Ingredients – Serves 4-5

• 3 Onions
• Shop-bought pastry for quiche
• 3 carrots
• butter
• grated cheddar cheese
• 2 big tomatoes
• 4 eggs
• ground black pepper
• ground nutmeg
• fresh thyme
• fresh rosemary
• Krauterlinge dried herbs
• Broccoli to accompany.

Method

1. Oven to 190
2. 3 onions peeled, cut in half, halves cut down and accross any too big bits picked out and recut.
3. Oven at temperature – stick dish in with shop bought pastry for quiche in baking paper in appropriate sized dish for size.
4. 10ish minutes… in the oven. Supposed to make lots of mini fork holes, I only read this some minutes in but it didn’t make much odds.
5. 3 carrots – rinsed, peel left on, sliced thin.
6. Chunk of butter in frying pan over a medium/high heat.
7. Once butter has melted, onions in, stir.
8. Few mins after, carrots in, lid on.
9. Pastry check / out. Oven down to 180.
10. Grated cheddar cheese – handful.
11. Couple of tomatoes chopped up. To pan a good few minutes after carrots & onions.
12. A Few minutes later, pan from heat, cheese in, stir, 4 eggs in, stir..
13. Good grind of pepper and shake of salt..
14. Pinch of ground nutmeg..
15. Fresh Thyme picked, washed, remove leaves using fingers rubbing..
16. Fresh Rosemary, picked, washed, removes leaves using fingers rubbing. Sliced thin..
17. In pan with other herbs – Krauterlinge both varieties that Yanil gets..
18. Decent stir.
19. That’s it – whack it in the oven for 40 odd minutes checking it occasionally. Take it out when it’s done before it gets dry.
20. Bung some brocolli in a microwave dish with a few mls of water – 6 minutes @ 800W with lid not tight, timed to coincide with seving the quiche. Dress the brocoli with some salt and olive oil or whatever.

In fact I’m currently listening to the “Knee Deep Mix” of “Everybody loves the sunshine” which I bought just this afternoon at Discos Juando which is right near the Mercat Santa Catarina in Barcelona for 2€. Bargain!

Yanil and I had lunch at Bar del Pla with Xavi and Michelle. A great little restaurant. Not quite enough staff for a Saturday afternoon but hey – we weren´t in a hurry… The croquetas de ceps & foie (Croquets with Seasonal mushrooms and Foie Gras) which weren’t advertised but which the waiter recommended were absolutely out of this world. I also quite digged the local beer – called Almogaver (Warrior) Beer – 5 years in Barcelona and this is the first time I’ve tried this Barcelona based beer! Worth the wait!

It’s about Being, Doing & Having :: Not Having, Doing & Being

When we create goals, it’s easy to focus on “when I/we get there”. When I have “X”, then I will do what I want, and then I will be who I want to be.

Unfortunately, it’s a recipe for non-achievement. Because when we get “there”, it’s no longer “there” anymore. It’s here, and another “there” pops up on the horizon.

It is the being that must come first. We must be extraordinary first. We must be determined, inspired, driven, successful, and happy first. Then who we are being will determine what we do on a regular basis. And our daily actions will then determine what we have.

To ‘be’ all of this first, without the outside evidence to prove it to others and ourselves, is both rare and difficult. It takes massive belief in yourself and your business, sometimes contrary to what current results demonstrate.

Without inspiration, we might never believe in the extraordinary.

What is extraordinary rarely begins in perfection. And believing in the extraordinary is exactly what we need to do in order to live it, build it, and give it to our customers and clients.

Ugarit has a chain of restaurants in Barcelona, I’ve been to the one in the Icaria shopping mall and the one on Calle Comercio before now and they were just as good. Only today I realised that they were a chain.

The name translates to “good bread” and it’s true… we bought some breads and pastries while we were there and had them for breakfast this morning – they were superb.

On Saturday evening with friends we had forest mushrooms served with a fried egg, mussels, oysters, spanish ham, tomato bread, sirloin steak with foie gras, andalucian style squid and monkfish. Red wine, beer, gin and tonics and a pudding that I can’t easily describe – little rolls filled with cream…

If you´re lucky enough to be there towards the end of the night, the gin and tonics are a spectacle not to be missed.

This is the story told from the perspective of Harry Silver who lives in London with his second wife (he thinks of her as his wife – the word ‘second’ doesn’t form part of his thinking), his son from his first marriage, Pat. Her daughter from her first marriage and their daughter (The daughter of Harry and his Second wife!).

The characters are well developed, likeable and real. Their relationships are explored and considered with intelligence, sensitivy and insight. The story moves at a comfortable pace and is pretty funny in places. It only took me a couple of evenings to read. The best thing about this book  really is how easy it is to empathise with the characters…

In the meantime I see that timwoolfson.com now has a Google PageRank of 3. There are a couple of reasons why this has happened. The first is that the domain is about 4.5 years old which Google’s PageRank algorithm scores highly. The second is that I posted some helpful technical contributions on a few technical community websites years ago and generated inbound links to this domain when I did so.

The result is that the website is getting some traffic, not much as yet, there are only 6 posts so far! But, the spambots had found the site and posted their comment spam in bucket loads. Fortunately WordPress comes with a great plug in called Akismet which deals with Spam extremely effectively. Go to Plugins, in the left menu of the word press administration, enable Akismet, In the description of the plugin you’ll see a link to get an API key. There are various prices for the API Key depending on the type of wordpress blog you have. Ranging from free ones for personal/hobby blogs, $5+/month ones for personal commerical use and $50+/month ones for corporate blogs and other commerical applications making use of the service. Akismet uses crowd sourcing to identify spam and with a few clicks it had cleared all the spam comments and is now deaing with them as they come in.