Culinary Delights

Tonight I attempt to cook my first roast chicken. It seems like a pretty easy way to cook really; buy a chicken, stuff it with some things (I've used a lemon, some garlic and some thyme) then bung it in the oven for an hour and a half. If all goes well I could be cooking a lot more roasts, the lazy cooking is very similar to stews and, to a lesser extent, cassaroles (they need a little more prep time, whereas stews you can just put everything in your pot and you barely need to fry start anything). To go with the chicken will be roast vegetables of course and if I can manage to not stuff it up we should also get a nice chicken gravy. The whole process will be carefully checked against my current bible of cooking, Jamie Oliver's book Jamie's Dinners. It's a really good cook book, not too heavy on the details (like the other cook book we have by Ainsley Harriot, Ainsley Harriott's Friends and Family Cookbook) but it's really made me want to eat more fish. The prices of meat have also made me want to eat more fish, even some of the expensive fish is cheaper than the chicken or beef you get around here. Lucky for me then I guess, more omega 3 and all that.

Enough about food, let me talk about what's been going on here. Not that it's really interesting, I just wanted to change topics. As I mentioned before, Chloe has been visiting Paul for the past couple of weeks. After doing some touristy site-seeing and meeting some relatives, they took the Eurostar to Paris for a few days. I thought I may be able to get a few quiet days to myself there but as luck would have it Annmarie was flying back to Australia the day after Paul and Chloe left for Paris. She was leaving from Heathrow so the family asked to stay at our flat the night before as travelling down to Glasgow takes such a long time it'd be easier to do it the day before. That was fine and Damien took the opportunity to stay a couple more days in London to see some of the things he missed from the last time he was here. Fast forward to today, Chloe has left to catch her plane to Australia, Damien and Willow are halfway to Glasgow and Paul is yet to return from Heathrow which leaves me in fragile peaceful surroundings cooking a chicken.

Last week at work I managed to stay late enough to see someone bring in a Sony PSP. That's the new handheld console from Sony, and it's the little sister of the Playstation 2. The PSP is a very nice looking device with an excellent large sized widescreen format LCD screen. The game I saw running on it (Ridge Racer) was very impressive even though I don't like the Ridge Racer series. The picture quality and framerates were definetely close to the PS2 so I'd place it as the best handheld platform around. I haven't really seen much of the Nintendo Dual Screen, but I have been looking at some of the Gamespot videos of Super Mario 64 DS. It looks nice, definetly being at least on par with the Nintendo 64, but I don't know how it compares to the Gamecube (probably poorly). It'll take me some time to stop thinking of the second touch screen on it as anything but a gimmick, but I'm probably clouded by my affection for Sony Playstation at the moment. The price I saw on press statements was 20000 yen which is around US$200 or £100 and the guy that brought the PSP in to the office even said it was US$200, but on all the online stores (like PlayAsia.com and Lik-Sang.com) they're around twice that. It's rather frustrating, but at least it'll stop me from buying one too soon.