What's in that lasagne?

A rare lunch with BLISS today

Her manor, her call of venue. I'm invariably drawn towards bargain basement curry outlets, noodle bars, and the seedier end of the ethnic food industry. She chose a café and a healthy jacket potato. What to have? I went for the lasagne. With chips. That irresistible café speciality, a pasta dish, with chips.

I'm a little bit baffled by how café lasagne works. I'm baffled as to how it's made, actually. It is like some sort of ultimate, bland, comfort food. The constituents appear to be:

Mince: a sort of generic mince. Almost without texture, and without sufficient flavour for provenance identification purposes. It's like minced whatever, with added reformed vegetable protein, and cooked without seasoning or flavouring.

Cheese sauce: the only reason you could know it's a cheese sauce is because you know lasagne has a cheese sauce in it. It's more a butter, flour and milk sauce with a dash of cheese without any vestige of the flavour of cheese grated into it.

Sheet pasta: soggy, tasteless pasta without any resistance to the bite.

Spices, flavourings: forget it. Nothing of interest allowed.

Where do they source the ingredients? Do they just buy it in ready made? How does it still somehow work despite all the shortcomings?


Parking meter fruit machines

Later, I parked up and there was a bloke walking down the street, systematically stopping at every parking ticket dispensing machine and pushing the coin return button. Something you might expect someone obviously down on their luck to be doing, but this was a tidy-looking bloke, wearing new and clean clothes.

Perhaps he'd been ripped off once too often by the machines in the area, and was determined to tilt the balance back in his favour.

Before I got too shocked and stunned, I remembered my experience at a pay and display somewhere. I filled the bloody machine with all the change I had. I pressed the ticket button. Nothing. I pressed the coin return button. Nothing. We were running tight for time, for the pictures, I think. Someone passing by said “hit it” I must've looked uncertain, “no, honest mate, it's always playing up that one, hit it”.

So it hit it, and got about a quarter of my coins back. So I hit it again. Back to about 50%. So I hit it a couple more times. Then I found I was enjoying hitting the machine for being so rubbish and trying to nick my money. Better still, for every satisfying, cathartic slap, the thing coughed up more coins. I kept going until they stopped coming and getting to the pictures was really, really tight.

Corny old point of view, but if we can land blokes on the moon but can't organise machines to give change, then, well, they're exploiting people's need for parking spaces, and when the machines don't do the single job they are designed to do, they deserve a good bashing up.


The Nightwatchman

Two fantastic articles in the Nightwatchman magazine, about the development of cricket (historically) in Papua New Guinea, and (recently) in Ireland. It seems that there's strict transparent rules to the ups and downs of the second, third, and etc. tiers of test cricket. But breaking into the top teir, well that's like becoming a member of some exclusive gentlemen's club.