Saturday 31 August 2013

Take one pan...

I'm getting quite good at these bung it all in a pan teas.

So, inspired by 'A Girl called Jack' I thought I'd blog it. 

First chop and fry an onion, add grated carrot and courgette and swede, the courgette was grown by my mum so was delicious, (we'd had two in last nights tea with some homegrown beans, pasta shells and a jar of Aldi tomato and mascarpone sauce.) the swede was left over from a pie I'd made a few days back ( ok, ok last week!) 
Then comes the magic... Open the cans and bung it in. 
In no particular order...
small tin of sweet corn
small tin of chickpeas 
tin of cannellini beans
tin of green lentils 
And a tin of tomatoes
Some passatta 
Two-ish teaspoons of veg stock
Two teaspoons of curry powder 
One teaspoon of garam masala
After tasting a bit I also put in a teaspoon of marmite and a teaspoon of miso. 

I do get a bit George's Marvellous medicine when I'm cooking!



I served it with basmati rice. 

Delicious, I shall freeze the rest and maybe add more stock for a yummy soup. 

The best complement.

Wednesday 28 August 2013

Lunch.

I'm going to miss our holiday lunches, the boys have really embraced sandwiches! 

They just aren't the same when they've been wrapped in plastic and left in a corridor for 3 hours. 

And bargain of the day, these baguettes were 29p from Lidl. 

 

Whoops!

I didn't do very well on the blog a day challenge. Sorry.
But I have managed to unsubscribe from a lot of my emails, there have been a few that seem impossible to, but on the whole I now have a 'lighter' inbox.
If only it was easier to unsubscribe from the junk that comes through my front door.

Thursday 15 August 2013

'besöksstol' The Millennium Trilogy. An observation.


No spoilers.

A friend gave 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' by Stieg Larsson to me ages ago and I'd never been able to get my teeth into it, then we went on holiday and 'bingo' I was hooked.

I was two thirds of the way through the first book when it struck me that visitors chair was an odd phrase but thought nothing of it, then on Wednesday I heard Front Row on radio 4 about authors and translating books


And it made think about the visitors chair again and if what I was reading was as intended etc etc but I didn't want to spoil my own enjoyment of the book so put it out of my mind again. 

I was close to finishing book 1 and my birthday was on Friday so I dropped boulder sized hints to the kids for book 2, they did pick up on them but no book materialised - so off I went to the local charity shops, I picked up the third book in Barnardos for 49p and the second book in Oxfam for £1.09 (ooh and a new bag) 

I'm now very nearly at the end of the second book and there's been lots of people sitting in visitors chairs, so I downloaded the Google translate app and set it up for English to Swedish and put in visitors chair. 

besöksstol

I even went back and forth between a few languages and always got visitor chair. 

I imagined a scenario when an English man/woman was sat with a Swede asking them to explain things, pointing at objects...
What's that?
-Bord-Table
That?
-Thats my chair, Stol. 
Your chair?
-Yes
So that? 
-Um, another chair, a visitors chair, besöksstol. 
Ooh besöksstol I like that. 

Maybe they'd had trouble with visitors and seating etiquette, visitors climbing on the lap of their hosts, so there was a need for visitors chairs?!? 
Who knows. 

I put  besöksstol into Google again and found this...

http://www.deadgoodbooks.co.uk/index.php/book-translation-an-insiders-perspective/

Seems I'm not alone!

So when does a stol become a besöksstol and when does a besöksstol become a stol?
And am I a visitor in my own home sat here at my Ikea 'Norden' table on my Ikea 'Gilbert' chairs?