A Nice Cup of Tea & a Sit Down

The light of my life has probably spent the most harassing weekend of his life. Having put up with the constant vagaries of Blogger, he finally decided to take the plunge and host his blog independently of Blogger and on his own site.

The whole process should have been painless. Set-up new site; import data from Blogger; leave a link on Blogger pointing to the new site; and, Bob’s your uncle. It is the same thing that countless bloggers have done before.

All went swimmingly well with setting up the new account; it was an absolute doddle. Familiarizing oneself with the new surroundings was a breeze. Importing data from Blogger turned out to be embarking upon the rollercoaster from hell. Transferring 0% the screen announced. Transferring 10% it went on. Eventually we got to “Transferring 28%” and then it was a case of “up-yours”. Blogger would let 28% of the blog transfer but not the rest. It was holding the data hostage much like bank robbers who let a couple of people go, and then hold onto, and shoot the rest.

Blogger technical support documentation suggested that if there was a problem with importing from Blogger, one should try publishing from Blogger. Following the directions, my brave soldier input all the various settings and then hit the button to republish. “Publishing 0%” remained on the screen for what seemed an eternity, until eventually it timed out. Checking the blog we found that it had disappeared from Blogger – page not found. We discovered that it still exists. You may not be able to display it, but you cannot do anything else with it either. Literally, the account is locked.

By this time we are seeking answers. Emails to Blogger technical support go unanswered. Meanwhile, it seems as though many people are having problems publishing and managing their blogs. We find an article on a UK website from last Thursday where Blogger apologises for the acute problems everyone seems to be experiencing with its service. A spokesman from Blogger states that the blogger system is so overloaded and old that it cannot cope, and constantly breaks down. The spokesman adds that Blogger wants to migrate everyone over to Beta Blogger as soon as possible, as it is hosted on new equipment. Forgive the sceptic in me, but you want to migrate people away from something that did work but now doesn’t and which you don’t want to fix; to something that is “beta”; which means, it isn’t ready yet - how messed up is that? Where’s the sense in that?

To pre-empt an email that will come flooding in; yes, I know that Blogger is a free service. That is of course, excepting for those people who stump up $12 a year so that their blogs are advert’ free. Of course, the vast majority of blogs are subsidised by advertisements. Advertising is only effective if people actually view it. If people are unable to publish or otherwise manage their blogs, people are no longer going to read them (who wants to read the same thing over and over again?); this means the advertisers are paying good money to reach an audience that is no longer there. How long do you suppose they are going to do that?

For me, my beloved poured his heart and soul into creating the best blog that he knew how. In fact it was so good; it was featured on Best Gay Blogs no less than THREE times. Now he is left wondering if all that hard work was in vain. The posts are not a problem; all of those exist on a local backup. However, all the comments and interaction may be gone. Worse, whilst the account remains locked there is no way of informing his readers that the blog has moved.

Google, you have dropped the ball. Either pick it up, or go somewhere and get some new ones!

Living in a farming community as we do in the mid-west; we often bemoan the fact that it is incredible that try as we might, we cannot buy fresh vegetables locally. We both remember living in large cities where fresh fruits, vegetables, fish, meat., etc., were very easy to come by and, it was very easy to adopt a vegetarian diet.

Sadly, being vegetarian in rural Missouri is not an option, unless of course, you like eating dead, wilting and brown colored produce. We also have concerns that our choices of simple meat items are very curtailed. Here, the shops sell steak; pork chops; Tyson chicken pieces; and, sausage. There really are only so many things that you can do with that limited repetoire and I ahve probably exhausted them all.

That said, we decided that we would like to try, just once a week, a day that is meat free. I researched our many cookery books and found what I thought would be an ideal recipe, as not only was it meat free, it appeared to be something that one could knock together in a short space of time with minimal effort. Accordingly, on Saturday evening I embarked upon making Curried Egg & Lentil Patties; a recipe I found in Delia Smith’s “Frugal Food”.

The recipe called for:

• 1/4 lb brown or green lentils (whole)
• 3 medium eggs, hard boiled and chopped
• 1 largish onion, peeled and finely chopped
• 1 clove garlic, crushed
• 2 oz butter
• 1 TBS chopped fresh parsley
• 1/4 TSP chilli powder
• 1/4 TSP ground cumin
• 1/4 TSP ground coriander
• 1/4 TSP ground ginger
• 1/4 teaspoon turmerec
• Salt and freshly milled black pepper
• 1 egg, beaten
• Wholewheat flour
• Peanut oil for frying

The instructions said to cook the lentils until mushy, about 25 minutes. Then, soften the onion and garlic in the butter, add them to the lentils with chopped eggs, spices, parsley, salt and pepper, and mix thoroughly. It went on to say that when cool, to shape the mixture into 9 little patties; to then dip them into the beaten egg; then cover with wholewheat flour and fry until golden on both sides.

I thought this was going to be a synch. How wrong I was going to be. I should have known that the finger of doom was on me when I went out into the garden to gather the parsley. We have been growing herbs in pots all summer and they have done spectacularly well. I arrived at the parsley pot and to my horror, instead of finding bushes of fresh green parsley, I found a few wilted strands of what was parsley. Yes, the frost of the night before had beaten me to it. “Never mind”, I thought. Parsley isn’t going to be mission critical to the dish, we will just do without.

Back to the kitchen and I am simmering a pot of lentils. The odor given off defied belief, but, I decided to ignore that warning too. I busied myself softening onions and chopping eggs. Actually, chopping eggs turned out to be difficult, the whites seemed to cling on to the side of the blade as though their life depends upon it. I dutifully measured and added the spices to the bowl along with the onions and everything else and gave the whole thing a good stir.

Eventually, the lentils were “ready”. I drained them and then left them to cool. After they had cooled, I wiped the by now, not so whole lentils with kitchen paper so that there would not be too much residual moisture. I added the lentils to the rest of the ingredients, gave it a good mix, and then, started to shape the patties. Unfortuantely, this is when everything started to go wrong. Shaping the patties was fine, the trouble was that when you dipped them into the beaten egg, they totally disintegrated. I was at a loss as to what to do. I decided that the best way forward would be to pour the beaten egg into the bowl, add some flour and see if I could thicken things up enough to stay together. This tack met with partial success. However, despite following the ingredients to the letter, rather than having enough mixture to make “9 small patties” I had enough mixture to make 20. I decided to make 9 large patties, as that is all that would fit into my frying pan. They mainly stayed together and made it into the pan in one piece; however, my nine patties looked larger than anything I would find inside a Hardee’s 2/3lb Thick Burger.

I fried the patties to perfection (not), and served them with pilau rice (another recipe from the same book that was equally as frustrating, especially the bit about breaking off a precisely measured piece of cinnemon stick, and, which produced more rice than two people could eat in a month of Sundays).

The horrific ordeal had taken me all of 2 hours to complete. I could have cooked a small turkey with all the trimmings in less time. Worse, my kitchen looked as though a bomb had hit it; and, I was absolutely frustrated and exhausted.

I delivered our dinner to the table with about as much style and panache as a 17-year-old with a major strop on. Curtis, sat down, took a bite and, as he did so, I asked how it was. I added that there was only one correct answer to this question and God help him if he got it wrong. Curtis smiled sheepishly and said that it was wonderful; in fact, these were the best curried egg and lentil patties that he had ever tasted. “At least you answered the question correctly I responded”. Curtis then asked if he could ask a question. I answered that as the love of my life, he could ask anything he wanted. Curtis looked me in the eye and said: “Is there something like a ham sandwich that goes with this?” At that point we both burst out laughing. No more lentil patties for us!