Et In Arcadia Ego

In the absence of anything better to write, I have decided to share with you my recipe for egg fried rice. It's as easy as it sounds, but I'm still rather proud for working it out. You know it as a phrase in the same way TheEmpireStrikesBack or DireStraits become words in their own right. You don't really consider the fact that Star Wars V actually features the villainous Empire striking back at the goodies, no more than you stop to consider what a dire strait might have been before being a band name. Get what I'm driving at? So I regard the discovery that if you fry egg with rice you get egg fried rice as a personal epiphany.

If you select your brands carefully, it can be totally free from colouring and cruelty, and can be as packed with healthy stuff as you imagine. It's probably the healthiest egg fried rice you will ever eat. Depending on your brands (instant rice vs. proper rice) and the extras you add, this meal can take anything between 10 and 30 minutes to prepare. 20 is a good safe bet.

Due to the chaos factor in preparing the Osterman Fried Rice, I don't recommend you make it as a side dish unless lots of people are dining, and you have someone else helping in the kitchen. It's hard to prepare in small quantities, is very filling and tends to be temperamental. Or maybe I'm a lousy cooker.

Rice or noodles (referred to as "rice" throughout, but noodles work too)

Cruelty free Eggs (this recipe will self-destruct if used with battery farmed eggs...)

For 1 person use one or two eggs
Consider using three eggs if you are cooking for 4+ and are using an noticeably huge amount of rice.

Hoisin Stir-fry sauce. I use Sherwoods. I'm sure other flavours would taste good too.

Oil/stuff to fry in

Peas, chickpeas, sweetcorn, any other variety of bean or vegitable you have lying around

Grated cheese (for a mega-disgusting protein fix - this doesn't taste very nice, I warn you!)

Fake-meat chunks (But not fake-mince! Seriously, I've tried this with mince and it really fails.)

Spring onion, waterchestnut e.t.c. (for genuinely-Asian kudos)

Anything else fryable to add protien, iron, carbohydrate, vitamins, whatever


At least one saucepan

Strainer / method of getting water out of the pan while leaving the rice in.
Note: if Dr Manhattan is aiding you with your cookery, you will not need to find a strainer.

Frying pan

Wooden implement for stirring the fried egg with

A plate to serve onto (well this is student accomodation we're talking about! In dire straits, you could make a "trencher" as the Medievalists did - find a slice of bread, fresh or stale, and serve onto it.)



1. The basic recipie is rice + eggs + frying = egg fried rice. If you want to turn it into more of a meal, raid your cupboards for other stuff to stir in. Vegitables? Fake-meat chunks? Waterchestnuts?

The finished product is very creamy and filling, so while you are pre-planning consider putting on only half the amount of rice you would normally eat and serving something refreshing alongside it. Not being a natural cook, the best I could come up with was cucumber or celery sticks with maybe a sour cream or tzatsiki dip, and cool icey water drink.

I never bother with this, but I'm not a discerning eater - I just shovel it and ignore the taste. If you have distinguished tastebuds, consider a cooling counterpoint.

2. Using the time on the side of the packet for both the extras and rice, work out when each needs to be started to reach boiling point at the same time. Usually, the extras need to go on first. I tend to do this all in the same saucepan - it makes for less washing up.

If you are making cold extras - celery sticks, complicated cocktails, or laying the table poshly - now is the time to do it.

3. When the rice seems to be getting towards done, put some oil in the frying pan and heat it up. Strain the water out of the rice.

4.a if you want your the egg in the egg fried rice to come out in little lumps like it does at the Chinese, begin frying it before you add the rice. Use the wooden implement to break the yoke and scrape the bits around the pan till it is in pieces. Then, add the rice and stir it all together.

4.b if you want the egg and rice to all be in one big cream, pop the rice into the frying pan first then break the egg over the top, mixing it all together with the wooden implement.

If I'm frying two eggs, I generally do both - b. tastes more sickly to be sure, but is more eggy too. If I'm frying with meat-chunks, or something else "solid" that is the focus of the meal, you're probably best to stick with a.

5. If your "extras" were not in the pan with the rice, now is the time to add them, stirring as you go. I like it when it steams, because it somehow feels more authentic, but be prepared to turn down the cooker and turn on the extractor fan.

6. Add some hoisin sauce (or the sauce of your choice). I tend to do three splats-worth, covering about the area of a £20 note on top of the rice. Real scientific, this. Keep stirring so the sauce goes all the way through. Another rough measure - the meal should not turn brown after being sauicfied - the egg pieces should merely look a bit grubby

7. Keep stirring, and get ready. The moment this meal hits the plate it begins to go cold, so make you are ready to eat the moment it leaves the pan. Make all essentials are cleaned up (i.e. put the eggs back in the fridge) and safe while you're frying, and anything that needs to be prepared for the table (plates and drinks) is ready. If you have an accomplice, this is a great opportunity to make them do some work ^_^

8. Switch off the cooker and serve the egg fried rice. Abandon all washing up and tidying for afterwards.

"Dry your eyes, for you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond Unmutual's cooking"

PS - Sugarbabes. Aren't they just like a rip-off, sweet edition of the Spice Girls? Just noticed that...

Calypso has invented the most fantastic drink, a sort of budget-Beechams, by combining hot water, a lot of sugar and a little lemon juice. I'm happy: the lemon was bought for pancake day, cheaply enough, but has been sitting around unused ever since. It's not going to waste any more, and plus: tastes great. I'll certainly be adding it, with the appropriate credit, to my little book of drinks. I know the notebook I'm going to use: it's marked Spring, and is one of a set of four seasonal notebooks friends got me two christmases back. They quipped "you can use it to talk about your family", and indeed the Autumn notebook has been filled with Flame observations of all kinds, mostly absorbing the fallout of various events I had no one to talk about with.

Gonna watch Resurrection of the Daleks now, a decision I will doubtless regret within ten minutes, because it's a nasty downbeat one. But it's a special one.

"My favourite episode" is a tough catagory. There's the old favourite/best split which can never be overcome. But with Doctor Who it's a little more complicated, because you've got the Doctor himself as such a prominent figure, and the concept of continuity. So now on top of the emotional and logical merits of an episode, you've got to rate something like Utopia which is all about his
character, with something like Enlightement in which he barely says a word. Genesis of the Daleks introduces the character of Davros. It's too much of a landmark to criticise it on any other perameter.

And between that, you've got episodes which are representative - and that's what Res of the Daleks is. The ultimate 5th Doctor adventure. A favourite, to be sure, and one with a lot of critical merit. But if you asked me to define who the Fifth Doctor was, as opposed to any other, I would direct you here: polite, sarcastic, trying and often failing to do the right thing, but always terribly heroic and very brave. In that hilarious Doctor Who Confidential (which reviewed every past Doctor and managed to say more about McGann's 90 minutes than Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy's combined 6 years, and generally tried to pretend neither of those mistakes had happened...), Steve Moffat described him as a better man than the universe he was trying to save. I've always thought that was lovely. I also adore Paul Cornell's description, in that short story which makes me cry:

"The last gunless hero, the man with the unashamedly white hat, who walked down those dark streets but was not himself dark. He loved well but unwisely, and took all the mess that the universe and the script editor threw at him, right on the chin without a helmet. He was going to be a hero, pure and simple. That hadn't changed, and it never would."

This is genius. Like always, I try to pluck a name based on what I was doing at the time - so this was almost called the Jimmy Olsen, the Lewis Klahr, the Pony Glass, the Andy Hardy, even Cold Fusion considering the contents - but when I saw it's colour, a line jumped at me from Cold Fusion which I, er, no, haven't been reading when I should have been working. In the opening scene, there's a robot band singing about how "they'll always be together in electric dreams" Naturally a Blade Runner tribute, but this smoothie looks like an alien sunset and tastes like liquid joy.

The Electric Dream

Freeze six blocks of either cranberry or pomegranite juice in advance. I'm pretty sure it was pomegranate. It was red in any case.

Throw three of them into the blender, and cover them with pineapple juice. Blend till pink and frothy. Then add the other three blocks, followed by a compensating amount of pineapple.

The pink will rise to the top, and the orange to the bottom - so have a straw, stick, tentacle or laser spanner on hand to keep giving it a stir. Serve in a clear glass so you can see the pink clouds gather over the artificial, neon sky, as you wax lyrical about the nature of man.

Tell me how it goes if you try it.

I currently have more names than smoothies, though. In my head, there are several names which I'm waiting for the right candidate. These include The Smoothie of Truth and the Smoothie of Lies (have to be a pair), The Whole Shebang (should contain EVERYTHING) and Cold Fusion (should, like the book, be a icy clash between two entirely alien substances. Might contain WKD blue or Smirnoff ice, for the colour)

More outlandish ideas involve the smoothies themselves. Considering that my most recent Gallifreyan Sunset, I achieved a...well, brainlike effect, with layers and shadows, I know it'd be possible to make a proper Rorshach-mask smoothie. But I'd need the juices to be black and white. I could get black from coke, coffee, at a push blackcurrent. But it does still need to taste nice - and I don't know any white or black fruit at all. And in my mind, I'm trying to compose a rainbow. Red, then yellow, then orange, then green, then blue. Could be done. If the bottom three layers were decreasingly packed with slushie ice, green was an actual juice on top, and blue floated as a froth on top of that. But it's going to need a stroke of genius. I'll call it Paris is Burning if and when I achieve it, in tribute to that heroic movie.

I was bad. But I have excuses. Some mood music, I think:



I've been mean about vintage/charity before, and stand by what I said. When Hollywood and New Look borrow an older style, their replica with modern materials and slick lines will be superior to the drab drapes people actually wore. 50s dresses are a bit like Jack's London I keep talking about, the London of the mind with gaslights and sewers. It sort of existed. But the replica is based on the myth, not the reality. And replica 50s dresses and films are based on those perfect housewife pictures, the idealised mythic women from the past, not as they actually were. So I am bemused where those people who just pop into Oxfam and find intense bargains actually go, because looking at the vintage shops in Camden, I'm amazed how drab and nasty it all is. I suppose you need an eye for possibilities and experimentation, an eye that I, wearing my 6th generation plain-white-clingy-long-sleeved-top, just don't have. Calypso seems to have a talent for it, so it is possible. My thrift shop talents lie in other directions, being able to scan a booksection in under a minute for the "W" word.

So I was amazed to find a genine 50s dress in Camden which was very much of its era, while being nice enough to wear in ours. It's just lovely. It's a dream dress, in the same way my green prom dress was a dream dress. I'm still amazed that I managed to find something so in line with my ideal. But while the green thing appealed to my inner elf, there's a part of me which would prefer to sit by the jukebox in puppy love with Elvis and the Beach Boys. It's pink and silky (probably not real sink), fits perfectly, has a petticoat underneath, and bows up the back.