nocto

ignore me

i’m adding delia’s fresh tomato sauce to my list of stonking good recipes. darren made it for tea at the weekend and i made some fresh pasta to go with it and it was gorgeous.

i’ve always ignored recipes when they demand you skin tomatoes but it turned out to be a lot easier than i thought and well worth the effort. you just pour boiling water over them, wait for the skins to crack open, drain the water off and pop the tomato innards painlessly out of their skins with your fingers.

and while i’m here let me leave a reminder to myself: when you make pasta dough, leave it for quarter of an hour before trying to knead it through the machine. i always chop the dough in half and have a right nightmare trying to get the first half to turn into pasta as it turns into a holey mesh on each run through the machine. when i’ve finally turned the first half into tagliatelle, i pick up the second half of the dough and have no problems turning it into a smooth strip of pasta in about 30 seconds. i’d be better leaving the whole lot for a bit and doing something else instead. and i’d make fresh pasta more often if i found it easier to do. i presume the flour is doing some kind of gluey starchy thing with the eggs while i’m wrestling with the first half of the dough.

wi-fi on trains is an excellent idea. even though i rarely go anywhere by train anymore i’m glad to see this kind of thing coming in. what i want to know is how they stop the wi-fi from getting out of the first class carriages?

i’ve been whinging on and on about natwest bank and the fact that they won’t let me use their online banking with the browser and operating system of my choice for years [1,
2,
3,
4 and there's probably more]. i finally put my money where my mouth is and have a shiny new cahoot current account. natwest have been telling me that they are ‘testing netscape 6/mozilla’ for well over two years. call me cynical but i’m not convinced they are ‘testing’ at all. for me online banking is not a nice add on for a current account but the core component of what i want from a bank.

it was far less hassle to move accounts than i expected it to be and took less than a week from opening the account to being fully set up with all my direct debits and standing orders moved across and having a new debit card in my hands too. i chose cahoot because i’ve had one of their credit cards for three and a half years so i know that their online service is great. and if it goes down the pan i now know how simple it is to move myself elsewhere.

(the reason i chose natwest to start with? coz they offered £40 cash to students opening accounts with them in 1990. i don’t want to add up how much they’ve made out of me over the past 13 years because i fell for that bit of marketing. not that the alternatives available at that point were any better i expect. it shouldn’t have taken me 13 years to overcome the inertia to switch banks though.)

i feel liberated. plus i’m getting 3.45% aer on my cash, as opposed to 0.2% from natwest, which doesn’t hurt either.

the mystery of time and space looks like fun. will come back to this later when i’m not supposed to be doing something else other than trying to open locked doors and crack codes…