getting my oats

I assume literally everybody had a go at making some sort of bread during the COVID-19 lockdown, right? There was a whole subculture (no pun intended) that sprang up around sourdough bread, including the best ways to ensure the capture of the airborne yeast that makes sourdough starter work. Other, if you will, avenues (what, your hairy avenue, etc.) are available for yeast acquisition, for instance if you are lucky enough to be the owner of a vagina you can harvest yeast from there, especially if you happen to be suffering from a conveniently-timed yeast infection. Intriguingly, it does appear to also be possible for the process to run in reverse, i.e. for you to catch a vaginal yeast infection from bread-making, although that does raise some interesting questions about how the yeast transference occurred. 

As an aside, if you want an even more extreme method of making bread rise, try making some gangrene bread.

Anyway, as much as I like eating sourdough bread I am far too lazy to get into the minutiae of starter fermentation and all that malarkey. We did nevertheless have a couple of goes at making bread during lockdown, firstly some fairly standard white bread (i.e. the sort that you make with the yeast that comes in a packet) which was fine, although we were a bit cavalier with the proving process so it was a bit denser than it might have been. 

The bread-making process isn't that onerous, honestly, but the yeast thing plus the multiple provings, putting a towel over it, leaving it in the airing cupboard, etc., is a bit time-consuming, so I was interested to hear that you can make bread with beer. The relevant paragraph from that linked page is this one:

There are two kinds of beer bread, both of which are incredibly simple. In fact, my favourite way is so simple a child could do it (disclaimer: don’t let a child do it). All you need to do is mix a 330ml bottle of beer, 375g of self-raising flour and 3 teaspoons of sugar in a bowl with a spoon. Pour it into a bread tin, top with a drizzle of melted butter and bake at 180°C/360°F for about 50 minutes, or until golden and crisp on top.

The results don't look massively different from the regular bread, and taste pretty similar too. I can't remember what sort of beer I used for the one in the picture, but you can imagine getting very different results from a lager or a light dry IPA, and a malty winter ale, or Guinness. 

The upside here is that it's incredibly easy to make and doesn't require any proving; just mix, in the tin, in the oven, done. The downside, of course, is that you'll have to sacrifice a bottle or can of beer to the process that you could otherwise have enjoyed in the proper traditional God-fearing way, i.e. by drinking it.

Anyway, it was perfectly nice, though I haven't repeated the experiment, partly for the reasons above, and partly because post-lockdown we now have nice convenient access to bread shops and the like. But I am always intrigued by a recipe that seems to bypass the sorcery and voodoo incantations associated with making regular bread, and I was therefore intrigued by a recipe that flashed past my eyes in a YouTube short (or possibly a Facebook reel) the other day. It's basically this one but I'll reproduce it here as it's very simple:

• 300g porridge oats
• 500g Greek-style natural yogurt
• mixed seeds
• 1 tbsp honey
• 1-2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• a pinch of salt

Seed-wise my current preference is a generous couple of spoonfuls of chia seeds in the mix, and then a generous sprinkling of pumpkin and sunflower seeds on top. Some recipes with near-identical ingredient lists appear to produce pale bread with a darker crust; mine is quite dark throughout. 

Essentially it's a variant of soda bread with the yogurt substituted for the more usual buttermilk and the flour/oats combo adjusted so that it's 100% oats. Anyway, the important thing is that the method is simple: chuck everything in a bowl, mix well, scrape it into a loaf tin and bake at around 180°C (gas mark 4) for about 45-50 minutes.

It's very tasty and lends itself to sweet or savoury applications: I've had it with goat's cheese and houmous on it, but also toasted with some honey on and both were equally nice. You'll recall that we have done bread-making using yogurt here before, but that was flatbread which is generally easier. 

waiter, there's some wiener in my schnitzel

One thing that struck me while reading Staying On was the whole business of the Smalleys living in a little annexe off a bigger hotel complex and mostly subsisting off the food provided by the hotel, sometimes ferried across to them on trays by hotel staff. This set off an odd echo in my mind of our time living in Bandung, specifically the brief period shortly after our arrival in late 1978 when we stayed in one of the chalets attached to what was colloquially known by everyone in the expatriate community as the Bumi Club (pronounced to rhyme with "roomy"; stop sniggering at the back there), but is apparently more properly called Bumi Sangkuriang. It's a distinctive building in some sort of Dutch colonial style (lots of swoopy roof gables) built in the 1950s, and still there in a slightly modified form today. I say "slightly modified form" on the basis of having compared a photo taken in the outdoor recreation area at the rear of the main buildings in 1978 to one from the TripAdvisor page linked above: as you can see some of the buildings in the background have been expanded somewhat and the sloping grassy banks removed. For reference you can compare the original roof-lines and observe that the bit right in the middle of the newer picture with the distinctive notch at the back is the one in the older picture, with new sections built on top of and in front of it.

I'm reasonably sure that's me in the background in the top picture, standing on the pool steps (my two sisters are in the foreground), probably with some trepidation since as I recall the pool designers had made the bold decision to have the steps lead straight into the deep end. My (possibly flawed) recollection also tells me that the rightmost section of building in the background housed the room where (having evidently exhausted the entertainment options available elsewhere) I watched The Hindenburg twice in an afternoon.

Anyway, the thing that actually twanged my memory synapses was the food thing; I can't remember exactly what the arrangements were at the Bumi Club, including whether we had any facilities for preparing our own, but I do vividly remember some of the stuff we used to get from the club's own kitchens and - presumably - have delivered over to us. Or maybe we went to some communal dining area to eat? I can't remember. Anyway, things that stick in the mind (and probably stuck to the ribs at the time) were the thick crepe-style pancakes that always seemed to be cold (did they start out hot? I have no idea) and smeared with some sort of Nutella-esque chocolate spread, and the two varieties of schnitzel, which were badged as Wiener schnitzel and paprika schnitzel but could have been pretty much anything. You might, for instance, ask yourself what sort of meat it was likely to have been. Pork? Unlikely in a largely Muslim country, I'd have thought. Veal? Maybe. Chicken? Dog? Human flesh? Who knows.

I note that some other less specific Bandung reminiscences were prompted by my reading of Eight Months On Ghazzah Street back in 2010. More can be found here, here, and here. 

rolled turkey has got me on the run

I'm pretty sure that the last thing the world needs in January, or really at any time, is some more tips on cooking Christmas dinner, but I had a go at messing a bit with the standard formula for Christmas 2025 and I was pretty pleased with the way it turned out, so I'm going to share it here. As always this is as much for my own amusement and future reference as anything else; the links I'm going to include will give a far more comprehensive description of the method than I'm going to bother with.

Anyway, the principle is this: a standard turkey of whatever size is an awkward and unwieldy thing to cook all in one piece in a standard oven and pretty much always ends up being overcooked, not least because different parts of the bird are different thicknesses and cook at different rates. So while tradition says you must have a giant single golden steaming monolith of meat to present to your jolly apple-cheeked multi-generational crowd at Christmas lunch, a more pragmatic alternative viewpoint says: fuck tradition, I would prefer to eat something that's actually pleasant to consume, quicker to cook, and leaves some oven space free for the host of other stuff that I need to put in it.

So the principle behind the deconstruction is: the legs are awkward because the drumsticks in particular are thin and tend to overcook, in addition they're very bony and sinewy and a lot of people can't be arsed with that. Also the giant cavity and the creature's back aren't really doing any good except taking up valuable oven space and slowing the cooking down. So what we do is: take the legs and wings off, debone them and roll them up into giant sausages (you'll need some string, ideally culinary/butcher's string (rather than, say, gardening twine or cable ties) - I kept it pretty simple but you can add some stuffing or other filling as you do this). The deboning is a fiddly job, particularly in the drumstick area as those partially ossified ankle tendons are a pain to detach, but it's worth the effort. Then detach the crown from all the unwanted remaining bones and skin and connective tissue and get rid of them, or make stock or something with them if you must. That leaves you with a crown roast and two chunky leg/wing sausages.

I also wet-brined the crown for about 24 hours before cooking it. This is another advantage of the deconstruction: a trimmed crown plus brining liquid will fit in a large-ish bowl which will go in the fridge; a whole turkey will require a large bucket or a bathtub and obviously won't go in the fridge, though the shed or somewhere similarly cool will probably do for 24 hours, unless you're living in Australia and it's the middle of summer.

The other thing you should invest in is a meat thermometer. I have a simple analogue one, nothing fancy, and it is invaluable for this sort of thing. What you will find is an hour and a half is ample to cook all the meat - mine was gratifyingly succulent and delicious but even then could probably have come out of the oven ten minutes or so earlier. Opinions and guidance vary wildly regarding what's the optimum temperature at which to hoick the turkey out of the oven and let it rest, but I reckon 65-70 Celsius is about right, probably the low end of that range, if you dare, for maximum juiciness. 

The other thing about turkey is that whatever you do on Christmas Day unless you've calculated the amounts absolutely perfectly you're going to have some leftovers, and those can be a dishearteningly dry and joyless experience, with the resulting sandwiches needing a surprisingly large amount of wine to wash them down. In this particular case, though, I'm happy to report that the leftovers were themselves delightful and a positively pleasant prospect for consumption on Boxing Day and afterwards. Eventually we got bored and just chopped the remainder up and put it in a pie; that was pretty good too.

a salt with a deadly ramen

There I was, enjoying a piping-hot mid-week bowl of lunchtime noodles as I am occasionally to be found doing, only to have my wife come into the kitchen and say, hahaha, the internet says those will probably kill you. This was unexpected and slightly unwelcome news to me, as I'd been scrupulously careful, as I always am, to avoid the risk of accidentally shooting myself in the nuts with multiple rockets during the noodle-preparation process. 

As always, once I'd gone and checked out the article Hazel had seen on the internet it turns out the reality is slightly less exciting than the headlines suggest, the shock revelation being that primarily noodle-based meals are quite high in carbohydrates (I mean, no shit) but are also extremely high in salt. This latter observation is undoubtedly true, as the 3.6 grams of salt that a standard packet of the Nong Shim ramen noodles contains constitutes around 60% of an adult's recommended daily intake. 

Yeah, you'll be saying, I see that, but that's surely only a problem if you're eating these things every day. And you are right, of course, but the whole variety and moderation thing doesn't generate those sweet sweet clicks that food websites crave even more than another delicious bowl of spicy noodles. So, for that reason, someone went and did the diligence and ate nothing but a variety of packets of ramen noodles for a week, and arrived at the shock revelation that it's probably not a great idea. This is its very own sub-genre of internet food "journalism", as you can see, some of the stunts probably being more toxic and inadvisable than others. I'm not sure when this all started but I think Morgan Spurlock may be at least partly to blame.

I was moved to wonder what the current rates of noodle consumption are here at Halibut Towers - this is more difficult to calculate over the last few years than it was back when I was tracking it in a serious way, because Wing Yip have closed their online store and I spent a couple of years trawling the far reaches of the internet for noodle bargains before returning to Amazon in the last couple of years. In any case, the numbers from back in, say, 2014 are meaningless in comparison with today's numbers, since we're now up to three enthusiastic noodle-consumers in the house. Nia and Huwie are on a couple of bowls a week on average, and if I have a couple as well that's very nearly a bowl a day between us on aggregate. Alys, contrarian as always, does not relish them.

That finger-in-the-air estimate is borne out by my recent Amazon order history, which shows that we collectively consumed 440 packets in 584 days between January 2024 and August 2025. I have no data on our collective sodium levels or blood pressure, and that's probably just as well.

My only hope here is that the mild scepticism about a perhaps-too-simplistic link between salt intake and blood pressure expressed in the excellent book The Man Who Ate Everything turns out to be true. Even if it isn't, this is a hugely entertaining read which I recommend highly.

I don't have a lot of food-related book recommendations but I would also suggest you read Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, a bit more of a downer but fascinating and well worth a go.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Today's pair are author Harlan Coben and actor, author, amateur chef and mixologist Stanley Tucci.

The only Harlan Coben book I have ever read is Tell No One, which I read a copy of owned by my then-girlfriend shortly after its 2001 publication in a desperate holiday running-out-of-books frenzy, something I would obviously never allow to happen nowadays. I would describe it as enjoyable, gripping and utterly ludicrous, which is all absolutely fine for a fairly pulpy thriller. Like many primarily plot-driven things it and its many successors in Coben's oeuvre are prime material for film and TV adaptations, and sure enough there have been a whole raft of them, most recently the Netflix series adapted from Run Away, which seems to feature a cast of mainly British actors.

Stanley Tucci, meanwhile, is probably right now deep in some method-acting preparation for the plum role of me in the movie of my life. For him to be a perfect fit appearance-wise I probably need to get slightly balder, something which I'm pretty sure will happen all too imminently. 

did an icebreaker at a work meeting the other day where the question was "who would play you in a movie of your life". panicked slightly trying to think of bespectacled bald fiftysomethings and said Stanley Tucci. increasingly convinced of the genius of the idea

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) July 17, 2023

cache for questions

Here's a map of a short walk we did with some friends when we went up to Leicestershire to visit them for New Year. We had, collectively, five kids with us, so a twenty-mile route march was out and in any case would have cut unacceptably into drinking time. We ended up performing a slightly complex set of manouevres involving a car in order to ensure that smaller people who didn't want to do the whole walk and might potentially get a bit whingy and risk PISSING ME OFF had an opt-out and in the end it was only three of us (me, Jim and Nia) who did the whole route (around five miles) on foot. 

No claim will be made by me here that this was the most exciting or challenging walk ever, therefore, but I offer it up nonetheless to illustrate that if you're interested in what goes on around you you can find quite a bit to interest and intrigue even on a short, low-level walk such as this.

Start and end point was at our friends' house in Stathern, which I have obfuscated the exact location of just in case anyone decides to go and burgle it. We then walked along the road towards the neighbouring village of Harby before heading north just after the old railway bridge and linking up with the towpath of a disused canal before making our way into Harby, where we had a couple of pints in the pub and then headed back via the more direct on-road route.

Some points of interest along the way: firstly the old railway bridge and the railway it used to carry. This was the slightly cumbersomely-named Great Northern and London and North Western Joint Railway which meandered its way around Leicestershire in a mainly north-south direction. Its main business was goods but there were passenger services (ending pre-Beeching in 1953), and there was a station serving both villages called, imaginatively, Harby and Stathern, whose approximate location is marked by the purple star on the map. As with any station designed to serve two communities, it was roughly equidistant from each and conveniently accessible from neither. 

As if that were not interesting enough, Nia reminded me to have a look at my geocaching app and see if there was anything in the vicinity. I discovered not only that there was, but that there was one right under the railway bridge - cue a lot of scrambling around until we eventually found it under a log by the side of the northern bridge abutment.

I see I've mentioned geocaching a few times on Twitter before but the only mention on this blog seems to be in this post from 2008 wherein I was a bit sniffy about it. Well, all I can say is that was pre-kids and it's a lot of fun hunting them out with the kids and gives them a little bit of extra impetus to agree to outdoor activities. The link earlier in this paragraph includes details of the app, of which there is a free version more than good enough to facilitate some entertaining hunting; give it a go. Top tip: take a pen with you as quite a lot of them have log books and only the really lavishly-appointed ones have an accompanying pen, still less one that works.

some more fun #geocaching up in #Wentwood woods at the weekend. Alys was very chuffed that her sharp eyes spotted this one before her sister did. also a bit weird that all the Wentwood geocaches have Papa Lazarou in them barking HELLO DAVE at me pic.twitter.com/1k14TDjjat

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) August 27, 2020

So then there's the canal - this is the old Grantham Canal which ran from, you've guessed it, Grantham, to West Bridgford on the southern outskirts of Nottingham (and where I went to school for a couple of years in the early 1980s - I mean, not in the canal specifically) where it joined the River Trent. It's pretty reedy and silty and overgrown these days though still just about recognisable as a waterway. 

Finally, once we'd squelched along the muddy towpath to Harby we called into the Nag's Head for a couple of reviving pints. They'd evidently done their research and knew we were coming, as they'd facilitated a nice home-from-home vibe by having Brains SA on tap, and very nice too. Needless to say we lingered a while longer then we'd originally planned, so when everyone else piled into the car to head home the remaining three of us had to stumble back along the road in the dark. Luckily the roadside verges were fairly wide and my phone flashlight was just about up to the job of helping us see where we were going and avoid getting killed by occasional speeding cars. While we're on the subject of pubs we also called into the Montero Lounge in Melton Mowbray on New Year's Day for lunch. 

Finally, my mention of Melton Mowbray there reminds me to remind you that if you're visiting the area you will be in the middle of both Melton Mowbray pork pie country and Stilton cheese country, so make sure you eat some. I'm not big on blue cheese but I did ensure I ate a pie while I was there. 

the best (and worst) of blondie

Literature and sport are all very well, you'll be saying, but what I really want is to stuff my big fat stupid face with some delicious cakey goodness until I fart. Well, Electric Halibut is here for you. It was my wife's birthday last week and, as is (intermittently) traditional, I concocted some goodies to celebrate. A few highlights from previous years include 2020's chocolate brownie cake, a triumph taste-wise but on an unfeasibly massive scale given that we were occupying at that time a moment in human history where it was uniquely difficult to share any of it with anyone outside the house. We did eventually work our way through all of it but it was quite an epic struggle.

And then there was 2021, where I hatched the idea of making some raspberry and white chocolate blondies instead, but in my hurry to get things in the oven (as it was rather late in the evening) made the elementary mistake of omitting all of the flour from the recipe, resulting in the ungodly oily lumpy (and needless to say inedible) goop pictured here. 

Then in 2022 we were in the throes of just having moved house and having to do quite a bit of unexpected junk clearance before getting our stuff organised how we wanted it, so I granted myself a cake amnesty and went and bought one from the shop instead. It was very nice, but to my taste a bit too sweet; then again I can't even remember to put flour in a cake so what the fuck do I know.

H's birthday today so bought this interesting cake. Huwie came with me and was very intent on reading the label. Served it up and he leaned over to H and whispered "Mum, it's a SUSPICIOUS CAKE". Actually very nice and not at all suspicious pic.twitter.com/EgSyJEPmuq

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) May 26, 2022

Anyway, I wasn't about to let 2021's failure define me as a man, a husband, and a cook, so I decided that 2023 was the year that we would finally crack the definitive blondie recipe. And I firmly believe that this is it. Note that it is largely derived from this recipe, with a bit of scaling-up of amounts to fit my 9" by 13" brownie tin and a bit of adjustment of proportions to accommodate the raspberries (which the original recipe doesn't have) and ensure it's not too absurdly sweet.

• 250 g unsalted butter
• 250 g white chocolate
• 125 g white granulated sugar
• 125 g light brown soft sugar
• 4 medium eggs
• 250 g plain flour
• 200 g white chocolate chips
• 50g fresh raspberries, chopped

Melt the butter and chocolate together (I used the microwave; a bowl over a pan of water would work just as well) mix it all up, add the sugar and eggs, mix some more, stir in the flour (if you're using an electric mixer, do this bit with a spoon first to avoid being engulfed in a mushroom cloud) and then the raspberries and chocolate chips (don't use the electric mixer at all here or you will end up with a uniformly pink cake with no raspberry bits in it).

That should give you a thick but still pourable batter which you can pour into a paper-lined brownie/traybake tin and put in an oven at around 180C/gas mark 4 for about 20-25 minutes. As with the brownies you want a slight wobble in the middle when you take them out. Let them cool and then put them in the fridge (overnight is good), then cut into smallish squares (they're pretty rich). You'll find the edge squares are a bit more cakey while the ones from the middle have a denser, rawer texture.

Anyway, they were exceptionally well-received and disappeared pretty quickly, helped by us being away for the weekend with another family of five. Where were those guys back in 2020 to help with the monster brownie cake? Well, locked in their house, obviously, but you take my point.

your cabbage awaits

But what, you'll have been thinking, has been going on in the spicy noodle arena? We don't seem to have heard about that for a while, and that's one thing that should have been relatively unaffected by the lockdown, since all that was happening by internet mail order anyway.

Well, I see that the last post where I presented an update to the ordering and consumption statistics was in January 2020, just after I'd done an order for 100 packets from my usual source, Wing Yip. This was a couple of months before the start of the first UK lockdown, and as you can imagine with myself and Nia at home seven days a week the consumption levels were fairly high. What I found when I had a look at ordering some more a few months later was that the prices had gone up quite dramatically, from 79p a packet in January 2020 to 97p a packet as of today (that's about what they were a year ago as well). I don't want to start accusing anyone of price-gouging, but is is certainly true that they must have seen a hike in demand, and for a while until things settled down it would have been either impossible or extremely difficult to get any from a physical supermarket.

The reasons for getting the noodles from Wing Yip in the first place were firstly that the unit price was lower than the supermarkets, so despite the P&P if you bought enough (100 at a go is plenty) you could save yourself some money, and secondly that they sell all sorts of other goodies as well, from strange green drinks with lumps of jelly in them to actual nice stuff like interesting curry pastes and kimchi. As I said here, I don't want to give the impression that I was munching fermented cabbage as a 5-year-old during our stint living in South Korea, because I've really only developed a taste for it in the last five years or so (I really was eating the noodles at that age, though).

Noodles can now be more cheaply obtained from supermarkets like Sainsbury's, or from Amazon, in both cases for a little over 80p a packet (and no P&P charges). That's great, but it leaves open the question of where I get my supplies of kimchi from. Some branches of Lidl seem to sell it, but none of my local ones do. 

So I did a bit of internet research and the general consensus seems to be that you can make your own without too much hassle or complexity. I mentioned this to Hazel and then forgot all about it, but fortunately she is a ruddy genius and got me a massive clip-top jar and some basic ingredients (mainly chilli-based) for my birthday. I won't attempt to rehash any of the gazillion recipes out there on the internet, but what they pretty much all have in common is the thing that lots of people around the world call napa cabbage but UK supermarkets tend to call Chinese leaf, garlic, spring onions and some form of chilli flavouring. There seem to be two schools of thought here regarding whether you should use the gochugaru (Korean chilli powder, on the left in the picture below) or the gochujang (a sort of paste made from chillies, beans and fermented brown rice) as the chilli flavouring; most of the recipes I saw recommended the former so I went with that. 

This video contains the distraction of the parallel making of another kind of kimchi out of a terrifyingly giant radish but otherwise gives a pretty good summary of the method, which is really pretty simple; soak the chopped cabbage in some salted water a bit to wilt it, make a fearsome-looking paste out of the crushed garlic and chilli powder and the shredded spring onions, mash the whole thing around until the cabbage is evenly coated (some cautious people recommend rubber gloves for this bit), put it in a jar, leave this at room temperature for 48 hours or so (mine got about 72 as we went away for the weekend but seemed none the worse for it). Then you just pop it in the fridge (a good seal on the jar is essential here if you don't want everyone else in the house moaning about their food stinking of kimchi), ideally leave it for another week or so, and eat. I would describe the results from my first attempt as FREAKIN' AWESOME.

I will seriously take the Pepsi challenge with any shop-bought #kimchi here. No doubt there are a gazillion brands I haven't tried but this is better than anything I've ever had out of a jar.

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) June 11, 2021

celebrity cookeylikey of the day

The Velvet Underground's bass- and viola-wrangler (and, hey, why not, Welshman of the Day) John Cale (pictured here in 1967) and absurd Turkish steak-wrangler and internet viral sensation Salt Bae (real name Nusret Gökçe, so, yeah, Salt Bae it is). Note that literally the only difference between them is that Bae's chin hair extends to a goatee whereas Cale restricts himself to a thing that I would call a "soul patch", but which apparently has various other names including a "jazz dot" and, incomprehensibly, a "Nollsey". That last one may of course just be a mischievous Wikipedia edit (the only person I could locate who goes by that name is this guy) and so should probably be taken with - no, wait for it - a pinch of salt.

findus crispy pandemicakes

We haven't done a recipe for a while, have we? I can see that I wrote down a very hand-wavey summary of what I did to make some spiced roasted pumpkin soup in this post from a couple of Hallowe'ens ago, but the last post I can find that actually had a formal list of ingredients in it was this one from 2016 for the latest incarnation of what I still think of as my clafoutis recipe, but these days is really a sort of cakey bread and butter pudding.

Anyway, here's a couple of things we've cooked up during lockdown - I say "we" as the girls, Alys in particular, are quite into a bit of the old cooking these days. The first is a sort of variation on some previous recipes which can be found here and here and which I tried as a means of using up some leftover mashed potato. The first thing to say is that you need less potato than you might think - if you've got enough to fill, for instance, one of those Gü ramekins that everyone has a stash of in the back of a cupboard, you've probably got enough for 3-4 decent-sized pancakes. Or, looking at it another way, if it's too much for you to say: fuck it, I may as well just eat that now, then it's probably enough to save and have a go at this with.

So, here's what you need:

Potato panbread flatcakes

• Some leftover mashed potato
• An exactly equal quantity, by volume, of self-raising flour (you're not an idiot, but just in case, the easiest way to do this is to empty the container you had the mash in into a larger mixing bowl, fill that now-empty container to the same level with the flour and then tip it in too)
• Some liquid just in case you overdo the flour (pretty much anything will do, water for instance, or if you're feeling a bit more creative maybe some plain yoghurt)

Smash everything together in a bowl, cut it into as many fist-sized pieces as it will make, flatten then with either a rolling pin or a fist or both to about 3-4 mm thickness and place in a dry, un-oiled, non-stick pan for a couple of minutes on each side. Hey presto, potato-ey pancakey things which are somewhere between the farinata (which is a proper floppy pancake) and the yoghurt flatbreads (which are properly bready and quite stiff) in terms of texture, and very nice with a whole variety of things.

You'll be wanting some dessert after that, so here's a supremely simple chocolate cheesecake we made when my parents came over for a post-lockdown reunion the other day:

Chocolate cheesecake

• 300g condensed milk (about 3/4 of a standard tin)
• 300g soft cheese - I used light Philly; usually the full-fat versions are better for this sort of thing but it doesn't really matter here as the condensed milk whacks the fat and sugar content back up to dangerous levels
• 200g dark cooking chocolate (anything but dark would make the end product far too sweet)

Make a standard smashed-up biscuits and melted butter base and put it in the fridge or freezer to set. Melt the chocolate, beat the condensed milk and soft cheese together, add the chocolate, beat some more, pour the resulting goop onto the biscuit base, refrigerate for a few hours, eat. Simple! These amounts fill what I think was a 10-inch flan tin; we made an initial experimental version in an 8-inch tin with ratios of 200g:200g:100g, which worked fine, although I think the slightly higher chocolate content in the second one improved things (as it generally does).

sriracha comin' atcha

Here's a follow-up to the chilli sauce post of a few years ago and this more specific sriracha taste comparison one from a year or so later. As an adjunct to my relentless bulk purchasing of noodles I usually order a couple of other products as well, sometimes basic essentials like kimchi, for which I have developed a bit of a habit, but sometimes more outlandish stuff like the grass jelly drink from 2014 which still haunts my nightmares. A while back I ordered a couple of bottles of sriracha of a couple of brands I hadn't tried before, and I note that I have not yet opined on their merits in this forum. Furthermore, as I was running low on my regular go-to sriracha (Flying Goose brand) I instructed my wife to keep an eye out for it when she went to Sainsbury's last weekend. She returned with two bottles with a red cap/nozzle instead of the normal green, which turns out to be the extra-hot variety, and so since I now had multiple untested srirachas (srirachae? srirachata?) I decided a comparison might be in order.

Left to right in the picture below are: my regular (and, as you can see, nearly empty) green-capped Flying Goose sriracha, the newly-purchased red-capped turbo nutter Flying Goose sriracha, and a larger bottle of Chef's Choice sriracha purchased from Wing Yip with a previous noodle order some time back. A blob from each bottle is presented on the chopping board in front of them.

What I conclude from my experience here with the Chef's Choice sriracha in particular, and also from its hitherto-unblogged predecessor, the excellently-named Healthy Boy brand, is that there are at least two schools of thought when it comes to things you might decide to label "sriracha" - one is the orthodox darkish red chilli sauce of the type represented by the Flying Goose and Cock brands, as well as various other branded versions, and the other is a lighter-coloured, generally slightly milder and sweeter product of the sort represented by the Chef's Choice and Healthy Boy brands which I would describe as more a sort of hotter version of the sweet chilli sauce widely sold in supermarkets. Nothing at all wrong with it, but I wouldn't describe it as "sriracha", exactly. 

Anyway, as you can see, the red-capped version of the Flying Goose brand (one of a bewildering variety of variants available) is slightly darker than the regular version, as befits something which presumably has a higher concentration of chillies in it. I'm pleased to report that while being appreciably hotter than the green-capped variety it is not absurdly, inedibly hot and is in fact very good, maybe even better than the regular variety (caveat: I am extremely fond of spicy food and have quite a high tolerance for Scoville units).

Moving on, here are a couple of slightly different bottles: this is the more Central/South American variety of chilli sauce, specifically a smoky variety made from chipotle chilles. I encountered the Asda version pictured on a camping trip and was quite impressed: it's not particularly hot, but it is very tasty and a thoroughly excellent accompaniment to a sausage sandwich, for instance. I don't shop in Asda very often - not through snobbery or anything, just geographical convenience - so when I was in Tesco a while back I picked up a bottle of Wahaca-branded sauce of a similar description. I was quite impressed with the restaurant food when I visited their Cardiff branch a couple of years ago, but I have to say this isn't as tangy as the Asda version, so I'd recommend that one instead. As you can see I've gone to the trouble of making a trip to Asda to stock up.

forever and ever, ramen

It's noodle-ordering time again, and I notice on a quick trawl back through noodle-related posts that I did a table a while back detailing my noodle consumption. A few years have passed since then so it seems right to bring it up to date.

Order date	Quantity	Unit price	Days	Consumption rate
15/07/2008	30	0.45	296	37
07/05/2009	60	0.59	266	82
28/01/2010	80	0.59	320	91
14/12/2010	80	0.65	328	89
07/11/2011	80	0.59	295	99
28/08/2012	100	0.59	399	91
01/10/2013	120	0.49	318	138
15/08/2014	120	0.55	392	112
11/09/2015	120	0.65	299	146
06/07/2016	120	0.65	266	165
29/03/2017	120	0.70	239	183
23/11/2017	120	0.70	263	167
13/08/2018	120	0.70	280	156
20/05/2019	100	0.79	233	157
08/01/2020	100	0.79	tbc	tbc

By a bit of Excel-fu that must remain top secret I've converted those by-order-period stats into friendlier by-calendar-year stats. Here you are:

Year	Total
2008	17
2009	67
2010	91
2011	91
2012	97
2013	103
2014	128
2015	123
2016	156
2017	177
2018	163
2019	157
2020	tbc

As you can see, consumption seems to have levelled out at somewhere between 150 and 180 packets per year, or a fraction under one every two days. What has most notably changed since the last statistical assessment is that Nia has progressed from stealing a few noodles from my bowl to having half a pack of her own (with some frankly rather tedious saving of half-sachets of soup powder between servings) to just having a complete packet to herself as she does now. The gradual increase and subsequent levelling-off of the consumption profile probably reflects that. 

What's also interesting to consider is my egg consumption, especially since I consume no eggs in their original form, and therefore stirred into noodle soup is about as close as I get to consuming one directly (I suppose I may consume the odd one as a binding agent in a tortilla or a frittata from time to time). I tend to use one for a 2-packet saucepanful of noodles, which probably means I end up consuming about half an egg per bowl. If we further assume I consume about half the packets that get consumed, that works out, at current rates of consumption, at something like 40 eggs per year. That must account for upwards of 90% of all the eggs I ever ingest, I should think, for all that other foods may contain small amounts, along with small amounts of lupin and sulphur dioxide.

bombed between groins

I spotted this on Twitter earlier today:

This turns out to be from 2014, but I imagine the principal protagonist (who is from Taipei) still winces about it, and possibly finds himself unable to eat noodles without experiencing some sort of PTSD reaction. A couple of questions immediately spring to mind:

• I mean, just generally, what was going on here? It turns out there is an answer, of sorts, involving, as you would expect, some exceptionally poor life choices;
• Who the hell is "Chris Illuminati"? Does he even exist? Is he some sort of Nazi space lizard, under deep deep cover as a lazy recycler of internet content for "brobible", and secretly using his job as an excuse to laugh at us puny humans and our pathetic warm-blooded non-scaly antics?
• Lastly, what does "cooking up ramen in a Speedo" mean? You'd think it meant he was actually using a pair of Speedos as a cooking pot, something that would surely be problematic from a flammability point of view, not to mention the issue of all the soup falling out through the leg-holes leaving a bulging gusset of half-cooked wet noodles. At least it might put the fire out. It turns out the original web page from which "brobible" shamelessly swiped most of the content phrased it slightly differently, although still not in a way most people would recognise as proper actual English (that would require an "s" on the end of "Speedo"). Maybe the extra "a" was added to foil plagiarism-bots hunting down shameless scrapers of website content or something;
• Finally, note that the byline under this version of the story is equally stupid, though a bit less obviously lizardy.

I think the reason that some of the phrasing here is a bit odd is that this is an English translation of an original article in Japanese. Clearly a bit more care has been taken than just running it through Google Translate, though, since if you do that you end up with this

my little...pumpkinny-wumpkinny?

So, Halloween, then. Source of much annoyance, some of it caused by pedants who insist that the word should have an apostrophe between the two e's, some of it caused by trick-or-treaters, some of it caused by those who sniffily dismiss the whole thing, or some aspects of it (usually the trick-or-treating bit), as a piece of modern American-inspired nonsense. I don't want to get into the argument, but, as always, it's a bit more complicated than that.

My objection to trick-or-treating is not based on some spurious lazy knee-jerk cultural bias, but on the empirically sound and verifiable fact that I am a grumpy old misanthrope and I don't like strangers coming round my house demanding I participate in some lets-all-muck-in come-on-get-involved community jollity or some similar heart-warming crap. As it happens we very rarely get trick-or-treaters round our way as we're a bit off the main residential circuit and the occasional drive-by shootings probably make people a bit nervous. What I generally do is lay in a load of fun-size choccy bars as a precaution and then spend the following week eating them.

One thing that you'll probably be unable to avoid, particularly if you have children, is purchasing one or more pumpkins for the purposes of carving amusing faces into them. And, furthermore, having done that, fretting about whether you should make use of the giant gourd for some sort of recipe once the novelty of the amusing face-carving has worn off, rather than just leaving it outside the back door to decompose.

This year I was determined to make better use of them, especially as we ended up with three, only two of which were used for carving purposes. So I decided to make some soup, most of the traditional alternatives, pumpkin pie in particular, having a fairly unpalatable look to them.

I have a few general observations about soup, as follows:

• firstly and most importantly, soup is predominantly, preferably 100%, liquid. There is, I am going to assert, no such thing as "chunky soup". If you have a bowl of that, what you have there is runny stew. I bow to no man, for instance, in my love for Welsh cawl, but calling it soup is a nonsense. 
• one of the reasons for this is that I eat things when blitzed unrecognisably into soup that I wouldn't touch with a bargepole in their "natural" form. Celery is a good example; my hatred of it in its natural form is mainly a texture thing, so when it's pulped into soup (probably with the addition of some potatoes and stuff) it's just pleasantly peppery. The criticisms levelled at Heinz Big Soup here, for instance ("mainly pipes and gristle") would have been more difficult to level if it had all been blended up into an amorphous goop.
• it's surprisingly difficult to over-spice soup. Bung in as much stock as you like, spice it up, chilli it up, you're very unlikely to overdo it. As you'll see below I had to chuck an extra consignment of spice mix into my soup to render it a bit more interesting.

So anyway, I made some pumpkin soup. I had two whole pumpkins, and I didn't want to end up with two gallons of soup, so I kept it simple - two pumpkins, a couple of onions, some garlic, various exotic spices. I chopped up the pumpkins into slices, slathered them in some spice mix (a mixture of some tagine paste I had in the fridge, some smoked paprika and a load of black pepper, as well as some olive oil and lemon juice) and chucked them in the oven for what ended up being a couple of hours. I then skinned them, put them in a big stockpot with the onions and garlic and a load of stock, simmered them for a couple more hours, put the whole lot through a blender, bish bosh, soup.

Slightly bland soup, to my taste, so I put together a small magic potion featuring some more stock, a dollop of some exciting Middle Eastern spice mix (as pictured) and a couple of spoonfuls of some Greek yoghurt, added that, and that seemed to improve things. It ended up being perfectly nice slightly spicy pumpkin soup, not the most thrilling taste experience ever, but, you know, it's soup, get over it. Here are a few pictures.

the pen is heightier than the sward

Mountain hiking, Paul, is very much like making love to a beautiful woman. As exciting as it is to conquer a new one every week, there is also something to be said for approaching a familiar one from an unfamiliar angle - you may find some interesting nooks and crannies you were previously unaware of, and although much of the terrain will inevitably be well-trodden - including, indeed, by other people - the new approach will hopefully make it fresh and interesting nonetheless.

And so it was that when a weekend away with some friends involving a couple of overnight stays in Cardiff was mooted, and it was furthermore mooted that we might have a crack at Pen y Fan on the Saturday, I took it upon myself to scope out a route. Just as with many other well-frequented mountains (Snowdon is the classic example) there are a number of "standard" routes up Pen y Fan.

I ruled out the quick route up from Storey Arms on a few grounds: firstly it'd have been almost impossible to park (or at least not legally) on a Saturday in June, and secondly it's just not that interesting a route. It's the shortest route up, involves the smallest height gain (since the car park is at the crest of a hill on the A470 so you get a head start) and there's no scrambling, but that is as a result of being on the more featureless side of the mountain. Also, crucially for a misanthrope like me, there are hordes of people trekking up and down this route who I have no desire to interact with or even see for longer than necessary.

Other routes can be had from the south, including from the car park in the Taf Fechan forest where we parked for the walk documented here and also from the car park a bit further up the road near the Blaen y Glyn waterfalls where we parked for the snowy walk documented here. Both are good, the second route somewhat longer than the first. Both still don't really approach Pen y Fan itself from its best side, though; to do that you need to come at it from the north. I have been up from the car park at Cwmgwdi on the Brecon side a couple of times before, as documented in the two photo galleries linked to here (plus bonus paella recipe). On both of those two walks we went straight up the ridge at the back of the car park, took in the summits of Pen y Fan and Cribyn and then came back down via the old Roman road that runs along the east side of Cribyn's north ridge.

Now according to my current set of rules for optimum walk enjoyment (as explained at length here and here) we should really have done those last two walks in reverse, i.e. with the boring on-road flat bit between the bottom end of the Bryn Teg ridge and the Cwmgwdi car park first, and then dropping off the ridge straight back into the car park at the end. So I decided we'd adhere to the rules this time, which means doing the walk marked on the map below anti-clockwise, thereby getting the walk along the road from the car park to the car park at Nant Cwm Llwch out of the way early doors while we were still all banterous and enthusiastic rather than have to do it at the end when we were all dead-eyed and monosyllabic. One could of course park here instead and then do the walk in reverse, but this way round enables you to traverse Corn Du and Pen y Fan in that order, thus adhering more closely to another of my arbitrary rules, i.e. that ideally the main objective of the day should be around two-thirds of the way into the route.

This is probably a more satisfactory walk overall then the other one starting from the same place, as it includes a close encounter with the pretty lake of Llyn Cwm Llwch just before the steep ascent up onto the main ridge, and provides the best angle for appreciating the steep northern face of the two main peaks. As with any walk, it was enhanced by having nice sunny weather (occasional wispy cloud on the tops aside) all day, and by excellent company including a couple of victims of my stag weekend walk who volunteered for further punishment. I'm very keen on solo walking, but it's nice to have a big group sometimes to keep each other entertained and motivated. It was pretty quiet on the ridges, but the two peaks were very busy with people who'd come up the other way, and there was something of a scrum to get the obligatory summit selfies.

There are still routes up that I haven't tried - I've never gone straight up either of the ridges which lead directly to the summits of Cribyn or Fan y Big, and there is a fantastic high-level traverse you could do starting in the vicinity of the Talybont reservoir dam, ascending via the Twyn Du ridge, and then ticking off all the peaks before dropping off via Pen Milan into Libanus. You'd probably need two cars for that one, though.

A small selection of photos can be found here. The gurning shot at the end of us in a restaurant is taken in Wahaca in Cardiff city centre, which is a sort of Mexican tapas/street food place which I recommend highly.