Jambalaya

A couple of years ago I wrote about Sainsbury’s unreliability. I don’t think much has improved since then, and there hasn’t been a week when everything on my list was on their shelves. Becoming increasingly frustrated with the experience, I decided to sign up for their home shopping service Sainbsbury’s To You.

I love shopping on the Internet. I can search to my heart’s content, mull things over as much as I need to, and buy what I want when I feel like it. So including the weekly grocery shop ought to be a breeze. In some ways it is, but the experience has been far from straightforward so far, and my concerns about the retailer’s reliability have not been dissipated in any way.

Google Maps UK has arrived. Terrific! At first site this seems a great implementation and easier to use than the other street mapping sites. The route planning function is excellent, and fast. There are a few user interface glitches but these are relatively easy to work around, and no doubt will be ironed out in time.

Satellite maps are missing: hopefully they will come soon. IMHO, essential.

One interesting observation is that the route to and from our home treats Waynflete Road as one way, South to North. News to us, but perhaps Google is prescient as well as everything else. Local residents are well aware that Oxfordshire County Council has plans for the notorious Green Road Roundabout. Work has already started on the ‘short term measures’ part of this scheme—swapping the bus lanes on the London Road—which, in isolation, has been an unmitigated disaster so far.

The original scheme envisaged traffic lights at either end of Waynflete Road (i.e. at both of its junctions with Bayswater Road) which would have effectively killed off rat-running up Waynflete Road. However, in their ultimate wisdom, officers of the County Council have apparently decided that the more northern set of lights is unnecessary. What makes them think that they know more about this than the traffic consultants they hired at great cost to us ratepayers defeats me completely, but it now appears that Google has let the cat out of the bag and that the hidden agenda is to make Waynflete Road one-way.

There is a kind of argument for this that might hold sway: it must be miserable for the bus drivers (who only drive one-way up Waynflete Road) having to negotiate parked cars, traffic calming measures, and irate drivers (not to mention cyclists) coming in the opposite direction. How much easier would it be for them if the street was one-way in their favour?

Frankly, though, I don’t think we owe them any favours at all. The buses the two rival companies now run are far too large, too heavy, and too frequent (they typically hunt in twos and threes, mostly near empty). The damage they have caused to the surface of Waynflete Road is considerable. It was resurfaced only a few years ago and is now dangerously defective, and potentially lethal to cyclists.

Addendum: I had hoped to illustrate the above rant about Waynflete Road with a map refereence to Google Maps, but this is not available at this time. So here is one from a rival.

Skip Lombardi suggests that soffrito can be made in advance and stored in the fridge for up to a month. Sure, but why?

For certain, it will save time when you come to make the soffrito-based recipe, but you still have to make it sometime. OK, so you can make a big batch all in one go. But the effort (as opposed to the time) in making soffrito is in chopping the ingredients, and the more there are, the longer it takes. Skip neatly gets round this this with a food processor: pulse, pulse. pulse, and there you go. Easy. But I have generally found that food processors pulverize onions rather than chop them, releasing bitter juices that do not easily cook out.

Anyway, for me, part of the magic of making a dish that calls for soffrito is preparing the ingredients, letting them fry gently whilst infusing the kitchen with a lovely aroma as one prepares the rest of the meal…