gpd + cbm

Online grocery shopping is the way forward. If you haven't tried it yet, then it comes highly recommended. Simple, quick and convenient. Don't know what you have in the cupboard? Just get up and look - then go back to the computer and order it! Can't think of what to buy? Just grab a recipe book or look at suggested recipes and click on a few ingredients. Feeling super cheap? Browse ALL of their offers on a single page and have a cheapskate field day. Not got time to go to the shop and queue for hours with the murderers? Not read up on your Izzard supermarket queue strategy recently? Just forgetaboutit - book a slot, order a few extra bottles of wine to lower the cost of delivery and get over it. Just remember to be in when they arrive with all the delicious goodies!

In the UK you can choose between Tesco, Sainsbury's and Ocado. Ocado is a strange joint venture / partnership between Waitrose and a dedicated grocery delivery company. Although somewhat more expensive than the other two, it sells super-ponce stuff and operates from dedicated warehouses so you get the good stuff, not the mush left behind in the local store picked out by someone that resents your very existence. Sainsburys is cheaper and is a reasonably choice, but you have to contend with substitutions or missing products - they are getting better but this remains a problem for those of use that want pak choi at 10pm on a Sunday.

When living in California you tend to forget about the most basic of living requirements. Washing up and laundry dried in about 7 minutes (great if you ignore the canyon-like fissures that were your knuckles after a few months), light and sun almost came through the walls and there were normally about 4 open WiFi networks within range. In Manchester it seems that achieving all three is more tricky. Catherine and I spent a year living in a flat in a particularly leafy part of already leafy Didsbury. The converted nursing home had tall ceilings and windows but had obviously been shoehorned into a former janitor closet and as such was a compromise of space over light. Despite being North-facing, the flat got amazing morning sun (on those rare occasions when 400 feet of solid cloud were not in the way) and warmed up like a little beauty. All great and good - but I haven't mentioned yet that the total floor space was about 40 square metres - which means little until I say that the bedroom had about 8 inches on either side of a 4 foot 6 inch bed. So we had to move and move we did - all of 100 yards across the road to a flat about twice the size. Yay! Buy hold on a cotton picking minute. Have a guess how long it takes Tiscali Internet Service Provider to move our account these few steps? 2 hours? 24? 5 working days? No - try over 3 weeks!

Our last apartment was so small that the idea of a fancy espresso machine was simply out of the question. Add to this the fact that once you have used the 'Grunstein Industrial Coffee Machine', you can't really go back to consumer level machines. However, to achieve this level of coffee splendour you need to replumb your kitchen, have a dedicated cubic metre of space and have your coffee flown in from Costa Rica.

The Moka Express is a classic invention that I have often seen people, especially Italians, using but had never quite realized how genius it was. Unlike crappy filter coffee machines and those stupid plunger things, these sit on your hob and generate the high pressures required to extract flavour from your coffee. They are simple to use, quick to clean and do a remarkably good job of making a coffee. Clearly they are not superior to the real thing - but at 15 quid a pop you can't really go wrong. I use a 6 cup one to make two mugs of strong coffee.

Using these it turns out that the really major factor in making a good coffee - wait for the shock here - is the coffee you use. The difference is amazing. Try Lavazza for a compromise between expense and taste (Carte D'Or Lavazza Latte Macchiato Ice Cream is also delicious!). Don't bother grinding your own - unless you have a dedicated grinder that produces exactly the right grind size / consistency. You will probably go through coffee pretty fast, and if kept in a sealed jar you should be good to go.

Thanks Jed Needle and Maria Vogelauer for independently making me aware of these things.

For a constant supply of delicious, 'fresh' sandwiches you must suspend disbelief and try this one. Take a good quality, unsliced, malted brown bread and on the day of purchase slice it thickly, put the slices back together to form a loaf and immediately freeze in the original plastic bag. On the day of sandwich requirement simply take out two slides, add sandwich filling to the frozen bread, wrap in cling film and come lunch time you will have remarkably fresh sandwiches. Honest. In fact, freezing the bread and doing this gives fresher sandwiches than leaving the loaf out over night and making the next day. Some fillings tested so far are in here.

In related news - another top tip is to buy fresh Italian base pizzas and freeze them. These end up being much better than an bought frozen pizza. Don't ask me why - but there it is.

We recently made a visit to Ajay's new apartment to experiment with unglazed floor tiles and Naan bread dough. In the process we witnessed the creation of a genuine Indian curry that tastes as good as any restaurant's - if not better. Below are some notes taken along the way.

Our initial Naan attempt used two unglazed floor tiles in the main part of the oven with the temperature dial set to '11'. This didn't seem to work out too great and resulted in what harsh critics might call 'filth biscuits'. Some research into the traditional Tandoor ovens reveals why normal ovens are fairly useless. Many claim that good homemade Naan is near impossible whilst others have resorted to building a backyard Tandoor.

There are two cheating methods to getting a reasonably delicious Naan bread to have with your curry. The first method almost guarantees perfect results: head down to your local Indian restaurant and buy 2 plain Naan at a cost of about $5. Next best are Trader Joe's frozen Naan breads - oddly these superiour to their 'fresh' counterparts and just need a couple of minutes under the grill.

My best method of making them at home so far is to place the unglazed tile or pizza stone on the floor of a cheap US-style oven's grill/broiler area, leaving the grill on 'Broil' setting. [These demented ovens use a single gas burner to heat the oven above and the 'grill' below. This makes for a grill conveniently located on the floor - forcing you into yogalates positions to see what is going on.] This gives heat from below (from the stone) and heat from above (the grill) which more closely matches the Tandoor.

A Napoleon is a rather tasty treat made with custard and pastry topped with delicate vanilla icing. The fine example pictured right is from The Champagne Bakery - a local SoCal chain I first found in Malibu with the Parentals. As a cold custard-o-phobe and prefer-a-tiramisu-aholic I surprise myself to be recommending this item. For those residing down under it is apparently known as a Vanilla Slice. If they are common in Ingerland they certainly didn't catch my eye and the name isn't familiar so I suspect they may be 'far too ponce' for the average frozen pizza and chips Tennents Super drinking Britisher.

Netflix, the online DVD rental service, looks like a complete winner on paper and has gained popularity in the last few years. The disks arrive is small red envelopes and can be kept for as long as required or returned the next day with no monthly maximum on most plans. With free shipping it makes sense to turn those babies around and maximize your disks per dollar. Recently we've been getting a little behind and so I decided to cancel - or at least put the account on hold. Despite sending most disks back the next day the stats are quite suprising. We signed up almost two years ago and rented 222 movies at a total cost of $457.54 or $2.06 per disk. I hate to think how much it would work out as if you casually kept them for days at a time. For my own posterity, here is the list of rented films - nearly all were worth watching - but a few of my hidden gems are highlighted.

A good thin crust pizza is delicious but very difficult to make without a fancy pizza oven and dough flown in from Rome. Since buying our bread machine we have used trial and error to try and improve the crust and have recently made some progress. Here is the current method:

Add the following to bread machine:
180g warm water
1 tblsp olive oil
1.5 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
340g White Bread Flour
1 tsp dried yeast

Set the machine to pizza dough (~50min). Roll / manipulate the dough into a pizza shape using as much flair and panache as your dexterity will allow. If dough attaches to the ceiling or lands in a bowl of filthy washing up water at any time - go back to step 1. Dough can be stored in fridge in a plastic bag - some say this improves it. Lay flattened dough on floured pizza tray, trim edges and add a thin layer of tomato or pizza sauce. Plain tomato sauce (not puree) from a tin works surprisingly well. Place in oven for 3-5 minutes until steaming. Remove and add toppings of your choice. If you add the entire contents of your fridge and store cupboard you may have made a delicious dinner - but it is no longer a pizza. Return topped pizza to oven for 5-7 minutes, rotate / adjust, then cook for another 5-7 minutes. If you get bubbles in the crust you are a legend.

If there are any Italians reading this (Ciao!) - maybe they can suggest improvements.

I've never been a big fan of popcorn - it didn't quite cut the cheese when it came to snack material. The salty stuff is a little bland, the sweet (you guessed it) a little sweet. The 'butter flavor' gives off such an evil stench that I am pained to use the word butter in the same sentence. Catherine recently found some cheese flavoured stuff - but this too was passable at best. With this background I was highly skeptical of Adam Sperling's excitement at the sight of a Kettle Masters stand outside UCLA store. How wrong I was.

Kettle Corn is a general name for corn cooked with the ingredients: salt, sugar, oil, popcorn. Simple - but if you can get your hands on some you will hopefully agree - deadly. In fact, if you are not strong willed kind of person I suggest you stop reading this and flash your brain with a MIB brain eraser immediately - yes it is that good. It's secret is in combining sweet (mmm... sweet) with salty (mmm... salty) so that it serves both as a main course and as a pudding all in one! Genius.

Kettle Corn, although not as good as stand bought stuff, is available from Whole Foods in large packets. Don't blame me if you find bits of corn all over your house in the coming weeks.

Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, the comic cheeksters and renown writers of TV's 'The Office' recently ventured into the medium podcasting and along for the ride came Karl Pilkington - a round faced idiot. I highly recommend that you get hold of the mp3s and catch up with Monkey News, Karl's Diary and other moments of clarity from the show. Brilliant.

[Update] The Pilkster continues on top form in the third series available now from audible.com or iTunes.