Back roughly the third week in Jan. Hope your Christmas is a goodun and that Santa brings you everything on the list, always assuming you’ve been good during the year.

In the Davies household we will have a full deck of kids back for the holidays so we are all looking forward to that.

Also I will be working on AnnesVans.com so keep your mince pies peeled for that early in the new year.

If I can offer any advice on how to survive the holidays it is be sure to drink to excess, eat too much and lie in excessively late every day, small children permitting.

If you are anywhere near Lincoln on Wednesday 23rd December you are very cordially invited to my annual carol singing session in the Morning Star – details on the Facebook events page here. It’s a great evening, assuming you like beer and singing Christmas Carols.

If we are lucky the evening may also evolve into a jazz session once the carol singers have exhausted their repertoire.

See ya in 2016 🙂

Morning after the night before – mollusc gets legless.

The night before: We had a BBQ at our house last night. Sending off for Kid2 before her departure for foreign climes and her year abroad. Festivities began at around 5pm and the kids left to go clubbing at 10.30. Couldn’t do it meself.

After they had gone with a parting shout of “don’t worry about the mess, I will clean it up in the morning” we set to to bring the garden back to semi respectability. To our surprise one reveller had stayed behind to finish his or her pint of cider. The snail shown in the featured image was getting totally legless.

Must have finished off the whole pint, glass and all, because this morning when I got up there was no sign of snail or glass. Perhaps Mrs Davies who got up “just” before me had cleared it away. I will never know because I prefer not to ask leaving me with the notion that there is now a giant bloated snail sheltering under a bush somewhere in the garden. Sleeping off the cider no doubt.

Of course said snail could have been eaten by a bird in which case I expect to see one flying erratically around the garden.

The morning after: It’s a bit of a slow start this morning. Something to do with the Stella Artois. Or maybe it was the margarita, or the red wine or calvados, or Carlos I Spanish brandy. It was one of that lot I’m sure.

The morning after the night before I stuck some bacon and mushrooms on the George Foreman Grill and made a spot of breakfast which was taken outside for consumption. In the garden I found we had a lot of designer cider left over plus a day’s supply of Stella. Gawd knows when we will get through the cider as Kid2’s departure is firmly fixed for Tuesday.

Looks like a red hot day in prospect in Lincoln. Had to come inside to write this post as it was already warming up. Before I wrap up and maybe go out an clean the bbq it is worth noting the gas supply dilemma.

The last thing you want when having a BBQ is to run out of gas. Especially if it is your daughter’s leaving bash and she is entertaining her “bezzie mates” (or words to that effect – I’m sure the colloquialism has already moved on, keep up Tref Dad).

There is a dial on our gas canister that lets you know approximately where you are in the gas supply stakes. However what it doesn’t tell you is how much actual barbecuing time you have left based on 3 jets firing at full throttle for most of the time. One could just refill the canister anyway but that would of course mean paying for a full refill whilst only needing a partial refill, if you get my drift.

The safe bet is to go out and buy a spare canister. That way if you run out of gas in the main canister the auxiliary can be switched in with very little loss of cooking time. That is what I did. Sod’s law of course dictated that we did not run out of gas in the main canister but better safe than sorry eh?

Having marinated the cubed lamb in step 1 we now move on to steps 2 and 3 for our lamb tikka masala recipe – the actual cooking.

This post continues part 1 of our lamb tikka masala recipe. The lamb will be nicely marinated having spent 24 hours in the fridge in the freshly prepared tandoori spice mix. I can confirm that in my own case the smell was heavenly (feel like I’m writing this for a woman’s periodical – next time I go to the dentist it’ll be there on the coffee table!).

The clay tandoor pot you are going to use to cook the meat needs soaking in water for a good hour or more. This is because when the meat is cooked in the tandoor the water steams our gradually keeping the lamb nice and moist. Heat the oven to gas mark 8 and place the tandoor containing the lamb, lid on, on a middle shelf. Give the meat an hour or so cooking time.

When the meat is cooked, remove it from the tandoor and crisp the outsides up under the grill. I discarded the liquid although something at the back of my mind tells me you can keep it for the next step.

I can only vaguely remember the next steps. I did research the lamb tikka masala recipe online before starting.  I’m pretty sure I chopped up some onions and mushrooms. I sauteed the onions in ghee in a wok. I bought the ghee specially. Never used it before but I now have loads of it in  tin in the fridge for the next time. Always handy to have some ghee in. Just like goose fat for roasties on a Sunday.

Some garlic, ginger and chilli mix I had left over from making the tandoori marinade were then added. With this I mixed in some tikka masala paste I had prepared earlier (in  jar  from Tesco – I lost the enthusiasm for doing it all from fist principles after the first night). After  bit of frying you add some tins of tomatoes (you decide how many – it’s a feel thing), tomato ketchup, turmeric and natural yoghurt. Other lamb tikka masala recipes have variants on this but fundamentally they are all the same.

i cooked the whole concoction over a low hear with a lid on the wok for around 60 minutes until the meat was tender and the sauce was just the right consistency. To finish off you toss in some chopped coriander leaves although I bought the wrong stuff and ended up with flat leaf parsley which does the job but isn’t quite as good. We kept the dish in the fridge and heated it up and ate it the next day. I think it always tastes better when the spices have had more time to infuse. Innit.

This lamb tikka masala recipe was brought to you direct from the kitchen of trefor.net. The top ranking lamb tikka masala recipe on Google is on the BBC website here.

We have a new item of essential furniture in our office: the Husky Stella Artois Refrigerator otherwise known as the drinks fridge.

A drinks fridge is something I have wanted for years. It began when I once visited Sir Terry Matthews’ office in Canada. This multi-billionnaire owner of Mitel had his own drinks fridge in his office. I thought to myself if Terry can have one then it must be right.

Unfortunately I’ve always worked for a business with a professional outlook on life and that being so felt that a fridge in the office would look somewhat out of kilter.

This is no longer the case. trefor,net has attitude, no constraints, no concerns over corporate image to hold back free thinking and initiative creation. trefor.net now has a fridge. All it currently contains is a jug of filtered water and what’s left of a pint of milk. However the plan is to fill it with suitable other liquids for the ongoing and ad hoc refreshment of the staff.

Once when I visited a Cisco facility at Research Triangle Park in North Carolina I noticed that their kitchen had floor to ceiling fridges filled with drinks. Well our needs aren’t quite that extensive but I will show a picture of a suitably filled fridge at the nearest opportunity. Not this week mind you as I am out of the office after today.

For future reference though if anyone is in Lincoln on  Friday afternoon from say 4pm onwards they should feel free to swing by  Room 18 at Sparkhouse and join us in some cool refreshment. Ease into the weekend. Feel the lurve…

Other cool stories include:

Kettles and Fridges
Embarrassing refridgeration gaffe
The kitchen of things