Kiwis, curries and rats with style

It’s that time again. Time to see what Chat has to offer this week. Once again, I am blown away by their fabulous witticisms, sprinkled throughout. For example, I open the magazine and the first thing which greets me is a photo of a pig in a picnic basket, with the caption ‘designer ham bag?’

Brilliant. There doesn’t seem to be any reason why the massive photo of the pig is there, just a little sentence about how the pig looks so comfy, “there’s no way we could ‘rasher’ to go anywhere.”

And on we go, to the photos page and there are a few good ones this week. The first is a here-are-some-cupcakes-I-made photo. The second is a here’s-me-with-a-huge-plastic-ape picture. And no, I’m not kidding. Someone really thought that the world would be interested in a picture of her with a huge plastic ape. Check it out.

There are some others of dogs and cows, which aren’t even worth mentioning in any greater detail.

So onward we go, past a story about a girl who had a maggot living in her back and a story of scandal with a 9.9 shock factor (!), to the Blimey, That’s Clever page.

And what have we here today? I think my favourite might be the kiwi fruit tip. Put it in an egg cup, we’re told. And that’s it. That’s the tip. Eat a kiwi out of an egg cup. £25 they got for that.  

Maybe I’ll make up some top tips and try to get £25 from Chat. Watch this space. I’ll think some up for tomorrow.

Another of the top tips is to use toothpaste to clean your mugs if they have tea stains. While I can’t see anything initially wrong with this, it just sounds a bit dodgy, cleaning a mug with toothpaste. You’re bound to have toothpaste-tasting tea for the next few days, I reckon.

Another tip seems to be, my granddaughter chewed the straw bit off her favourite beaker, so I put a new straw in. I don’t know whether that really warrants a place on the Blimey, That’s Clever page, do you? It’s not as though, previously, people have been throwing away their children’s beakers every day with no clue how to fix it and then they open Chat, see this tip and go ‘Wow! I’ll just stick a new straw down the hole where the old straw was. That’s genius.’

Next we have some more scandal, a murder, some letters, some weight loss stories and then the baby photos page. Ahhhh, the baby photos page. Photos of babies. Doing nothing at all. Just being babies. A whole page. One is a baby on a slide, one is a baby swimming, another is a baby and a cat, one is two children smiling a bit. A whole page.

To the side of this page, we have the recipe section. Now previously, I have seen some amazing gourmet recipes that opened my eyes to a whole new world. The week they had a recipe for mushrooms on toast was a week that changed my life. This week’s recipe? Onion and potato curry.

Mmmm. Doesn’t that sound great? Onion and potatoes. In a curry. Like when you look in the fridge and you don’t have anything in so you bung together some nonsense and fill up on ice cream afterward. Mmm. Nothing-in-the-fridge curry. The ingredients? Olive oil, 4 potatoes, 2 onions, spices and mustard seeds. And the attraction in making this meal? It’s only 54p per head.

Now it doesn’t take a genius to work out that it’s not 54p because Chat are so great at providing good meals on a budget. It’s because there’s NOTHING IN IT.

If you want great meals on a budget, I can give you far better, go-to ingredients – squid is really cheap, people. Fry it with fennel. Re-use old bread by chopping tomatoes, adding red wine vinegar and basil and ripping your old bread up and mixing it in for a panzanella salad. If you want a curry, spend your money on some chicken and chuck it in a pan with tomatoes (tinned or fresh) and add whatever combination of spices you find in the cupboard, depending on what country’s cuisine you are chanelling.

See? All those will probably be about £1 per person but don’t resemble student food or invoke severe depression in the person who is eating it.

Anyway, back to Chat, the finale is the ‘Ratwalk models’ story on page 46. Yes, RATwalk models. You know what’s coming. It’s a story about a lady who designs and makes clothes for rats. Yes. Rats. It started with making ‘couture creations’ for her pet chihuahua, inspired by a dress worn by Penelope Cruz to the Oscars.

A few years later, business was booming, she went full time into her pet clothing designing and her friend asked her to help “raise the profile of her annual rat convention.”

Honestly, this is not a joke. It’s all true. Her friend runs a yearly rat convention.

So she designed and made the dresses. There was a fashion show with 12 of the ‘models’. Post-show, fame and fortune came her way, she got calls from everyone, even David Letterman.

The article finishes with the touching line, “After all, every single pet should feel like a star.”

That’s something we should all remember as we go on with our days today.

I hope you have learned something here.

Murder at the Academy Awards! And Donald Duck…

Yesterday’s Getting Excited About Stuff was relatively straight forward = It’s Joan Rivers’ birthday. Get hold of a book by/about Joan Rivers and read it.

Well, there wasn’t one at the library and I thought about walking along to the book shop but I was a bit knackered after my long swim (my legs and arms ache a bit today, I kind of entered a trance and just kept going then realised I’d been in there for absolutely ages!). So I headed home and looked around on Kindle on my phone and found a book by Joan Rivers called Murder at the Academy Awards! (There was also one called Men Are Stupid… And They Like Big Boobs but I thought Murder at the Academy Awards looked better.) Can you imagine anything better than a few hours with your head in a potentially-trashy probably-rubbish book called Murder at the Academy Awards?! After the onslaught of Serious Facts and Textbooks that became my life recently, I have been revelling in the more frivolous side of life. I got stuck in.

It’s told from the point of view of a reporter on the red carpet trying to snatch interviews with A-listers arriving at the Oscars. It’s actually told quite well. I was surprised to read on Wikipedia that Joan has a degree in English Literature so what I was expecting – a loud-mouthed Hello! magazine but longer and with more insults – was not what I got. Of course it’s brash, of course the insults fly (Cameron Diaz is given the what-for for wearing a dress that ‘not even Winona Ryder would shoplift’) but it’s done quite well. Don’t get confused here, I’m not telling you all to run out and buy it because it is a work of literary genius. But it’s a fun read for an afternoon off work.

I’m only half way through so the mystery of how the star of the show dies, a young actress who spends her time in and out of rehab, is yet to be solved. The hilarity of the situation that the main character is now in is entertaining reading. She’s having herself admitted to a rehab clinic with a pretend addiction, so that she can dig around and find out some gossip about how the starlet may have died. And she just lost her dog when taking it to the vet. And her bodyguard loves pantsuits. And she loves plastic surgery. It’s all going on in Murder at the Academy Awards!

And so to today. 9th June. Would you believe it? In 1934, on 9th June, Donald Duck made his debut in The Wise Little Hen! So today, I shall spend some time getting excited about Donald Duck. I’ve read up on him. I know all about him and his rivalry with Mickey Mouse. He gets over it eventually and they are the best of friends. I know all about his career in films and his educational programmes for children. I know that he struggles with his temper. I even know what his sayings are. “What’s the big idea?” is his most used. I also know about his health issues, he’s quite lazy and all his friends think he needs to get some exercise. But one time he knocked a shark out with one punch so he’s still pretty strong, even if he is lazy….

I hope you enjoyed that little fact-onslaught about Donald Duck. I feel we would all benefit a little from knowing more about Donald.

So today I am going to dress as a sailor. Well, not really. I’m just going to wear white trousers and a blue jumper. And say “What’s the big idea?” to people. And maybe I’ll watch The Wise Little Hen if I can find it on Youtube.