So, in the opening of Saving Private Ryan, there's a whole sequence where the chaps from the landing craft jump out into the water, and go down a couple of metres under the weight of their equipment and it is all etherial, and bullets go whizzing past and kill a couple of people with a plume of red.

HOWEVER.

In Mythbusters, they comprehensively ( Read more... )

 This weekend, with A. being away, I'm watching a vast batch of War Office Training films from WWII. I'm quite impressed. Not only are they socially interesting (especially the "find yourself a job after the war" one, with 3 chaps and a woman making use of the employment exchanges), and made by the usual suspects (a lot of Michael Balcon, ( Read more... )

I've been thinking about that celery/beetroot/goats cheese dish. The solution might be a golden beetroot bavarois / jelly, and try infusing the celery with some gentle pickling agent in the vac pac bag, plus a little celery salt ( Read more... )

Gair and Gerald have visited (hooray) and gone (boo), and the food was eaten. I had the most appalling headache on Saturday, but 2 hours of napping in the middle of the afternoon enabled me to carry off the cooking without too many modifications. Here are some details on the dishes; they were basically all experimental (apart from the salad), as I' ( Read more... )

More for my own memory's benefit, here's this weekend's menu for our esteemed visitors.

"Bloody Mary"
Invisible tomato and black olive ravioli
Blue cheese, pear, pickled walnuts and rocket salad
Egg on toast (100% egg)
Champagne-infused cucumber, celeriac and a beurre blanc
Celery, beetroot and goat's cheese with horseradish icecream
Melon, soy, sesame
( Read more... )

I've been very lucky with work to the end of the year, so we treated ourselves to lunch at Midsummer House apropos of nothing in particular, except that a good lunch is a magnificent thing.

I love food at this time of the year.

Spring is great and all, with the young vegetables, spring lamb and the like, but this early autumn period is probably my ( Read more... )

Saw the Hairy Bikers make a cornish pasty yesterday, so I made one for dinner tonight, based on their recipe, but messed about with by me ( Read more... )

I'm feeling under the weather, so I want to make something very simple, that also wouldn't take long to cook, but had bags and bags of flavour ( Read more... )

Took the hotpot leftovers and grated some cheddar over the top of it. (BTW, for anyone in the UK, believe it or not, but the seemingly-too-plasticy Cathederal City Mature Cheddar is brilliant for melting; I wouldn't use it for, say, sandwiches, but it is awesome for cheese on toast, or grated on top of things like this; and it comes in a resealable ( Read more... )

I've just watched a rather splendid 1961 film called "Strongroom", starring Derrin Nesbit. There were several things to commend it - suspense, a slightly surreal air during the robbery sequence (they made particularly good use of the stocking-masks), a twist that I was not expecting; and it was only 75 minutes long.