Chocolate fondue

Is really easy. I made it today. This is what you do:

Take equal parts chocolate and double cream (300g/300ml will do for 8 people). Break the chocolate into equal sized chunks (or different sized chunks if you're lazy) and put in a bowl and stick cream in a pan and bring it to the boil. Pour cream over chocolate. Stir lots. Add whisky. Dip stuff in it.

You don't need a proper fondue bowl, melted chocolate stays runny for ages when there's cream in it.

The end. Delight all round.

Added bonuses are that you won't need to eat for the rest of the day and that it turns into Nutella-style gloop once its hardened.

Forgotten gems

My music listening is largely dictated by the device most convenient and closest to hand. This for a long time was the laptop on which I type now. It was passed up for my iPod, perfect for nasty London commuting, good old fashioned CDs and my work computer. Said laptop is experiencing something of a resurgence and today I had a dig through my old tunes. I came out with some corkers (many of which I cannot claim I discovered myself). They are the songs I defined myself by, danced to and played out most but which I have rarely listened to since coming to London.

I remember that there was a time when MSTRKRFT was the most exciting thing in the world, Jesse F Keeler was beating Josh Homme in the contest of hottest man in rock and I spend hours accumulating thousands of MP3s. Some discoveries lead to further listening (thanks for Jenny Wilson, Uncritical) and others just to some dancing (Panico). Many of them I never really listened to (apologies to those of you I passed up, you'll get over it).

Here is today's top 5 re-discovered, undisovered gems. Totally danceable, totally disposable. Perfect for a Sunday night when you've been pissed off by a vanishing plumber and have consumed little but Lemsip and porridge for the last 48 hours.

1. Ce'cile - Hot like we
2. Panico - Transpiralo
3. Capricorns - The new sound
4. The Fever - Ladyfingers
5. Diamond Nights - Girls attractive

New York Times on My So-Called Life

This article is almost perfect, like My So Called Life.

Choice bits:

"To a certain sort of woman who is somewhere between late youth and an unacknowledged middle age, the name Jordan Catalano isn’t a television reference, it is a sense memory. You don’t recall Jordan Catalano, you feel him." Fact

"There is never any question that Angela and Jordan are doomed as a couple. The show gently mocks her infatuation, cutting to Jordan applying eyedrops whenever she begins to read in his intense blinking the signs of poetic torture. Where she sees soulfulness we know there is merely corneal irritation and presumably a bad habit."

Read here: Dear Rebecca, rocker boys are useless. Also, its AMAZING how MSCL uses Jordan Catalano as a piece of comedy, even though he's the love interest. Apart from when he can't read. That's not funny.

"As the touchstone examination of adolescence in the ’90s, “My So-Called Life” rejected the Clintonian ethos of ambition: striving, perhaps, wasn’t better. And at the same time it linked itself closely to the feminism of the period, one that prized interiority, self-help and revolutions from within. It was a diluted notion of female advancement, but at least it was a modestly dressed one."

Anyone with me for a modestly dressed revolution? Thick tights and polo necks here I come...