supplies!

It's that time of year again, where I stock up with a vast quantity of Korean noodles to see me safely through the winter. This year's batch are now safely stowed in the utility room (see picture) ready for gradual consumption over the next year or so, or in a more concentrated burst should it all kick off when Barack Obama and his fellow NATO heads of state are in town in a couple of weeks and we have to barricade ourselves into the house until it all calms down.

As you'll be aware, it's the excellent Wing Yip that I get my internet noodles from, and one of the things their website does is keep a history of details of past orders. So I can see at a glance exactly when I placed an order, and how many packets of noodles I ordered each time. I can also see the occasional extra products I ordered at the same time, so I can for instance remind myself of the can of Famous House Grass Jelly Drink that I ordered as a bit of a dare, and of the fun we subsequently had in the office trying it when it turned up. Here's a couple of pictures:

Basically this is a sort of murky greeny-brown liquid with little cubic lumps of green jelly in it, not especially attractive to look at, although of course that is entirely a product of culture and upbringing. It's well popular in Asia, so they must presumably like the look of it. Other versions are available that are heavier on the jelly and lighter on the liquid and for which I imagine you might need a spoon.

In addition to the somewhat faecal appearance, I was slightly put off by the jelly as I'm not particularly fond of drinks with "bits" in, fruit juice for instance. My view here is: either it's food and I need to chew it, or it's a drink and I don't; don't start blurring the boundaries. But for the full experience you need to consume the whole thing, jelly and all, so I did. I can't honestly say it was all that pleasant, but it wasn't especially unpleasant either.

Back to the noodles: it occurred to me that it would be of interest (if possibly only to me) to work out how many packets of noodles I'd got through over the last 6 years or so since I put the first bulk order in. So here's the order history:

Order date	Quantity	Unit price
15/07/2008	30	0.45
07/05/2009	60	0.59
28/01/2010	80	0.59
14/12/2010	80	0.65
07/11/2011	80	0.59
28/08/2012	100	0.59
01/10/2013	120	0.49
15/08/2014	120	0.55

Working out how many packets I get through per year is slightly tricky because I don't eat all the packets I order; there are a few people at work who usually take a few off me. A completely unscientific pulling of a number out of my arse results in a figure of 15% of each order passed on to other people (note that I don't say "given", since I do expect payment). Apply this across the board and you end up with a figure of roughly 470 packets of noodles consumed by me in the last six years, at a rate of one just under every five days. Say three a fortnight, give or take. Note that I'm also ignoring the fact that something like 90% of the packets I eat these days are shared with a small person; I'm not about to try and account for that as well though. Here's a year-by-year chart; no definitive number for 2014 yet but all the indications are that it'll smash all previous consumption records.

noodle news

Bit of a noodle crisis at Halibut Towers: not only have I run out of the first choice Nong Shim Korean noodles, I've also run out of the excellent back-up Sutah Ramen noodles. So while I'm waiting for my latest consignment of internet noodles from Wing Yip to arrive I've had to take a plunge into the unknown and one of the random selection of packets I picked up on my last trip to Kin Yip Hon in Bristol.


These particular ones are made by Nissin Foods, who, crucially, are Japanese rather than Korean. Possibly because of this they're quite different from the two previous brands: only the one sachet in the pack, containing the powdered soup base (i.e no dried vegetables like you get with the Korean ones), and the soup is much paler and less red then the Korean ones, which suggests it's not going to be nearly as fiery, and so it proves. It's a bit watery, actually, as well as being rather salty. The noodles are slightly thinner, as well.


Verdict: well, there's nothing wrong with them, but they're not in the same league of dangerously chilli-laden deliciousness as the Korean noodles. Those are a meal in themselves; I'd suggest if you were going to make a habit of eating these you might want to use them as a base for adding some extra ingredients to as they're a bit bland on their own. On the other hand, the soup base does bear the splendid name of Yuk See Mein, so it's not all bad news.

if love is good, let's get to ramen

My internet noodles haven't arrived yet, so I ventured forth on a journey into the unknown at lunchtime today and tested the first of my random noodle selection. First up: Sutah Ramen. These are distributed in the UK by the delightfully named Double Happiness Wholesale Ltd., who are based, rather more mundanely, in Romford.


Verdict: they're pretty good. In fact they're probably largely indistinguishable from the classic Shin noodles in a blindfolded test. The noodles are a bit yellower and go softer a bit quicker, and the spicy soup mix dissolves better so you don't get that slightly surprising sting in the tail you get with the Shin noodles, whereby the last couple of spoonsful from the bottom of the bowl blow your ears off across the room. Your classic egg drop noodle soup combo is pictured below.

oodles of noodles

Great excitement: my latest batch of internet noodles has arrived.

I reckon my family are single-handedly keeping the UK Korean noodle importing industry going; not only has my sister Emma made recent use of the Wing Yip internet noodle facility, my younger sister Hannah is a big fan as well (though I think she favours the all-in-one Pot Noodle-style polystyrene tub version - it's essentially the same product though). My parents are also addicted, and since the Oriental shop in Hereford has recently either shut down or stopped stocking the Nong Shim noodles (not sure which) I added some for them to this order - so the large pile (70 packets) pictured isn't all for me, just most of it.

Just to reiterate: other brands are available, but the Nong Shim ones are the guv'nor in this particular culinary genre. If you really can't find them then the Sutah Ramen noodles are a pretty acceptable substitute, but they just aren't quite hot enough to make your nose run and your (face) cheeks go numb in patches while you're eating them in that charming way that the proper ones do.

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.

insert chilly/chilli joke here

When conditions are harsh and wintry, as they are in Newport at the moment (the snow picture above was taken about half an hour ago) it's vitally important to ensure you've got enough spicy noodles to see you through till springtime. This lot should do it.

I note from my original internet noodles post that the unit price of a packet of noodles in July 2008 was 45p. As of my latest order this week that price is now 65p - so that's a price increase of 44% in just under two and a half years. So with that sort of galloping hyperinflation there's all the more reason to fill up your store cupboard with delicious noodles, sew yourself into your thermal underwear and batten down the hatches until springtime, whereupon you can emerge blearily, stretch, prise the tappen out of your arse and face the new year with renewed confidence and vigour.

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

apparently Thursday is the new Friday

Well, I didn't get to sample the apple & mint jelly - I'd forgotten it was Thursday night, and Thursday night is (occasionally) pub quiz night. So I had to knock up something quick for dinner, and I came up with this:

Dave's Prawn Laksa

You will need (these quantities are for 1 person, i.e. me. Multiply them up as required. I haven't put quantities for some of them as I assume it's obvious, i.e. as much or as little as you want, within reason. Don't come complaining to me if you put a pint of lime juice in and it ends up tasting horrible.):

• Prawns (I had a 220g packet of jumbo king prawns, which was more than enough for me)
• Coconut milk - about half a tin. Shake up up before opening it, otherwise you get half a tin of really thick coconut goo and half a tin of water.
• Garlic
• Red Chillies
• Ginger
• Lemon grass (mine comes out of a jar)
• Fresh coriander (ideally. Mine came out of a jar last night, though)
• Laksa paste. Reuben Solomon's Singapore Laksa paste is the one I use, and it's great. Sainsbury's sell it, or at least the one in Bristol does.
• Lime juice
• Fish sauce
• Noodles (I used the big fat wormy udon ones last night, but any old noodles will do. Amoy ones are good.)

Fry up the garlic, chillies, ginger and lemon grass a bit. Bung a couple of big spoonfuls of the paste in and stir it around a bit. Add the coconut milk, lime juice & fish sauce and stir it all around so it's mixed together. Chuck the prawns in, cook for 5 minutes or so, add the noodles, another 2-3 minutes, add the coriander, stir it in. Serve. Eat. Bish, and, indeed, bosh. Total preparation and cooking time: about 15 minutes. And it's delicious. Well, I think so anyway.

Then we went to the pub, specifically the Hop House in Clifton village, which has a music quiz on Thursday nights. Nice pub, one major complaint: they don't have enough beer! They do a very delicious pint of Wadworth's 6X, but I don't think I've ever been there when they haven't run out of it at some point during the evening. Last night I managed to get in two pints before it ran out and I had to switch to something else. It can't be that difficult, surely? Other pubs seem to manage it OK.

Speaking of drinking something else, we came second in the quiz, and this week all the prizes were drink-based, specifically varying numbers of bottles of Quinn's, a sort of fruity alcopop that Diageo are marketing as "Fruit Made Alcohol", i.e. the alcohol comes from fermenting fruit, and is therefore presumably more "natural" in some way, as if this makes a blind bit of difference. Anyway, second prize was ten bottles of the stuff, and we didn't want to carry it home, or argue about dividing it up, so we drank the lot there and then. My head hurts a bit this morning! Though on the upside I am in no immediate danger of catching scurvy, which is nice.

porky days and porky nights

As my wife will tell you at prodigious length at the slightest provocation, my daughter takes after me in a large number of ways. For one thing, she loves my spicy noodles - it's a rare occasion indeed when I get to enjoy a full bowl all to myself any more without a small person tugging at my elbow and saying "Daddy, noonles" (that being Nia's version of "noodles") until I twirl up a forkful and deposit them on her plate. That's not really a complaint, as it is rather adorable, but still.

Another way in which she resembles me is in her love of books. We've mostly moved on from the simple flap-based board books now to actual stories, many of them featuring the work of the stupendous Julia Donaldson, mostly in collaboration with illustrator Axel Scheffler. Another thing we've embraced fairly recently is the cute anthropomorphic porcine world of Peppa Pig - not so much the TV programmes, as they're on Channel 5 and we're still pretty loyally bound to CBeebies, but we do have a lot of Peppa Pig clothing (mainly cast-offs from Nia's cousin Kira) and, now, a book.

There's something a bit rum about this book, though - maybe a few sample pages will help you see what it is:

1. Crikey, it's raining, a lot. 

2. Wow, seems like the whole world is flooded; unless you've got a boat you're pretty much screwed.

3. At last the waters recede, leaving boats high and dry on top of hills, and a bird brings a green frond as a symbol of rebirth or some such shit.

4. And there was much rejoicing.

So, yeah, it's basically the Great Flood/Noah's Ark story from the Bible. Now while I'm instinctively disapproving of any attempt to shoehorn crypto-religious nonsense into kids' heads, I suspect that the motive here was more likely to have been the desire to borrow a story whose authors weren't going to be around to sue for breach of copyright.

In any case, even if the Christian churches were somehow able to get a case together, it would be a pretty hypocritical one, seeing as how the Genesis flood story is itself just a mish-mash of various older folk-tales, most notably the Sumerian Epic Of Gilgamesh. Pretty much every civilisation that started up by farming the delicious fertile soil of river flood plains (and that covers pretty much all of them) had, for obvious reasons, folk tales featuring catastrophic flooding, spun retrospectively as a necessary cleansing act by the gods as punishment for some vaguely-specified acts of depravity and/or disloyalty.

So I think I can manage an indulgent shake of the head here, rather than a full-on book-burning. By the time Nia gets to school she'll have been brutally schooled in critical thinking anyway, so if anyone tries to do any proselytising she'll be well-equipped to tear them a new one.

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.

anybody got any salmon? sorted

Here's my latest purchase from the fantastic Kin Yip Hon Oriental supermarket: a great big jar of pink pickled ginger.

This stuff tends to be used as an accompaniment to sushi, along with the usual wasabi and soy sauce. You can just eat it straight out of the jar, as I sometimes do, but don't overdo it or you'll ending up making the noise denoted by the little green bit of text on the label, which I assume is just there as a warning of some sort.

You can also cook with it, and this is what I did with it last night: get a load of it out of the jar, chop it up finely, chop some garlic and chilli up finely as well, stick it all in a bowl, add some lemon juice, sesame oil, soy sauce and some teriyaki marinade (Kikkoman do a good one). Then get a couple of salmon fillets, put them on a doubled-up sheet of foil, crimp the edges together into a parcel, and before crimping shut the last edge pour the contents of the bowl into the parcel. Then stick it in the oven for about 25 minutes.

Meanwhile, chop and fry up some red pepper and mangetout. When the fish comes out of the oven, snip off the end of the parcel and pour the liquid into the pan - scrape in the garlic/ginger goop as well. Sprinkle in a bit of Chinese 5 spice powder, then bung in some stir-fry noodles (Amoy are good), stir the whole thing around until the noodles are cooked and the liquid has cooked off a bit, then stick them on a plate. Put the fish on top, and eat.

noodles by post

As if prompted in some magical mystical way by my lunch, my internet noodles have arrived! Lavishly packaged to ensure not a single solitary noodle was bruised or broken; very impressive.

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

sloe, sloe, noodle, eel, sloe

Firstly, another plug for a local Bristol business: the very wonderful Kin Yip Hon Oriental supermarket on St. Thomas Street down near Bristol Temple Meads railway station. A veritable Aladdin's cave of pan-Oriental goodies from green tea to tinned fried gluten (whatever the heck that is). I mentioned this because I bought a job lot of the Shin Ramyun noodles (pictured here) a day or two ago. These approximate pretty closely the sort of spicy noodles I used to get in South Korea back when I was living there (roughly between the ages of 5 and 6 and a half), and they're great. Hot though. Which reminds me of an interesting linguistic fact I picked up during my other 18-month sojourn in a foreign country (Java, between the ages of 8 and a half and 10): the Indonesians have two words for "hot"; one (panas) meaning hot as in temperature, and the other (pedas) meaning hot as in spicy. Is that not a highly sensible arrangement, precluding an awful lot of explaining, particularly in a tropical country with a tradition of spicy cuisine?

The other food item pictured is a tin of roasted eels, which looks interesting, though I haven't felt quite robust enough to tackle it yet. Fascinating eel fact: uncooked eel blood is toxic.

Right, that's enough food, let's move on to drink. In the run-up to Christmas I decided to decant one of the jars of sloe gin I prepared a couple of months ago. Normally 3 months would be the optimum storage time, but this batch of berries was very ripe, so I thought I'd do one jar's worth early in order to a) have some for Christmas, and b) have some to put in the hip flask for Dartmoor. So - step 1: rig up the jelly bag (you may remember this from the apple & mint jelly post a while ago) above a large bowl and decant the contents of one jar into it, berries, twigs, dead sparrows and all. Then scoop the resulting filtered liquid out and bottle it up. This first jar made one full 500ml bottle, one full 250ml bottle, and the beginnings of a 750ml bottle, out of which I had a quick tot, just to check things out.

Mmmmm......delicious. No, it actually was, despite my comical facial expressions here. I reckon the rest, when I decant it in early February, will be even better.

Korea opportunities

I took a lunchtime trip into central Bristol yesterday to visit the Kin Yip Hon oriental supermarket, which I've mentioned here before. I'd run out of my favourite Korean Shin Ramyun noodles, and this is the only place I know of that sells them. Tragically, however, they only had one packet left, so I had to stock up with a pick'n'mix selection of other brands instead.

Now I'm sure these will all be very nice, but they're just not the same. So I got to thinking: surely in these multicultural times there must be an online Oriental supermarket of some sort? And, well, it turns out there is. In fact I expect there are probably several, but the one I visited is here, and the particular product I was after is here. Postage and packing costs are relatively high, especially when you consider the unit price of a packet of noodles is 45p, so I'd recommend buying in bulk. I bought 30 packets. Yum.

this week I have been mostly eating potatoes

I seem to have accumulated a few foody pics on the camera, so here they are with a few explanatory recipe notes.

Spanish Stew & Tortilla

I picked up some interesting-looking pork and fennel sausages in Waitrose the other day, made by the people at Unearthed. We also have a big sack of potatoes from Hazel's parents which we're gradually working our way through, so this seemed like a good excuse for a Spanish stew and potato omelette extravaganza.

First, the stew:


You've got your sausages, obviously, plus a 500g pack of boneless chicken thighs, a couple of onions, some garlic, some Peppadew peppers, a couple of tins of tomatoes and a tin of beans - I've got cannelini beans, but any old white beans would do; haricot beans, butter beans, that sort of thing. The amounts as shown here will make about four portions.

Cook the onions and garlic a bit, bung the meat in, cook that a bit, throw everything else in, add a bit of thyme and paprika, maybe a dash of red wine, and leave it to cook.


Meanwhile, the tortilla. Now most recipes for this would have you cook the potatoes slowly in a frying pan in several batches. I can't really be arsed with that, though, so a profitable short-cut is just to dice them up, slosh a load of olive oil over them and then stick them in the oven for half an hour.


Then beat up half-a-dozen eggs in a bowl; I threw a bit of grated cheese in as well, though this is no doubt sacrilege to the tortilla purist. Stir in the spuds. Then pour the whole sloppy mess into a hot oiled non-stick pan.



All you need now is a bit of green salad and a large glass of wine.


Thai Fishcakes & Noodle Salad


What I've got here is 400g or so of white fish (this is haddock, as it happens), a few spring onions, some garlic, a lime, some ginger and chilli, some Thai curry paste, some Thai spice powder and some parsley and coriander (out of a jar, though fresh coriander would be much better). This will make enough for two people.

Divide the fish in half. Chop half of it fairly finely, and throw the other half in the food processor along with the other ingredients (well, don't throw the whole lime in, just squeeze the juice out of it). Whiz it around for a minute or so until it's a smooth-ish paste. Then take the blade out and stir the chopped fish in.


Make the mixture into little patties (lots of small ones is better than a small number of large ones, as they'll only fall apart) and fry them in some sunflower oil in a non-stick pan.


By this time you'll have made the noodle salad by blanching some ready-cooked noodles for a couple of minutes, and then mixing them with some chopped Peppadew peppers, chopped spring onion, lime juice, sesame oil and fish sauce. All you need then is a few salad-y leaves, and a cold beer.

buffering; please wait

It occurred to me after re-reading my earlier parkrun post, which included a picture of me lumbering sweatily towards the finish of my first-ever parkrun in 2013, that I was wearing my Welsh dragon Buff on my head and that furthermore there were probably a whole raft of photos from various outdoor activities over the years which feature me wearing a variety of Buffs in various of the many possible configurations. Moreover, having got a couple of Buffs for Christmas and, honestly, probably having enough of them now I thought it might be a good moment for an audit. So: pictured below is my Buff collection.

A quick run-through:

• The green bamboo-themed one at the top left is the OG, the first one I ever bought, from an outdoor shop in Keswick (possibly Rohan) in probably around 2008. Hazel bought one as well and we had an entertaining trip to a pub just up the road (possibly the Dog & Gun) immediately afterwards experimenting with the various wearing options, to the fascination of various locals.
• The red, white and blue one at top right is technically not a "real" Buff as I'm pretty sure it was from the middle aisle of Aldi, and was therefore almost certainly cheaper. Where it wins over the original one is in being slightly bigger; the extra fabric real estate is very handy if you want to make it into things like the pirate bandana or the beanie hat (see the linked video above for instructions) and have (like me) a freakin' mahoosive cranium. 
• The Welsh dragon one is probably the one I wear the most - you can see that I'm also wearing it in the Llanfoist Crossing parkrun photo in the previous post, for instance.
• The blue one was slightly bizarrely (but awesomely) given away as a free gift when I ordered some cheap maps from Dash4It.
• The one with the Norwegian flag on it was purchased in Oslo when we stopped there on the cruise we went on in July 2023.
• The YesCymru one is a recent replacement for one I had previously (further investigation reveals it was Christmas 2020 - I'm wearing it in the post-COVID Riverfront parkrun pic in the previous post), lost for a lengthy period of time, found in a slightly musty state in my golf bag to much rejoicing and then promptly lost again almost immediately. Commendably they are only a fiver on their website, though, so I just bought another one.
• The parkrun one was a Christmas present from this year, a sort of bonus item alongside the 50-parkrun commemorative T-shirt I also got.

A few bonus Buff-wearing pics, respectively these depict: the original green one, looking at a map with baby Nia halfway up Gray Hill; rocking a textbook pirate bandana cooking up some spicy noodles near the Ystradfellte waterfalls wearing the blue Aldi one; me (wearing the Welsh dragon one) and Hazel at the top of one of the Buttermere fells (either High Stile or High Crag); some heartwarming family shit featuring me wearing the YesCymru one (the old one, before the start of the lose/find/lose again cycle) and another parkrun one, this time of me wearing the Norwegian one while struggling to muster a sprint finish in (successful, as it happens) search of a PB at Riverfront. No pictures featuring the other two yet, though I expect I will wear the parkrun one to a parkrun at least once during 2026; seems only fair.