types of cake next week then. Plus it’s Mr. Lacer’s birthday two days after and a cake will have to be made for that to . . .

* Footnote – Mr. Lacer would also argue that I make chocolate cereal cakes badly, back in the heady days of my 20s, when my cook book collection was but a glitter in my eye, my idea of baking was Mars Bar cornflake cakes, which were basically cornflakes mixed with melted Mars Bar, delicious butwhen the Mars Bar hardened again, it left toothbreaking nuggets of toffee in the middle of the cakes. I still ate them, Mr. Lacer on the other hand learnt to avoid them.

Smoke and Mirrors

I’ve just finished reading Smoke and Mirrors, a collection of short stories by Neil Gaiman. I was really impressed with the start of the collection, from the first story in the introduction, initially thought of as a wedding present for some friends (although he got them a toaster in the end), called The Wedding Present, the story (embedded in the introduction) has a Dorian Gray type quality. I like how he wrote after the story;

And that is the story I did not write for my friends’ wedding. Although, of course, it’s not the story I did not write or even the story I set out to write when I began it, some pages ago. The story I thought I was setting out to write was much shorter, much more fablelike, and it did not end like that. (I don’t know how it did end originally any more. There was some kind of ending, but once the story was underway the real ending became inevitable.)

Most of the stories in this volume have that much in common: The place they arrived at in the end was not the place I was expecting them to go when I set out. Sometimes the only way I would know that a story had finished was when there weren’t any more words to be written down.

Other stories I liked included ‘Chivalry’, what the author calls a ‘friendly’ story about an old lady who discovers the holy grail in a charity shop. My favourite story was ‘The Price’, which was what seemed initially a run of the mill story about a cat that kept on getting injured but then, well I won’t spoil it for you. I also loved ‘Troll Bridge’, a take on Billy Goats Gruff and ‘Don’t Ask Jack’, a story about a jack in a box which reminded me of a book of old horror stories my mum gave me as a child (mmm, now as a parent myself, I question that particular parenting choice of hers, but she apparently had the book as a child herself). I also liked ‘The Goldfish Pool and other stories’, a story a bit like ‘The Price’ in that you’re constantly questioning which bits are real and which are not.

‘Eaten (Scenes from a Moving Picture)’ wasn’t quite to my taste as it was quite sexually and violently graphic but it was well written as it was so vivid. ‘Queen of Knives’ was interesting, about a family’s visit to a magic show.  ‘We Can Get Then for you Wholesale’, about a man hiring a hitman was a ‘fun’ idea. Finally ‘Snow, Glass and Apples’ was a very interesting take on the Snow White story taken from the evil stepmother’s prospective.

Generally though I much preferred the beginning of this collection, as the story’s progressed they got more graphic, more violent and more sexual and far less ‘magic in everyday’ which I like. However I will definitely be reading more Neil Gaiman, think (once I plough through some more books on my to be read pile), I’ll be attempting Neverwhere, I remember the TV series ages ago, which I loved but was thankfully long enough ago, I can’t really remember what happened.

Wash hands

A little breakthrough occurred whilst I was typing the last post, Boy Lacer finally woke up from a very long lay in (wish I had one considering he woke me up at 5am to to tell me he was trying to fill his nappy). I was in the living room, I heard him get out of bed and potter around and then he appeared in the living room with the bottle of liquid hand soap.

“Do you want to wash your hands?” I asked, completely forgetting that the speech therapist had said yesterday not to use questions with him but use statements instead.

Boy Lacer doesn’t look totally horrified by the prospect (we’ve never been able to reliably get him to wash hands without forcing him to do and then dealing with the screaming fit afterwards, so we 99% of the time just use wipes to clean his hands). So we went into the bathroom, Girl Lacer helped him with the pump on the soap dispenser, I told him to stand on his “special step”, I turned on the tap, expecting the screaming to start any minute and he happily put one hand then the other under the running tap and was perfectly happy about it. So, maybe progress, he’s never been keen on water, you can imagine what baths are like.

Really want to work on the wash hands issue as he’ll need to be able to do it without freaking out, once he’s in playgroup from September.

I have a lot of work to do (Nike+ sports band review)

I went for my first run since last Easter last night, my running since then had been halted by an injured arm followed by a bad asthma flare up and a broken toe (courtesy of Boy Lacer), but like the mug I am I’ve signed up for the Nike+ Global 10K run on 31st August, what am I doing, I couldn’t even run 10K before the injured arm, bad asthma, broken toe!

However, I have a new toy, I have upgraded my trainers to a pair of Nike+ running shoes (see, Nike’s purpose of holding the race has already worked on me) and I have also brought a Nike+ Sports Band, which is the latest Nike+ innovation. You no longer need an IPod to use Nike+ (I would never part from my superior CreativeZen MP3), instead you wear the sports band on your wrist and it picks up the information from the sensor in your Nike+ shoes and monitors time, speed and calories.

So, I tried it out last night, now I’m not by nature an evening runner anyway, I much prefer first thing in the morning but I can only do that if I’m running at the weekend, but that run was tough. Gone were my fantasies of running though the park, light footed, wind in my hair. I managed to the end and back of the long road that connects onto my road, 1.43 km in 12 minutes, I had planned on running a little longer but I was in danger of splattering something on my brand new, white, pristine trainers, that’s another reason why I hate running in the evening, I much prefer running on an empty stomach! The Nike+ system though worked, the trainers are a lot lighter than my old run of the mill Nikes and it was great having something to monitor time that wasn’t my old kitchen timer (which honestly, I used to use) and then having to go home and work out my distance and speed on WalkJogRun. The Nike+ site is great (although it’s red and black theme and it’s heavy use of flash makes it taxing on my ancient, display faulty laptop), you get to download your run from the little USB thingy on your sportsband and you get a little nifty graph of your run. You get to track progress and monitor goals. They also have a training section but that seems to be in Beta and was a little unreliable to load (at least on my laptop), but when I could get it to load I looked at the 5k and 10k training plans and they were quite frankly frightening. I should be obviously doing the 10k plan, which says something along the lines of making you comfortable to run 10k in 12 weeks, which seemed to be by making you stagger great distances from the word go, up to 12k by the end, so obviously when you get to do that 10k race, if you’ve been running 12k, then 10k would be a breeze, theoretically.

So, I have a lot of work to do, it’s got to be running three times a week (including the dreaded evenings) and I can’t use the excuse I’m on holiday at the beginning of August not to run then, most definitely not, even if it is in North Wales.

Edited to add (28/8/08)

I know a lot of people have been and still are reading this post since I posted it in June (1,482 as I type). I’m still running, the Human Race is on Sunday and eek I think I might just be able to do it, although I’ve only run a maximum of 8.67km so far!

But I’m posting because I came across this thread on the Nike forums about the sports bands, I’m not sure if you can see the thread without logging in, so in summary the thread is about faulty sports bands, it seems like there are an awful lot of them out there. The display on my sports band is faulty with what looks like leaking LCD at the bottom left corner and on the right edge of the screen, it’s still just about readable and not wanting to part with it during my training build up to the Human Race I haven’t returned it. Looking at the forum it seems quite a lot of people have had the leaking LCD problem but even more people have had problem with moisture getting into the display unit and ruining it, just from sweating, which of course you would do from running, from running in the rain or in humid conditions. I’m obviously not that sweaty then and amazingly considering this miserable summer I haven’t run in the rain with it yet and humid, don’t make me laugh. But it is a worry, specially considering guess what the weather forecast is for this Sunday’s race? Having read through the very lengthy thread, apparently some stores in the States no longer recommend you buy sports bands as they are too faulty and rumour has it they are now not for sale in Japan at all. There are rumours of a generation 2 sports band eventually coming out and right now like a lot of people have said, it feels like we’re beta testers and paying for the privilege.

Having said all that I am grateful for the encouragement that the sports band has given me in my running, I’ve run without anything to monitor my progress before and I had trouble making it even to 5k race standard now with the sports bands help I’ll probably just about stagger round the 10k route on Sunday, although just looking at the route map makes me feel faint! So I’ll continue using my sports band, I just hope the display doesn’t get worse,  apparently the hole in the back of the strap doesn’t help with the moisture problem, so I may do something to block that hole up, but god help me if it rains when I do that 10k as I’ll spend all my time worrying that I’m about to finish my sports band off and that is not something that I should be worrying about.