Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

Haystack,

I was curious how your soda bread turned out?

Have you tried making your own pizzas? If you've got teenagers at home, I can guarantee they'll love them!

I use Jamie Oliver's dough recipe (which is pretty much the basic mix for most breads), and a shop bought jar of passata with onions and basil for the base. The other topping are whatever take your fancy (my fave is tuna, sweetcorn, anchovies, olives and mozarella). After a few attempts, it's easy to produce thin and crispy pizzas with a light and airy crust which are every bit as good as anything out of Pizza Express, and a close second to the pizza joints with the pukka wood-burning bread ovens.

And the best bit - Jamie is a real lard-arse and his dough mix recipe to serve 4 will actually serve about 10! This means that you will invariably have dough left over which you can wrap in cling film and put in the fridge for 3 or 4 days where it will continue to rise. I then chop black olives and sun-dried tomatoes and roll them into the left over dough to bake a kind of Mediterranean style small ciabatta loaf.

What a sport Branson is.

British billionaire Richard Branson strutted his stuff as an AirAsia flight attendant Sunday -- complete with fishnet stockings and figure-hugging red pencil skirt.

His star turn on the flight from Australia's Perth to the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur came after he lost a Grand Prix bet with the Malaysian budget carrier's founder.

Hils and Hays,

You will be able to help out Manuel when he reopens his caff.

Surely that was Manuel in Drag.

I have been making pizzas for years. I use 00 flour as the good pizzerias do. My kids prefer them to restaurant pizzas. It just isn't possible to make perfect pizzas due to home ovens. Restaurant ovens cook in 10 minutes at around 320c. They also rest on a very hot surface straight away in the oven. One improvement would be a slab of stone in the oven and the use of a proper pizza shovel. My kid's like my pizzas better than every restaurant except the one owned by my friend. His pizzas are at another level. I have tried using his flour. The chef has even given me a big hunk of their dough, but it still doesn't work properly. The chef and I have come to the conclusion that it is the oven and there is no reasonable solution.

You can purchase round cooking stones for ordinary ovens, about half inch thick about 18"+ diameter.

I use one for cooking bread on.

Also, easy enough to build your own outdoor baking oven with fire bricks and a reinforced slab of concrete and grade heat resistant stainless levels for different heat levels.

Control heat by heat resistant doors opening at different levels.

Save yourself problems by having a chimney.

Built one in the garden of a previous house worked very efficiently and roasted who poultry and also smoked lightly salted meat.

( Stainless steel, try Stainless steel scrap metal dealers, who may cut to lengths you need.)

I would recommend the program just starting on BBC2, The Fantastic Mr Feynman. The story of Richard Feynman, a hero of mine.

See Cameron is encouraging team play over Europe.

Well, I suppose a captain should go down with his ship, especially when the crew are mutinying.

What a party!

Couldn't even arrange a BBQ.

I have a few recipes for pork.

We use rectangles of granite that sit on the oven shelves - I've never tried the round stones you buy in cookware shops because I always figured they were a bit on the small size for a decent pizza. It's the centre of the bases that don't crisp at the bottom. Putting the pizza onto a pre-heated stone allows the base to crisp.

When you see the proper pizza chefs spin and throw their pizza bases around, they're actually trying to make the centres thinner than the edges so that they cook evenly.

I can confirm that it is the oven that makes the difference, certainly where bread is concerned.. I know about these things.

most ovens cook unevenly anyway - i think to cook evenly, the oven needs to be absolutely level .... more to the point, oven thermometers are notoriously inaccurate, so i strongly recommend a good quality separate one

can't comment on pizzas or bread as have never made either

huhne and wife released after serving only 1/4 of their sentence
how can this conceivably be right and fair? .... i was wrongly under the impression that even with good behaviour you had to serve 1/2 your sentence, and this was scarcely a jay-walking offense .... the pair of them aggravated their "crime" by claiming innocence time after time after time so, whatever their public profile, why should they get off so lightly?

simple because they are one of the people who run and make the law
the law is different for MPs and judges .always has been
and lets be clear it was not a prison no working class person would ever go their
it is a hotel for the rich to retreat too for their crime

now go and read the rules as to why .... as usual, you're talking total crap without a grasp of the facts or indeed much else....

whether or not those rules should have been applied, when morality and public perception would see it otherwise, is another matter

yellow belly their are the true facts

tory party must DITCH the coalition now and save the party .

Cameron and Osborn do not appear to listen to anyone else.

Cameron doesn't know which way to lean.

The party implodes and he can't afford a pizza.

I thought The Guv had given up the "leadership hunt".

.