Month: July 2008

Categories
Inane Banter

You’ll Go Blind

Did I miss the bit in the bible where Jesus said, “it is easier for a man with more brains than a retarded slug to enter heaven than it is for a whale to pass through gnat’s chuff?”

Around 50 people in India have gone blind looking for the Virgin Mary in the sun. That’s one impressive level of stupid. That’s right up there with refusing medicine and relying on prayer alone to cure your childs illness. Your faith may be unshakable but so is the science behind staring at very bright things. Sounds like it was the only bright thing you could stare at around there.

It also appears the church is right about what will happen to you if you spend your time looking at virgins.

Categories
Food

Is it a biscuit or is it a cake? Neither, it’s meat!

About a month ago somebody on b3ta designed a new snack combining the joy of Jaffa Cakes with the meat and eggy goodness of scotch eggs. The result, that you can see an image of on b3ta’s forum, is the Jaffegg. At the time several people thought it was a marvellous idea and vowed to actually make a jaffegg cake. As far as I can tell nobody did. We now somebody has. Me.

Ingredients

To make jaffeggs you will need.

  • Sausage meat
  • Eggs
  • Breadcrumbs
  • Oil
  • Flour

Making a Jaffegg

First you need to make the sausage base. Put a bit of flour on a board and your hands so the sausage doesn’t stick. Roll the meat into a ball and then flatten it quite a bit. Finally use your thumbs to make a dent that will hold the egg yolk. I used normal sausages skinned rather than a packet of meat and one sausage made one jaffegg.

A made four in total. My plan was to make two with the yolks in and two that I added the yolks to near the end so the yolk was only partially cooked. I then brushed the top outer ring of each base with oil so the breadcrumbs would stick.

I then separated the egg yolks to add to the base to make the “smashing yellow eggy bit™.” This went relatively well and only one yolk out of four was sacrificed to the kitchen sink. I then carefully slid the yolk onto two of the bases.

Breadcrumbs were then sprinkled onto the top of the complete jaffeggs. The two that were having the yolks added to later I just sprinkled the breadcrumbs round the outside. I added some extra crumbs to the tray to sprinkle on afterwards. If you want to cheer up Gordon Brown you can use stale bread to make the breadcrumbs. I don’t think anything could put a smile on his face so I used the unnatural orange breadcrumbs that are used for scotch eggs.

They were then ready to bake. I shoved them in for 30 minutes at 180°c. I took them out five minutes from the end to add the yolks to the other jaffeggs before shoving them in again. That was the plan however the one’s without the yolks had shrivelled to half the size so the yolk just balanced on top and the spare crumbs had burnt. I had to sprinkle fresh crumbs on top and hope they cooked in five minutes. You have been warned.

When cooked I took them out of the oven and discovered they’d lost a lot of the jaffa cake shape and had become little round sausage UFOs* instead. *Unidentified frying object. Deep fat frying the cakes may well stop this happening but I don’t have one despite living in Leeds for a while when I was younger.

Time to cut the eggy bad-boy open to see if the basic shape was preserved.

Not bad at all. You can make out all the parts and they are roughly in the right place. The one’s I added the yolk to later looked all wrong. Like pac-man in a meat canoe with his mouth shut and cocaine all over his face.

I can report that both where lovely, like scotch eggs without the boring egg-white. Many thanks to Thor_sonofodin for the original idea.

Categories
Inane Banter

Mind Reading, Half of a 90s Double Act, Lizard

I was chatting to Mrs Fatuous over the dirty dishes the other days about the news that Gordon Brown wants us to stop wasting food. It’s very rare that we discuss the news as we both listen to different radio stations on the way home. You will not be shocked to hear that the news overlap between Radio 1 and Radio 4 is very small. Radio 4’s news doesn’t need quotes round the “news” part for a start.

I casually mentioned that Gordon wasn’t really talking to us but was in fact having a sly dig at John Prescott and his. “That sounds like the sort of crap you’d put on your blog,” she said, probably quite correctly.

And now we take a journey into my procrastinating little world and how it can come unstuck. If I have an idea suddenly I usually just write down a title to remind me then put off doing anything about it until weeks later when I finally get round to it. You’ll notice a general lack of biting, up to the minute, satire on this site. There’s a reason for that. Actually there are several reasons for that including a general apathy towards politics, lack of bite but mainly it’s due to me being too slow at writing this to keep up. I’d probably just be getting round to moaning about Maggie Thatcher by next week.

Anyway, I just wrote down the title which was “Greedy Gord Slams Spewy John” and then left it until I could build up a bit more meat around what was in essence a one paragraph post.

I downloaded a few podcasts on Wednesday to take to the gym to drown out the idiotic dance music they play there. It’s that remixed 80s song type of dance music that they play at the gyms all the time. As far as I can tell their only criteria for the music is that it must be crap and that the video must feature scantily clad fit young ladies. I’m assuming the ladies are there to motivate the wobbly women at the gym to up their game. I tend to listen to podcasts while staring at the videos in a desperate attempt to disguise the fact from my bored body that I’m running on the spot. I can’t even stare at the women on the video properly like a red-blooded male should. I keep getting distracted by Eggheads on the telly next to it. My love of lythe young ladies is overpowered by my desire to punch the smug one from eggheads in the face. I know they are all smug but there is one that’s smugger than the rest and you know who I mean.

I was listening to the latest Herring and Collins podcast when I heard Richard Herring make exactly the same point I had made days before over the kitchen sink. I was gutted. The podcast isn’t usually out until Friday by which time I would have finished the post so I could have crowed, quite incorrectly, how my joke had been stolen by less successful member of a cult 90s double act. Instead he had read my mind and then beat me to it by recording the podcast days earlier thus trumping me. I suppose I should be grateful it wasn’t 80s loving Andrew Collins who said it, not that I have anything against his abilities to remember every toy or TV show from decades ago. I’d rather it was the comedian of the pair that used his lizard powers to read my mind rather than the one who uses his lizard powers to recall that the Evel Knievel wind up bike toy only used to go about 5 inches from the red ramp before it fell over.

Now, thanks to my procrastination, my only hope is that John Holmes makes exactly the same joke on this Friday’s Now Show.

Breaking update – Andy Parsons made the same joke on Mock the Week. Get in!

Update 2 – I missed the Now Show so I’ll have to use listen again but Clarkson made the same joke in his column in Saturday’s Mirror. If you’ve seen the same joke anywhere else then let me know in the comments below.

Categories
Inane Banter

Swear O’Clock

Here in the UK we have a TV, and I presume radio, watershed. Before this set time swearing and nudity can’t be shown. This being the UK and not the rest of Europe this basically means there’s a bit more swearing and the minute possibility of a flash of breast about twice a year (not in fact a flask of hot steamy breast as the post originally said, thank you Dr Spam). This watershed is to protect the kiddiewinks and presumably other people who like to go to bed early. I like to imagine vicars get tucked up in bed with the bible around 9pm and everybody knows that old women go to bed around 8pm just so they can start pottering around at four in the morning.

There are a couple of things that bother me about the watershed though. The first is the time, not the 9pm time as that sounds relatively reasonable to me. My problem is what time does the watershed end? I’d imagine you could get a fairly racy film on at four in the morning but I’d be shocked if there was a torrent of swearing at six in the morning. Is six the cut-off point?

Secondly why is it time based? Surely it should be based on the audience? Big Brother is on after nine but, let’s face it, only appeals to children and the mentally challenged but it’s full of swearing. The money programme is on at an earlier hour but I doubt anybody under the age of 40 actually watches it. Songs of praise is on early Sunday evening but it’s average viewer age must be 70+. I think it should be perfectly reasonable for Aled Jones to exclaim, “Welcome to motherfucking Twunterberry cathedral, isn’t she a cocking beauty?”

Radio 4 could, in fact, sound like a Quentin Tarrantino film with no fear of upsetting a single child’s ears. Come on the Today Show, call Brown a wanker when he next dodges a question. I know Cameron is a twat, you know Cameron is a twat, let’s not hold back Charlotte Green, call him a twat to his little twatty face.