McDonalds

And I bet they are too. The shareholders that is.

In the USA McDonald’s the world's largest hamburger chain will now pay a dividend of 61 cents a share, and sees total cash returned to shareholders about $5 billion in 2010, split between dividends and share repurchases. The dividend of 61 cents is equivalent to $2.44 per share annually.

McDonald's said it saw total cash returned to shareholders in 2010 at about $5 billion, split between dividends and share repurchases.

I know that the UK McDonalds is a franchise solely owned by Associated Foods and they have done as well as in the USA.

Just goes to show that selling bits of recovered beef with added salt, plus those horrible fries can make you a rich man.

Come Dine with Me

I don’t know if you have seen this program it is on Channel 4 in the UK.
The concept is that they get 4 people, strangers, from the same town and they each have hold a dinner party for the others (some eating if its in the same week!). The others then give marks out of 10. The winner takes home £1,000.
The dinners are hilarious and the channel 4 website has all the recipes. However, they some times have a vegetarian in the group. So the other meat eaters have to produce two menus. One meat one veggie.But when the veggie cooks they just do one, a vegetarian.
Surely that’s not fair! They should be made to cook a meat/fish meal. That will teach them. LOL

The most annoying thing is the sneering narration. Not nice and not needed.

Card Trick

We went out recently with some friends to a nice restaurant we go to on a regular basis. This evening some live entertainment was provided. Not a singer, not a group but a magician who went from table to table doing card tricks.
He got to our table and I was ‘selected’. I was asked to select a card show the others (but not the magician) and sign it. I was then asked to put the card in the pack. The magician then placed the cards on my hand. He then took from his pocket a wallet and placed the wallet on top of the cards and then asked me to put my finger on top of the wallet.
He then chatted for a minute and then asked me to remove my finger. He then opened the wallet and there was a zipped compartment that he opened and inside was my card with my signature on it…. amazing. However he then removed the wallet and the pack of cards that should have been there had been replaced by a plastic block!
It was absolutely amazing!

Recommendations

You know what it’s like, you live in the area and visitors ask you to recommend restaurants.
Tapping in to the wisdom of the crowd is a natural human instinct, according to one expert. “We’re hard-wired to get as much information from other people as possible,” says Graham Jones, a psychologist. “We use the views of other people to help validate our choices, and to meet our need for social acceptance.”
Trouble is you can come unstuck. We had a great couple of meals at a local tapas restaurant and recommended it highly to all and sundry. We had not been for a couple of months so we took the Lady of the Villa’s mother and sister to the restaurant recently. It was abysmal. It had turned into a bar with food rather than a restaurant. Still doing tapas but of poor quality and the service was abysmal.
From now on if we recommend anywhere we will have to go on a more regular basis.

Copa Ingles

This is a Copa Ingles or translated the English Cup. It is, in my opinion, and without doubt the best Ice cream dessert sold in Spain.
It is Chocolate mint ice cream, with chocolate Ice cream. The chocolate ice cream is only surpassed by the chocolate mint ice cream which has real dark chocolate chips imbedded in it.
This version is only sold in a restaurant in Cabo Roig harbour called La Bahia. If you are in the vicinity do not hesitate, do not pass Go, go straight there and it only costs 6 euros.
Heaven in a bowl!

Gazpacho Soup

This is a brilliant soup for a hot day. If you cant chill it for a few hours or overnight add a few ice cubes. It’s much better cold.


8 Tomatoes or a large tin of Plum Tomatoes
2 Small Cucumbers
1 Clove of Garlic
1/2 Onion
2 Green Peppers
3 Spoons Olive Oil Vinegar, salt, pepper and water.
Cooking Instructions:
Apart from the above ingredients you need a blender. To prepare a good Gazpacho is a simple and quick job. First Clean and chop the vegetables. Then puree all ingredients in a blender.
Strain, discarding any vegetable pieces that did not puree fully.
The Gazpacho is best served cold. Drink a nice Spanish wine with your homemade Gazpacho to have the full Spanish experience!

The Ultimate Disaster – Eroski Closed

The local Eroski supermarket closed down, taken over by a Consum a rival. This in itself should not have been a disaster as we have all kinds of supermarkets around. But we considered it the ultimate disaster.
Eroski had something that no other supermarket has, good cheap wine both red and white. And not only is it good wine it is 80p a litre!
We had to go about 20 mile trip to stock up the wine fridge – hence the picture above. We bought 24 litres less than £20. Bargain.

Scouse Recipe

Being a Scouser I had to put up a Scouse recipe. Here is one we used on more than one occasion to keep us warm!

INGREDIENTS
Half a Pound of Stewing Steak
Half a Pound of Lambs Breast
A Large Onion
1lb of Carrots
5lb of Potatoes
2 Oxo Cubes
2 Teaspoons of Vegetable Oil
Worcester Sauce
Salt and Pepper
Water


HOW TO COOK

Takes 4 hours of slow cooking
Cut the meat into large cubes and fry in the vegetable oil until lightly browned all over. You may wish to add some Worcester sauce at this point for added flavour.
Transfer the meat to a large saucepan and add the onion that should have been chopped into large chunks. Follow this by chopping the carrot into medallions and place this on the meat. Peel and then finely dice 1lb of the potatoes and place on top of the carrots.
Fill the pan with cold water until it is half full. Break up the Oxo cubes and sprinkle into the water. Add salt and pepper for seasoning. Let the pan simmer gently, stirring occasionally. The large pieces of onion will start to break up and the potato will become soft and will make the final sauce thick.
Simmer for a total of two hours, and then add the remaining potatoes that should have been peeled and roughly chopped, along with a few splashes of Worcester sauce. Then simmer for another two hours.
Serve piping hot with red cabbage, beetroot, pickled onions and crusty bread. You may add Ketchup and HP sauce for flavouring.

Granada Trip – Day 2

Having had a good nights sleep, an excellent breakfast at the hotel we headed off on a mini bus to the Alhambra Palace, the reason we were making the trip.

 Arriving at 11:15 and joining the queue for entrance tickets we found after a twenty minute queue that we could not enter until 14:00 and that our entry into the main palace was 18:00!

We headed back to town and decided to take the tourist bus around the city to see the rest of the sites.
I was stunned at the traffic in the city it was dog eat dog or mans inhumanity to man. No quarter was given any gap was big enough and the car horns were in use good style!

The motor scooters were the worst elbowing their way to the front and roaring off like demons to try and beat the next set of lights!
After the your we ended up at 14:15 in the Alhambra Palace gardens. The actual area contains many palaces, some in ruins some being restored and one the Kings Place the jewel in the Crown. The whole place was surrounded by thick walls and keeps. It really gave an idea of how big the Palaces (or mini town) was in the 9th Centaury.

The Lady of the Villa was well enamoured with the Wisteria that abounded around the Palaces.

We actually exhausted all the Palaces and grounds by 16:30 but we still had a 1:30 hour wait to gain entry to the Kings Palace so we waited outside and chatted to the other visitors. Eventually we got in at our elected time (you could not get in before as each ticket was electronically timed).




Here are some of the pictures I took. A really fabulous place now never mind in the 9th Centaury!

This last photo is a view over the city of Granada from the highest Keep in the Palace. The city has grown a bit since the 9th Centaury. 







We returned to our hotel, showered and changed and went off to the Moorish part of the town. We had found three restaurants that had been recommended in the tour books, but it was soon whittled down to one, the others did not serve alcohol! It was called the Kasbah and the food was excellent as was the service.
Back to the hotel were we swapped tourist stories with our fellow tourist in the hotel bar.

The Curry House

Up until recently, well last November, I used various Indian Cookery books (Madhur Jaffrey, Anjum Anand etc). Then one day surfing the net I came across this site www.curryhouse.co.uk. It is in my opinion Brilliant.
There is a public area with a few recipes and a write up of the approach being adopted. For a small fee (I think £7.50) you can access the whole recipe "book". I say "book" but it is a series of pdf files each with a single recipe. It is a one-off cost and more and more recipes are added as they are perfected.
I have not had a failure yet and the Lady of the Villa says the curries have improved. Rare praise indeed from her ladyship!

AFELIA

I like cooking. The Lady of the Villa does not. So we are a matched pair. She thinks my signature dish is Afelia. If your interested here is the recipe.

Pork Afelia

2 to 4 servings

Ingredients

455 g pork tenderloin

180 ml red or white wine

30 ml olive oil

3 g coarsely crushed coriander seed

2 cloves of garlic peeled and crushed

salt and pepper to taste

Directions

Trim the pork and cut into chunks. Put in a glass dish or bowl

Pour over the olive oil, add the coriander seeds and the garlic and stir the pork until it is covered in the oil, coriander and garlic.

Put in the fridge for at least 2 hours the longer the better. Overnight is best.

Add the pork and the marinade to a heavy-based saucepan and "brown" or seal the meat..

Once the pork is browned (sealed) add the wine and cook on a high heat.

Bring the liquid to a boil; reduce heat and let it simmer.

When the meat is cooked, the liquid should be reduced and thick.

If it is too thin, remove the meat temporarily and reduce the sauce by raising the heat.

Serve on the top of boiled rice.

Give us our Bread

Once a week I make bread. Here is this weeks offering. Why four loaves? Because I only have 4 tins and under normal circumstances only myself and the Lady of the Villa are in residence and 4 loaves lasts the whole week. When friends and relatives arrive baking days increase to two or even three a week. The whole process takes about 3 hours including baking and waiting for the bread to rise.

Here is the recipe for 1 of the loaves in the picture.

Ingredients

200g/7oz whole milk, at room temperature
150ml/5½ fl oz water, at room temperature
2 tsp fresh yeast, crumbled
200g/7oz plain white flour
300g/10½oz strong white flour
1½ tsp fine sea salt
olive oil, for greasing
flour, for dusting

Method

1. Place the milk and water into a bowl. Add the yeast and whisk gently until dissolved.
2. Place the flours and salt into a clean bowl and mix together well.
3. Add the milk, water and yeast solution and mix together until it starts to come together as a sticky, cohesive dough, then cover and leave for 10 minutes.
4. Turn on to a lightly floured work surface and knead until the dough is smooth and elastic, about 10 minutes.
5. Put in a clean bowl and cover. Stand in a warm place for 1 hour to rise.
6. Shape each into a ball and leave, covered, on a flat, floured surface for five minutes.
7. Heat the oven to 220C/425F/Gas 7. Lightly grease a 1kg/2¼lb bread tin.
8. Turn each ball on to work surface and knead for 5-10 minutes.
9. Shape the dough into a long French sticks and place it onto a flour-dusted baking sheet OR shape the dough into loaf shape to fit the tin.
10. Cover with a clean tea towel and allow to rise back up again, about 15 minutes.
11. Bake in the oven until golden and risen, about 30-40 minutes.
12. The base of the loaf should sound hollow when you tap it. Turn on to a wire rack to cool.