h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Ohhh...purple turnips...fancy dress...and Denis the Donkey too! And a drawing competition where you have to draw a purple turnip!

Beats me how Derry got that City of Culture gig - with all that going on I'd have opted for Lisburn

Purple turnips?!

Oh no no no! its not natural. Just not natural. mark my words, mwark my words, its just the thin end of the sliparry eel... It might start with purple turnips, but what next? eh? eh? yeh... what next, just think... this kind of ghastly unearthly unaturalness must be stopped! It might just be a purple turnip now... but soon... they'll be making blue banannannannas and red garlic! red garlic! yeh... just imainge that... the horror, oh the horror.... As my Grandmother always used to say "When you've scraped the eel bucket, and it can't be scaped no more, there's always one fool, who'll scrape it again; And you can count on their not realising one iota about the price of potatos on a tuesday, not at all..."

I'm good with purple turnips,

Weren't carrots originally purple, now that took a little bit of adjusting too

What that has to with the price of salt, or indeed potatoes I don't know

I see there's a feedback form on that Lisburn City Centre Manager's site, 2legs - maybe you should cut and paste your views about purple turnips into it. They'd find it very useful to gauge public opinion!

should I? shouldI? Can I really be so evil, as to let them have my 'feedback' about purple turnips? so tempted...

For the greater glory of turnips!

Best not. They might charge Bea twice as much for bin collections out of vindictiveness if you do...

How true... Just like my grandmother used to say;
"Don't stir the eels, unless your prepared for the consequences; Its an ill-stirred bucket of eels, which blows a cold wind to the heart of all but the most daring and unholy of their knowledges of our fenland ways. Oh, and pass me the turnip grinder, there's a dear."
Never was sure mind, what the eck she meant half the time...

I made a practice halloween fruit loaf, which is now cooling in the kitchen. It's not ready for tasting, but it smells good enough. I'll try it in half an hour with a mug of tea.

I think I'll need another by the weekend. And the gingerbread.

I must try find a suitable gingerbread recipie... (one I can do with ingredients I have in... hoping I can find one that uses SR flour, rather than plain with bicarb/soda , and in which I can use up the massive lump of root ginger lurking in my fridge.... it might end up very gingery.... and I don't have any gingerbread men cutters/shape thingies....)

I'll need to remind myself of a gingerbread recipe I think. The fruit loaf is good

Not sure why I used glacé cherries, as I've never been a great fan of them. But it's still very good even with them!

Are we talking biscuit-y gingerbread or soft, spongy gingerbread?

When I was over in the UK last week and helped my Mum do her shopping in Waitrose, I picked up some "mini gingerbread men" - They look like harmless little chocolate biscuits, but they are very gingery! I think they're more a sort of Christmassy thing.

I have a very good, simple recipe for ginger nuts (pardon my French) which you dollop on the baking sheet and they spread to nice round biscuits - no cutting involved. But then again you can only do rounds.

I'm sure I've an old round cutter somewhere; the sort of thing one might use to cut scones with (sort of err wrinkly round cutting surface one side, and 'flat' err round surface on the other side)

Of course, there isn't anything to stop me, rolling the entire 'dough' out, and then cutting shapes out of it, using a knife...


Mmm... either gingerbread sounds good; I'm thinking I guess more of the biscuit hard gingerbread, one makes gingerbread men with (yeh, they're probably more a Christmasy thing I guess)... Most recipies I've seen use plain flour, bicarb of soda (or baking powder, I'm always getting those two confused), ground ginger (as opposed to fresh root ginger), sugar, and some kind of syrup... I don't have any syrup/treacle stuff, nor, now I think of it, any brown/molasis sugar and I may* have an unopened tub of either bicarb of soda or baking powder, in the cupboard... I've got onion salt too, but that is of no help whatsoever, which really, really, makes me wonder why it even sprang into my head... ahh... probably because its next to the suet in the cupboard, which, err, probably doesn't explain anything, cept that the suet is quite possibly next to the unopened tub of bicarb/baking powder its too early in the morning for me to thing strat

I've never really made many cakes, and I don't think I've made biscuits, ever... unless chese straws count as a kind of biscuit mmmm cheese straws sod the gingerbread, I'm going out to buy cheese

AFAIK baking powder (in the UK at least) is a cleverly designed mixture of bicarbonate of soda and cream of tartar.

In Germany they put far too much bicarb in the mixture and home-baked cakes feel funny on your teeth. Fortunately, if you look hard enough, you can find a cream of tartar-based baking powder which is much better.

Hmm, either gingerbread, but more the gingerbread man type. A bit like ginger nuts, but not just so hard - slightly more crumbly than crunchy.

I forced William to traille me through shops today... In search of a gingerbread man cutter
Sadly, I could not find what I wanted
Lakeland had one... but it was too* small
Robbert Sales had one... but it was also too small, and way* too expensive
I may have to resort to EBay or Amazong
Mind... I still need to find a recipie I like, or go with my gut-instinct.... using S.R., flour, no bicarb/baking-soda, lots* of fresh grated root ginger, and maybe some nutmeg, cinnamon, and chilli in it hmmm.... sort of an Indian-spiced chilli-ginger-bread-man sod it... garum mucarla too, and maybe some cumin.... hmmm.... garlic salt... ahh... this isn't really going to be a gingerbread man I'm making is it? I might as well just give up and make a curry instead

Hold that thought...it could be a dehydrated curry for the use of cosmonauts and hikers!

I've always preferred cosmonauts, as a word, to astronauts. A cosmonaut explores the cosmos, but an astronaut just explores...ehh...The Astro-Hungarian Empire.

how true... And hungry people, shooting oastriches, called ducky always end up starting wars... I think... cosmonaughts sounds betterer too... kinda.... cosmic... maan... mmmm.... curried donuts anyone?

Right. Turnips.

The plan is a long lunch with P. tomorrow, which will be a turnip conference, to draw out stencils and designs for the turnips.

Then tomorrow night or maybe Wednesday will be lantern-making!

There won't be time on Halloween night to do it, and I reckon carved turnips shouldn't go too soft and dry in one or two nights, if they are kept cold and dry.

Very poor show from Tesco on the turnip front. Small, soft, wrinkled, and ten pence more each than the pumpkins! Tut tut.

You'll be pleased to hear that I saw a carved turnip today. For the past few months, a local artist has been using an empty shop window as a canvas, changing the display every few weeks. Recently, the shop she was using was turned into a temporary gallery, so she moved across the road to another disused shop. The temporary gallery has now closed, but she's still across the road. Anyhow, as I passed the place this morning, I saw she'd changed it. The current display is a handpainted poem about Halloween and consumer goods, with a turnip sitting in front of it with the word "MASK" carved into it.

TRiG.

It sounds interesting. Although she might be even more hardline about pro-turnipness than I am!