• Hair-dried Barbecue
    Hair-dried Barbecue

    Us chaps do like to be in on the lighting and coaxing of a barbecue. I’ve seen various ways of doing it, dried kindling, fire lighters, petrol, meths, paper – all these methods then require a bit of blowing to get things heated up.

    Personally, I’ve started to use a blow torch! That gets it alight pretty quick. I build a pyramid of charcoal and light it, then I tear up a piece of corrugated cardboard from a box and use it to fan the flames until it’s red hot and going nicely. Then I spread the coals out and fan some more so that they are evenly distributed.

    Vasilis, our host and landlord on holiday in Greece, had his own ideas. His barbecue was made from an old water tank cut in half lengthways. I’m not sure what he used to help get the fire started, but I came across him at the hair drier stage! Yes, he was blowing the flames with a hair drier – and boy did it work well? He had to cover his arm because there were so many sparks and it got up to a pretty roaring heat very quickly. The whole thing is designed to take a lamb or a piglet for roasting.

    We had home made Greek sausage and Souvlakis which were fab, accompanied by roast vegetables, stuffed vegetables and baby okra. What a meal!

  • Victoria Sponge Pasta Cake
    Victoria Sponge Pasta Cake

    Pasta Cake Cut Open
    Pasta Cake Cut Open
    Wanting to surprise my wife for her birthday recently, I followed a link sent to me by stumbleupon. TheCiao Chow Linda blog gave me a brilliant recipe for a cake that looks like a plate of Spaghetti Bolognese! The only trouble was that it was in American measurements and terms so I wasn’t quite sure how to go about it.

    So I made it up as I went along. The original cake required chocolate meatballs with chopped nuts. The recipe seemed a bit complicated for me, so I made the meatballs out of Rice Krispies and chocolate. I could have made them a little smaller or the cake a little bigger to get the proportions right.

    The cake is a basic Delia Smith Victoria Sponge Cake and the icing is a softish butter icing that I forced out of an icing bag. The biggest hole I had in the piping set was vermicelli sized, so it was quite hard work. Try to get a spaghetti sized hole if you can, it will be much easier. The sauce is Mrs Beetons strawberry and gooseberry jam. I warmed it up so that it would pour more easily, but this did kind of melt the icing in a couple of places. It also made it very sweet.

    Anyway, she was suitably surprised – as was everyone else. You get a lot of impact for relatively little work. It is a little odd having something that looks savoury being so sweet, though!

  • Tzitzikias or Greek Cicada
    Tzitzikias or Greek Cicada
    I found one eventually. I only had to follow the sound to one of the noisy little blighters that sounded as if it was at head height.

    The cicadas in Greece are very loud. Locally they are called Tzitzikias, which is a very good name for them because that is the sound they make. I was amazed at how loud they could be. Midday in an olive grove was almost deafening.

    My wife and children said, “what noise?” They only heard it when I pointed it out to them. Mind you it’s the same with many other visual details that I take for granted that everyone else has seen. I guess some people just aren’t interested in stuff and pass it by.

    I suppose their bodies are about 40mm long. As you can see from the photo, they are very well camoulaged and you have to get right up close to them to see them. The noise appears to come from the tip of the tail which vibrates. I’m not sure I could live with that all year round. At midday they are at their loudest. You don’t want to be in the middle of Tzitzikias love festival – trust me!