WHO LIKES CURRY? HAVE YOU EVER HAD A GREEN CURRY SOUP.. IT'S GOOD.. NO, IT'S BETTER THAN GOOD.. IT'S GREAT!

In fact, it's a cracker of a soup!

This recipe will serve two so double it up if you have more mouths to feed.

You need:
1 tbsp of ghee or coconut or vegetable oil. She always uses coconut oil.
1 hot red or green chilli which you must de-seed and chop quite finely.
1 tsp of ginger paste, you make this by grating a ginger root with a very fine small grater.
1/2 a stalk of lemon grass chopped.
4 dried lime leaves chopped.
4 tbsp of Thai green curry paste.
1 tbsp of creamed coconut.
600gms - 1.5lbs of cauliflower separated into small florets.
800mls - 1.5 pints of boiling water.
1/2 tsp of salt.
150gms - 5 & 1/2 ozs of peas or edamame soya beans either fresh or frozen.
10gms  - 1/4oz of coriander leaves chopped.
Juice of 1 lime fresh.

How to do it.

Heat the oil in a large saucepan, add the chilli, ginger paste, lemon grass, lime leaves & curry paste and fry for about a minute over a medium heat.

Add the creamed coconut, cauliflower, boiling water and salt and cover with a lid, cook at a very gentle boil for about 7 minutes until the cauliflower is tender. DON'T OVERCOOK IT!

Blend the soup with a hand blender or in a liquidiser until it is smooth.

Return it to the pan, bring it back to a gentle boil and add the peas and or beans, cook for 1 minute, add the chopped coriander and the lime juice just before serving this delicious soup.

QUICK.. TASTY.. PRETTY.. EASY.. SLURP!

Time for my bedtime. Hopefully I will get her to post another recipe tomorrow, I think it will be Minced Chilli Pork Noodles.

I know she's buying pork fillet from Dickinsons, our very lubblyjubbly butchers tomorrow, she has a proper old fashioned mincer so she'll cut off some of the fillet to make this.

No waste on a fillet, so she'll freeze the rest. Good night to you all, stay safe wherever you are.

GeeGee Parrot.
January 14th, 2020.

'THE LOST WAR HORSES OF CAIRO' - YOU HAVE TO HAVE GUTS OF STEEL & NO TEAR DUCTS TO READ THIS BOOK WITH DRY EYES

An childhood friend of hers recently told her about this book, it was in her local library and she read it over the past two days.

Constance had plopped her onto a pony at a young age and that was it. She hasn't ridden for over twenty years but her love of horses is still as great as her love of avian, canine and feline folk.. And she includes donkeys and mules in this love of equines.

The book is the story of how Dorothy Brooke in 1930 started rescuing the horses that were shipped to Egypt during WW1.

Only a very few of them were shipped back after the war, the rest were sold.

The equine hospital charity that she started in Cairo still exists and has been extended to, thank God, a number of other countries.

Be warned.. this book will make you cry but then the 'stories' that are occurring at this very moment as she taps this are equally dreadful.

We have already written at our disgust at the appalling behavior of the Australian Prime Minister and the disastrous fires that are currently burning throughout the country,  made even worse by the knowledge that a great many of them were caused by arson.
  
The horrifying situations also caused by mankind currently happening in : Yemen. Syria. Iraq. Palestine and the Israeli invasion and current occupation of southern Lebanon which no one ever talks or writes about.

The Iranian destruction of the Ukrainian airliner this last week killing 176 people.. what the hell were their air Traffic Controllers doing in order to let this happen, the aircraft would not have left Iranian airspace and they would have still been in contact with the aircrew speaking in English, is this the reason the Iranian government do not want to release the Black Box which has all the verbal communications plus the aircraft's altitude and speed recorded on it?

The world is not a 'happy' place. 

Therefore, it is up to every one of us to be aware of doing 'right' and being kind, whether it to be an animal of any breed or another human being.. every day.

40% of sales from the book 'THE LOST WAR HORSES OF CAIRO' by Grant Hayter-Menzies go to the International Brooke Animal welfare facilities dedicated to improving the lives of working horses, donkeys and mules across Africa, Asia and Latin America. 

GeeGee Parrot.
January 11th, 2020.
PostScript: This post is far more important for you than recipes, they will come tomorrow.

BUDGET.. DON'T JUST SPLOSH THE DOSH.

Because she is her parent's daughter, she knows how to make her money go further than most of her friends and they ask her how she does it and here are some of her ideas.

First up.. don't flash your cash in overly expensive shops of any kind, just because the shops are full of new clothes, footwear, gadgets and toys, it does not mean that YOU have to buy them1

Next, use your library. Only buy books and DVDs if they are ones that you need and that you will keep. 

Unless you plan to use it a lot and several times a week, do not join an expensive gym.

You do not need the newest smart phone or the fastest Broadband connection, she told a friend recently what she paid for her Wifi connection - £29.00 (including vat) a quarter - and it nearly made him sick.

Find a proper butcher, fishmonger and local market or if not, a proper greengrocer and grow as much as you can. Their produce is all going to be a great deal fresher than that to be found in the supermarkets.

DO NOT WASTE FOOD. The outer leaves of a cabbage, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, carrot peelings etc, may not be what you want eat in a bowl of steamed vegetables but chopped up and put into a pot stock - which you have made and frozen - and with onions and garlic, then pureed either with a hand held machine or put through a Mouli, they make a thick and delicious vegetable soup.

Learn to wash your clothes properly, she washes her sweaters by hand, then rolls them in a thick towel to extract as much water as possible and they allowed to dry away from heat.

Find a proper boot and shoe mender.

Now I know that we are incredibly spoilt with the range of food suppliers we have here in London, if she wants Arabic, Chinese, Indian or Malaysian, Polish ingredients, she doesn't go to a normal supermarket but to one of their own food shops.

Here in London, they wouldn't dream of selling anything that wasn't of the freshest or best quality, if they did, they would be out of business very quickly!

She makes a meal, usually enough for two or three portions so two portions are frozen. Then all it takes is the heat and time to reheat it.

She uses the Co-op, for which she carrys a membership card, where they give you 5p for every £ that you spend on their own brand items is a great deal more than what Sainsburys give you, which is 1/2 a pence!

And this month her budget is being squeezed even tighter.. for our trusted and much appreciated washer dryer died at the beginning of December.

It was second hand and we had it for eight years but she is not just going to splosh the dosh without knowing that she had saved up the money. 

And she has.. so tomorrow she is off to see a friend, who sold her the old Hoover washer dryer, to see what she has in stock.

For whereas she doesn't mind washing 'smalls' and sweaters by hand, double duvets and bottoms sheets are a 'bit' of a struggle.

So that's what she is up to tomorrow. She's in search of a washer dryer.. but one not made by Whirlpool!

Tomorrow, at some point, you'll have a few recipes of our favourite 20 minute meals.. PipPip.

GeeGee Parrot.
January 9th, 2020. 
PostScript laptop might get the boot as despite being repaired by our much beloved friend it is causing her grief..

OUR DISGUST AT AUSTRALIA'S PRIME MINISTER 'FIDDLING LIKE NERO' & NEW AUTHORS FOR YOU.

We are as angry and saddened beyond belief as to what is happening in Australia and to learn that a great many of these fires were started deliberately is beyond comprehension.

And for Scott Morrison, the Prime Minister, to have gone on holiday to Hawaii.. well, talk about 'fiddling' whilst your country burns. He will forever be likened to Nero.

Sadly, there are some people who are truly evil and these arsonists are amongst them.

Onto other subjects..

We like a good book, yes indeed, we certainly do and she recently found two new, to us, authors.

Adam Brooks, whose first novel 'Night Heron' is scary beyond belief as it is very close to the bone and so believable given what is going on with technology and safety at the moment. I strongly recommend that you read his four books in the sequence in which he wrote them.

Lisa Gardner has written a great number of books for which she been, quite rightly in our eyes, internationally acclaimed.

Four of her books have been made in to TV movies: Hide, The Perfect Husband, At the Midnight Hour and the Survivor's club.

I promise you that you will be engrossed in her plots they're clever!

So there you are.. new year = new authors.

What have we been doing? Well, not so much I'm sad to tell you. The weather has been dismal, if not wet and soggy underfoot, it has been cold and very grey, not conducive to gallivanting about at the allotments and certainly not the kind of weather that she'd take me out in.

Although I have been out, for we were both invited by Andreea and Juliano for Christmas lunch. And to meet their twins, Amelia and Lukas, who are now 13 months old. Much squealing went on when they saw me perched on their mummy. 

I didn't get to eat much as it was all to exciting but my mama did.. infact she ate so much that she was glad that there was no public transport and she had to waddle home.

As she felt just like a python who had unlocked its' jaw and swallowed a calf. Luckily I was in my light weight small travel cage with the outer layer as it was quite chilly and she waddled fast, passing Gloucester Road, the turning to South Kensington, the V&A, there was Yeoman's Row and with a hop and a skip, we were home.

I fell upon my bowls of yumyum and we were early to bed with a book.

Which is where we spent the evening of the 31st of December.. aka New Year's Eve. She had had a couple of invitations which she had refused and we were happy to spend it quietly.

2019 was a strange year for her, those two naughty heart attacks had scared her more than she liked to admit and the behaviour of some friends was so weird that she sat and thought about them and realised the word 'old' applied and that she had no longer anything in common with them.

It's not the amount of friends that is important, it's the quality of those friendships.

Today is a quiet day at home, although it is a reasonable looking day out there, she is taking this next week quietly. She had a rotten cold and it has left her with a virus called Labyrinthitis!  

She had been feeling dizzy when moving about and happened to mention it to her nice GP doctor who said "come to see me tomorrow at 11.30".

She went yesterday and he examined her ears, asked her to follow a pencil with her eyes without moving her head and a few other tests.

"Here's a prescription for tablets, stay active but don't move your head to the left so quickly, it's your left ear that's affected. I want you to go to have a blood test, so here is the form, please do it asap and I will get the other ball rolling as well".


She went to have her blood test done, then onto the North End Road Market where she bought avocados and apples and came home via the library as Lesley, aka LuLu, in New York had recommended a book called 'Warlight', written by Michael Ondaatje, the author of The English Patient.

That all for today. We both send you our best wishes for 2020, don't forget to write 2020 and not just the year as forgers can alter the dates and make all kinds of trouble for you!

GeeGee Parrot.
January 9th, 2020.