- Go to the AWW Shepherd’s Pie recipe
- Replace Lamb with leftovers from beef roast
Serves me mainly (Andrea will be lucky enough to get some too).
hēg denu
The old english words from which my name is derived, hēg 'hay' + denu 'valley'.-
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Cottage Pie Recipe
Calçots are not onions
Actually calçots are a type of onion, from specific regions of Catalunya. But they’re not just onions, they’re really a little bit of a throwback to that time when you couldn’t buy any fruit or vegetable in the supermarket all year round. They sprout at the end of winter / early autumn and that’s the only time you’ll see them about, and even then you’d probably be hard pressed to find them outside of Catalunya.
So, when they are available they’re everywhere, it’s common throughout Catalunya for communities, be they towns, farms, or streets to hold Calçotadas – you buy your ticket and get well fed on calçots as well as butifarra amb mongetes (sausages with beans).
Last Saturday the street where I live put on a Calçotada, which we do annually, in part to raise money for the street decorations for the Festa de Gràcia, but also because it’s a fun event and calçots are great – well that’s why I was there. I’ve got some photos of the Carrer Progrés Calçotada up already. Bon Profit!
[Edit: I’m having a problem with the photos on my site, got to the Flickr set to see them]
Mike and Soph’s wedding
Last weekend was Mike & Soph’s wedding, the now Popkiss couple. I’ve known Mike since we were both eleven or twelve years old and since the following year we’ve been best mates. Soph I met working at Dick Smith at Southland (in Melbourne), we also coincidently had a class together in my first year at Monash.
I’m pretty sure I was the only one at the wedding who knew both Soph and Mike before they knew one another, although saying I introduced them would be a stretch – I did suggest to our HR manager that she should hire Mike, so maybe that counts a little towards that claim.
The wedding was fantastic, with a small group for the “legal stuff” at the registry office in the old treasury building in the morning, a lunch with various out-of-town family (I was helping bulk out Mike’s family as Soph’s lot outnumbered us 3-to-1 at least), followed by a reception at Matteo’s.
Of course I had my camera and was snapping away throughout the day, I’ve already uploaded a selection of photos of Mike & Soph’s Wedding, but looking on facebook for more will get you everyone else’s.
So that’s it, with Mike getting hitched half our little group of school friends are now married – and hopefully I won’t have to buy another flight back to Australia for a while.
Five fingers, five toes
I’ve finally got a pair of Vibram Five Fingers, “barefoot” running shoes which I’ve been trying to track down for the better part of the last year.
They come with instructions on training your feet to wear them, so while I’m dying to try them out going for a run, I’m currently just wearing them around the house.
[Edit: I have a photo!]
In Melbourne
I’m in Melbourne (again), this time for Mike and Sophie’s wedding in a little over a week.
The weather has been a bit average, but it just means that we can pass off the last 8 years of sunny weather and droughts that Melbourne has had as a strange anomaly and return to Melbourne where…
I hate a sunburnt country,
a land of sweeping planes.
That’s why I live in Melbourne,
where it always bloody rains.
I have also discovered what retired ad men do. They write blogs ranting about the poor state of the advertising industry and watch clips on YouTube.
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Holidays in London
I never thought I’d be off to London for holidays, but Andrea has never been so last weekend we took the short trip over France and the channel to Old Blighty. The nice thing was I got to show Andrea all my favourite parts of London from when I lived there.
A lot of this involved food, I made sure we visited Hummus Bros. as well as Handmade Food in Blackheath for Sunday breakfast. They have an upstairs area now, which greatly increases on their previous seating capacity (which was 4).
One thing I had not seen before was the Rosetta stone at the National Gallery, and so seeing that that was really exciting.
I’ve got photos up already too.
The four of us
We had a new flatmate move in here in December, and today for about 15 minutes we had all four of us in the house together. For the first time.
PhD prices
While looking for scholarships I discovered that the University of Manchester charges £14,200 per year to do a PhD for an international student. If you’re a local it will only cost you £3,466, then again my fees come in at slightly over €500 a year in Spain where I am and international student. Does this seem a little disparate to anyone else?
I couldn’t (in five minutes) find prices for any university in the states, but I did discover that you need to pass a language exam in French, German, or Russian to do a PhD in mathematics at Berkley.
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More Photos
I sneakily uploaded the second set of photos from Christmas last week, but didn’t post them.
So here they are now: Christmas in Granada (part 2).
Photos from Christmas
It’s been kind of hectic this year, I can’t remember exactly what’s been going on, but it’s passing by rapidly. So it’s the last day of January and I’ve finally got the first batch of photos up from my Christmas down south in Granada with Andrea’s family.
We spent Christmas eve with Andrea’s sister Sonia’s family and Andrea’s folks. Christmas day is when all of Andrea’s mother’s family, Andrea’s Trujillo side, get together (nine siblings means a lot of family) and so I had far too many names to remember, but had a great time. Lots of food, lots of talking, although I’m pretty sure that per person the Wilson clan still make more noise.
There was also the christmas cake, which I made in Barcelona and carried (all 2.5 Kg of it) to Granada. We were somewhat lacking in supplies this year, I didn’t realise food colouring was so hard to get hold of in Spain, and it ended up being a New Year cake for the same reason.
I will endeavour to get the remainder of the photos up at some point this week and get more or less back on track.