Category: Me

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Me Nature

RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch 2011

It’s that time of year again. Time for some citizen science! I got off to a great start with two siskins, and ended up with a respectable 17 species:

Blue Tit × 6
Great Tit × 4
Long-tailed Tit × 3

Chaffinch × 5
Greenfinch × 7
Goldfinch × 3
Siskin × 2

Dunnock

Robin

Blackbird

Nuthatch × 2

Woodpigeon × 2
Feral Pigeon × 4
Collared Dove

Great-spotted Woodpecker × 2
Green Woodpecker

Magpie × 2

Collared dove is a new one for the BGBW; it’s a species that only turns up in the garden very occasionally. As always a few regular species failed to show: coal tit, goldcrest, jay and most surprisingly, ring-necked parakeet. But it was still a good year.

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Me

The 6th annual Christmas stuffing post

The annual Christmas stuffing post may be the most pointless of the arbitrary traditions that have accreted themselves onto this blog, but it doesn’t take long to do, and what better time of year for arbitrary traditions? So here we go:

As usual, two stuffings both made with a base of sausagemeat, breadcrumbs, onion and celery. The more savoury one has returned to the usual chestnut version, after a brief dalliance last year with pistachios. This year the fruity one is pineapple and ginger, using dried pineapple reconstituted in a bit of water and candied stem ginger.

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Me

Ham

I cooked a ham. Looks good, innit:

Unfortunately I don’t think it’s going to taste as good as it looks, because I trusted the man who sold it to me when he said it didn’t need to be soaked before cooking, and the little bit I trimmed off to taste was VERY SALTY. Which is irritating, because it was quite an expensive chunk of meat. Ho hum.

It probably didn’t help that I steamed it instead of boiling it, but that’s how I cooked last year’s (after soaking it) and it was fine.

I also made an Italian Christmas cake thing called pangiallo, which was mildly stressful because of the not-very informative recipe and turned out to be a pleasant but completely unremarkable fruitcake of the kind I don’t like very much.

Bah humbug.

CHRISTMAS EVE HAM UPDATE:

I cut a few slices, and it’s certainly saltier than I would ideally like, but it’s not unbearably, mouth-shrivellingly salty, which I thought it might be after the little test bit I cut off. So let’s call that a partial win!

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Me

Christmas biscuits*

I did some baking yesterday.

There’s nothing especially Christmassy about the recipes themselves — ginger biscuits with candied peel and chocolate chip oat cookies — but I did make them sparkly.

It’s quite hard to photograph the glitter. It’s actually holographic rainbow sparkles, but in photographs it just looks silver.

* Note for Americans: not those kind of biscuits, obvs.

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Me

Bionic Cat!

One of those OMG I’M LIVING THE FUTURE!!! moments.

We have our cats microchipped, so that if they get lost, they can be traced back to us. But that isn’t the futuristic bit; no, the futuristic bit is that we have a new cat-flap which has a chip reader and an electric catch… so it’s a cat flap which electronically scans the cat and only opens for cats it recognises. Very Star Trek.

If I’d designed it, it would have flashing lights and a robotic voice that said cyberfeline identity VALIDATED when the cat came through. Which is just one of the reasons why I’m not an industrial designer.

» that’s not my cat, btw.  Cat with glowing eyes is © Random Tony and used under a CC by-nc-sa licence.

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Me

Salmagundi update

A London Salmagundi, my Tumblr, has now been running for five months and accumulated over 1200 posts; if you haven’t been visiting it, this is the kind of thing you’ve been missing.

Photos by Pierre Bonnard — Hausa horsemen in quilted armour — C19th corset — a hornet mimic — Giovanni di Paolo — optical illusion — mermaid plate — Song dynasty vase — elephant skin — aubergine shoes — paper mosaic — knitted cuttlefish — brass knuckle — rhino beetle — Sweden — dub — ibis — sand art — taxidermy — cittern — set design — weimaraner — type specimen — target practice — bidis — bleeding tooth fungus — cricketers — diamond mine — mantua — good luck charm