cobbled together

Oops, only two weeks old and already the blog is being neglected like an ugly child. Sickness has certainly been getting in the way of other stuff. Oh, and a bit of disco fever, porno style action and text-flirting. Yeah, it’s spring and even a sore throat can’t take the gleeful sting off a bit of interest from a cutie.

Saturday was the triumphant feast of The Black Pearl trivia team. I staggered home at 5 feeling completely retarded and wondering if I could cook. Cooking turned out to be the easy bit – dinner party conversation was much more of a challenge.

Sandy made pasta with oven roasted tomato sauce. Much better than I expected. He quartered the tomatoes and then poked a sliver of garlic into each one. Roasted them forever and mixed them with olives and more garlic. I made a vegetable cobbler because I’ve always wondered what the hell a cobbler is. It was from the Crank’s Bible, which I got from library but might have to steal. So the cobbler was chunky vegies cooked up with lots of shallots and covered in a rich creamy sauce. I don’t normally go for creamy sauce but this one worked. Then you put all these rounds of a cornmeal scone dough on top and bake it – so it’s kind of a pie but you can mop up the sauce with the scones. Very cute and quite the impressive party dish.

The other joy of Saturday night was the pebre that Pilar brought. It’s a Chilean salsa and we ate it on bread but she said they eat it on everything – rice, in soups, on beans etc. I’ve looked at some recipes but the basic thing seems to be lots of coriander, parsley, garlic, red or spring onion, garlic, lots of lime juice and some chilli. Mince it up with some tomato and you will be in pebre heaven.

Looking for a chocolate souffle recipe for bindi. Let me know if you have a trustworthy one.

Other great finds of the week – bbc1xtra is the bbc’s black music station and you can listen online. I’m hooked.

Token Olympic comment: we were watching the ping pong final (Korea/China) and Sandy said "they won't let queers marry because it cheapens the institution of marriage but they'll let ping pong into the Olympics." People keep making comments about different sports (baseball, lawn bowls, ping pong) and how they shouldn't be in the games but all sports seem kind of ludicrous and underserving of this much attention. Greco-Roman wrestling was definitely way more weird to watch - so much doggy pose action.