jonny777

Well possibly, but pros also use vacuum packs and 'sous vide' to cook certain meat (duck, pigeon, partridge, etc) but I doubt most people prefer it to a proper pan fried version in butter. (Snooty chefs - do not read any further), and 6 minutes deep fried in a chip pan can produce a wonderful sirloin or rump steak. Obviously you have to trial and error cooking times depending on the thickness, but the one thing deep frying also does is fully cook the fat on the edge of the steak. The added advantage is that the chips can be cooked at the same time as the meat, and even mushrooms and/or tomato halves if you are feeling really lazy.

Not a problem with modern ceramic or induction hobs. On my old ceramic hob, my chip pan bubbled over when I miscalculated the temperature and dropped a large amount of chips into the fat without realising how hot it was. I prepared for the whole thing catching fire as very hot oil spilled over the side of the pan, but all it did was smoke and set the alarms off. I had time to wipe the smoking oil off the hob with a couple of folded tea towels and breathed a big sigh of relief. I have now replaced that with an induction hob, and they are supposed to be even less of a fire risk. I have no interest in tightly controlling the temperature of the oil. If it is too hot the oil smokes. Add cold food to the oil and the temperature will drop significantly for a few minutes. Maybe the sellers of expensive deep fat fryers are not keen to reveal these truths?

Thanks. I think it must be Vol2, but there is no photo on the Booklaw site. Vol1 is subtitled 'Lines In the City' and Vol3 is 'Off The Beaten Track'

Sadly not, I'm afraid. I am old school and use a chip pan filled with dripping/lard on the hob.

Is that Volume 2? I have looked at the Booklaw site but there are no descriptions. In the end I may get all three volumes, but wondered which one to purchase first.

Dry and sunny here in North Somerset. The BBC website recipe for LDC looks very good. I will give it a go sometime. SWMBO made ginger biscuits yesterday and I can honestly say they were the nicest ginger biscuits I have ever eaten. Quite gingery and knocked spots off anything I have bought. Have just removed another large branch from the yew tree. It is being dismantled in stages. I saw about 3/4 of the branch and leave the rest to gravity, but have to be careful where I saw the cut in order to make sure it falls in the right direction. If anyone tells you yew is slow growing, they know nothing. This 3ft high seedling from 15 years ago, is now about 20feet tall. It looked ok for a while but is now beginning to shade out half the garden. It has to go, or at least become a strange shaped bush which can be easily pruned. The church bells were tolling earlier. Apart from the clock striking, it is a sound I haven't heard for a long time.

I try not to buy commercial cake, as a lot is made using palm oil. Mr Kipling seems to use it in everything they make. I prefer to keep the bits of the rainforest we have left, and see nothing wrong with sunflower oil - and the bees have a good time too. It is not as if cake is difficult to make at home, and people know what the ingredients are.

I like these inner city industrial rail linked layouts. They give scope for adding lots of detail which seems to be missing from many larger industrial models. I spent ages looking at photos from the railway in the region of Moorgate and Farringdon in the 1950s/60s and it is amazing the wealth of detail which may not be seen at a first glance. I know that is below street level in places and therefore has a myriad of pipework and other bits and pieces which just add to the atmosphere.

Cloudy here in North Somerset. Spitting with rain but not a lot so far. I had a strange dream last night where I had gone to spend Christmas with my parents, but was worried that I would not have time to go and visit my dad and step-mother. My brain seemed to have no problems with my father living in two separate places with two separate women at the same time. I stopped of at my grandmothers where I found her sitting in her normal chair by the fire looking at a Christmas cake she said had been given to her by the BBC. It was a large thing, in the shape of the Big Ben clock tower, and fully iced with clock faces and everything. This went on with a big Christmas party, and queuing down the street to buy something in a shop, but I won't bore people with any further nonsense.

Yes, there were some transfers between regions in the mid to late 60s. I remember the occasional green mk1 appearing in rakes of excursion stock heading for Skegness, but I can't remember the year(s). Probably 1966/67 though. There is also at least one green coach in a commercial video I have somewhere. This was seen on local trains passing (I think, from memory) Church Fenton station towards the end of steam.

Dry and sunny in North Somerset, but thunderstorms are likely later - I gather. I managed to cut the front grass once it had dried yesterday, and I am hoping to do the back this afternoon before any rain arrives. It looks like the worst of the weather is going to the south of us, so I might get away with it. On the subject of Attendance Allowance for those in a care home; I have no idea about the precise rules, we just filled in the forms sent them off and they paid whatever they thought Dad was entitled to. If he gets it, I don't see why others shouldn't.

Another from the Facebook gallery. Don't worry if your BR arrows look a bit amateurish. Just leave the old logo next to it as well.

Dry and sunny in North Somerset, but the goldfish are invisible despite the improved weather. I doubt a heron has had them, because water lilies cover 50% of the water surface and it is about 2ft deep at the lowest. I suspect that the water temperature is lower than they had been used to, and they have gone into delayed shock and are hiding together in the depths until things warm up. There is safety in numbers, even though they number only five. I really hope I have not done them a dis-service by chucking them out into cold water just as the weather turned into deluge-mode. Time will tell. Have been reading Mike Bellamy's care home difficulties. Don't forget that with a close relative in a care home, it is possible to claim attendance allowance if they need regular care or checking up on. The forms are a nightmare; about 30 pages or so, but the money helps to offset care home costs (I get about £350 extra a month for my Dad), and they did backdate it to the point at which he came out of hospital. Lunch beckons......

Is that a black helicopter I hear hovering above your house? Keep well away from your windows.....

This is not what you asked for either, but your questioned jogged my memory of one of the few times I have seen diesels working with the nose doors being connected while in use. This is a screen grab of a pair of BRC&W type 2s on the Settle-Carlisle, and comes from Marsden Rail video Vol9 'Leeds'. Sorry about the lack of quality.

Overcast and wet in North Somerset. 9mm so far today; to add to the 14 we had yesterday and 7 on Tuesday. It would seem flood, drought, flood, drought is back. As for recipe books, I count them as a complete waste of money; mainly because most authors just make a few minor changes to someone else's recipes and then add those to their book. My goldfish arrived in the post yesterday. They were a bit stressed by the ordeal, but calmed down once they were tipped into the new home and could hide amongst the water lilies. Unfortunately, it has rained for much of the time and they have taken to the depths out of the bad weather. So now I have two ponds, the goldfish one and the frog one. I don't want the two combined because the fish would scoff any wildlife in the frog pond.

Clouding over now in Somerset. Persistent rain not far away. The washing is dry, and I am going to celebrate with a bottle of Henry Westons Vintage Zider I phoned Virmin and a very patronising friendly bullsh1tter call centre operative informed me that Apple had insisted they changed the security settings on their routers, and he could talk me through how to fix it. I began to think that, if customer service is as important as you profess it to be, why have I not received a message to this effect and instructions on how to do this myself? Could it be that Windows customers are still seen as priority, and Apple people as the idiots who buy expensive equipment to look cool? Therefore they are bottom of the pile? Anyway, it all works now - and my problems seem to have been sorted.

Have you always liked the Bachmann slope sided minerals (the British Steel variants), but thought they were unsuitable for a 1970s BR blue layout? Here is one with 08008 at Worksop in 1975.

Were these clips taken with a phone?

Here is Car No 336 in original livery, but out of use at Wolverton in May 1972.

And someone has noticed that rails are a different colour to the sleepers.

Dry and sunny here in North Somerset, but showers are promised later. However, I have put some washing on in the hope the showers will be slow to arrive. I watch them on the rainfall radar in these situations, so can rush outside if necessary and bring everything in. I will have to contact Virmin Media about their router, which my iPhone now decrees is too insecure for the phone to even bother connecting to the internet. Phones with built-in arrogance. That is something I never thought I would see, but I suppose computers are destined to take over, and mere human laissez-faire attitudes are unthinkable to a machine other than Marvin The Paranoid Android.

I spent an hour online with an Apple support technician, who decided my phone needs to be taken to a service centre. I'm not sure why, but obviously they have no idea what has happened. My phone will not access the internet either via wifi or 4G. If I go onto the wiseguy fixit sites via my laptop, they say "in the last resort, restore your phone to factory settings". Yeah right. They probably have never really tried that process, which involves sending the Apple ID password over the internet. The internet which the phone is refusing to connect to. I have only had this thing about 3 weeks.

Well possibly, but the point about a newspaper letters page is that if it was always filled by pedants arguing the fine detail of a subject, the majority of the readers would soon get bored; and few would be brave enough to throw themselves into a lion's den and write replies. Not good for circulation figures. If, on the other hand, the contributors are being somewhat economical with the actualité, it will encourage those with robust views into an exchange of letters; which is precisely what the letters editor is looking for.

A showery day in North Somerset. A bit late because I have been having internet access problems with my new-ish iPhone. It is an 11 and has decreed that my home wifi is not secure enough for it to operate, despite my laptop, my wife's iPad, and an old iphone6, seeming happy enough with the security settings. So no internet in my iPhone - the computer says no. And this is progress, or so I am told.