Preparedness for when

DawnW

jk0 wrote: »

Oh, that reminds me how I got my Bolognese sauce recipe: I just bought all the ingredients on the back of the Dolmio jar. I was trying to cut down on my sugar, so I left that out.

I make bolognese when I have lots of bits and pieces in the fridge that need using up - makes good use of shrivelled carrots, bendy sticks of celery etc, and excellent for stretching a pack of mince I put in loads of veg, and prep it in the food processor so that it is cut up small. It is a brilliant way of getting vegetables into kids and teenagers, and great if guests come for dinner as it will stretch almost indefinitely - just cook extra pasta, provide lots of salad and HM garlic bread. Or you can freeze leftovers for another meal when you CBA to cook

Add chopped chillis and stir in a can of kidney beans and you have chilli con carne to make a change. Eat with rice, corn chips and a spoonful of yogurt if you have been enthusiastic with the chillis

VJsmum wrote: »

Chocolate is a plant, right?

OK, where can I buy a chocolate plant? I defnitely need one for my garden :rotfl:

Frugalsod

jk0 wrote: »

Those are good rules VJ's Mum. You are so right about the number of ingredients. Anyone looked at one of Jamie Oliver's recipes? There must be twenty things in there! Even if I could find and afford all twenty, what am I to do with all the leftover ingredients?

I make homemade cheeseburgers on Saturday nights. Yum.

If you look online at many recipes you will see masses of ingredients that put you off starting. I wonder if they are added simply as a copyright issue. I found a cream of tomato soup with a dozen ingredients but managed to cut that down to four.

I have an "if you can make it, you do not buy it rule" as well.

Butterfly_Brain

I always add lentils and or beans to any mince dish plus lots of veggies to bulk it out even further.

I am another one who cooks from scratch, even though I have a lot of tinned foods in the storage cupboard, they are a necessary evil for when the shtf

pineapple

I think recipes are the spawn of the devil - apart from cake and biccy recipes which have to be reasonably exact.
That said I sometimes get ideas by looking at the ingredients in the ready meals section in supermarkets.
I have an ancient Readers Digest Complete Guide to Cookery - a fabulous book which is more about technique.
Plus I'll own up to an old Floyd on Fish book and my Nutriblast (as seen on TV ) recipes.
Generally speaking I find that men are more obsessional about following a recipe to the letter. As in, the sky will fall in if they don't have that sprig of parsley :rotfl:
Runs and hides.....

jk0

I think S just hit the F:

http://rt.com/news/166532-gas-pipeline-blast-ukraine/

craigywv

pineapple wrote: »

I think recipes are the spawn of the devil - apart from cake and biccy recipes which have to be reasonably exact.
That said I sometimes get ideas by looking at the ingredients in the ready meals section in supermarkets.
I have an ancient Readers Digest Complete Guide to Cookery - a fabulous book which is more about technique.
Plus I'll own up to an old Floyd on Fish book and my Nutriblast (as seen on TV ) recipes.
Generally speaking I find that men are more obsessional about following a recipe to the letter. As in, the sky will fall in if they don't have that sprig of parsley :rotfl:
Runs and hides.....

your post reminded me of my all time favourite cook book the readers digest THE COOKERY YEARS my mum used it when I was a child it covers everything,she refused to give me it EVER!!!!! I found it last year in a church sale for 10 books for a quid oh what joy I had and mines in better condition than my mums, I find the old books are the best xxx

GreyQueen

Well, I had an interesting convo with the lovely customer service peeps at my local Tosspots, where I am a regular customer. A 'product report' is being sent to head office re the PNB and I have my money back. They could see exactly what I meant about the subsititution of ingredients (chiefly oils) for cheaper oils, and the changing of the nutrition profile for the worst - less fibre and more fat.

And, I learned something interesting. They took the manufacturer's code of the products (it was a little code begininng SC, in small type, alongside the Procuced for Tesco Stores Ltd) and it wasn't even maufactured by the same company.

OK, so you use the same label, but have a different company produce it from different (cheaper) ingredients.......dishonest, much?

The trouble this kind of messing about, is that it erodes trust and you start thinking that they're all a bunch of lying barstewards, and don't trust anyone, any more. We need to start compaining about this carp.

Liked the martial arts video. Not my art, but lots of similar moves to aikido. Only so many ways to throw, I guess. My sensei always told us that if you control the wrist, you control the body, the rest is just technique and leverage. He was a Glaswegian electrician in his day job. And I've had the privilege of a master class with a 7th dan sensei from Japan, very elderly and very powerful. Would you believe a pensioner could pin a great lout the size of a rugger player and two generations younger than him to the ground by leaning on the hem of his gi with one big toe?

I would, because I've seen it. Awesome.

Today I will be playing with the bows and arrows again. My longbow has a 36 lb pull, which on the indoor range means the arrows are thunking 4-5 inches deep into the target. Funny thing is, I'm not a particularly strong person, but when I showed the bow to a pal, she couldn't even draw the bowstring back properly. It's all about conditioning the muscles to a certain usage. Teach let me have a go with a 45lb pull longbow, which was too strong for me.

The amount of pull you can take on a bow is related to have frequently you practice. If you do archery like me, once a week, you aren't as strong as if you practice 2-3 times a week. If I did that, I could handle the 45 lb bow, according to Teach, but now I can barely draw it. Same is true for the blokes and for the different kinds of bows. A 60 lb pull is the maximum permitted in competitions in the UK but there are some rogue 80lb compound bows in circulation, which were imported from the USA. That's seriously-scary kit. Hell, the 60 lb ones are scary; they look like something from a sci-fi movie.

Mind you, you wouldn't want to get in the way of a target shooting arrow from a longbow like mine, it'd do serious harm, which is why you have to be very careful with them.

Righty, going to have my tea and get ready to go out again. Laters, GQ xx

pineapple

craigywv wrote: »

I find the old books are the best xxx

Give me the old Bero book and I'm a happy bunny. :j

nuatha

greenbee wrote: »

Electricity is our biggest problem, not helped by the fact that we moved to centralised generation and distribution. Electricity doesn't travel well and you lose a huge amount in transmission. If you go to scandinavia, as well as lots of renewables, you find lots of LOCAL generation. It also helps with the planning process as communities can get involved in the decision on the generation mix in their area as they know it is supplying the local community, not vast cities on the other side of the country.

I remember the physics master from my old school proving that it was more efficient to transport energy as coal via steam train than as electricity through copper wire once the distance reached something like 85 miles.
However politicians aren't governed by the laws of physics and NIMBY costs/gains votes.

GreyQueen wrote: »

:eek: OMG, not Hebden Bridge! Pineapple lives in (on?) the moors, has she been told? I know she said she'd had an estate agent around to value her home, did she get a tip-off from the aliens? How long until it's incoming? Will she have time to sell up? I've never been to HB but I've seen it in a colour supplement and it looked rather nice - should have gone when I could......dammit Janet.

Tis a nice place, planning on being back down that way in Autumn (which was why it sprang to mind as the example used - that and it being near enough smack bang in the middle of the UK (if said comet had been aiming for the Square Mile, I'd have been raising a glass to its success)

...
When I were a young lass and first living away from home at 16, my parents used to worry about my safety. Then I took up arm-twisting classes and they started to worry about other people's safety instead.:p

Snipped blood thirsty but good advice on dealing with an attack from behind - snapping little fingers tends to distract most assailants, if you wear heels then make use of them for attacking the fork (if you wear stilettos with pointy toes, I appreciate the dilemma - just use whichever end is most convenient at the time)

**********
I am most ticked off about the PNB, I only have about 6 months' supply of the older style, plus only a dozen of the Sains teabags. If they'd only announce these things ahead of time, I could get the stocks in. It's most vexacious to my squirrelling instincts.

I shall be watching out for more of this diabolic daylight robbery. What have you seen, nuatha? Name and shame them, if you would be so kind.

I'm less than helpful on this one. I updated my lists at the beginng of the year and discarded the versions with the DNB scrawled all over it. I now carry lists of the do buy items as well as the expected price range. We have larger than usual stocks of Heinz beans and spaghetti due to recent Asda offers, as they were the best price I'd seen for a while.
Similarly the cat herd has substantial stocks of Felix as Lidl recently had it at 42p per tin (and a £5 off £30 shop voucher)
The first product that I had stocked was Asda's Smart Price Rice Pudding, it got a new recipe, gained artificial sweeteners and a burnt caramel flavour and colour and 23 and a half tins were returned for a refund.
Since then, there's been a couple of varieties of Irish stew, I don't have any meatballs or sausages on the list. The stock price list used to be 4 sides of A4, its currently a single side, there were even some bottled waters removed (suddenly gained added sweeteners)
My current policy is to buy a single example of anything I stock which I haven't bought for a while and try it, before committing to cases of stock. Where I buy case quantities I sample one before adding them to stores.
If I spot any more changes, I'll make them known.

Bedsit_Bob wrote: »

It will ignore the additional current.

The current drawn, is governed by the device drawing it, not by the source supplying it, hence the term "current drawn".

Compare it to you sucking a drink through a straw, rather than the drink being forced into you from a hosepipe.

It depends on the quality of the design and the components, some devices have the equivalent of a sip it slowly policy, others are a lot greedier and overheat as they suck all they can - this over heating can and has resulted in fires and explosions (there are also devices that are designed to safely take advantage of the maximum current available)

nuatha

Frugalsod wrote: »

If you look online at many recipes you will see masses of ingredients that put you off starting. I wonder if they are added simply as a copyright issue. I found a cream of tomato soup with a dozen ingredients but managed to cut that down to four.

I have an "if you can make it, you do not buy it rule" as well.

Currently I'm unable to pressure can meals for long term shelf stable storage, therefore I buy a number of commercially produced meals and meal components. Generally I do cook from scratch, though the times when this happens least are when health issues intrude or when I'm developing and testing new recipes - there's only so much cooking that I'm prepared to do.

Recipes aren't subject to copyright as such - the list of ingredients and the method are regarded as statements of fact without any personal input, which means they can be copied and reproduced. Its only the particular manner and expression of the authors ideas that is protected (so a straight method isn't copyright, a whimsical wandering description of ingredients and methods is)

pineapple wrote: »

I think recipes are the spawn of the devil - apart from cake and biccy recipes which have to be reasonably exact.
That said I sometimes get ideas by looking at the ingredients in the ready meals section in supermarkets.
I have an ancient Readers Digest Complete Guide to Cookery - a fabulous book which is more about technique.
Plus I'll own up to an old Floyd on Fish book and my Nutriblast (as seen on TV ) recipes.
Generally speaking I find that men are more obsessional about following a recipe to the letter. As in, the sky will fall in if they don't have that sprig of parsley :rotfl:
Runs and hides.....

I've never been scared of a lack of parsley or other ingredients. Though I'll admit to a well stocked larder and spice shelves (not to mention cookbook library)

Recipes can be many things, generally I see them as starting points or guidelines (or as profitable )