The quest for a good chinese…

Wimbledon has a lovely indian restaurant, thankfully just a few minutes from my front door. It was the first place we visited after moving in and there’s been no reason to go elsewhere.

The same cannot be said for chinese takeaways. Obviously this is a punishment for having a nice curry house, so there’s been trial and error to find somewhere else:

Nu - Kingston Road, SW19 [gmap]

Looks nice from the outside with a modern interior and friendly staff. Didn’t look dingy from the outside. Order: 2x sweet & sour chicken, rice and prawn crackers.

The sticky rice was good and the prawn crackers were very thin and greasy, but the chicken balls, well, lacked chicken. They were huge but each one had the tiniest bit of chicken in it, the rest being made up of tasteless, uncooked, doughy batter. On the international scale of chicken ball crispyness they’d get a 0. 10/10 for soggyness though. Sauce was also disgusting, that lovely radioactive colour that only chinese restaurants know how to produce.

Total cost: £13.40. Won’t go back.

London Highlights: Fernandez and Wells

Fernandez and Wells is the name of two different outlets in Soho: There’s a deli in Lexington Street and, just around the corner, a coffee shop on Beak Street. The deli sells a great range of meats, cheeses and wines whereas the cafe specialises in serving great coffee, pastries, sandwiches and cakes. I find it difficult to go to this corner of London without coming up with a reason to visit, although visiting Fernandez and Wells needs no justification.

The coffee is made from top quality Monmouth Coffee Co beans and was by far the best coffee I’ve had in London - my cappucino’s milk was silky smooth and, on previous visits, the espresso was perfect. The cakes are delicious too; I particularly like the carrot cake.

After getting accustomed to drinking the same lukewarm coffee from Starbucks, a visit to Fernandez and Wells is a pleasant change.

To find out more, visit fernandezandwells.com.

White Chocolate and Blueberry Muffins

Another Sunday, another opportunity to create huge amounts of washing up. This week: White Chocolate and Blueberry Muffins. The mix of blueberries and white chocolate gives the best of both worlds - they are incredibly simple to put together and take only 25 minutes to bake.

The recipe I followed is the same as the one from BBC Good Food, just with 1tsp of baking powder instead of 1/2 and no salt, as I forgot to put it in. Doesn’t seem to have affected the taste at all. It’s important not to mix too much and lumps are OK - I couldn’t tell the difference between lumps and chocolate chunks and probably only mixed it for 30 seconds or so.

Once cooked, leave in the tin for 5 minutes before leaving to cool. This gives them a chance to solidify a bit so they don’t fall apart whilst being removed.

Hacking Canon Cameras with CHDK

CHDK is a program that can be used to get extra features from Canon digital cameras. It works by replacing the standard canon firmware with its own version, giving more granular control over the camera. What’s best is that it doesn’t permanently overwrite the firmware - it runs only for a single boot - so all that’s needed to go back to standard operation is to turn the camera off and on again.

Some of the features of CHDK are aperture, shutter and ISO overrides, shooting in RAW, live histograms and depth of field calculators. It also allows you to script camera functions so you can easily do things like bracketing on a simple compact camera. There’s also reversi, which is novel. All menu features are accessed by standard buttons on the camera and the interface is surprisingly easy to navigate.

I managed to get version 1.02a onto my IXUS 75 and, following the instructions, loaded it up without any hassle. Didn’t get a chance to test out all of the features but it looks promising and it’s now on my SDHC card in case I need it in the future. Only issues I had were when trying to access the menus, the CHDK ones overlaid the Canon ones. This didn’t get in the way too much though.

Only question I have is what the hell does CHDK mean?

The Wimbledon Tennis Championships

Yesterday marked the start of the 132nd Wimbledon Championships at the AELTC. It’s the second tournament where both men and women win the same prize money (as the ladies final is a maximum of three sets compared to five for men, they do better in the pounds-per-set ratio, but with ¬£750,000 to win I’m sure the men aren’t complaining) and the first where hawk-eye technology can be used to challenge any decisions by line-judges. Players get 3 challenges per match - although they only lose one should the challenge be wrong. I’ve seen hawk-eye in the cricket over the past years and it’s both a cool and useful technology which adds to the experience for spectators. Now it’s improving things for players too, making bad line-calls a thing of the past.

I went this afternoon, taking advantage of the fact that for the first time in my life I can be at the front gate in less than 15 minutes from leaving my flat. A person under the train at Monument stopped me getting back from work quickly so we didn’t sit down until 2pm, just in time to watch Venus Williams destroy Cavaday 6-3 in the final set.

Later it was time for the start of the annual contest of a British person getting close-but-not-close-enough to the final. Murray won in straight sets but his performance was nowhere near that of Nadal who beat Beck in the second match of the day.

Finally we saw the beginning of a ladies doubles match involving Venus and Serena Williams. The Williams sisters dominated throughout the first set, but the lure of the chip shop got too much so we left after five games.

It was the first time I’ve gone to Wimbledon with a ticket and the experience was considerably less hassle than the usual queues to get in - the longest wait was for the 493 to turn up! In previous years I have queued outside for hours on end and got tired by mid afternoon due to being on my feet all the time.

Plan to go again next week, weather permitting. It’s good that for two weeks of the year, every weather forecast mentions what’s going on in my local area. From my childhood I always remember it pouring with rain during Wimbledon fortnight. Hopefully the sun stays shining and Cliff Richard stays away.

Baking Bread

I have recently been having fun baking bread.

There’s nothing better than a freshly-baked loaf - it’s a million miles away from a white sliced loaf from the supermarket. The recipe is very easy - flour, water, salt, sugar, yeast and a bit of olive oil - it just takes a bit of time to get everything together and do the kneading.

Next, shape the dough, leave for 10 minutes under a greased loaf tin, then shape the loaf properly and put into the tin. Leave to rise for an hour, then put into the oven for around 30 minutes at 200c until brown on top and it sounds hollow when you knock the bottom of the loaf. Afterwards, let the bread cool for a while (if possible, I can’t resist warm bread) and then eat. It’s especially nice with a bit of marmite.

I have a baking stone (used mainly for pizza) which I preheat in the oven while the loaf is rising. The crust at the bottom can be crisped by taking the loaf out the tin 5 minutes before it’s ready and placing finishing on the stone, but it’s not crucial to making a good loaf.

An Afternoon at the Fair

Today was the annual Wimbledon Village Fair, held the Saturday before the start of the tennis championships. Despite the threat of rain (that’s what you get for organising something close to the start of Wimbledon), we popped up the hill to see what was going on.

As well as a huge funfair there was a showjumping course and a considerable amount of stalls selling home made food, drink (including delicious Devon cider), plants and other bric-a-brac. There was a bandstand, punch and judy and, much to my delight, a large number of tombolas. Erika and I profited well from these winning a huge bear, a picnic set, a kids art set and a mini bottle of champagne. All for 4 quid. Luckily we recently threw out a lot of stuff we’d never use so there are plenty of places to store my art set.

Afterwards we went to the new Le Pain Quotidien and despite the staff being rushed off their feet, had a cappuccino in a bowl the size of a swimming pool and one of their mixed berry tarts. The tart was gorgeous with strawberries, raspberries, blueberries and blackberries, none of which were overwhelmed with sugar which makes a nice change from past experiences in patisseries. An alternative to Costa/Nero/Starbucks in the village is welcome so I’m sure we’ll be going back in the future.

It’s now the start of two weeks of chaos whilst the tennis is on - got a few afternoons off work over the next couple of weeks so hopefully the weather will improve and we can spend some time at the AELTC. There has to be some advantage to living here!

Tempted to start writing things again

After not putting pen-to-paper for a year I probably have a few things to say again. Watch this space (but don’t hold your breath..).