Come Dine With Ja

Polish 'Come Dine with Me' is marred by the fact that most of the contestants seem to regard foreign food with a suspicion bordering on hostility.

I remember the first time I cooked a seafood risotto for the in-Laws. More used to fresh water fish, the long quiet moment in which they encountered the prawns with their tails on was pregnantly awkward. They then engaged in the kind of subterfuge eating I remember as a kid, burying unappetising food under a pile of mash in the hope of getting away with not having to eat it.

They were much keener on toad-in-the-hole. Tato was happy to eat what he described as a "sausage cake"....but not a creature from the deep, oh no!


I've been losing weight with long walks rather than bus rides and not having the time or availability for familiar snacks. It's one of the great things about not being stuck behind a desk with a vending machine a coin's throw away. 


I made three litres of potato soup this week. The combined ingredients cost less than £2.00 and are incredibly healthy. Soup makes a great lunch time or afternoon snack and has the added advantage of putting a bit of heat in the belly when a long walk in a brisk wind beckons. 

Et voila. The jerk chicken we recently had was good but I am still not getting the rice quite right. There's something wrong but I can't put my finger on it. 

Any left over jerk makes a great seasoning for wraps and sandwiches with an unconvential bit of bite to them. 

Still, hits the spot.


This evening we went to a town outside Warsaw to watch the performance of a friend of a friend in a comedy play. Despite understanding little, in the words of a Kurt Vonnegut character, "I had to laugh like hell." 

My tally of watching near death experiences has also increased as I watched a woman in a Toyota Corolla drive straight over a pedestrian crossing without looking, forcing a middle aged guy who was walking on it to have to leap to safety with inches to spare. 

It feels like it's only a matter of time before I see something serious happen because people just don't pay attention to what they're doing.