Cooking Challenge

I'm the first to admit it - I'm no fan of cooking.  Allow me to draw an analogy.  I love riding my motorcycle, tipping it into corners, accelerating around obstacles, the sense of freedom.  What I enjoy far less is tinkering and fettling the bike.  Don't even get me started on the topic of cleaning the damn thing.

And so it is with food.  I LOVE food, the eating of it and even the rituals associated with it.  Almost all kinds of the stuff.  Love it.  What I really DON'T enjoy is all the preparation, the faff, the constantly having to wash my hands, the mess, and the inevitable clearing-up required afterward.

In my defence, at least I do actually cook real food - no ready-meals in this house, thank you very much.  However, my lack of love for the preparation of a 'proper' meal means there's quite a lot of repetition and focus on quick and simple, often to the detriment of nutritional quality.

Lately I've been trying to establish ways to improve said nutritional quality, although at my ripe old age old habits do die somewhat hard.  Visiting websites and Likeing nutritional writers on Facebook does not, I'm reliably informed, constitute 'doing something about it', even though there are some good sites, like this one I stumbled across: Engine 2 Diet

A friend of mine has a thing about including all the colours of the rainbow in her diet, and takes great pleasure in lambasting the lack of variety in mine, so I can't say I was hugely surprised when these items were handed to me in a gift bag as a belated birthday gift last night...



My challenge, it appears, is to take the item on the left and use it to do something creative with the items on the right.  My first instinct is to stick the whole lot in my smoothie-maker (excluding the book, silly) and fabricate something approximating to soup, but to be quite honest with you, I don't even know how to make that!  Unimpressive.

In other words, my selection of the word 'challenge' above was quite deliberate.  The challenge is only exacerbated by the fact that - so I'm told - the items on the right will not wait indefinitely for me to figure this stuff out.  The horror!  Time to open the book and quit procrastinating by writing a blog post, methinks.

In closing then, two questions for you, dear reader:

1. What would you do with the items on the right?


2. What are your favourite nutritional dishes involving minimal preparation?

Please share your thoughts via the comments.  Oh, and wish me luck!  :-)

Twitter tips

Last week I created version 1.0 of Simon's Guide to Twitter, a short presentation for my colleagues at work, designed to evangelise Twitter, encourage an increase in their use of the service, and to provide some guidance for those getting started.

One of the slides contains a list of tips which I thought made a good starting point for the newbie.  Some I made up myself, and some I 'borrowed' or were shared with me after an initial request for contributions.

I thought it might be worth sharing here, and also using this opportunity to ask for your thoughts on what should be included.  If you're new to Twitter I'm keen to know whether you find these helpful and encouraging, and if you're a seasoned pro, I'd like to hear your thoughts on how this list can be refined.  The aim is to get the 'top tips' onto a single slide, so it's certainly not intended to become an exhaustive list.

Please have a read-through and share your thoughts in the comments.

• Have a theme you tweet predominantly about


• Mix professional and personal* tweets


• * not too personal :-)


• Ensure your bio describes you and what you’re about


• Try to tweet at least 2 or 3 times a day


• Reach-out by sending ‘@replies’ – aim to increase conversations as % of tweets


• Use your real name in either ‘username’ or ‘name’ - eg. My username is AvayaData, name is ‘Simon Tompson’


• Use a photo of yourself (nobody follows an egg)


• Alcohol and twitter do not mix


• Consider anything you tweet will be public in perpetuity


• Use a #hashtag to join a conversation about a specific topic


• Don’t feel obliged to follow people who follow you


• Use Twitter search to find people covering topics that interest you and who may be interested in you


• As the number of people you’re following grows, use Lists to categorise


• Beautiful 20 year-old women who follow you are 99.9% guaranteed to be spammers