[Recipe] Cheese with Friends

I'll be honest. I didn't know what to call this one.
The recipe popped up in my head a few years ago. I fear this is not a very original idea, but it's quick-ish to make, and it's good.

You'll need:
4 or 5 potatoes (I favour the roseval variety)
8 or 10 smoked bacon slices
about 8 slices of cheese (edam, gouda, whatever's available when you go shopping)
pepper (if you want)
a tiny, lil' pinch of salt (optional)

Prep time: about 25 minutes
Cooking: about 40 minutes

Instructions:
I've got a square dish that I use, but you can adapt the recipe to any shape.

1 - peal the potatoes and slice them rather thinly (confession time: I don't wash them for this recipe).
     Place the slices at the bottom of the dish to cover it.

    I usually add some pepper on the slices.

2 - Add 4 or 5 slices of smoked bacon.

(this time, I added 5 because there were only packets of 10 at my supermarket, and I'm lazy)

3 - Add 4 slices of cheese.
(my camera betrayed me with this layer, but it should look like this:)

4 - Then, add one layer of potatoes, one of bacon, another one of potatoes and top with the remaining cheese slices.

5 - Put in the oven for about 40 minutes (my old oven goes from 1 to 10, and I use it on 7. No idea of the exact temperature, sorry, but to give you a scale, that's the setting you use for a frozen pizza if you want to eat it 15 minutes later).

You get "Cheese with Friends".

With the bacon, I find salt isn't needed, and I add no oil or butter since the cheese is enough fat in the dish.
Enjoy!

PS: If this has a "real" name, tell me what it is...

No Eliza Doolittle

Today, I got some additional proof that some bipeds are raised in barns (aka: good education is becoming rare - and I don't care if I end up sounding like a snob).

I was shopping in a store (big name that exploits its employees and pays them peanuts for long hours) and I'd reached the end of the queue I'd selected when it happened: a young employee with an empty supermarket trolley drove into an old lady. 

This is what happened:

1) The old lady was hurt and protested.

2) The young employee apologized.

3) The old lady simply said: 'Now, that's going to leave a mark.'

4) The young employee blew a fuse and growled: 'I apologized. What do you want? Me kissing your feet?'

5) The old lady was rather angry and added: 'I wasn't moving, and you collided with me. You were supposed to pay attention with your trolley.'

6) The young employee started going away as she said again: 'I already apologized. Do you want me to lick your feet or sumthin'?'

The young gal might be exploited in her job, but she clearly wasn't paying attention (in fact, I suspect that she might have been waving at a colleague in the next aisle).

And now's the moment when you can feel free to call me old-fashioned, but when you work in a shop, clients (or patrons, or customers, or whatever you call the nice people coming to your shop to spend money to pay for your wages by the end of the month) are Royals. They're always right, and you're always wrong.

You're entitled to growl and curse and howl in the staff room, at home and at the pub, but at work, the client is a deity.

I hope the old lady's feeling better now.

It's clear that the young employee is in that store by chance, and it certainly wasn't her career of choice, but she'll never get a better job in retail, if she shows that she's been raised in a barn (this flower girl will never leave Covent Garden and dance with a prince).

Point 3 should really have gone: 'I apologize again, Ma'am. I'm dreadfully sorry. Would it help if I rubbed or massaged the area where I hit you? I am so terribly sorry. I feel so bad.' (that doesn't cost a penny, and the old lady, I'm sure would have felt a lot better whereas the young employee, in the end, made her sound - and probably - feel like an old bat with unreasonable demands).

When one works in a store, one must keep in mind that a complaining client may well ask to meet the manager to have a little not-so-friendly chat. Basically, learn elementary strategy and don't shoot yourself in the foot: a ton of fake honey will take you farther than a haughty growl.

This doesn't only apply to people stuck in unpleasant jobs, the same goes for a few people who have a lot of money and who behave as if the world belongs to them. Usually, that lot is the kind of bipeds the non-barbarians despise.

I know I do sound like an old bat now, but I was taught to behave properly.

I see some very nice young people, as well as some old twats (just last week, I caught an old lady on the bus with her feet on the seat in front of her!).

What I call "being raised in a barn" has nothing to do with birth or/and money. It's all about treating the rest of the world like crap because you think you're better.

Another Encounter with the Void

This is probably going to sound like a bit of a whinge, but if I can’t pour my heart out on my own blog, where could I do it? 

It’s more a statement that I need to get off my chest than anything else, really… Maybe it’s another testimony of my broken heart I want to post, like a message in a bottle. 

Here’s what happened:

When I finally managed to watch the British Academy Television Awards 2012, I was expecting some fine entertainment (and I wasn't disappointed!), but I wasn't expecting to cry when Monica Dolan made her speech.

What caught me by surprise was this:

'Twelve young women and girls, that we know of, were  lost in the Cromwell Street murders, and some of them were taken from  their families and some of them were in and out of care and I think the thing that affected me most working on this was not the  appalling violence actually; it was the fact that some of those women,  some of them, were never reported missing, and it seems that some of  them, no one noticed that they had gone for twenty years, and I would like to live in a world where everyone is missed.’

Of course, I haven’t been abducted and murdered, but I’ve discovered that I can become silent in a few of my Internet spots and, basically, disappear, and no one notices (nearly no one – I got one flare from a far-away friend, who did wonder what was going on [if you’re the one, and you’re reading this, you’re glomped again].).

On most groups, I’m not that active, so it’s not a surprise, but in the group I started, I was posting very, very, very, very, very regularly, and when a nasty bout of depression, a bit of Void caught me, I just couldn’t post.

Void and darkness left bit by bit, but I’m now coming back to a place where I can be MIA for two months, and I could have been decomposing on my linoleum, and I have the feeling that no one noticed.

I really feel as if whether I’m on this planet or not makes no difference, and it’s not the best of feelings. I’ve recently read things that explained the lurker phenomenon, but I really feel like a piece of furniture that’s forgotten against the backdrop – all the more since, in the past, I’d already explained that my health problems tend to take their toll (being half-paralyzed for years will do that to you) and I’d warned that a sudden disappearance might well be a sign that the Void was calling me (if, by any chance, someone is reading this and thinking “Pft! She’s just crying wolf to make herself interesting”, I’ll answer that my mantra in most of April was “I want to die, I want to die”). Yet, in spite of my earlier call for a bit of e-warmth, I got nearly nothing (just one message from the other side of the globe).

I see some good things happening; some people caring and being good.

And so, I end up wondering if there’s something wrong with me and if I’m invisible or something.

I know I’m not the only one having problems, but I can’t imagine that I’m dealing with hundreds and hundreds of lurkers, which is why I do feel like a piece of furniture. Since this is happening to one of my other literary incarnations, I tried a little experiment and took down all my works from the archives (no one noticed, which tells me that I could disappear for good and it’s the smell of decomp that’d inform neighbours of my fate – if they cared enough to mention it to the landlady!). 

I feel as if I’ve been dumped by the site I started. These readers haven’t realized yet that they’ve killed my muse, and I’m not going to write anything else for them (it's not to punish them; it's just that my inspiration for their plots dried up and died. My silver lining is that I’ll focus on my original works from now on).

This is what happened to me in that particular zone of the Internet, but when I met friends in town and basically sent an SOS, I was ignored. I came to the conclusion that it’s fine if I’m around to help them with something, but I’m not worth a quick hug (which is all I need).

The conclusion is that there’s nothing wrong with me, and some of the people I know and e-know are just not on my wave length. There’s no need to ask for a hug or even just a smiley in an e-mail, I’ll never get that. I could make it my sig line (“If I suddenly stop e-mailing for several days in a row, something’s wrong; please, wave, send the cavalry, beam Captain Kirk, or something…”), and the message would still not go through.

In fact, the one who’d send the cavalry is my brother. The handful of friends who’ve got the address of this blog would notice too, but for the rest of the planet, my fall would be quieter than the breaking of a twig in the heart of a huge forest.

I think I’ll try to exorcise a bit of Void with a new Sordid Fairy Tale on the topic.