lifestylesupportguru

Tag: cooking

Advice on the Latest Heat Wave

How fortuitous!

I first published this advice in 2013 when we must have been going through a heatwave (seems like we survived that one), so I felt it appropriate to publish it again!

WARNING! Lifestyle support guru back again, offering some sound advice on how to deal with the heatwave. There is a real danger of HEAT EXHAUSTION in these temperatures, so my advice is…DO NOTHING and that way you won’t become exhausted.

Forget the hoovering: that can be done when it’s raining;
forget the ironing: wear linen as much as you can – it looks creased within five minutes of putting it on anyway, so nobody will know that you haven’t actually ironed it;
don’t cook: it will increase the temperature in your house, so eat lettuce instead because it’s really boring and you won’t want to eat it, so you’ll have the added benefit of losing weight; and finally,
SAVE WATER and help the local economy at the same time: go to the pub and drink beer instead!

I have followed all these rules and I can honestly say that I don’t feel in the least exhausted.

Eggsciting Times!

Tonight, dear devotees, I intend to offer some tips on cooking. As you know, I am particularly adept at producing the perfect Pot Noodle, but you don’t need me to advise you on this culinary creation since the instructions are written on the pot anyway. No, today I wish to offer some advice on poached eggs on toast and, more specifically, poached eggs in the microwave. You may not have realised that poached eggs could be cooked in a microwave, so I am here to broaden your horizons and offer you two alternative methods of poaching eggs in the microwave, as tested by the Lifestyle Support Guru and a male sibling. It is up to you to decide which method you will eventually choose. Both are equally effective. I will set the scene:

Male sibling suggests poached egg on toast for lunch as a change from Pot Noodle. You point out that the sliced bread has mould on it, but accept that the cobs are still relatively fresh, so they could be cut in half in order to fit in the toaster. And now here are the two methods:

1. Male sibling looks at the instructions for the (until now unused) poached egg device for using in the microwave and breaks two eggs into it, pricking the yolks and whites, as instructed, so that they don’t explode. He then says that he needs to add half a tablespoonful of water to each egg and proceeds to add water straight from the tap rather than go to the trouble of getting a tablespoon out of the drawer. You stand looking on in awe at this facility to measure half a tablespoonful straight from the tap. The instructions go on to say that the eggs should be cooked on low-medium power; unfortunately, neither of us has ever used this function before and can’t work out how to change the power setting, so he takes a chance and stays with ‘high’. (I did offer to get the microwave instructions out, but he said not to bother – so I didn’t.) Meanwhile, he has forced the two halves of the cob into the toaster and there is a wonderful smell of burning coming from it because they are a touch too wide for the slots, At the same time there are some wonderful popping sounds coming from the microwave before it pings. Since the sibling is wrestling with getting the oversized cob halves out of the toaster, you open the microwave and find that there are splatters of egg white decorating all its inner walls and a puddle of water on the microwave plate. Sibling slides the eggs onto his ‘toast’ and goes off to eat them, quite satisfied with his efforts.

2. You follow the same method as above right up until you realise that you need to add half a TEASPOONFUL of water to each egg, which you duly do. You then get the microwave instructions out and learn how to change the power setting. The eggs are ready to go, so you follow the sibling’s actions with regard to the cob halves. Unfortunately, you have cut them unevenly, so one of them has to be squashed into the slot, which means it comes close to setting the toaster on fire. There is that wonderful smell of burning again! But no popping sounds from the microwave! And no layer of egg white or puddle of water in the bottom (so to speak). You wrestle with the ‘toast’ and eventually have to turn the toaster upside down to get all the bits of cob left inside, but it needed a good clean out anyway. The eggs don’t quite slide smoothly out of the microwave dish – they need a little ‘persuasion’ with a knife, but they taste fine, even if the toast is a little unevenly cooked (or, rather, hardly cooked at all since you started to panic at the first smell of burning) and it doesn’t matter that the whole meal is cold because of the time you spent working on the toaster (which has since remained safely unplugged) because you get an immense feeling of satisfaction from having cooked it all yourself, putting in even more effort than you would for a Pot Noodle. And it only took half an hour from start to finish!

Please let me know if you would like more detailed instructions on preparing this healthy, quick and tasty meal. Buoyed by this success, next week we will be attempting Chateaubriand steak with duchesse potatoes and asparagus spears.

The Party’s Over

Camilo Ayala

Great Sadness

It is with great sadness and an aching heart (but an immense sense of relief) that I have to announce that I no longer regard myself as a PARTY ANIMAL. How has it come to this, you may ask yourself. How can the Lifestyle Support Guru have reached this sorry state? What momentous event can have caused this? Let me tell you…

DODO and I decided that we would venture into the city centre to sample the bright lights of a Saturday night, something we had not done for some time. THIS WAS A MISTAKE.

We started in a new ‘games pub’ where everyone was playing board games, which wasn’t so bad, although it’s not how I personally would have chosen to spend my Saturday nights when I was in my twenties (or thirties, or forties, or…).
Looking for something just a touch more lively, we moved on to a Latin-American-themed establishment. THIS WAS A MISTAKE.

At first we were ignored by the bar staff, who probably thought we were the cleaners and had arrived early. After getting served (we were the only ones not drinking cocktails), we managed to get a seat and gazed around at the clientele. I came to a number of conclusions:
i) Too many women were wearing dresses at least one size too small
ii) Too many women had failed to purchase ‘no VPL’ (no Visible Panty Line) underwear to go under their small dresses
iii) Too many women had not practised walking in stilettos before coming out for the night
iv) Too many women were too concerned about flicking their hair alluringly over their shoulder then looking round to see who’d seen them do it
v) Too many women were ‘shaking their booty’ – not a pretty sight in a dress two sizes too small, and quite unnerving for DODO because they were ‘shaking it’ in his face. He almost choked on his beer!

I am all for self-expression and not judging others, but there are limits… I doubt very much that the young woman with the VERY large bust and VERY narrow hips wearing a VERY short, tight dress with large flowers (possibly peonies or cabbage roses) on it had intended to look like a drag queen… THIS WAS A MISTAKE.

But there has been one final ‘event’ that has settled it in my mind that my PARTY ANIMAL days are finished. I was preparing a gourmet Sunday lunch (fish and chips – or ‘frites’, since they were from M&S) for myself and DODO. It was as I was lifting out the baking tray to turn the ‘frites’ over halfway through cooking, as per the instructions (is there a knack to this? They seem to end up on the floor or not turned over unless I use my fingers, which HURTS!) that a thought sprang unbidden into my mind – ‘Hmm, I could do with some new oven gloves.’ NEW OVEN GLOVES? NEW OVEN GLOVES? NEVER in the LSG’s long(ish) and illustrious life have oven gloves ever featured in any significant way. And certainly not on a Sunday afternoon with lunch and a glass of wine waiting.

And that, beloved believers, is when I realised that my PARTY ANIMAL days are finally over. One cannot allow PARTY ANIMAL and OVEN GLOVES to exist in the same mind. I am off to the Aga shop tomorrow…
THIS MAY BE A MISTAKE.

Domestic Goddess

A very good evening from the Lifestyle Support Guru! You may not have noticed my name mentioned as one of the ‘winners’ in the election, but I can let you know that I shall be working undercover as a secret advisor to the government and all the other parties, but if I tell you what I’ll be doing, I’d have to kill you, I’m afraid, so I shall move on to something else.

Domestic Goddess

Now, as you know, the LSG has skills in many areas, but what some of you may not realise is that I am also a DOMESTIC GODDESS and I am going to help you achieve this status, too. Being a DOMESTIC GODDESS doesn’t have to involve such mundane tasks as cooking, washing up or cleaning the oven. Goodness me, no! All you have to do is get someone else to do it for you (by going out to lunch on as many occasions as possible) or buy a Groupon voucher for an oven cleaner to come and get rid of all the gunge that has somehow gathered inside your oven, even though you use it infrequently (that means ‘almost never’ in LSG-speak). Personally, I blame the cats – I think they may well be secret Michelin-starred chefs.

Now, imagine the scene: you have a professional oven cleaner booked for the afternoon, so what’s the first thing you do? Yes… you clean the oven! You also clean the kitchen itself and, just for good measure, the bathroom – just in case!
The cleaner arrives and you lead him into your sparkling kitchen, show him the oven and he

oven

examines it. ‘Does it have an interior light?’ he asks. You finally manage to stop laughing because this is almost the smallest oven you can buy without it being a Calor gas camping stove, so an interior light would make it look like a floor show every time you open the door!
He opens the oven door and looks inside and you feel a frisson of terror in case he refuses to clean it. ‘Please, tell me you’ve seen worse?’ you plead and he says – slowly – ‘Yes…’ and then there’s silence… until he adds, ‘We also clean carpets,’ as he looks back into the living room where the red carpet has a fine covering of long, white fur as a contrast.

Italian coffee

You offer a coffee and he then asks to use the toilet (relief that you put that little bit of extra effort in) and then you explain to him that you will be doing your Italian homework while he’s working, hoping that this will impress him and make him realise that the LSG is far above domestic chores.
The oven cleaning and the Italian homework finish at the same time – guess which one of us said, ‘Well, I’ve done the best I can.’?
To the undomesticated eyes of the LSG, the oven, once again, looks sparkling – if those bloody cats decide they want to start doing cordon bleu cooking, they can go elsewhere! This oven is not for burning!

And there you have it – being a DOMESTIC GODDESS is easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy, as long as you let other people do everything for you(except your Italian homework). Pot Noodles for me from now on – or lunch out.
Sleep well, dear followers!