It’s been ages since I’ve shared a recipe, and since there’s a predicted cold snap on its way, I thought I would share this slow cooked sausage casserole (or crock pot for my US readers):

Pewari’s Slow Cooked Sausage Casserole

Ingredients

1lb sausages
1 medium onion, diced
2 large carrots, chopped
3 large potatoes, cut into pieces
1 leek, sliced
150g baby mushrooms
1 red pepper, sliced
half a pint of pork stock
squirt of tomato puree to taste
cornflour to thicken

Method

1. Brown the sausages for ten minutes in a frying pan (a bit naughty, but by far the quickest way – I use olive oil to fry them with as a sop to health).

2. Place all the ingredients into the slow cooker, except the cornflour.

3. Cook in the slow cooker for 6-8 hours on low.

4. When ready to serve, mix a couple of tablespoons of cornflour with some water in a cup, then pour the resulting mixture into the casserole. Simmer on stove until sauce is required thickness

Serves: 3ish. Depending on how carried away you get with chopping veg.

… I’m not the only one with comment problems… Hope Six Apart get a fix out soon.

Due to an excessive amount of spam comments over the last few days even with MT-Blacklist installed, I have finally succumbed to putting in a verification code in my comments. Well, okay, Akra did it for me.

It should be possible to cut and paste the code in manually to make it as hassle free as possible but still have to be done by a human. Please let me know in the comments or email to Pewari AT may DOT be if Akra has broken anything along the way.

I’m sorry that I’ve had to resort to this. Please be assured that I still highly value each and every legitimate comment that gets posted.

Edit: No, he’s broken it. Still a work in progress, obviously.

… I forgot to blog about my baby’s amazing achievement! (Yes, I know, bad mummy, bad mummy….)

Li’l Bhaji can sit upright at last!

Well, okay… not for long…

Okay, can someone explain this to me, because I’m not sure I understand.

While I know it’s not ideal, I really don’t understand the furore over the visa fast-tracking scandal. Now, if Blunkett had used his influence to push through a visa that otherwise wouldn’t have gone through given his stance on immigration then I’d have been the first in line to cry “hypocrite”, but just making it happen a bit faster? To me that’s no different to when I was working for a large insurance company with a backlog and a broker would phone me up expecting preferential treatment for something that was “urgent” (translation: I’ve stuffed things up with the customer can you please save my reputation?). Okay, so I often didn’t because that broker was a complete arse, but had he been a little more pleasant then he might have had more favours from time to time because they did bring a lot of business our way, would help if I needed a little leeway at a later date, etc.

Now I *know* in an ideal world you’d expect everyone to be treated the same in a timely manner. I’d probably be a bit more miffed if it was hundreds he’d arranged to have preferential treatment. However you look at it though, in both the private and public sector, people do things for their mates. They “see what they can do”. They don’t break the rules, but see if they can bend them slightly – after all, you never know when you might need a favour yourself some day.

I can’t help feeling that the timing of Blunkett’s biography lost him the support he’d otherwise have had from his colleagues. I doubt he’d have resigned on the current allegations if the knives weren’t already out. While I don’t fail to see the irony that revelations of the private life caused the downfall of the very man who was set on eroding everyone else’s privacy and civil liberties, I can’t help feeling that he was marked to be got rid of with any trumped up charge they could find.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad to see the back of him. Not so sure his successor is going to be any better though. We shall see.

NOW who am I going to complain about?!!!

I listened with interest this morning as I heard that NICE (The National Institute for Clinical Excellence – the people who work with the National Health Service and recommend best practises and treatments – a well-respected medical body in the UK, basically) have been investigating laser eye surgery for short-sightedness and come to the conclusion that there were too many concerns for long-term health for it to be recommended to be widely used.

Being short-sighted myself, Lasik was something I investigated a while back. ANYTHING to be able to see properly, be able to swim and see the edge of the pool, be able to wake up in the morning and see more than a fuzzy blur before I put my glasses on. I hate wearing glasses, I hate the fact that you lose peripheral vision because the lens is only in front of your eye. I hate the faff and uncomfortableness that comes with contact lenses – even with the daily disposables. Surgery is the ideal solution, isn’t it?

So like any good preliminary researcher, I did a Google and got a fair few sites to give me a rough idea on how much it cost. But that wasn’t all I turned up. I turned up pages and pages and pages of support groups for people for whom it had gone horribly horribly wrong. While I appreciate that you’re going to get some bad stories for any medical procedure, I was quite overwhelmed by the sheer numbers. Some of the bulletin boards offering support, like Surgical Eyes make for horrifying reading and even relatively common and minor complications (such as dry eyes, reduced night vision, etc) can make a big impact on your life.

Then I found 10 Common Sense Reasons Why You Should NOT Have Lasik Eye Surgery – some of the most scary parts of the document being how the industry drastically downplays the risks and performs very perfunctory tests before and after. Yes, your distance vision may well be improved, but what about the overall quality of vision? Sure, I can read the letters on the board over there now because they’re a nice high contrast black and white, but if my general contrast sensitivity has been reduced and I am now sensitive to bright light where is my improved quality of life?

Of course, all these are only risks, they are not inevitabilities, but this NICE report has only confirmed for me what I decided a long time ago: eyesight is far too important to take risks with unless it’s absolutely medically necessary.

I’m sticking with glasses.

I was on a bit of a BlogExplosion wander last night and for the life of me I can’t remember where I found the link to this, but it’s required reading if you have sons:

Six Things To Teach Your Son.

The carol-singers are moving with the times around here and have abandoned all sense of tradition along the way… Last night, around the kids’ bedtime we were greeted by very loud Christmas lift music blaring out of a car stereo system and stepped out of our front door to this:

Either that or Santa has traded in Rudolph for a brand new Audi… somehow it just isn’t the same.

Akra Jr thought it was fantastic though, and that’s all that counts. I suppose that’s the true spirit of Christmas isn’t it – it’s not about someone’s birthday, it’s not about a massive party to celebrate surviving the depths of winter – it’s about worshiping all truly tacky things that we all think we’re above once we get to the age of 12 or so but never really grow out of…

I’m not sure if this is a Dad thing too, but I’ve certainly found it true of my Mummy friends – having children is the first introduction into complete mind-boggling terrifying paralysing fear. It’s the beginning of the realisation of your own and everyone else’s mortality. It also transcends rationality.

When Akra Jr was small (just after September 11th) there would be whole nights I couldn’t sleep, petrified that we were all going to die a grizzly prolonged and painful death of smallpox. I had our demise down to fine detail – living in Croydon at the time we were obviously ideally positioned to die early from the catastrophe that was about to strike the nation, close to Gatwick airport and a major immigration centre it would be trivial for a terrorist to infect him or herself, enter the country then infect a large number of people in the region before anyone realised.

Then there were the slightly more realistic but still highly graphic fears – that I wouldn’t notice him one day while he was lying on the floor and would tread on him and crush his skull. That he would get meningitis and he would die in my arms. The constant fear of cot death. When he was older and we took our first weekend away from him I was convinced our plane was going to crash and leave him an unloved orphan all for the sake of a booze up with friends in Spain.

The second child arriving shows no lessening in the cycle of paranoia and fear – I’m convinced that any day now, despite my best efforts, Li’l Bhaji will choke to death on a carelessly discarded small toy, that someone will break in the house in the middle of the night and be standing between me and my babies, that there’ll be a fire and I won’t be able to get to them in time. I’m slowly learning to not read anything in the news with “baby” in the title.

I’m sure it’s something to do with our natural protective instincts for our children going into overdrive, seeing threats where there are none, reminding us to keep them safe at all times, but that doesn’t quite explain the complacency or ignorance of other areas of risk (the glass full of orange squash left on the floor by a visitor that Li’l Bhaji “found” to the detriment of the carpet, his clothing and his digestive system, for example. Thank goodness it wasn’t a hot drink and the glass didn’t break). Maybe it’s a sign of mild post-natal depression.

All I know is … “here we go again”.