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Post by onlyMark on Feb 20, 2024 15:17:42 GMT
ktyblank
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Birds
Feb 19, 2024 10:28:47 GMT
Post by onlyMark on Feb 19, 2024 10:28:47 GMT
The magnificent and much maligned common pigeon. Source of sustenance, communication and leisure time activity -
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Grief
Feb 19, 2024 10:19:55 GMT
Post by onlyMark on Feb 19, 2024 10:19:55 GMT
The good thing about an after life is if there isn't one, you'd never get to be disappointed.
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Grief
Feb 19, 2024 6:26:12 GMT
Post by onlyMark on Feb 19, 2024 6:26:12 GMT
My conundrum is if both of you are devout enough and worthy enough to ascend to heaven but you hated and the idiot in real life, do you still meet up? Or is it specific to 'loved ones'? And how much did you have to love them to qualify? What if they loved you but you didn't love them, bit of a bugger then if you keep bumping into them........ What happens with stalkers? The man/woman you split up with because they were a bad person but they still 'hold a candle' for you?
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Post by onlyMark on Feb 18, 2024 21:19:20 GMT
Does that mean the designation chaat is for dishes more likely to be found on street side stands or the like? In short, yes. A lot has to be eaten with some form of spoon/fork but there are others, like pani puri (puri is "a deep-fried breaded sphere" and pani means water from what I remember, could be wrong though) which is just served on a plate in the hand and you eat it whole. Then there are the normal samosas, pakoras, toasted sandwiches and many others that you just buy and eat standing up. I rarely eat in a restaurant in India, one reason being I can't see the kitchen, but also there is a lot more variation in street food than restaurant food. But even then there are more dishes you can shake a stick at. Now though there is a growing number of fast food places that there never was that specialise in street food so you can also sit down in a building and eat it. Pani puri. They are about 2 or 3 Rupees each. You'd get maybe up to 30 of them for 1 USD. There is a variation at the end where you just break up a load and add stuff to it then you'd eat it with a spoon. The big doughnut shaped thing is a mildly spiced mashed potato though there are as expected a number of different fillings depending on the location like chickpeas - To finish, this is one of my 'go to' items of street food (or a variation of it). It's mild potato curry wrapped in dough, fried and accompanied by a chick pea curry and 'salad'. You'd get about three now for a USD. Maybe two. It's a while since I've been. Aloo is potato, paratha is the style of bread, chole is chick peas -
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Post by onlyMark on Feb 18, 2024 18:27:39 GMT
Dinner tonight for us (three people) was an Indian takeaway. Was pretty good. There was - Channa Chaat, Punjabi Chaat, Papads/Poppadums, Mixed Raita, Paneer Pakoras, (veg.) Samosas, Butter Chicken, Chicken Tandoori Murg, Alu Gobi Masala and a load of basmati rice. We do have a few leftovers but not much. There are a few Indian restaurants in the town but there is only one that does the chaats, which is my favourite Indian food and what I eat a lot of when I am there. It's very rare to come across a restaurant not in India that does them - probably because they are not restaurant food but street food. You don't find them in restaurants in India anyway.
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Baking
Feb 16, 2024 17:06:59 GMT
Post by onlyMark on Feb 16, 2024 17:06:59 GMT
Making them are on my list. Look good.
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Brexit
Feb 16, 2024 11:59:56 GMT
Post by onlyMark on Feb 16, 2024 11:59:56 GMT
One interpretation is that maybe he just wanted your money and was being polite. You are right in that the hoops to jump through seem to have increased, or maybe they've just changed, but simple bureaucracy has always been an oxymoron. This is the same man or a different one from your old boss who was also coincidentally from Manchester you called retarded?
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Baking
Feb 16, 2024 6:20:11 GMT
Post by onlyMark on Feb 16, 2024 6:20:11 GMT
Bixa, I had a quick look at the flours in the supermarket yesterday. The range of protein was about the same as yours. The lowest was like a cake flour with 10.8 and the highest was labelled strong bread flour and was 13. Cheery, can't get suet particularly in German. It is here but little used and hidden away when you can find it so I've never tried a suet pastry and once tried a hot water one that was at best, ok.
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Post by onlyMark on Feb 15, 2024 16:46:38 GMT
I don't pack bags at the checkout at Aldi or Lidl. I put everything back in the trolley and usually behind the check out is a long shelf to pack your stuff. Take my time and sort it out as I pack it into the different bags.
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Post by onlyMark on Feb 15, 2024 12:24:59 GMT
There are supermarket price comparison websites in the UK for what is the cheapest for the same thing where. In Germany there are the range of supermarkets as in most countries where you generally get the cheapest or the best quality range. There can be a big difference in prices from one to the other. I use Edeka which is my walking distance one but five minutes away by car in the winter or ten minutes by bike in good weather there are other selections like Lidl/Aldi/Rewe etc. For practicality I don't hunt around for the cheapest item, more I go to one and see what is on offer then adjust accordingly. For major stock ups like cleaning supplies I'd go to what I know the be the cheapest in general and leave it at that.
I have no problem with stuff from Lidl and often things do seem of a better quality and price, like salmon or some cheeses. As a kid my dad worked shifts so if we had meal together it was at the weekend unless he was working overtime, which did happen quite a lot. My mother was a small woman who never ate a lot but she could scarf down a box of eclairs without a problem. For a few years I got free school dinners anyway so we tended not to have dinner in the evening, also because it wasn't done in my area. Dinner was at lunchtime. For five or six years my mother also worked as a dinner lady at a school so we did tend to end up with leftovers from time to time. Handy job that was, get paid and bring home most of a meal for the family.
Most men on our streets were miners and usually with little savings so if they were off sick/injured for more than a week or so they would get sick pay but it wasn't a full wage and the other households would chip in after a while with food (often in the guise of "Oops, I bought a bit to much and it'll go off so you might as well have it") so the kids didn't go hungry. There were a couple of times I remember when the husband was thought to be "swinging the lead", especially when he somehow managed to hobble to the pub, so the kids and wife would end up eating at someone else's house a few days a week and he would go hungry. Nowadays I do check prices in the supermarket but I'm not so bothered to root out the cheapest of something.
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Post by onlyMark on Feb 14, 2024 9:37:35 GMT
*Paula
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Post by onlyMark on Feb 13, 2024 20:21:21 GMT
I listened to him a lot when younger. Couldn't go for the black dyed hair and goatee and amber lensed glasses as he was last off. Looked like a wimpy Steven Segal. Didn't he have a controversy quite a few years ago with being accused of something with young girls or kids? Was that him of am I mistaking him for someone else.....
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Baking
Feb 13, 2024 20:15:58 GMT
Post by onlyMark on Feb 13, 2024 20:15:58 GMT
Thanks Mich. It's just normal beef mince but not the lean stuff. It has some fat in it to give it a bit more flavour. The pastry is short crust. If you use lamb mince and a hot water pastry then it is called here a Scotch Pie but I don't like lamb particularly and for me short crust is easier. I softened up some onions, added the mince, cooked until brown, added some beef stock for ten minutes, drained what was left of the stock off and used that later to make gravy, a table spoon or two I poured back in through the hole when I re-heated them. Seasoned however you like. Cut a big circle and smaller one, packed the mince into the bigger one in the pie tray, egg wash the edges to stick the top on and then again to cover the top, baked about 170 C for 40 mins close to the bottom of the oven to make sure the bottom was browned properly.
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Baking
Feb 13, 2024 18:32:38 GMT
Post by onlyMark on Feb 13, 2024 18:32:38 GMT
You've got me wanting to go to the shop now and examine all the flours to look for the protein. I do have a packet of mid-range flour in the cupboard and that says it has 12g of protein which is just a fraction less than in the video the strong flour. I'll work on this and see what happens depending on the flour I can get. Thanks. You seem to be an excellent cook. This leads me to wonder when you will schedule the next Anyport meet-up. Probably best when we are posted to an exotic country and not Germany. In several years then would be the earliest. I'll hone my meat pie and pickle making skills.
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Post by onlyMark on Feb 13, 2024 15:08:52 GMT
Have you done anything with it yet? Realised I had more jars than red cabbage today. So added some onion and carrot to use them up plus the extra the pickling vinegar mix. I've had a busy day with the pies (in the baking thread), these pickles, a mash, peas, carrots, pies, fried onions and gravy dinner ready to go, a walk to the shop and a shit, shave and shower.
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Post by onlyMark on Feb 13, 2024 13:27:37 GMT
Stone Town, Zanzibar City, Zanzibar - once the capital of Oman and the shortest war in history.
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Baking
Feb 13, 2024 10:36:08 GMT
Post by onlyMark on Feb 13, 2024 10:36:08 GMT
Can you get vital wheat gluten where you live? Sorry Bixa, missed that. I don't know. I'll have to look. It's not something I've noticed though. What do you use it for? Had a go at making some pastry then wondered what I was going to do with it. So made some mince meat and onion pies and with the left over, a cheese roll thing. I think the proof will be in the eating though. It looks ok but I'll see later. The pies have a bigger hole than normal in the middle so I can get some extra gravy in there later -
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Brexit
Feb 12, 2024 20:36:11 GMT
Post by onlyMark on Feb 12, 2024 20:36:11 GMT
If the UK is against unity, perhaps England should divest itself of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Those useless lumps are probably dragging it down. Rearrange these three words to form a famous saying - "straws - clutching - at".
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Brexit
Feb 12, 2024 19:05:07 GMT
Post by onlyMark on Feb 12, 2024 19:05:07 GMT
Brexit has been bad for the uk imho. On the whole I agree. It certainly has. Whether the idea was good or bad is an argument in itself. Beyond dispute is how badly and stupidly it was executed. But then it was no surprise considering the standard of the politicians handling it. We used to have some good politicians, whether you agreed with their policies or not you could still respect them, but nowadays they are as much use as an inflatable dart board.
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Brexit
Feb 12, 2024 18:49:45 GMT
Post by onlyMark on Feb 12, 2024 18:49:45 GMT
GDP annual growth (in percentage) of the UK compared to the EU as a whole then. So it shows how inaccurate that accusation is. In effect I chose two of the better performers individually. The performance of the EU as a whole is worse. Of course the UK weighs little by itself. But what happens when the organisation it is tied to is dragged down by it's own poor performers? Note the UK percentage before and after Brexit compared to the whole EU -
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Brexit
Feb 12, 2024 13:20:27 GMT
Post by onlyMark on Feb 12, 2024 13:20:27 GMT
"So you approve both politics of Bojo and Trump." - exactly fits the definition of a specious comment - "superficially plausible, but actually wrong." The worst part is you don't really believe what you said, it's just for effect. Enough of the childish wind ups, stick to some facts for a change. "I suggest you forget about the basterds living in Belgium since we must all be as bad as I am !" - nope. Met some nice Belgians over the years. You get bad ones in every nationality. You're not special. "Jeez Mick you really think we all hate UK do you ? and it gives you an excuse to hate us ! Grow up man." - so the point of your previous comments is.....? I'm sure others may believe that the statistics of GDP growth are not an indicator of how well a country is doing compared to another. I think it helps. Especially for those who take the individual country figures in isolation and after a major event like Brexit, but then fail to compare them with what may have been happening at the same time in the rest of Europe anyway. Saying there was a depression in the UK could have been accurate but gives the impression it only happened in the UK and thus must have been a result of Brexit. This is the "correlation does not imply causation" effect. If you compare annual % GDP growth in the UK and France and the UK and Belgium between 2010 and 2022, you get the following graphs. The source is the World Bank. Not a lot in it really. If anything the UK has been doing just a bit better than both. The depression around 2020 was worse for the UK though, but like the others, it soon bounced back.
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Brexit
Feb 11, 2024 20:45:05 GMT
Post by onlyMark on Feb 11, 2024 20:45:05 GMT
I'm sure K2 can make his point by himself. He does seem to care. Evidenced by how often he brings the subject up in different threads. And yes, the situation does appear dire if we have to copy what the Fench have been doing at the drop of a hat for decades. Soon our truck drivers will be blockading the ports. Setting fire to stuff. I never realised how bad it must be in France if they've had to resort to those tactics so many times over so many years. We must have been spoiled. Not so now though, we need to stoop to their level.
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Brexit
Feb 11, 2024 17:52:22 GMT
Post by onlyMark on Feb 11, 2024 17:52:22 GMT
You've done well holding your tongue K2. It's been ten days since you last mentioned Brexit.
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Post by onlyMark on Feb 11, 2024 14:02:09 GMT
That's stretching it.
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Post by onlyMark on Feb 11, 2024 13:44:49 GMT
That's not your town though. I'm the same distance from Metz as you are. Except not today, because I am in Metz.
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Post by onlyMark on Feb 9, 2024 16:01:01 GMT
I'm away for the weekend whilst Mrs M and daughter are staying home, so I've took the car (in the rain) to do a big(ish) shop at a big supermarket for them. It's surprising how much toilet roll we seem to get through. The danger of slipping on ice and snow doesn't bother me as much as in the bath/shower.
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Baking
Feb 9, 2024 6:15:36 GMT
Post by onlyMark on Feb 9, 2024 6:15:36 GMT
I've bought a silicon bread tin. Stops it sticking and peeling bits off the sides.
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Baking
Feb 8, 2024 15:52:34 GMT
Post by onlyMark on Feb 8, 2024 15:52:34 GMT
Chucking it down with rain so made some bread instead of going to the shop for it. In Germany and I suppose many countries, the flour usually has a grade number. The lower it is, the finer the flour is. I've been trying a few different ones with the same recipe and made a loaf today with what is rated as 1050, so it contains "parts of the outer layers of the wheat grain" and so darker and rougher than the 450 or 550, an all purpose flour, which here makes soft white bread for example. Turned out good but I would have liked it to rise a bit more. I know now with my standard recipe I need to add a couple of grams or so more yeast -
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Post by onlyMark on Feb 8, 2024 15:38:09 GMT
I'm made of sugar though.
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