It was quite some time ago that, as part of an inebriated challenge, I made it my goal to significantly improve the plain cheeseburger. I have relatively simple tastes. If I’m eating a burger, I have the burger, some cheese and the bun. That’s it. Mayo or other sauces are out, leafy green crap (I believe we’re calling it lettuce these days) is in the bin, and gherkins… well, no sane person likes gherkins anyway. Nice and simple.

Some people don’t like that though. It’s boring, they say. Those people are wrong and missing out on the beautiful simplicity that is the plain cheeseburger. However, I did take them up on a challenge: to find an ingredient, a single addition, to make the plain cheeseburger rival a burger with the works in their eyes. It would be hard work, a lot of burgers would need eaten but, damn, someone had to do it.

I started where any sensible person with a knowledge of junk food would begin: the humble pizza. Yes, pizza. Master of toppings, mixer of random flavours. Ham would be cheating as it’s too close to a bacon cheeseburger. Pineapple was a bad idea on pizza, it wasn’t going to be better on a burger. Smaller. Sweetcorn!

Sweetcorn is an interesting vegetable. A lot of people really like the taste and the texture, the slight squirting sensation as your bite into the main section and the watery goodness inside. It is, however, a terrible idea for burgers. It just makes the taste seem an out-of-date lumpy. Bad.

Another choice: beans. Everyone likes beans. Juicy, tomato tinged and just the right side of “I’ve got some in the cupboard”. The beans were interesting. Although it did work to an extent, some couldn’t understand the bean/burger combo. The beans were dripping out of the side in ways they couldn’t stop, and more ended up on the floor than anywhere.

Damn.

Another look in the fridge revealed something so simple, so lowgrade, so brilliant that it would have to work. And it did. The secret ingredient was barely noticeable but it tasted fantastic, the perfect counterpoint to cheese and the minced flavourings. What was it? Another kind of beef: corned beef. A slice of that in your burger and you’re set.

Challenge accepted and won.

Food. I like it. You probably like it too, everyone does. So a short series on food seems like the right thing. I’m going to go over a few very unhealthy recipes (that sounds a bit formal for the kind of thing I mean but alas there are no better words), and possibly diverge a bit. To my knowledge (ie from recall, rather than from looking through the archives), this is the first post I’ve done on food since the ill-fated omlette incident, way back at post number six. Anyway, the best place to start when it comes to food is the dessert.

‘Now’, you’re wondering, ‘what culinary masterpiece is Gary going to teach us how to make today?’ Today, today, we make mars bar melts. Here’s how:

• Buy a Mars bar.
• Put it in the fridge for a day. You want it to be cold to the touch and rock hard.
• Unwrap, put it on a plate, and microwave it for 20 seconds.
• Enjoy! If you’ve done it right, the chocolate shell should still be relatively solid and the middle should have melted. Warm goo! Nummy.

If you’ve got any masterworks of the black art of cooking that would make Mr Grossman envious, I encourage you to take this opportunity to post about them. Another, more savoury, treat in a day or two.

A full month of cinematic goodness brings us four films pretty decent films.

The 40 Year Old Virgin is almost entirely predictable. Our protagonist’s colleagues find out he has never had sex and set about fixing that, in increasingly bizarre ways. In the end he finds the right women and all is well. Even though the premise doesn’t warrant the two hours or so that the final cut is, it’s still a good film. Steve Carrell pulls off both the geeky and awkward side of the character and his quiet wit with aplomb. If nothing else, this film should be a vehicle for him to go on to bigger things.

Next up is new Wes Craven film, Red Eye. A killer corners his victim on an aircraft and tries to get her to assist in his plan. Being a headstrong young women, she resists. Until the final acts, it does pretty well; the two lead characters showing a fair amount of depth and creating a real tension. Sadly the final section, away from the enclosed space of a plane, is truly awful. The film degenerates from a creepy encounter to a farcical horror film. Shame.

Sadly, I’ve yet to see Dogtown And The Z-boys so can’t compare it with its dramatised reimagining, Lords Of Dogtown. The story of the friends who reinvented skateboarding by introducing aspects of surfing, we see fame and fortune tear them apart. An enjoyable film, even if the acting lets it down at times.

Finally, George Romero, king of zombie films, adds another chapter to his infamous series with Land Of The Dead. Set decades after the dead begun rising, the last remnants of civilisation are holed up in a walled city. The poor stay in slums and the rich in a fortified tower block, keeping everything else out. In a continuance of the smarter zombie theme from Day Of The Dead, the zombies begin to realise that the city is where they need to go. Mix into this the theft of the one weapon capable of taking away the power from the rich, and you’ve got the makings of an interesting storyline. It’s not as good as the predecessors, taking in too many action movie influences and making sure the increased budget is spent rather than focussing on the characters, but still damn good.

Film of the month is Land Of The Dead, but if you know me you would have known that before it came out.

And a second list of quotes appeared and it was not quite as good as the first list, but was still reasonably entertaining. It also made for excellent blog filler.

The second quote list.

Yar, it be another Talk Like A Pirate Day (well it will be in 45 minutes). Which, of course, means a very minor redesign.

As the lack of posts around here lately probably show, I’ve been very busy for the last few months. It’s been ages since I’ve had both the time and energy to write something worthwhile. The last series (about my hometown) probably wasn’t worthwhile, and I wrote literally months ago for a posting drought like this. Oh well. After going to Edinburgh for most weekends in August (ah, the fringe), the usual bunch of September flatwarmings (spread over no less than 7 cities this year), and various other things during the week (my job being one of them), things seem to be quieting down.

If I say here that I’m going to release my first Greasemonkey script soon and that I’ll finally write up my fourth year project, then I may actually begin work on either. Or then again, it might be another quiet spell. We shall see.