I’m not going to say a great deal about it really. Only that initially I forgot all about it. When I remembered I quickly learned a very important lesson.

Don’t eat pancakes you buy from the store. Make your own. I tried some from a supermarket in Stratford which shall remain un-named. Both, the pancakes and the supermarket. Rather than limit my disdain for these appalling creations as marketed by a particular chain I thought it best to condemn them generally. If you would like to nominate some exceptions to this general, and dare I say it, important rule then please comment away!

Making pancakes is easy. Flour, milk and egg. you can fuss about with extras like salt and chocolate chips but really I reccommend that you avoid detailed recipes. All that they lead to is mild panic that you may have added 220g instead of 230g of one ingredient or another. You can’t go too wrong with pancakes.

Take some flour. Plain is best but I have used self-raising too and I’m still breathing. When I say some I mean the sort of amount you would put of a favourite cereal in a breakfast bowl. Some. That’s going to be enough for one person like me and maybe one and a half, or perhaps two, persons of more austere appetite like you. When you have some flour put it in a measuring jug. If you have more than you can fit in a measuring jug then stop eating so much cereal. What are you eating out of? A salad bowl?

Crack an egg and drop it on top of your small mound of flour. yes, the one in the measuring jug. Don’t mix it in yet as this will make a sort of flour-egg glue which will stick to the sides of your measuring jug unpleasantly.

Pour on some milk. Again some. I like the breakfast analogy because that’s how much milk is in some. You know how you pour milk directly onto your cereal in the morning without measuring it? That’s some ‘milk’. Pour that much milk on top of your flour and egg.

Now mix it all up. the toughest part about this stage is not doing it so vigorously that you cover yourself with soft clouds of flour and splashes of eggy milk. Eggy milk doesn’t just rinse off, you’ll have to wash your clothes. Keep the splashes in the pancake mix!

Ok, while you are mixing it up you will learn about the consistency of the mix you have just made. If it is the consistency of milk then you may have poured the milk into an empty bowl rather than the one with the flour and egg in it. Try again please. If your mix is too dry then, again, you may have poured your milk in the wrong bowl or you have just worked out why your cereal is so crunchy all the time!

If the mix is too thick add a little more milk, mix it up and try again. If it is too thin, drop in a little bit of flour. This is actually quite tough to incorporate so I reccomend trying to cook your mix if you think it is too thin before you start trying to add more flour.

Cook a small pancake. Eat said pancake while adjusting the temperature of the pan/griddle and adding salt if required. Remember, you can always add more salt, you cannot take salt away! Be sparing.

That’s it, you now know what to do. Don’t buy them in the stores, make your own. Preferably thin like crepes with lemon and granulated sugar. Mmmm.

Word of the Day: Cachalot
- noun

1 – A sperm whale

After a visit to our preferred Indian restaurant last night I thought it only right that I make a recommendation. After all, why should I keep this valuable information to myself?

A mistake often made by restaurants, especially given the emphasis the web receives today, is the failure to maintain an informative and interesting website. The Spice Island in Plumstead is no exception. It emerges very quickly that there is an appropriately named website listed. Unfotunately this is registered to a venue in another part of the country so I wouldn’t use their menu too much if you are going to be visiting their, completely unrelated, counterpart in south east London. On second thoughts I’m not sure I should mention it as using those place names will only cause confusion for googlers. (Edit).

So about the restaurant. You can find them here:

196-212 Plumstead Common Road
Woolwich
LONDON
SE18 2RS

There’s a small car park behind the building so if there’s no space available on the street to the front of the premsises you can try and park there.

The real appeal of the place is in the take away menu. If you place an order of more than ten pounds then you can choose a vegetable dish as a free extra. What this means practically is that you can have a delicious Indian for two hungry giants or three more normal appetites for a little over a tenner. Our usual arrangement is to place an order and put some rice on at the same time. Food is normally ready for collection after 20-25 minutes and the range and quality of the dishes is excellent. Like most small restaurants, if what you want isn’t listed then they will do all they can to accommodate your tastes.

I would go on to recommend some specific dishes at this point but before I do I want to point out that I am yet to be disappointed by anything I have order from this place. We often eat this food with friends and the inevitable mixing and matching that goes on with Indian food means that I have now tried a very large number of their dishes. They are all, even if I happen not to like ‘em, very good. The chicken tikka masala, a mainstay of British Indian orders, is excellent and very creamy and mild. Their Madras dishes are excellent and the Dansak dishes. A type of sauce which is hot and slightly sour and based on lentils is wonderful. Try it with the lamb!

I do enjoy my food photography and next time we order I’ll take some photos for you all to salivate over. In the mean time, why not give them a call yourself. Spice Island is open from 6pm. You can call them on 0208 316 5207. Do it now. Well, if you’re hungry and it’s after six!

There are of course a small number of compatibility issues. Peanut Butter cookies don’t work well with calorie controlled diets, they’re anathema for people with peanut allergies and they make your fingertips oily. All of these ‘cons’ as it were are obviated by they’re warmth, flavour and finger lickin’ goodness.

A few of our more pedestrian friends may be concerned that combining peanut butter, butter, brown sugar, white sugar, a drop of vanilla, a couple of eggs and a pinch of baking powder is hardly a way to foster health and good teeth but who’s listening to them eh?

Peanut butter cookies are also incompatible with keyboards, not to mention crumb-free environments. So if you work for Intel forget it. No one’s going let you eat these treats in the lab.

Despite their multitudinous failings, being cooked in a shade under eleven minutes not among them, I still feel that these distinctive nibbles with their twice-fork-pressed tops are a classic example of American cooking and to quote the free and the brave. God bless America for peanut butter cookies.

Yes, yes. I know, that’s paraphrasing.

Word of the day: Balalaika
-noun
1 – a Russian musical instrument having a triangular body and a neck like that of a guitar

I can still recall with some horror the first time I was offered a glass of Dandelion Tea. My suspicions began when the word glass was used. I thought this may be a simple translation issue and so was somewhat bemused when a kettle was produced and near boiling water poured in to a set of glass tumblers, the sort you may purchase at Ikea were you so inclined. You can imagine how I felt when two or three freshly picked Dandelions were dropped, stalks and all, into my glass. “What’s this?” I spluttered. Full well knowing, as I watched the colours gently diffusing from the petals and stem, that what I had before me was garden-fresh Dandelion tea.

I have retained much of the caution about Chinese cuisine that I learned in those long months in Newcastle and so it is with relish and indeed relief that I eat at our local, and thoroughly westernised, chinese. There’ nothing direct about this place. Everything suits my palate just fine and I can for a moment pretend to be enjoying exotic flavours and smells.

Perhaps one day I may even make it to China, if McDonalds haven’t taken the place over entirely.