Halva Heaven/Tesco Torment

I always look at Treat of the Week in The Grauniad's colour supplement with interest and hope. Occasionally I'm boggled. The recipe a few weeks back that required a punnet of blackberries, for example: whoever knew that blackberries came in punnets? Double-layered plastic bags or a colander, maybe, but punnets? Doesn't that imply a financial transaction and, er, shops?

Last Saturday's treat was Sesame Ginger Halva, which I made yesterday. Highly recommended.

Acquiring tahini (and the absence of milk in the house) necessitated a visit to Tesco.

I HATE TESCO.

First off, earlier in the summer, the move began to "integrate" the organic products into the rest of the store, instead of having them coralled in several separate little sections (until Xmas last year the dry groceries were next to the refrigerated section so I only had to find milk and meat elsewhere--joy). This means far more hunting around and walking through the store instead of a quick nip around a small subset of locations where I can find everything.

Second, the process has been so protracted that it's meant even more hassle. Things have moved piecemeal, and their destinations have been shifted around too, which must have been just as annoying for everyone else using the store.

Third, during the move several items seem to have been "lost". The organic range has contracted: there's certainly less meat; only one brand of organic strong white flour (Tesco's own) instead of a choice of two or three. There's some things I just can't find, too: Kallo organic rice cakes, unsalted; organic tinned pineapple.

On the board of customers' comments there's a quote from one shopper saying they'd like the organic products shelved alongside the rest of the stock. So my idea of convenience may not have matched others' experiences. (I'm being charitable here and not giving in to the suspicion that the quote is a plant.) However, I wonder what the effect has been on their revenues. I've not quite stopped using it (it is virtually our corner shop): I'm buying meat on-line for the freezer now; I've never bought much fruit and veg there (the box scheme's been going longer than the store has existed) and at the minute we're harvesting our own stuff and benefiting from others' surpluses; I try to use local stores where I can. But currently, it's double clubcard points on all organic goods. Have other folk failed to find their usual purchases and gone elsewhere?

Paging the Hive Mind: speech recognition software

Okey doke. So I've got the new PC and laptop. One of the things I was going to try out--from curiosity, because it might be useful--was speech recognition software and dictating to my machine (Looby Loo, too). So there's Dragon NaturallySpeaking and IBM's ViaVoice that I know of. Are there others? What's good? What's not?

What I want to be able to do is to dictate into a word processor/text editor other than MS Word. Or FrameMaker directly, since that's where most of my words go. Interaction with a browser--Opera/Firefox--would be good as I'm using both Writerly and Google Spreadsheets fairly regularly and expect to use the latter much more frequently. So the requirements aren't huge and complex, but my choice of software is non-standard (or is that simply, non-Gatesian?).

Gloverly

So I knit Fetching--twice. (A further pair has been requested by the wearer of pink.) The green pair took a tad over the single ball of Cashmerino Aran, but I had some spare, so no problem there. For the black pair I had only one ball of yarn: a reduction of three rounds in the plain part of the hand was spot on for yarn requirements.

The one other change I made was to even up the ribs so that the mitts are a proper mirror image (look at the picture on the index page of the Knitty site just above the start of the thumb and see how the lines of purls in the rib aren't quite mirrored--I know it's marginal, but I likes my symmetry). The solution on the second glove was to finish the final round of the main section of 4x1 rib three stitches early and commence the knit in waste yarn section for the thumb there. Simple, but pleasing tweak.

( big piccies )