Top Tips

Online grocery shopping is the way forward. If you haven't tried it yet, then it comes highly recommended. Simple, quick and convenient. Don't know what you have in the cupboard? Just get up and look - then go back to the computer and order it! Can't think of what to buy? Just grab a recipe book or look at suggested recipes and click on a few ingredients. Feeling super cheap? Browse ALL of their offers on a single page and have a cheapskate field day. Not got time to go to the shop and queue for hours with the murderers? Not read up on your Izzard supermarket queue strategy recently?

When living in California you tend to forget about the most basic of living requirements. Washing up and laundry dried in about 7 minutes (great if you ignore the canyon-like fissures that were your knuckles after a few months), light and sun almost came through the walls and there were normally about 4 open WiFi networks within range. In Manchester it seems that achieving all three is more tricky. Catherine and I spent a year living in a flat in a particularly leafy part of already leafy Didsbury. The converted nursing home had tall ceilings and windows but had obviously been shoehorned into a former janitor closet and as such was a compromise of space over light. Despite being North-facing, the flat got amazing morning sun (on those rare occasions when 400 feet of solid cloud were not in the way) and warmed up like a little beauty. All great and good - but I haven't mentioned yet that the total floor space was about 40 square metres - which means little until I say that the bedroom had about 8 inches on either side of a 4 foot 6 inch bed. So we had to move and move we did - all of 100 yards across the road to a flat about twice the size. Yay! Buy hold on a cotton picking minute. Have a guess how long it takes Tiscali Internet Service Provider to move our account these few steps? 2 hours? 24? 5 working days? No - try over 3 weeks!

Our last apartment was so small that the idea of a fancy espresso machine was simply out of the question. Add to this the fact that once you have used the 'Grunstein Industrial Coffee Machine', you can't really go back to consumer level machines. However, to achieve this level of coffee splendour you need to replumb your kitchen, have a dedicated cubic metre of space and have your coffee flown in from Costa Rica.

For a constant supply of delicious, 'fresh' sandwiches you must suspend disbelief and try this one. Take a good quality, unsliced, malted brown bread and on the day of purchase slice it thickly, put the slices back together to form a loaf and immediately freeze in the original plastic bag. On the day of sandwich requirement simply take out two slides, add sandwich filling to the frozen bread, wrap in cling film and come lunch time you will have remarkably fresh sandwiches. Honest.

We recently made a visit to Ajay's new apartment to experiment with unglazed floor tiles and Naan bread dough. In the process we witnessed the creation of a genuine Indian curry that tastes as good as any restaurant's - if not better. Below are some notes taken along the way.

A good thin crust pizza is delicious but very difficult to make without a fancy pizza oven and dough flown in from Rome. Since buying our bread machine we have used trial and error to try and improve the crust and have recently made some progress. Here is the current method:

Add the following to bread machine:
180g warm water
1 tblsp olive oil
1.5 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
340g White Bread Flour
1 tsp dried yeast

I've never been a big fan of popcorn - it didn't quite cut the cheese when it came to snack material. The salty stuff is a little bland, the sweet (you guessed it) a little sweet. The 'butter flavor' gives off such an evil stench that I am pained to use the word butter in the same sentence. Catherine recently found some cheese flavoured stuff - but this too was passable at best.