I know it was on The Age website, but really, Stephen Fry is quite funny, and so is humping, especially when it involves a rare parrot and a man’s neck.

See it here now.

It was hot, and I decided to utilise the presents my fellow and I gave to each other for Christmas to spruce up our kitchen. He got an ice-cream machine, I got a Kitchen Aid (potentially the most useful thing I own). So I beat some eggs and sugar in the later, added it to some cream and milk over heat, let it cool, and I put the mixture into the former to spin into a most delightful summery treat. With luck it would soon be dripping down my chin. This is where is all fell down. The delicious creamy mess, which tasted and smelt delicious, permeating the whole house, was curdling right before my very eyes in the above picture. Only, it was hiding under the thick, rich, bubbling surface, and alas I did not know until it was too late. I tried pushing the lumps through a sieve, twice, but there was no way to undo the damage.

So, lesson learnt, and my advice to you dear reader is this. When you spend $30 on ingredients, make sure you don’t fling your sugar covered recipe aside like the pro you know you’re not. Read the instructions carefully, go over them a few times, and when is says “stir constantly” make sure you are not doing the dishes at this point.

Alternatively, think of the loss as a cheap cooking class in ice-creamery, and look on the bright side, all that cream and sugar is down the sink, not round your mid-section.

I think I might make sorbet next time.

I know this is a foody post, but I am lot about the food stuff.

I stumbled upon this amazing product last week, though it is from the Americas and the postage is almost 7 times as much as the little jar. So I made myself some of bacon jam, gosh it’s goodness. The world needs more of this.

If you are willing to pay the price, get it here – http://www.skilletstreetfood.com/baconjam.htm

Or make your own delicious specimen like my fellow blogger – http://www.notquitenigella.com/2009/10/08/bacon-jam-your-wildest-dreams-come-true/

Let me introduce you to A Taste of Marilyn.

This blog is to follow on from a book we made at the end of 2008, titled A Taste of Marilyn. The book was the culmination of a year’s worth of Friday lunchtime recipes, chronicling what started out as an impulse, turned into a ritual, and ended up being the centrepiece of the working week. A Taste of Marilyn blog documents the continuation of Friday lunch, online.

There are culinary highs and lows, and degrees of skill and effort that ranged from the truly herculean to the downright average, yet with each meal there is always that delightful mixture of a cook’s pride and the warm, appreciative glow that comes with a belly well filled.

So it is with great pleasure, and some trepidation, that we present to you the collection of Friday lunch recipes for A Taste of Marilyn.

http://atasteofmarilyn.com/

I’m not sure I can believe this. It’s completely frightening, it can slither and scratch. Yipes!

I have missed you it’s true. I promise to love you more. So much so, I’ll make you a packed lunch that looks like the below. How could you resist.

Though I have become quite obsessed with the Japanese cuisine of late, this had taken the bento box to another level.

There’s the turkey roll, and, my favourite, the peanut butter, chocolate and banana roll for desert. Those little jelly things are mini cocktails. Yipes.

It is not love lost here at BHN, really it’s not. I thought I’d bring it all back with a book review of Wetlands, topically. Not saturated soil, but certainly a moist area in the undergrowth. I read a profile on this cute German TV presenter Charlotte Roche, and her racy new book Wetlands a couple of months ago. It wasn’t out in Australia at the time, so I ordered it in at the local bookshop. When it came in, the bookshop lady called me to let me know that she had started reading my copy, so I’d better get down quick to pick it up. I am only 4 chapters in, but what I will say is I do feel slightly uncomfortable reading this book on the bus in the morning, and not because it is fluorescent pink with an avocado on the front. It is quite refreshingly grubby so far, but also intriguingly explicit, and even though my initial thoughts are skeptical about the age of the 18 year old protagonist, Helen, and her unabashed interest in her slippery lady fingers, I am doing a early-read book review, and will follow it up with my thoughts at the end. There aren’t enough reviews published mid-stream, but there are surely plenty of books that warrant discussion before climax – this is one.

Last week my housemate had a visitor stay from LA – a friendly chap from the Land of Plenty. This fellow came bearing gifts too, but what found quite ironic was the selection of foreign samples scattered around the house. Fair trade tooth paste next to my toothbrush – a delicious fennel and aniseed mouth of froth, fair trade face wash and shampoo in the shower, sure I am into that hippy stuff. Actually, it’s not hippy at all, and I’d buy it myself if I could afford to maintain the extra expense that is donated to the fair traders. How nice, I thought, to have someone in the house so indebted to empowering developing country producers and promoting sustainability, as well and utilising the export of (mostly) natural products.

However, I later opened the pantry and stumbled across something of the editable kinda of American souvenir, to find that Sir Amnesty had also lugged a very large jar of bright yellow cheese dip all the way across the seas. It seems he couldn’t last three weeks down under without the slimy yellow goo. I checked the packaging for the fair trade label – perhaps Ecuador had some extra funding in their factories and began producing more Americanised produce to seduce the American market – but to no avail. No no, this was highly preserved, home-grown American nacho cheese dip (sans cheese) with a hundred and seven different chemicals I had never heard of that will most probably give you a potentially fatal illness in some way. I’m sure the Quinoa farmers hadn’t heard of them either.

So here’s my quandary – why buy fair trade products for your teeth and face and hair, but not for your stomach. Surely the internal is as important, if not more so, than the exterior. It seems someone is confused here right? Well, I hate to make a generalisation based on one judgement of one person from one place, but it just so happens that this place is exactly the place one might expect these kinda of contradictions to take place, and do all the time.

I don’t not pose to preach a fully sustainable lifestyle by any means but this kind of annoyed me is all.

That aside, dreadlocks or not, I would like to know where to get that fennel and aniseed toothpaste – it tastes better anyway.

Now I am of the option that every man should, at some point, have a tailor-made suit. For it is not the man the makes the suit, but the good suit that makes the man look devilishly handsome, especially one that fits him perfectly. It’s a bit like Cindarella really – he will become a prince and all – only he won’t turn into a pumpkin if he is not home by midnight wearing it.

There is something quite charming about a bespoke suit, and a tailor that will measure you up and down. Here’s one I know – http://www.suit-shop.com/