So, here’s the trick to Mim and Minty’s Supermarket Fine Cheese:

1. Go to your local co-operative food supermarket, and buy their Truly Irresistible Parkham Farm Cheddar.  (although I do suspect it’s made by these people, because I’ve seen Tesco variants…)
2. DO NOT OPEN IT.  If you do, you’ll have some nice, but ultimately forgettable, plastic Cheddar.
3. Continue to ignore.
4. Wait until the useby date has expired.  A month is a good starting point.
5. Eat.  Enjoy the stingy taste. Perfect.

I’ve tried leaving it once I initially tasted it, and I just got slightly blue tasting supermarket cheese.  But leaving it sealed so it can finish off maturing, and it really is a thing of beauty.  WHY supermarkets don’t dare sell us things in this state in the first place, I do not know.

We now have about three blocks in the fridge at any one time, maturing away. Works perfectly.  And best of all, it’s cheap.

Tuesday
Took advantage of the weather to cook outdoors at my parents. They have a chiminea, and while Stuart’s played with fire there a few times, we’ve never got it together to actually cook. We spent the afternoon cooking; we decided to have a go making our own burgers, partly because we wanted to have a play with the burger press we got last year. Stuart got a good fire going very quickly (he has a worrying affinity with fire) and we spent the evening cooking and eating. I think it’s the first time I’ve ever had what could be classed as a BBQ with my parents, but I hope it becomes a regular thing.

Wednesday
I mention Wednesday only because I haven’t got the foggiest what we were actually doing. It’s not even that we were doing boring things that I (for once) edited out. There’s just nothing. It’s like the day didn’t happen. I’ve decided that we must have been very relaxed.

Thursday
Got an email on my work account from a colleague telling me about some issues at the office. It finished off “Given that it’s the nicest day of the week so far, I’ll be somewhat disappointed if you reply this afternoon. Get a life, woman.” I took this as a hint and logged off.

Stuart fancied actually doing something for once, so we drove down to North Wales – an area neither of us know. We went to Rhyl for the laugh, but were really surprised to find out that a place we’d been told was absolutely dreadful wasn’t at all, really. It had a lovely beach (with donkeys), the people were nice, and while it was obviously poor and past it, it wasn’t as hopeless as some other beach resorts I’ve been to.

Unlike the resort down the road. The locals were fine, but all the tourists were hard. You could see them glaring at you when you walked past, hating you with every scrap of their being. The resort looking unchanged from about 1950, with a weird mix of portacabins and older building that were falling down. Very very seaside – and it looked like exactly what it was; a cheap way to get away. Given the weather, I doubt it was that dissimilar to the Brits Abroad resorts anyway.

Sunday
Decided to celebrate what’s been a fantastic couple of weeks with a trip into Rusholme for a curry (God knows what that’ll do to tomorrows weigh in, but I don’t care. We went at lunchtime, so we were the only people in the place, but we’re rather glad that we went when we did because it’s currently the biggest thunderstorm I’ve heard in a long time. Waddling back to the car getting wet through wouldn’t be the ending I’d hope for.

Don’t laugh, but I’ve had a great time today tidying up the blog. There aren’t too many changes, but the code is much neater and I’ve split out the css prior to playing with different stylesheets for different viewing methods (like over my pda phone). And talking of my phone, I’m just about to upgrade the OS after losing my temper and googling something like “rubbish phone hangs slow crashes” and getting a link to a guy who had exactly the same problems as me until he upgraded the software. A bit nervous though, it involves doing some unlocky stuff with unofficial software and knowing me, I’ll break it.

Work tomorrow. I can’t wait.

Anyways, one of them was squishing down beautifully as it cooked but the other one was just sort of sat there changing colour but not squishing down. After they had been on for several minutes and turned several times I went to turn the one that was not changing and there was a loud bang and a burning sensation on my leg. The purple sod had just exploded and thrown its fiery hot content in all directions.

Several pieces landed on my leg and I now have some ace blisters just waiting to pop. Fortunately none of them are particularly big enough even they they are quite nasty burns. Even the fence got it and there bits hanging from plants that were in the vicinity.

I saw the funny side of it and ended up laughing fairly hard for a couple of minutes. I think Miriam was a bit more upset as I had just exploded half of the base for a dip she was making, eeek!

So, aubergines are dangerous, be careful people!

What I don’t understand is why I now feel like crawling under the desk to sleep for the rest of the afternoon. I started having muesli to try and stop the mid afternoon energy dip (it worked), but surely brown bread can’t have the same effect? Can it?

I had a worrying conversation earlier in the day with a colleague who wasn’t going to have any because he didn’t have time to get an mix from the shop. I tried to convince him that you only needed flour, eggs and milk, but he wasn’t for having it.

The packets of mix I’ve seen before now require milk and eggs anyway, so I’m not sure what’s in them. Surely they can’t just be selling very small, very expensive bags of flour? Can’t they?