Happy Chinese New Year!

2010, the Year of the Tiger!

The Chinese year is based upon the lunar month which means that it starts aroundabout late January to early February, and the festival itself lasts for 15 days.

Legend tells us that, back in the day when it all started, there was a monster called the Nien that terrorised villagers on the first day of the New Year, eating anything and everything, including villagers! They took to leaving food outside their doors in the hopes that that would sate the monsters appetite.

One day they saw that a small child dressed in red scared the Nien away, it was scared of the colour red. From then on they hung red decorations etc on their doors at New Year and let off firecrackers as an extra deterrent. It never bothered them again.

Today, red is still the symbolic colour of Chinese New Year. Red paper lanterns (amongst other colours) adorn houses and streets, and on New Years day children are given red paper envelopes containing money or other gifts.

On New Years Eve families get together for huge sumptuous meals and wish each other peace, happiness, luck and prosperity. It's traditionally a time for forgiveness and letting go of old grudges.

The tiger itself is a graceful, brave and fierce character who is supposed to protect households from the 3 main tragedies of fire, thieves and ghosts. Nowadays in this country that's probably fire, flood and repossession.

I think I'll head down to Chinatown on Sunday and check out the New Years celebrations, I went there for lunch with the Wiluf and Fabrice last week, and the lanterns completely took me in!

For my own personal little celebration today, I made some Chinese New Year cookies. I did concede slightly to Valentines day, check out the sexy heart shapes, but I tried to use some traditional new year symbols, check out el tigre:

The paper lantern:

My interwebs research indicated that this symbol means 'tiger'. It's probably a big joke and it really means 'ballbags' or something:

I believe this is a symbol conveying luck:

And the least Chinese of them all:

I know I have at least couple of Chinese/Asian readers, my apologies if I've just offended your families by etching rude slogans across my sugary treats!!

The recipe again for those who might have missed it the first time round:

225g Butter
125g Caster sugar
275g Plain flour
50g Semolina

Cream the butter first, then add the sugar, then the flour and semolina.

It looks really crumbly and unworkable at first, but grab it all together and knead it for a bit and it's all good. Don't try and manipulate it too much whilst you're rolling it all though, it's a bit temperamental and falls apart easily!

Mmmmmm, cookies!

I'll be off for a nice Lush bath soon, but for now please allow me to wish you peace, happiness and good health for 2010.

Sun nien fai lok!

It's a Plague!!

Regular readers may recall that in my post-award euphoria a week or so ago, I promised to do some baking, in order that I feel worthy of the aforementioned award.

Ms Humble is a cookery blogger, and does these awesome science-themed cookies, so I thought I'd follow that theme. I run student practicals every year in which we play with locusts...so for me, locusts sprang immediately to mind....after the shennanigans of today I really do wish they hadn't.

But I promised them, and here they are!

It's a plague!! A PLAGUE I tell thee!

Well, does six constitute a plague? It does when they're in your kitchen, I guess it depends on how much you like locusts.

Let me give you a little blow by blow account, and the recipe incase anyone should desire it.

Ok, so, first you make the dough (no pictures of this exciting bit I'm afraid). This is actually a weight watchers recipe, though I fail to see how considering how much butter and sugar goes in. In fact, they seem to have taken just about the lowest fat ingredient barring flour (eggs) and replaced them with semolina.

Well done weight watchers.

Here's the recipe:

225 g butter
125 g caster sugar
275 g flour, plain
50 g dried semolina, or ground rice
50 g icing sugar

Preheat the oven to Gas Mark 4/180°C/fan oven 160°C/350°F.

Beat the butter until softened and gradually beat in the caster sugar. Add the flour and semolina, working it in with a wooden spoon. Gather the dough together with your hands, then knead for a few moments until smooth.

Roll out the dough thinly on a lightly floured surface.

Cut out shapes

Arrange on baking sheets.

Bake for 8-10 minutes, or until light golden brown. Cool on wire racks.

Mix the icing sugar with a little water to make a smooth glace icing, then use this to decorate the biscuits.

Now, the 'Cut out shapes' instruction is deceptively simple!! Normally one would use a cutter of some description...but funnily enough, try as I might, I couldn't find a locust-shaped cookie cutter. So I made my own template by tracing a picture off of google images!

When it comes to icing, I knew I needed more than the recipe says, so I used 250g of icing sugar and about 50ml of water, give or take (ish...please don't follow that to the letter, Ms Humble has a good guide on her blog). Then I split it and made some brown (by mixing equal amounts of red, yellow and green food colouring) and yellow icing.

So....after locusts had baked, I let them cool on wire racks, before I set about icing the outlines in brown. It took me a while to get into the flow, and I'm SURE that the icing was gloopier(scientific term) than it should have been, but hey! You can see what they're supposed to be right?

RIGHT!!!?

Then, once that icing had hardened (or not, I'm impatient and wanted a sit-down), I started filling in with yellow.

My back soon started screeching at me, and so I opted to finish at 6.

So here you have them....my plague of 6. It's the first baking I've done in years, and I quite enjoyed it.

Now, please excuse me whilst I go and wash off these crusty bits of dough I keep finding all over my face!

A week??

Since I last posted? Surely not! It doesn't seem that long ago, but then this week has been a packed manic week full of fun and shennannigans!

Wednesday was my first night of drinking since starting the old diet and I was dreading a big style fall off the dieting wagon. I met up with Kayleigh for a couple of wee drinkies and her boyfriend Tom...or Tomphibian as he is affectionately known, joined us halfway through the evening. Double G and slimline T was the order of the evening, and very nice it was too. Fun and merriness was had by all, they make a sickeningly cute couple! I left them to it at some point and got home before 10pm which I was vereh impressed with, plenty of water and off to bed and I felt no effects the next morning. I succeeded! Huzzah! This wasn't to last as you will find out later.

I have my St John divisional night on a Thursday and I'd had a call from my division leader earlier that week to make sure I was attending for radio training....so no getting out of it. Whenever someone hands me a radio I become immediately terrified, as if tiny monsters may crawl out, burrow into my ears and eat my brain. I just nod and pretend that, yeah, of course I know how to use it, then just hope against hope I never need to. Conveniently...they had forgotten to bring the radios, so this was all theory. A couple of questions after the training and that was it..we'd passed. Phew, thank gawd that's over. Little did I know....

Friday....what on earth happened Friday? Ah! It was mums birthday on Friday, and Mum and Dad's anniversary on the Tursday (which I had forgotten about). So we took the parentals out for dinner at fancypants Coombe Lodge. Actually, it's not that fancy, not compared to Fishpimps jaunt to the Ritz, it's a Beefeater. For us it's a bit fancy :o) Dinner was lovely and I was hyper in the extreme for some reason. I didn't get a dessert of my own for obvious reasons, I did however stick a finger into everyone elses dessert before they even touched it, the waitress was unimpressed, especially when I asked for a fourth spoon please :D

Saturday was one of the most exhausting days ever, surpassed only by the London Marathon (First Aid cover you understand) and a very busy zoo day. I did a 12 hour St John shift at Twickenham. It was the Guiness Cup final, the London Irish were playing the Leicester Tigers. Kick off wasn't until 5:30pm but there were lots of kids games before that, so we arrived at 9:30am. I gorged on wholemeal pitta and houmous, mmmmmmmm. We mostly faffed around until about 1pm when we were split into teams. I was given the job of collecting the radio and whiclt in control was duly informed that I would be the radio operator for my team. A familiar terror consumed me, I begged and pleaded like a pathetic person for a little while, all to no avail. Secretly I knew this is what would have to happen to make me EVER use the radio, in at the deep end whilst the knowledge was still fresh.

Off we went for lunch and then onto our post, in the North West corner. We were probably the only team without big coats and we got put on one of the coldest corners of the stadium. Relieved only once in about 4 hours, we were freezing our titties off by the time the game had ended. I hadn't done too badly with the radio, I found it's all about confidence really, as long as you sound like you know what you're on about you can get by. I might make up my own phonetic alphabet though, E is for 'Elephantiasis', P is for 'Phosphorylation'.

After titty freezing in the stadium, we were sent to the Guiness Village, of all places. It's what it says on the tin 'The Place Where People Go To Get Pissed On Guiness', oh yes, we strike gold baby! I've never seen so many people trying to maim themselves in such inventive ways. It would have been entertaining had I not been dreading having to use the carry sheet we were lugging around with us.

Finally left the stadium at 9:30pm.....breathe.......

Sunday was Zoo day. I had lots of lovely ladies in so it was nice and chilled, that goes for the weather too. By the end of the day the wind had picked up a hell of a lot, I had to shut the kiosk window to avoid being caught up in a cloud of whirling 'the Birds and the Bee's' leaflets. Shutting the window in the kiosk almost makes you look like you're sitting in a terrarium, people wander past and point as if you're some kind of H.Sapiens exhibit, scratching your head and picking your nose. I got to spend a bit of time training people on the ungulate touch table on Sunday, it's one of my FAVOURITE parts of the zoo. The morning session was a bit dead, but when we went back in the afternoon it was great, we had 2 groups of young girls, the Rainbows and the Brownies. Mostly kids just look at your specimens and shout 'Euuuurgh! Is that a FOOT?? Is it REAL??' closely followed by 'what's that? and what's that? and what's that? and what's this? and this?' It's lovely to impart knowledge though, no matter how basic.

We had some leaving drinks for a vol who is moving back to Oz shortly after the zoo. 14 people came along and it was great. All of us girls and aged between early 20's and early 30's. We grabbed a table in the corner right outside the mens loo, so they literally had to squeeze past to get to it, we must have been quite intimidating really. Some left after one drink and after that people slowly dropped off until the hardcore remained, Jade, Helen G, Stacey and myself. I ended up drinking 5 pints! Count them....1......2.....3, you get the picture. I was fine until we hit the air outside, then I went all stupid. Memories came flooding back to me when Stacey walked into a lamp-post on the way back to Camden, I did the same thing a couple of years ago.....cringe. You can't help but laugh when someone does something like that though. I know my housemate wet himself a little bit when I did it.....bastard.

Minging hangover, plus points guilt this morning, I'm looking forward to being fresh when I wake up tomorrow morning. There's nothing like waking up without a headache the morning after a hangover.

Ahhhhh, that's about it I think. Friday is Dirtayyy Dancing for mums birthday pressie, and Saturday I'm at an Ann Summers party, I'm going to make willy cookies :o) I wonder if anyone heard me on the phone in the zoo on Sunday talking to my dad:

'Dad, don't throw the willy cookie cutter away if you find it...yes.....willy, WILLY cookie cutter. I KNOW you think it's disgusting, it's for my party on Saturday....the Ann Summers party....*sigh*, yes dad, another Ann Summers party. Just don't throw it away ok? Thank you'