The not-very red hot chilli peppers

I’ve been making arabiata sauce as it’s on the Christmas menu. It’s a fairly simple sauce consisting of onions, tomatoes, olives, basil…

…and chillies. Here they are. All plump and red and juicy

Chilli peppers

and completely and utterly without taste. Well, they taste vaguely of red peppers but there’s no heat whatsoever.
Luckily, we have a secret weapon up our sleeves (or at least in a tupperware box downstairs…

dry chillies

These dried chillies were bought from one of the asian shops in Pollokshields some time around 1996. They’re good and hot. Using more than one risks severe structural damage (to the customer) so we’ve restricted ourselves to that. The arrabiata is finished and tastes rather good in an olive-y spicey way.

Oh, happy Christmas to all our readers. I still haven’t put the tree up but rest assured it will happen some time in the next 8 hours and 28 minutes.

Flexing our mussels

It’s seafood time at the spread. I’ve long wanted to do mussels and the fact that they are available in small quantities and seem quite happy in the fridge for 48 hours means that we can. When I say happy I mean of course that they are not dead. It’s quite difficult to discern the emotional state of a mussel which is just as well since it’s safe to assume that they won’t be particularly cheerful after being steamed in white wine, onions, garlic and shallots.

They did taste rather good though.

Moules marinieres

At the risk of being accused of shellfishness I have to admit that I ate them all myself.

Board stiff

The past week has been quiet, so I’ve been getting on with some DIY jobs around the place. First up was the repair of the floorboards in the new cafe area. Here’s a picture and there will be special prizes for anyone who can spot the new board. Take your time now…

As the year comes to an end and the pound heads for parity with the Zimbabwean dollar it may, despite a general air of doom and gloom, be time to be grateful for a few things…

• We don’t owe the bank anything
• We own the bank
• We hadn’t heard of Bernard Madoff until yesterday
• We don’t have any shares
• We have lots of ice cream within easy reach

That’ll do for now.

Gas

“Hello, is that the hotel?”
“Er, yes it is although I’m actually 100 miles away from it at the moment!”
I was standing in the middle of Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow next to an enthusiastic busker and trying to take a booking for four gas engineers who were working on a major supply problem in Kelso 10 miles from Jed. I confirmed we had the rooms available and told her to fax the details.
I was taking the phone call because Lorna, ill with a cold, had gone to bed and forwarded the hotel line to my mobile. I was in Glasgow for a night out with friends. That had seemed a fine idea two weeks earlier but now we all had bad colds, one of my friends, not wanting to be left out, was also feeling ill and the hotel was fully booked. The night out was abandoned and I headed back to Edinburgh and started to drive back to Jed….
… and it began to rain, then to sleet and then to snow – heavily. It hadn’t been forecast and the road hadn’t been treated. Things became distinctly slippery and I turned back.

It only snowed for an hour or so, but of course I didn’t know that at the time. I managed a few hours sleep at Mum’s, got back to the hotel around 6am and managed to do breakfast for some of the guests. Think a wee snowfall will prevent breakfast at the Spread? Ha!

Lurgi strikes!

The absence of communication for the past few days has been because we have all gone down with a particularly nasty cold. Frances is pretty well over it, I am still feeling fairly rough and Lorna has gone to bed.

Despite this, I managed to mend the washing machine. A microswitch was broken.
This microswitch to be precise:

From Spread

Of course LG won’t sell you the microswitch (cost 12p) but insist on you buying the entire circuit board (£120). I don’t think so!
So, after half an hour of trying to get my soldering iron to warm up in sub zero temperatures I managed to replace the switch, reassemble the machine and all’s well.

Oh, and Frances has four teeth now. She’s taken to grinding them which is most unpleasant.