Climbing the Social Ladder

On Friday night, as I settled down to watch a marathon of crappy Friday night TV, I got a very unexpected but very welcome message from a girl I knew back in the T Dot. Turns out that she was now in Edinburgh doing her Masters and heard that I was in G Town. Her message mentioned that the city was having their annual "Doors Open" festival over the weekend and if I didn't have anything else planned, that I should drop by.

All thoughts of hair washing were pushed out the window and so I set off the next morning for a day of sightseeing and happy wanderings through churches, graveyards, libraries, castles and random old buildings. (More about that on the travel blog later). Later that evening, I met up with E and we settled down to dinner and pints at lots and lots of chitty chat.

The next day, when I woke up tired and a bit hungover from the night before, Rain Man bounced into the kitchen reminding me that I had promised to cook biryani over the weekend. He'd scooted off to the stores early on and bought all of the ingredients and so there was no backing out. (Crafty Devil!)

And so, we made biryani. Rain Man nominated himself Official Lamb Chopper-Upper Person and went at with a gusto that was just a tad worrying and had me considering if I needed to get myself a lock and bolt for my bedroom door!

I took all the meat (and it was a lot!) that we got off the leg and after adding a little bit of this, that, the other and some more of the first stuff it became:

We had a bit of a challenge with the rice as the recipe called for 1 kg of rice but we didn't have a utensil large enough to cook that. So we had 3 little pots going all at once and desperately tried to monitor all of 'em so that we wouldn't screw up the main part of the biryani. We didn't do too badly (only one dish burnt), but kids, don't try this at home.

About half way though the lamb cooking, we realised that we were desperately late for the basketball game (a bunch of RM's friends were all going) so Rain Man went off and I stayed back to finish off the curry, layer the rice and the meat. All that was left was to let it cook in the oven for about 20 minutes and we were done.

Post game, we headed out for pints... which was followed by more pints and then then someone suggested pub quiz... and since we were all very susceptible to suggestion at that point that's just where we headed.

And best of all, after we were done at the pub quiz got home we popped the biryani into the oven and 20 minutes later we were chowing down on yummy yummy rice and lamb goodness.

This really isn't the best picture of our 3 hours of hard labour, but we didn't actually think about taking pics until we were more than half way done. Judging by how much Rain Man ate, it was finger lickin good.

And so went the weekend. Turns out, I have a semblance of a social life after all!