For some reason WordPress decided it’d be funny to post my last post about baked beans without any text. Hilarious. Anyway, the gist of it was thus:

I’ve now been a student for seven years, and one thing you learn as a student is how to give baked beans a bit more zing. So after many failed experiments (I can confirm that garlic, smoked salmon, dill, brown sauce, soy sauce, prawns, mayonnaise, salad cream, beef stock,  English mustard, French mustard and American mustard have no place in beans on toast. I don’t know what I was thinking when I tried some of them.), I am pleased to share what I believe is baked bean Utopia with you. Please be aware that it is not suitable for vegetarians (apparently Worcester sauce has anchovies in it) or people intolerable to lactose.

You will need:
One tin baked beans (small or large- not important)
One tablespoon of Worcester Sauce
A pinch of basil
Two slices of bread (I prefer Kingsmill Love to Toast, but there are some varieties of brown bread that are really good for this too, although it’s even more satisfying to make your own!)
Butter/ spread
Marmite
Hard cheese (like cheddar or red leicester: Brie is so-so, edam, emmenthal and gouda just don’t have the right texture)

For the beans: Open tin, place beans in saucepan, add the Worcester sauce and basil, stir for 3-4 mins while heating on a high-ish heat.

For the toast: Toast bread as normal, but spread on it to taste, add a thin layer of marmite and a couple of slices of cheese is more than plenty.

Finally, place the toast on a plate and smother on the bean mixture. Sprinkle some grated cheese on top and add some pepper to taste.

Bon appetit!

As a follow-up to the succesful “Pasta Idol”, we decided to do “Pizza Idol”, the premise being that everybody uses a common pizza base and makes their own toppings to make the best pizza in the flat. The voting was the same as before, with everyone putting the pizzas in order of preference and first getting three points, second getting two, and third getting one.

Here are the results:

1. Dougie BEng(Hons) 11 points

2. Will MA(Hons) 10 points

3 = Andrew MA(Hons) MSc 3 points

3 = Luke MA (Hons) 3 points

3= ulsterscot84 BSc (Hons) 3 points

so congratulations go to Dougie.

I thought, actually, of putting the recipes up here, in a different order. Please leave a comment saying which one sounds yummiest!

1. Tomato, basil and oregano sauce with mozarrella, blue cheese, banana and apple

2. Tomato sauce with balsamic vinegar with red onion, chorizo and bacon

3. Tomato, onion and garlic sauce with chorizo and goat’s cheese

4. Tomato and garlic sauce with mozarrella, potato, red onion and chorizo

5. Tomato, chili and garlic sauce with cajun chicken, red onion and mozarella

I should say they were all of the highest standard! For (not very good)  pics, see facebook via the links below!

Pizza 1

Pizza 2

Pizza 3

Pizza 4

Pizza 5

Today I made my pasta dish and, being the last, the vote followed. We each, secretly, chose a first, a second and a third placed dish, allocating three points to each first place vote, two for second and one for third. Here are the results:

Luke, MA(Hons) 10 points

ulsterscot84, BSc(Hons) 7 points

Dougie, BSc (Hons) 5 points

Will, MA (Hons) 4 points

Andrew, MA (Hons), MSc, 4 points

So I congratulate Luke on his fine effort. What will we do next semester? Pizza idol? Pie idol? Pudding idol? Curry idol?

Wait and see! It’s been fun!

Normally I’m ok when it comes to having a cold, in that I try to get on with things as much as I can and keep “man-flu” like behaviour to a minimum.

But when you’re ill and by yourself it’s a hundred times worse

We’ve introduced a new culinary competition in the flat, to serve three purposes:

1) To avoid crowding around the oven at meal times on a Wednesday (there are three of us)

2) To eat together as a flat more often

and most importantly

3) To find out who is best at cooking.

Now, the form of this competition is a pasta cook-off, wherein the idea is that all of us cook a pasta sauce for everyone and at the end we rank everyone else according to how much we enjoyed the sauces in question.

There aren’t really any rules, although there seems to be an implicit ceiling on meat content, and causing food poisoning or killing anyone is unlikely to go down well. There was an agreement to use Spaghetti, but that was not followed.

I’ll let you know how it all goes when the challenge ends, probably end of November!

Today we get the keys for our new flat (which is not so far away from the current flat), 11 months after I moved into the one we’re moving out of. It’s unlikely I will miss the place, we’ve had too many issues with mice, carpeted bathroom floors (I know, try not to think about it), faulty lights, break-ins, tiles falling off the bathroom wall, loud parties upstairs and the couple above my room “enjoying eachother’s company” a bit too much for my liking. Mericfully, after enduring this sort of thing for five years, I now have a top floor flat so I won’t have to endure this again. I am staying with the same guys as before, plus one (hey Dougie) so there’s not really going to be any serious transition in terms of personnel.

But what of the last year, and how has it affected me personally?

In a good way, I think. I arrived there from somewhere I really didn’t feel safe, and I know that’s a strange thing to say, but that’s how I felt, so in a way I was glad to be moving on, despite the clear dinginess of the new flat (previous tenants had been given three months rent free because of all manner of horrors that I won’t go into here). However, it still took me a while to adjust and to feel “safe” again to be going home, something that happened over time. Now I’m glad that I moved in here with these guys, and life has been all the better for it, thanks be to God.

Everything has its time though, and this little flat in Marchmont has had its day. Thanks for the service all the same.

This is post 99, so it must be time for….

One aspect of flat living that is unavoidable is the designation of washing-up duties. We are currently in the process of trying to figure out the best way of allocating said duties for next year’s flat. There will be five of us, and the object is to design a flexible yet rigorous system to stop dishes piling up every night.

It occured to me that this is a highly mathematical problem, requiring some kind of neat optimization given the initial conditions of how many people are in the flat, expected amount of dishes and also number of other things that will need regular cleaning, such as the kitchen, the bathroom and the hallway, not to mention taking the bin out and recycling. Thus, my side project over the next few days will be to devise an algorithm for optimal sharing of cleaning duties given these conditions. I’m sure you’re all excited as to what I’ll come up with, so stay posted. If you have any ideas, please share them. “Buy a dishwasher” is discounted.

EDIT: In over 75 posts, this is the first I have posted in “Maths”. That I have resisted this long is perhaps just short of miraculous.