Huge thanks to all who commented on my last post and to everyone on Raisetheriver for their kind comments following my Mtt cash on Saturday night.It seems these things are like Glasgow buses ( you wait ages and they all arrive at the same time) as congrats are due to Rosie for taking first in a weekend Mtt for a nice score,to Mair for winning the live APAT Event for Raisetheriver and to Mr Cloud over at Hairygymnast.com on taking a shot at a higher level sng and scudding the fish to win it. A feelgood weekend if ever there was one!I've downloaded the whole hand history ( all 7 hours 31 mins ) and will try and pick out a few of the more interesting hands to look at in future posts.( just be grateful I don't plan to make a video of it!)First of all I should probably thank the poker gods for...
We drew 0-0 with the Greek league leaders at Ibrox on Wed night and after the game I headed over to the ex's to look after Step A.Last night I picked Nacho up and taking him a long walk ,I hit the $16 turbo's slightly earlier than usual at around 9.30pm.I wish I hadn't bothered! On table one I folded AK to a shove early on and would have flopped a straight.On table two I pushed preflop with AK and ran straight into AA.At higher levels there's probably an arguement which says my shove is -ev ( not profitable) as I'm only going to get called by a better hand, but at $16 I'd expect calls from AQ-A10,k10-KQ and may well force small to medium pairs to fold or take a coin flip.I had my Aces busted by Q7 soooted in the next game and crashed out of two more before Stars sng lobby once again...
After watching Rangers beat Caley Thistle 2-0 at Ibrox I popped home and then headed over to the s-mans for a couple of hours of ps3 Fall of Man fun.I may need to buy a PS3 at some point as it was a fine gaming experience!On the way home I picked up Nacho and took him for a run before coming home and hitting the tables.I messed about for ages with Pokertracker ,GT+ and the trial version of Poker Ace.I settled at a $100nl 6 max table on Bet365 and doubled my buy-in before losing most of it to a complete fish.That was frustrating, but one by one the other players left and all of a sudden it was just me and fishboy left.I had $115 at this stage and over the next hour I slowly ground down the fishy and left with just over $200.Heads-up cash play is not something I play often, but I felt I had...
It's just aswell I'm blessed with thick abundant folicles ( all comments from s-man and Al Eleven will be deleted!) because although I won at the tables last night,a bad beat at Dusktilldawn had me literally pulling at my own hair in sheer frustration.Surely shouting "don't pair the feckin' board" is a proven poker method used by all the pro's?!I'd managed two third place finishes after playing a set of four $16 ,18 player turbos before moving to DTD.I had deposited £40 there the other week to use for Raisetheriver games and I'd managed to reduce that to nearer £10 during the last week.I won £23 yesterday afternoon and last night I took £25 of my £33 to a 6 max £.50-£1nl table.There were two solid players,1 semi-solid but careless player,a fish and a someone who overplayed many...
On our recent trip to London, K and I stayed with my friend Johanna's for a weekend. During that time we had the pleasure of feasting - literally - every morning. We had eggs benetine or florendict on Saturday (great poached eggs!) an omelette layer cake with smoked salmon and rocket on Sunday (an impressive-looking layered affair), and a savoury clafoutis with cherry tomatoes and rocket on Monday (a 'requested breakfast' dish - I had the pleasure of eating this on the morning after Jeanne's & Johanna's blog birthday bash in June 2006, and couldn't wait to have it again). Each one of those breakfasts sounded & looked fabulous and tasted een better. But it was the omelette layer cake with smoked salmon & rocket that kept haunting us long after we were back home in Estonia. So it...
May I present you with a smoked salmon and cucumber tart, also on the table last Saturday (alongside the cute mini potatoes with wasabi cream and fake 'caviar' and the mocca cake with toasted almonds):It's a bit like a sandwich cake, only that it contains no bread :) The dish is lined with thinly sliced cucumbers - pretty and spring-like. The recipe is still being developed - hence the WIP (work in progress) in the title of this post. It was tasty, but a bit too salty for my liking; the filling contains sour cream, cottage cheese, mayonnaise, cold smoked salmon, dill and is set with the addition of gelatine (thus not too dissimilar to the festive smoked salmon sandwich cake). I'm also not happy how the filling has leaked through the cucumber slices, so next time I'll double-line the dish...
Today is emakeelepäev (there's a mouthful!) alias the day of the mother tongue in Estonia. It's the birth anniversary of Kristjan Jaak Peterson (1801-1822), the father of Estonian written poetry. Since 1999, this day has been marked by various events celebrating Estonian language, the mother tongue of just one million people. It's a beautiful language, closely related to Finnish, and more distantly to Hungarian (and not at all to Russian, Latvian, English and other Indo-European languages). Apparently it is a pretty difficult language to learn. We have a funny letter Õ in our language (as well as more familiar Ä, Ö and Ü), we use lots of wovels, have three degrees of phoneme lengths, no grammatical gender (the word for 'he' and 'she' is both 'tema', no distinction is made), our nouns...
For the first round of Waiter, there is something in my ... ! I made Anthony Bourdain's boeuf bourgoingnon. For the second round of this new foodblogging event - in February focusing on pies and hosted by CookSister's Jeanne - I made something from the Russian cuisine: kulebyaka. Kulebyaka should have been on my 2007 list of foodie resolutions, as I had been thinking about making it for months, but somehow it slipped my mind when I wrote the post. But better late than never, and now was my chance to make that festive Russian pie. Kulebyaka is a high and oblong closed pie with different types of fillings. When looking for the perfect recipe, I came across kulebyakas stuffed with fish, mushrooms, meat, cabbage, even apples. I realised that it is the shape of the pie (enclosed, high, long)...
When I first wrote about a sandwich cake on this blog, it was an elaborate multi-layered affair with fancy toppings. This one is so much simpler, but no less prettier or festive. I made it few weeks ago for K's mother's birthday (yep, the same party where K. contributed a lovely cinnamon boston). I can still think of ways of developing this recipe, but it is also good enough as it is, so I'm sharing it with you now and here. It's loosely adapted from this Finnish recipe from Pirkka - the base is directly from them, whereas the topping is all mine:)A great addition to a buffet table or coffee table - it can be eaten with a small dessert fork.A simple salmon sandwich cake(Lõhetort)Serves 16Rye bread base:400 grams full-grain rye bread75 grams melted butterFilling:350 grams cottage...
I'm sitting in my office at work with a large mug of hot tea to keep me warm. It is -17 Celsius outside (1 Fahreinheit, I believe) and I'm trying not to think that I'm supposed to step outside in half an hour to meet a friend and check out a new creperie that has opened its doors near our university. It's freezing cold. But it's also incredibly beautiful - everything is covered with a thick, pure white snow blanket, and the sun is shining amazingly brightly - if briefly. Quite appropriately for such a chilly time of the year then, the Nordic food magazines provide recipes for filling and heart-warming casserole dishes and stews. The recipe for a creamy salmon and potato gratin is adapted from the Finnish Ruokamaailma. We had it on Monday night, together with some salad leaves and cucumber...
Some ten days ago I had invited a friend of some friends and a young American colleague over for dinner. I wanted the dinner to be slightly Nordic in honour of our overseas guest, who was also a fish-eating vegetarian. The main dish was a beetroot and blue cheese risotto (beetroot qualifying as the 'Nordic' element there:), and we started the meal with small smoked salmon and dill tartlets. Dill is one of the most-loved and most-used herbs in Estonia, and as the country is surrounded by water on three sides, then fish is a suitably suitable main ingredient, too.A note on smoked salmon. Here in Estonia, you can buy either hot-smoked salmon or cold-smoked salmon. When I moved to Scotland, I found it confusing when recipes just asked for 'smoked salmon' and didn't specify which type of...
