The Susanne

Well, that took about a day… haha. Yes­ter­day I was too ill to get to my lec­ture (read: too ill to take a bus and the tube all the way there just for a 45 minute lec­ture on the geo­graphy of USA) and I was in des­per­ate need of some com­fort food. And when I got to the super­mar­ket and saw they had a spe­cial on beef shoulder, I bought a huge slab and made Irish Stew! Ohhhh…yummm! Cooked some carrots, onion, celery and swede in a little olive oil with the bones for about 30 minutes. Then added 500ml water, 250ml Guinnes and 100ml red wine and brought to the boil - then added the beef (in big chunks) which I’d rubbed with salt, pepper and worcester­shire sauce, and let it simmer for about two hours with some lovely fresh thyme. Added some chopped pars­ley just before serving (The Ex came over for dinner, poor thing. I’m sure he will starve without me, or at least get mal­nu­tri­tion from all the tinned food and frozen pizzas). The meat was so per­fect — it just fell apart on touch. So tender and deli­cious! Still have loads left over — that’s the beauty of living on my own, I can eat for days on what would be gone instantly when I had a man in the house.

(This was really a sim­pli­fied ver­sion of the Irish stew I made in June — the recipe for that is here.)

We both ended up fall­ing asleep after, it must be the ‘comfort’ part of the meal.. Woke up hours later and real­ised I’d missed a whole after­noon of study time. I made it up today though — was at uni from 10am till 6.30pm. Very proud. I’ve joined the edit­or­ial staff of a lit­er­ary magazine pub­lished by stu­dents from my fac­ulty, which is very excit­ing. I’m think­ing about writ­ing an art­icle for the next issue, but I’m not sure what to write. The theme is ‘conflict’. Any ideas? I’m also taking over the layout job, which will def­in­itely be a chal­lenge, but fun I’m sure. And def­in­itely very valu­able exper­i­ence! They’re send­ing me to a  layout sem­inar which should be good. Also I get to go to a sem­inar called ‘writing for the Internet’! Which I’m really the most excited about.. As I love writ­ing for the Internet ;)

My parents’ cat loves play­ing with other anim­als. Since the bunny arrived he’s been trying to get at him to see if he’s a poten­tial new play­mate, but as the bunny is almost always inside his predator-​safe cage, the cat has been increas­ingly frus­trated. Last night we let the bunny out on his leash to have a trumble in the garden. The cat was ecstatic, but the bunny couldn’t care less. The cat tried chas­ing him a few times but he didn’t bat an eyelid. The few times the bunny jumped over to have a sniff at the cat, how­ever, the cat ran away in fear. It was hil­ari­ous. Today the bunny has stayed in his cage, mostly inside his little house in fact. The cat found him­self a lovely spot to lie and wait for the bunny to appear:

Now for some­thing very dif­fer­ent: I have posted a bunch of my recipes. I hope the col­lec­tion will grow stead­ily but I must admit I find writ­ing them a little boring. I prefer making the food and then eating it, and writ­ing about how good it was! Writ­ing about cook­ing just makes me long for the kitchen… Yes­ter­day I made Irish stew for the whole family which was a huge suc­cess. As soon as I get around to it I’ll write out a recipe and maybe if I make it again I’ll take some pic­tures to accom­pany it.

On a some­what other note, I have noticed that some people out there don’t have a prob­lem with copy­ing other people’s things and passing them off as their own. I hope I never stoop to that level. Whilst I might make things that are very common and that many have made before me, at least I hope to keep my integ­rity safe in the know­ledge that I do not steal. And then there’s the fact that many of the ‘fakes’ aren’t as good as the ori­gin­als, and often a little cheap look­ing. Kind of like in fash­ion, I guess…