travelling all over london

london 5.50pm victoria station concourse 18C friday 2019

its a dull day today, and quite chilly, or perhaps i was only wearing a hoodie and have shorts on, so i felt the cold more. i have been ranging from west to east london and south as well. i have certainly been using my freedom pass to the fullest haha. started early today by going to ladbroke grove. why? u might well ask, because i wanted to go to the papa john pop up at the top of portobello road, (the one with the famous open air market stalls). they were giving out sweet cakes and i did not know this… filter coffee as well. to publicise these cakes. they will be doing it again tomorrow, so i might go again. i did not realise it is near the portobello road… i have heard of this famous market of course but i have never been there. it is one of these strange pockets of neglect when i was a tourist doing tourist things when i first arrive here. for some reason i never seem to visit these portobello market. after getting my cake , i took a wander down the road, and had a look see what they are selling. knick knacks , old clothes, old furniture. (they could be antiques for all i know, but they look like old furniture to me haha). people laying their stuff on the road, like what you see people do in the poorer street markets of asian cities.

i am surprised it still happens here, but it could be that top end of the road which i was on, is given over to poorer vendors. i have always got the impression that the stuff sold in the market on that road are quite expensive.

there was a loud crash, and i saw a vendor had two of his furniture fall over, he had put them on the pavement, which has a small slope to the road to allow water to drain, and that plus a strong wind gust, must have toppled the cabinet, breaking the glass on the front. i felt a bit sorry for him. then, i returned to ladbroke grove station, and took the hammersmith line just as it came when i arrived, and took it all the way to upton park, to buy chilli, and garlic. then back by way of the jubilee line at west ham, to waterloo. and home by the bus. 

i came back to an empty flat, because my friend from usa has gone out of london for a week, and simon was at work. i had a lunch of eggs and bacon, and then decided to go to the library to charge up my chromebook. and there i saw an advert in the times, from lidl saying they are selling chicken legs for £1.49/kg. it is excellent value so i went to the lidl in stockwell to buy them, and got 3packs. and a cucumber at 39p too. the upton park was selling 3 cucumbers for £1, i had wanted to eat cucumbers but 3 is a lot. so this one is just cost only a little bit more and dont have to buy so many. 

anyway, i am back to the victoria station, charging my chromebook to completion this time. whilst i had  cooked one of the packs as chicken curry sitting on the stove now it is cooking on the residual heat. we seem to have good bargain prices on chicken recently. i sometimes wonder why it is so.

i read in the news that in indonesia they have such low prices for chicken, because of a glut of them, that they are asking farmers to destroy their chicken eggs, or give it away… it is puzzling to me, what connection to a glut of chicken to many eggs. but that is the interconnection of factors i suppose. one of the reports said the price of chicken has gone down to US$2.10/kg, that is £1.71/kg. and that is supposed to be the lowest price chicken for 3yrs. i am surprised that they consider it so low that it jeopardise the market, when here we are being sold £1.49/kg , the chicken legs that i bought in lidl today… something is fishy dont you think? why can we here in the west can make a profit with those prices, but they cannot in indonesia??? 

 

at last i bought my fresh chilli and ginger

london 2.55pm. 14C drizzle monday 2017

monday is not a good day to go brixton shopping, but i was so desperate for fresh chilli, and ginger, i had to go. there were not a lot of choice in the ginger and chilli and the portions were smaller. but needs must so i bought them.

 comingback it began to rain. luckily , it was a drizzling rain, so it did not matter that i have not got my umbrella with me. not that i could hold a umbrella whilst fiddling around with the crutches. the boot really was very useful and it made the journey less tiring.

so now i got my ginger and chilli, i immediately made a fried rice with the chicken breast that john bought before he went off to visit relatives. he has just gotten back when i returned to the flat and he warns me that chicken breast has to be cooked. it was just about to turn, so i knew it has to be cooked immediately  or it would have gone too bad.

i made a chilli sauce , dicing up the fresh chilli and immersing them in black soya sauce and vinegar… the commercial ones would add suger and colouring, in the form of tomato sauce; but i dont need to. i had the boots still on, and found that i could walk about the kitchen doing all those chores without needing to use the crutches. that is good to know. 

 

random talk

london 2.18pm 16.9C cloudy friday 2016

6.14pm 16.2C dry dark night .amazing that the temp has not dropped much since this afternoon.

i am rather pleased that the ginger and chilli are still the same price in brixton. i think it will always be, but they will change the amount we get according to the season. come winter, we get less, and hopefully we get more come summer. i find it lasts me   from 2wks to 3wks.  i find they are quite essential in my cooking now.

garlic i can do without, though simon seems to want it in his cooking. he is quite prepared to pay 50p each bulb, ( he just bought 3 bulbs of garlic from our local sainsburys where they are 50p each!) .

when in brixton u can get 4bulbs for 50p. he said the bulbs he buys are large ones, which he wants.

he is so typical of british people, he does not want to be fiddling about with the small cloves. like some people not wanting to eat fish because there are too many bones in them. or preferring chicken breasts because to them life is too short to be bothering with bones. well, i have realised that when people get something in their heads, some strange notions, it is hard to shift them. to me the meat or flesh that surround the bones are the most tasty part of the creature. 

he does not realise that smashing the garlic cloves makes it easy to get the skin off. what i find is that the british garlic is so mild that i get no flavour in my cooking from them. that is why i stopped buying them.

recently i went to morrisons hoping to buy their topside beef joint which is £4.97 a kg, which is a ok price,( in brixton u can get this price all the time  but maybe it is for cheaper cuts of beef. to me, i cannot tell which cut is better. to me they are all the same, because it is how u cook them that counts.) but it was all sold out, which may turn out to be just as well.  because this afternoon i went to our local sainsburys to redeem simon’s shopping, to enter it in my nectar card, when i browse the store and saw 450mg beef pieces for £2. normal price £3.75. i was tempted to buy but i thought i shall just wait till the end of the day when they might be reduced to £1, when i shall buy the lot. haha. there were quite a lot of the packs that is why i suspect it might not be all sold out. anyway when i went there at 7pm, i found only one pack left, and it was marked down to 50p. so i got that. it is nice now and then to have beef slices in the stir fried veg. it gives a nice flavour to the dish. though if i have got more i might make a beef rendang out of it.

i have not suspected this local sainsburys so near me to reduce their food prices. they open till late, 11pm everyday even sundays as they are a convenience store and have different opening hours to the big stores which are governed by sunday shopping hours. since they open so late i always thought they dont reduce their prices. but this pack expires today, so i guess they have to sell it off by today.

people who shop there works in the govt offices nearby so they go for the ready meals. and the hot packs of takeaway lunch packs  which seem to be so popular. so maybe raw meat is not so popular. the pricss are higher than the main stores. 

whilst waiting, i cooked pork slices in ginger in my rice cooker when the rice is being cooked at the same time. i could substitute sliced beef for this instead of pork and it would turn out just as good. 

 

 

Digital StillCamera

bird in the bush.

Digital StillCamera

Digital StillCamera

Digital StillCamera

this is an easy dish to make. all cooked in the same time and pot as the rice. this one is slices of pork with ginger and soya sauce.

i keep up with news from malaysia by following some blogs there, and this one mentioned gurney restaurant closing, and i googled it and found out that they are planning to build a undersea tunnel from penang to the mainland in that area. it is surprising that the blog owner did not know of this development, he never mentioned it. and he is usually very informative of developments in penang, like the extension of land on the seafront near gurney drive.

and i only found out by accident. it did say it is  privately funded , so maybe that is why there is no public consultation which would be required if public money is involved, i suppose.  i wonder who are the private firms behind it. they hope to make back their money with a toll. but who would want to use it when there is allready a bridge that is now there.  the bridge has a toll fee, so this toll for the tunnel must be as cheap otherwise who would use it? . i fail to see the logic of this tunnel . must be quite  rich private developers to finance such an expensive project as an under sea tunnel… even then i would have thought it must affect penangites, and the owners of businesses or land or housing that will be destroyed to accommodate that so surely some kind of public consultation should be required. but no one seem to make a fuss about it… so different from our heathrow airport extension.