Or, blogging last night’s dinner.

This is about 3 lunch-sized servings or two if you’re hungry:

Roughly chop one onion and 1-2 cloves of garlic (depending on how garlicky you like things; I of course used two).  Fry the onions and garlic in a little oil for couple of minutes with dried cumin, dried coriander, and chilli powder (start with a heaped teaspoon of each; you can add more at the end.)  Add one tin of toms, one drained tin of kidney beans, one tin’s worth of water and a stock cube, then simmer for about 20 mins or until beans are cooked.  Blitz the mixture in a food processor or blender, season to taste, then eat.  Alternatively, to serve as a meal or just to make it a bit less healthy, place the soup in a heat-proof bowl and cover with tortilla crisps.  Cover crisps with grated cheese and grill or bake until cheese melts, then serve with dollop of sour cream on top.

For lack of anything to say, I’ve changed over to Kaushal Sheth’s Warped theme.  This is also my first proper foray into using Widgets to organise the sidebar.  So far, so good: I wanted a section on the sidebar to show my flickr feed, so grabbed this plugin, enabled it and the widgets plugin, set a few defaults and there it was, easy as pi.

This is the funniest thing I’ve read in a while.

Casa have set me a little bit of test!  I get back from holiday, and first rehearsal back I get the Tower of Power tune There’s Only So Much Oil In The Ground transcription dropped infront of me.  Now, I was aware of ToP, but hadn’t actually heard them in action before, so it was a little bit jaw-dropping to hear the incredibly solid semi-quaver groove the bassist was using.  A little bit of interweb research and I find that it’s being played by one Rocco Prestia.  You can see a vid of ToP playing here, and here is an excerpt from a video of Rocco’s (mullets ahoy!).  I can see this is going to be a punishing technique to master…

Miss me? I’ve been on honeymoon in Thailand for a couple of weeks. Yes, honeymoon. But more on that later.  Despite it being a) rainy season and b) coup d’etat season, Kyla and I still went ahead with our holiday.  Actually it turned out fine: the rain did appear most days for an hour or so each afternoon, but as the temperature was above 30 degrees it was actually quite welcome.  We didn’t see any evidence of the coup (quite disappointing, I was looking forward to getting my photo with a tank), but given that we bypassed Bangkok when we arrived, heading straight down to Koh Samui, that is hardly surprising: Samui doesn’t have much law and order at the best of times, being mainly concerned with seperating tourists from their cash.

We stayed in two different places on Samui: Choeng Mon, which is a fairly relaxed little village on the North East coast, then Chaweng, which is significantly more “Yarmouth”.   Actually, “Camden-on-Sea” might be a  better description, due to the number of people trying to sell you tat.

After a week or so on Samui, we headed North to Chiang Mai.  Kyla and I were surprised to find that going North in any country seems to have the same effect: the local food immediately changed to more meaty broths incorporating distressing amounts of liver.  I was waiting for someone to offer me a cup of tea and a bit of Lancashire hot pot.  The holiday took a turn for the cultural at this point; we wandered around various temples, went hiking in the jungle and visited a few hill tribe villages (mostly a highly-choreographed tourist “experience”).

We finished off in Bangkok for a couple of days. The idea behind this ordering of destinations was a gradual increase in stress levels, from quiet beach to busier beach to small town to megalopolis wig-out.  In the latter role, Bangkok did not disappoint.  Up until that point we’d laughed at the insane recklessness of the taxi and tuk-tuk drivers, but in Bangkok we finally found someone who seemed hell-bent on finding out whether or not the Buddhist idea of reincarnation is true.

Still, I’m back now.  Normal service will resume once I’ve shaken this jet-lag.