Depressed Strawberries

I still had a lot of yoghurt left that needed using up, so last night, I decided to follow Patrice’s advice and make smoothies! Unfortunately, I didn’t actually have any fruit in the house so I decided to make a trip to Tesco.

I love mangoes but I haven’t actually had one in years so I decided that mango was surely to be the base flavour for my smoothie (they’re also really difficult to draw on Paint. It looks more like a maraca but bear with me).

I actually got two for two pounds, which was cheaper than I had expected. This left me with about three pounds to spend on some other fruit:

With produce in hand, I was ready to head to the checkout. It was only by chance (when Luke decided that he wanted to buy some energy drinks or something) that my attention was drawn to the reduced section in which I came across something that I’d never seen before.

Although I much prefer fresh fruit, I do love tinned peaches and pineapples; I’m even partial to the whole fruit cocktail (in juice, not syrup). Despite my many experiences with preserved fruit, I was surprised to see tinned strawberries – reduced to only forty five pence, at that!

I was excited at this, so I rushed home, diced my mango and chopped my bananas (the oranges were somewhat more challenging but I won’t go into that).

I always have to ask Luke to open tins for me as I can’t work our tin opener and he has a way of doing it.

*

I hate our modern tin opener. I much prefer the old fashioned ones; they are much easier to work and they do a better job. Not to mention that the more modern openers are often razor sharp and dangerous. I could probably write a whole post about tin openers, but I shall restrict my rambling to this small paragraph.

What we found in the tin certainly wasn’t attractive.

The strawberries looked awful. They weren’t light, stiff and happy as normal strawberries are; they were dark in colour and flaccid. They were heavy and I supposed that if you were to drop one from significant height (about a metre and a half, perhaps), it would be unable to contain its own mass and splatter when it hit the ground (where a normal strawberry would bounce and recover with ease). Truly, a sad thing indeed.

Strawberries shouldn’t be like that; however I can’t say I’m surprised. Being contained in a tin like enclosure like that would depress anyone. Those poor strawberries never stood a chance. Regardless, I put them in my smoothies (their only hope for salvation being a merciful death), but they weren’t exactly the tastiest strawberries I’ve ever eaten.

I should add that I didn’t technically make smoothies after all. I was about to, when I was informed from an outside source (Luke’s mother) that blending fruit isn’t healthy as it releases all of their contained natural sugars (or something like that). Therefore, It turned into some sort of fruity yoghurty dessert which I was fine with.

*I hate that expression, surely it should always be ‘give it to me’ because ‘give it here‘ doesn’t really make sense grammatically – I mean, you can’t give something to an adverb, can you?

A Friend Indeed

Hello, everyone!

This is a pretty strange post and I’m not quite sure how to go about this because I feel terribly arrogant; I’m just going to jump right in and say what I want to say:

I have a friend who just started a blog and he’s feeling somewhat apprehensive about it. Like me, he started writing not for the sake of having a great readership and to achieve blog fame, but to serve his own purposes and vent his emotions.

It’s nice to write but it’s also nice to be read; to be heard; to know that there is someone out there who cares what you have to say – even if they just find you interesting at face level, it’s nice to know that there are like-minded people to talk to.

I feel arrogant about it, but basically, I want you to stop by my friend’s blog, Pink Shell, because I want him to be able to experience what I have. I want him to meet wonderful people and maybe feel a little better about himself and about life.

Like I said, the purpose of his blog isn’t to achieve readers and he hasn’t asked me to advertise his blog for him, I just think that I was somewhat saved by the people I’ve met here and I want to allow him the same chance.

There are only a couple of relatively short posts so far, so it’s not as if stopping by his blog will be awfully time consuming on your part. If you’re really not interested in what he has to say, so be it.

In any case, I realise that this has been terribly arrogant of me and for that, I apologise; however, I think that my willingness to be perceived in this way illustrates my seriousness.

Thank you for your time, sincerely.

Itchy Balls

Luke was having this conversation with himself in the kitchen earlier:

It actually went on much longer and concluded with him telling himself sternly that he was going to put some sugar up his bumhole. I do worry about him sometimes.

Sorry that this isn’t a real post. I’m having terrible writers’ block lately. In any case, I just thought I’d share this little moment with you.

 

 

Yoghurt and Healthy Cookies

A week or so ago, I bought three giant cartons of yoghurt that were on sale. I thought that I’d use them instead of milk (mainly in cereal) in order to be a bit healthier; also to cut down on calcium for I drink a lot of milk, and if you have too much calcium in your system, the excess excretes itself as those white-headed spots with solid bits – which are actually lumps of calcium – inside them. Athough, thinking about it now, yoghurt contains just as much calcium as milk, I’m sure.

Unfortunately, I’ve only used up half of one and there are still two more to go. I’m beginning to get worried that they’re going to go off soon and I don’t think you can freeze them because they’re in a cardboard carton with nothing else to reinforce them.

On a pot of yoghurt that I’ve bought in the past was a recipe for this incredible lemon cake (which I will share the recipe for soon). It reminded me that a great way to use up all of my unwanted yoghurt would be to incorporate it into cooking.

Apparently, you can use yoghurt instead of butter, not just milk: you halve the amount of butter that you want, and then halve that again for the amount of yoghurt. So say the recipe told you to put in 100g of butter, you’d put in 50g and then 25g of yoghurt.

The other day (by which I mean the day before yesterday. Annoyingly, Luke always refers to events that occurred several years in the past as happening ‘the other day’), I used this butter/yoghurt technique to make chocolate chip cookies. I used wholemeal flour, too, so in my mind, they were healthy cookies.

Unfortunately, they were so solid that you couldn’t just eat into them without taking the risk of breaking your teeth; however, I think that was my fault for putting in too much flour.

To eat these formidably strong cookies, you had to either soak them in milk for half an hour (this was my favourite option because afterwards, the milk tasted of cookies; however, it defeated the object of not wanting to drink milk), or microwave them until they were warm and soft.

They tasted great though – once they were edible!

Here’s the recipe for anyone who wants to make their own healthy cookies:

Pretty much just chuck all the dry ingredients in together, then rub in the butter and then slowly add the wet ingredients while mixing. It isn’t the most precise method, granted, but it works. Just do it in the way that you feel is right.

Bake them on gas mark 5/ 190 degrees Celsius. Each batch only takes 10-15 minutes to bake.

If anyone has any other recipes that require (or can use) yoghurt, please post them (or a link to them) in the comments, because I really do need to use all of it up soon!

NOTE: I just got a tablet and I’m still trying to get used to it. At the moment, I’m mostly using it for writing; the reason I say this is because I used it to write up the recipe and some speech in the panels; I hope you can read it! If not, let me know. I was also worried that the writing simply looks too scruffy. Should I stick to touch pad or progress with the tablet? I mean, it’s a lot easier and faster using the tablet (meaning I can theoretically post more often), but does it look as good?

 

My Relationship with Lettuce

Lettuce insists on being part of every sandwich that I make. It can often be difficult to deal with Lettuce’s clinginess  and that causes a lot of tension between us.

Lettuce hates being alone. It gets upset when I leave it in the fridge, who isn’t very happy with me at the moment!

Lettuce is charismatic and gets along great my other food friends.

Having said that, Lettuce doesn’t like the unhealthy foods at all (seductive as they are).

Even though I don’t always make the right choices in life, I know that I’ll always have Lettuce to fall back on.

Lettuce isn’t on very good terms with me at the moment because I called it ‘Cabbage’ by mistake.

Despite our quarrels, Lettuce is good for me. I love Lettuce very much.

NOTE: I want to apologise for some of the drawings in this post. I know that they’re not up to the same standard as usual and for this I really am sorry. Drawing all these on a touch pad one after the other can be hard on the fingers (it’s mostly all the writing that does it)! It does make my hand ache awfully. Thankfully, I’ve got a graphics tablet on its way so this should make this a lot easier and I’ll be able to post more often hopefully! Also, I’m feeling pretty excited because I’ve wanted a tablet for years!

HELP: Flash Export

I’ve recently started using Flash which is pretty fun, but agonisingly time-consuming. In any case, when I export what I’ve done, even though Flash uses vector graphics, the exported ‘movie’ (we say film here) is pixelated and I can’t change it. If anyone knows why this is happening, I’d love some help!

Also, I can’t play SWF files, I’d love some help with that too!

In any case, here’s my first test as a GIF; I was just testing out movement and emotion while getting a general feel for the program. It won’t play on the page (even though it plays in the ‘Edit Post’ box), but if you click on it, a new window will open and it’ll play there.

P.S. I’m using Flash 8

 

Post-haste

I’m not quite sure why this is, but for some reason or another, whenever I buy something online that has an estimated delivery date, said date is never the actual date on which my package arrives.

While the first couple of days are bearable, eventually hope and patience begin to wear thin.

Soon, all I can think about is when the item will arrive.

By the fifth day, I’m almost at breaking point: I go from being distressed at the fact that my package still hasn’t arrived to being angry that the estimated delivery date has grossly lied to me.

And then comes that inevitable and barren day on which there is no hope at all for a delivery.

Then the fear that my package could have got lost hits me. I could easily have mistyped my address on the delivery form, it’s not an unheard of scenario.

Usually, the package dies arrive eventually, but the story doesn’t always end happily. The situation on the 10th day (below) is actually fictional, but I have missed delivery dates many times in the past on account of the EDD being inaccurate.

Incidentally, I have a package that due to be delivered tomorrow. Wish me luck!