Golden Nugggets

This week we received our rent - a large bag of freshly picked corn-on-the-cob straight from our land. Now I can see you are all imagining mouthwatering, bright golden husks of sweet delight....

LUNCH - Corn on the cob
Ingredients:
Freshly picked Corn cobs (2 or 3 per person depending on size of cob and person)
Water
Pinch of Sugar
1 knob of butter per cob
Salt/Pepper to taste

Special Utensils required:
A cooker/hob/gas burner
Large lidded pan

Method:
1) Fill pan with water and bring to boiling point with a pinch of sugar
2) Drop in pallid, rather hard cobs.
3) Replace lid and simmer for a couple of minutes until at least some of them turn golden
4) Remove from pan, insert corn holders (jab end with fork)
5) Serve on a plate.
Note: do not yet smother with the precious butter until tested if edible.
6) Return cobs to pan for a further hour in the hope they will become more tender.

DINNER - Corn & Chicken chowder
Ingredients:
Cooked Corn
Chicken
Jipang
Onions (some big ones & some shallots)
Garlic
Chili
Coconut milk
Seasoning

Special Utensils required:
A cooker/hob/gas burner
Lidded pan

Method:
1) Remove boiled corn kernels from the cob (You can use the ones you've got left over from lunch)
Note: If you use your thumb to do this wait until the cobs are cold or you will get a rather large blister burn.
2) Coarsely chop the onions, garlic, chili and gently sauté in a little oil/butter until golden.
3) Add corn, diced chicken and peeled chunks of jipang
4) Stir in a cupful of water and seasoning to taste (in this instance I used a spoon of Gulai paste but it could have been anything) before covering with a lid to steam the chicken & jipang mixture until tender.
7) Add a cupful of coconut cream, bring back up to heat before serving on a bed of rice
Note: If you are experiencing severe dental problems serve with noodles not rice to make picking out the corn easier or simply omit the corn altogether from recipe.

COFFEE TIME SNACK - POPCORN
Ingredients:
Raw Corn Kernels (you've probably still got a very large bag of cobs in the fridge)
Oil
For dressing Butter, sugar or salt as you prefer

Special Utensils Required:
A cooker/hob/gas burner
Wide, heavy-based lidded pan

Method:
1) Heat a small amount of oil in the pan until it's the right temperature. To test this, toss in a couple of corn kernels replace the lid and wait for the pop. Note: Lift lid carefully, away from you, so the hot corn splatters on the window behind the hob and not on you
2) Throw in the rest of the kernels just enough to make a single layer on the base of the pan.
3) Replace the lid and swirl the pan around so as to coat all the corn in oil before returning to the heat to listen for the pop, pop, splatter bang, pop.......
4) Once they've cooled down, throw away the tiny blackened nuggets, making sure you scrape all the ones off the lid before soaking the pan overnight.


BREAKFAST - CORN FLAKES
Ingredients:
Cooked corn kernels (you may have to make a fresh batch unless you've still got some left over from yesterday's lunch and dinner)

Special Utensils Required:
Rolling pin (yep I have)
Oven (mmmm - tricky) or Frying pan (OK I've got several of those)

Method:
1) Roll out the individual kernels.
2) Sweep the resulting crumbs from the chopping board, you and the floor into the frying pan to dry-toast until they're crispy
3) Offer the result to your husband on a small saucer just to see

Actually the result of this experiment did have some relation to a breakfast cereal, just not cornflakes as we know them. More research on this discover that Mr Kellogg uses a 40 ton rolling pin and 600 degrees C, malted-air blowing, drum oven.

Current experiment: Have plate of raw corn kernels on Sun regulo MK9 (in-between showers) drying out for further attempt at pop-corn.

I think we basically have the wrong corn for anything remotely edible by a human, but as sweet "Mr Smiley" Botak took the trouble to peel and de-beard the lot of them it seems a shame not to try.


OK, Wayan have you made that catapult yet...

It's not funny

So, our Saturday night pre-dinner lime-based drink was starting to take effect when there was a kind of splatty noise near our occasional table (two stacked upside down coca-cola crates).  The wife, who has already been having a bad day as squeezing the limes was extremely painful, hampered due to recently open (unintentional [so she says] self-inflicted) burn-based wound, bravely rattles the crates.  First pass yields nothing. A second, more aggressive thwack produced a further splat. Batty doesn't look too well.  How were we to know their sonar is not capable of detecting a simple ceiling fan.  Now, don't go all green, tree-hugger, save the snail on me, I know bats are protected in the UK but here they eat 'em and tonight is curry night - just need a few more. "Turn the fan up another notch darling, I've got the net ready..."

Techno Fail

My beautiful big sister has discovered a problem with the blog.  My incredibly clever use of some HTML codes don't work for everybody.  So if you nip back to the previous post, the bottom row of text should have had some dotted underlines to show there were some brilliant hidden messages. In fact, I've used this method quite a lot - some of the funniest bits I realise now have been wasted - oh well, never mind.

I promise to be a little less subtle from now on - Yes, yes I know subtle doesn't normally spring to mind about me but Amanda is still teaching me how to be more polite and say the right things and not to fly off the handle every time someone does something crassly stupid.

This is a test of my new method hover here I don't like it as much, maybe on a quiet day I'll look into it some more. Dammit - there I go again and I promised not to...

Dungeons and Dragons

You are sitting under the shade of a coconut palm watching a snake eat a frog. A stunning blonde sits next to you and proceeds to breastfeed her baby. Believe it or not that's what happened even if it does sound like a 1970s computer game...
West lies a stepping stone path leading to a small hut, South lies an inviting garden path leading to a turtle hatchery, East is a fully equipped dive centre and North is a beautiful sandy beach and the sea. Your knapsack contains a) a stick of chewing gum. b) a book of poetry. What do you do?
[N] [E] [S] [W] [Kiss frog] [Kiss woman] [Kiss snake]

Wedding Fever

Our wedding: 1 afternoon, £107.50, excl. lunch.
Nieces wedding: 1 day, £15,000, incl. lunch.
Bali wedding: 4 days, 1 pig, incl. lunch (unless jewish or muslim!).

Our wedding: bride, groom, 4 guests, 30min ceremony 4 hour party.
Nieces wedding: bride, groom, 100 guests, 2 hour ceremony, 8 hour party.
Bali wedding: bride, groom, 1000 guests, 2 hour ceremony, 4 day party.

Ok, you could argue that hen/stag nights are a party on a different day to the ceremony and that a honeymoon could be classed as a party but you get the idea.

So one of our girls, Kadek (yes she has a real name but since she's only been working here a year I still don't know what it is), gets married. We are invited to attend on 2 of the party days that follow the ceremony.

Day 1:  Our invitation is verbal - "be there at 5:30pm, dress up". I assume this means I have to wear a skirt again. At 5:28pm a group of us are standing outside the grooms house synchronising watches. It seems that in order to accommodate the magnitude of guests one has to allocate 20 minute slots per 10 guests (so in 10 hrs you can see [3 slots*10 hours*10 people] 300 people) which doesn't include the static entourage of 50 family members all milling about giving out cups of tea and cigarettes. Now by popular agreement it is precisely 5:30 and we can enter. The bride and groom greet us at the entrance - actually they've been standing there since 08:00am and look ready to collapse but they put on brave faces, we say hi and are ushered through to a table for our tea & cake. Sitting there, I get the feeling that everyone is looking at us - silly me, they are looking at us! We smile & wave & stare down the children who only know one word of english (hello) and insist on using it constantly - after 10 minutes I'm ready to snap, luckily I get a poke in the ribs by some toothless hunchback who urges me to move to the next table. This turns out to be the 'exit' platform where we sit for a respectful 10 minutes before leaving. On the way out it appears we have passed some test and are invited to tomorrow's bash as well. "7:00pm, casual".

Day 2:  This is more like it, the band is setting up in the front garden, a huddle of menfolk with big wedges of cash (probably worth a pound) play a gambling game of what could only be described as 3D dominoes. A 50 gallon drum of stinky, home made alcohol stands in the middle of the grounds surrounded by - waiters? - who beckon you to try a glass. A plastic jug is plunged into the barrel, the frothy scum on the surface parts exposing the semi-clear liquid beneath and we are poured a glass of stuff that smells like a maggot infested gamekeeper's crow but if you hold your nose it tastes ok. As we haven't eaten yet we restrict ourselves to an unusually puritanical 4 glasses.
The band starts to play so in true pop festival tradition we push through to the front where 50 people have taken to the dance floor. 5 women (and I use the term loosely) take the lead. The band reaches fever pitch & the ladies drift off into a maniacal trance and start to really let their hair down - good job there are 3 supporting hairdressers associated with each prima-donna ready with pins/bones/barbed-wire to try and pin it back. We stand there open mouthed as the dance moves on to the next phase where the ladies plunge swords into their bosoms - I don't see any blood so I assume it's safe, I mean, they wouldn't, would they? The music stops abruptly, the spent women are dragged off taken away and we leave before dance 2 in case we get roped in and have to bite the heads of a few live chickens/bats/geckos - although, I am rather hungry...

Only one picture for this episode, but it's an S95 dammit. The boss is so impressed by our performance he's given us a bonus of going halves on a camera.
Oh, go on then. Here's some of the very first shots from said camera.

One is of our friends Robin & Chez who popped over for a week and are standing by the road to our land.  The other is a view of Menjangan Island from our boat. Nice eh?

Butter wouldn't melt

Our resident Golden Labrador Coral dog (yes, that's what we call her; the same as our Bali Whippet Luna is called Luna dog - or Snowy) is the proud mother of these 2 bundles of joy. Both little porkers since there are only 2 and Coral dog has at least 16 nipples capable of supplying a small African country (or Wales). One we like to call Ripyerfroataht dog, the other Chewyernutsoff dog because in spite of their super-cute appearance, the father (Blacky dog) was from "the wrong end of the beach" where men are men and boys are satay!  It hasn't happened yet but ever since "the curious incident"  where our resident adolescent turtle took the top off a small boy's finger (Silly sod - what responsible parent says "Go on Joey, see what it's powerful beak feels like") I do worry when I see the look on Coral dogs face as another tourist's child tries to walk off with one.
Apologies:
1) Holger. This has some rather unusual grammatical content - not very BBC I'm afraid.

2) Tanya. Please don't cry, they're not really puppies, just a couple of my old socks with a gecko inside photoshopped to look like puppies.

It'll cost yer

It's OK, Adrian's medication is kicking in now and he has opened up Pisspad for me to create this blog (note from Ady should read PSPad - wife is pisspad, due to it being EvenToad¹)

After very nearly 2 years we think the staff have accepted us. Nengah has given us pet names. I am now Ni Luh along with 50% of the female population and Adrian is Wayan right down to the stinky wetsuit.

We have also added a few words of Bahasa Balinese to our smattering of Indonesian. It's the usual start to any language learning. We can say "How are You?", "I'm fine", "That's a nice arse/big tits/big knob?" I've tried Google translate for balls but all I get are recipes.

Dear Holga, does Sula have a sister? Nengah swears her doppelgänger was sitting in our bar only last week, right down to the facial mannerisms - but without the skin-tight leather catsuit.

I know we should get out more but we don't and instead the world and his wife come to us. Our only references are the dim memory of former life in the civilised world - with TV & Radio

If anyone out there wants some material for the next series of the Fast Show or the like, we've got it all here. (note from the editor again, some names have been changed to protect the identities of the innocent but if the real McCoys are listening we hope you will forgive us)

Welcome Tim nice-but-dim & Lucy darlings; ex-pat brits living in Hong Kong but Oh My. She would walk to the end of the earth for him and he would protect her from hell's fire but how on earth they have managed to get through life so far is beyond us. "Lucy darling come here you'd love this". "Oh yes, yes (intensely)) it's lovely" or for exactly the same thing "Ooh Lucy darling don't go there you'll be scared "Oh gosh yes that's scary" but the scariest thing of all is they probably run a multi national and there is another little Tim on the way...

Our day to day work requires us to deal with our potential guests through a series of emails until their eventual arrival. We have a saying "5 strikes and you're out" implying if it takes more that 5 exchanges to secure a booking for a 2 night stay and a day's diving there is something wrong with you and we'll suddenly become full & suggest some other nice place for you to stay.

But just sometime we get brave or curious...

Sally Creek and her lovely friends. Far too long since her first stay in Bali and the pit-pat of emails was not the usual idiotic request for me to be a travel agent, more "what can we bring you from blighty that will make your life better?" - cheers to Mr Gordon!! And the curiosity - she created and runs an organic lubricant company...

Chan; in spite of his seriously Asian name lives in Lancashire. Mmm I think, isn't that where cheese comes from? "Dear Chan, Yes, we have reserved you a room and put your name on the diving calendar. You will receive an invoice through PayPal bring cheese to secure the booking" And bless him he did - not exactly Lancashire but a B.O.G.O.F. deal from Tescos with Branston Pickle :)

Mrs Penguin brought us books and pile of Indian spices which are mixing well with the perfected yoghurt recipe. (Note to Peter for Jane, I've found the secret is to strain it).

The stream of guests is endless and we will be sure to share the highlights as they unfold.

¹That's another story...