Wonderful Weekend

Hi everybody!

I had a lovely and rather busy weekend. My brother came back to visit and he's busy for the next 4 weekends so it may be a while before I see him again.

I made risotto with fennel we grew and dried ceps I got from my last jaunt in Switzerland. I got carried away and added bacon, chicken, onions, garlic, chestnut mushrooms (and obviously arborio rice). It tasted really nice, but apparently could have done with sweetcorn (which I had thought of, but had decided to avoid as I had already added loads of other stuff, so didn't want to go overboard).

For dessert, I made Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Flour-free Chocolate Chestnut cake. It was ok, but far too gooey and unsurprisingly, not very cake like. It was more like a gooey brownie. It later transpired that it's a cake that isn't best eaten fresh out of the oven like we generally like it, it's much nicer after it's been allowed to cool down and set, where it becomes a sweet, rich treat. Well worth a go if you're a chocoholic!

We had arranged to have a little trip out to London on the Saturday. My sister had arranged for her and me to go to the Star Wars Exhibition, and as we were going out, my brother and mum came along to have lunch with us, and go to the Science Museum. Fortunately the weather was glorious and sunny, so the tube journey seemed promising.

We decided to try the S&M cafe; a reasonably famous London cafe specialising in sausages and mash. I was looking forwards to it, enjoying Oxford's "The Big Bang", a tasty budget restaurant with good quality local ingredients.

On arriving to the S&M cafe at around 1pm, it was reasonably empty. The server sat us down and started nagging us rapidly for our orders. Three of us had sausage and mash, and my sister had a sausage Caesar salad.

When the food finally arrived, they'd got the orders wrong. Only in a minor way, I had asked for the spring onion mash, and they brought a plain one. I couldn't be bothered to mention it, so dug in. The food was a real disappointment. They sold their sausages as "prime rare-breed saddleback sausages". Their "original sausages" tasted cheap and nasty, like a bottom of the range economy sausage, the type that would make Turkey twizzlers seem like a welcome improvement. The Steak sausages or hickory smoked were no better. You could tell they were different, but if you didn't know what they were meant to be, you had no chance of guessing what they were. The portion size was small, and the mash was watery and mediocre. The sausage Caesar salad was no better. The lettuce was fine, but the croutons were soggy and disgusting, and the cheese vegetarian sausage was gritty and tasted only of rusk. It wasn't very expensive, but I think £8.50 was expensive for the appalling quality of the food. It was rounded off, by the staff snatching the plates away, and delivering the bill without being asked for it. It wasn't even as if the place was full, there were empty tables galore. In case you want to avoid it, we went to the branch in Angel, which has many other places nearby which are significantly better, including Rico Rodrigo and many of the pubs. I understand the name, it was the culinary equivalent of being chained up, whipped, and then being asked to pay for it. And for that I'd rather go to Soho.

The Star Wars exhibition was a bit of a disappointment too. For £16.50, it was overpriced, small, and had far too much about the poor episodes I, II and III, and too little on the original classic movies. There wasn't even a model of an X-wing or Y-wing. The whole thing smacked of a money making exercise. The lighting seemed determined to prevent you from getting good photos while there, forcing you to pay £5 to have an official photo taken with R2-D2, or £8 to take home a souvenir DVD of a green screen battle with a "Jedi". I was pretty disappointed.

However, I had a great weekend. Not that I enjoy being disappointed, or enjoy moaning about being disappointed. It was so good to be out and having fun with family. It emphasised to me that it doesn't matter what you're doing, just who you're doing it with. Trite and cliched but true.

And on that note, good night all.

AcidCat