Thursday, July 12, 2007

In a fit of anal retentive pedantry I emailed Lakeland Plastics today .

Dear Mr Lakeland Plastics,
I have your current (Summer 07) catalogue in front of me and I am fascinated by your description of The Ant Stoppa tape (item number 9581). It is described as 'Completely chemical-free'.
Is this really the case? Does this product really contain no chemicals at all?


I will let you know if they reply. But what a stroke of genius. 'Completely Chemical-free'. You could advertise anything as being "Totally Chemical-free", promise you'll send it in "Totally Chemical-free" packaging, take punters' money, and then not send them anything at all. 100% profit (minus advertising), no capitol outlay, and it would be 100% legal!

It's even better than my dehydrated water idea.

...


This evening the latest of Merriol's Couchsurfers arrived.
Initially when Merriol signed up to this thing I was, at best, sceptical about the idea, and at worst hostile. But after three sets of visitors I am rapidly changing my mind (and especially after Lisa and Uwe, the two Germans who left this morning after staying with us for two days, cooked a meal for us last night). I like getting cooked for.

The latest arrivals are a couple of young female French schoolteachers hiking around some of the hillier bits of Scotland for a couple of weeks. They turned up late in the afternoon having travelled up from Glasgow, after (not) sleeping in an airport the night before. As Merriol put the kids to bed, I cooked the tea, and they grabbed a quick shower. It is INCREDIBLY intimidating cooking for French people. I'm not a good cook. I don't do Grown Up proper cooking and here I was trying to feed two total strangers from the country with the proudest culinary heritage on the planet and I had no idea what they liked, if they had any cultural / religious / ethical prohibitions - and nothing in the fridge. I did my number one, emergency, Get Out of Jail Free Card cooking thing. A pile of plain warmed tortillas and lots of bits of anything and everything I could quickly throw together all in individual, help yourself to what you want bowls. Everyone takes what they like and nobody ends up trying to rearrange stuff they couldn't eat, even if you paid them, into as unobtrusive a pile as possible.
"Well, they didn't eat much of the shrimp and parsnip curry did they?"
It's flat pack, self-assembly food. Knife, fork, and one of those dinky little Ikea allen keys on each place setting.

1 comment:

Phoebe said...

Oh hush Liam. You are a brilliant cook - and it's BECAUSE you don't do it grown up style. You're much more creative about it all.

Missing CD? Contact vendor

Free CD
Please take care
in removing from cover.

Copyright (c) 2004-2007 by me, Liam Baldwin. That's real copyright, not any 'creative commons' internet hippy type thing.

(this copyright notice stolen from http://jonnybillericay.blogspot.com/)

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