Making Macaroni Cheese

I love Macaroni Cheese but every time i make it there is just something missing so and no way will i eat the Macaroni Cheese that comes in box it tastes so plastic

Anyhow i finally found a recipe that is easy to make and tastes great

• 400g macaroni
  
• 1 tablespoon oil
• 2 rashers middle bacon, sliced into bite sized pieces
• 1/2 white or brown onion, chopped
• 1 1/4 cups cream
  
• 1 cup milk
• 1 1/4 cups grated tasty cheese
• 3/4 cups Gruyere cheese, grated
  
• 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
• 1/2 cup dried breadcrumbs
• 1/2 cup grated tasty cheese extra

1. Preheat oven to 180C. Cook macaroni according to directions in plenty of salted boiling water until al dente – ensure that it does not get too soft. Drain and set aside.

2. Grease a large (about 30x25cms) baking dish.

3. In the saucepan heat the oil and fry the onion and bacon until onion is soft and translucent and bacon is cooked-about 5 minutes. Then add the cream, milk and nutmeg and wait until it comes to a boil, turn it down to a simmer and add the cheeses.

4. Pour into the prepared baking dish and sprinkle with the breadcrumbs and extra cheese, bake for 5-10 minutes or place under hot grill under crumbs are crunchy and cheese melted

With the baking dish size you can put it in a less shallow dish to bake it, but i like the cheese and the breadcrumbs on top.

I got the recipe from Not Quite Nigella she has quite a lot of recipes some easy some hard but they all seem pretty good to eat

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Where does time go

Writing in this seems to be one of the last things i want to do atm and it seems any reason is a good reason not too.

Last week i was going to write about something but when i went to sign in it said the password was wrong
I have loads of passwords for different pages i sign into so have them written down in an address book, but it kept coming up that the password i was trying to put in was incorrect so that's one reason i haven't written.

Maybe now that i changed the password and able to log in i will start to put my thoughts down .....hmm maybe i should make my password incorrect so i remember it

Why do we get Itchy

Have you ever been laying in bed and the next minute you feel you want to scratch yourself cause you start feeling itchy, well if you dont it happens to me. I can be laying in bed about to go to sleep tucked under my blankets about to go to sleep and feel i want to scratch a part of my face.

I know you can get itchy from dust around you or if you have a dry skin but wondered why.

So of course im going to tell you all why

It seems that that some of the Nerves in our body are dedicated to the Itch feeling where others are there to feel pain and the such.

What happens is that the hair on our body reacts when a stimuli like dust or hair touches, you automatically want to rid yourself of the sensation so you scratch, this is the most simplest explanation.

Itching can happen for more than a piece of dust or hair touching you, things such as:

• Mosquitoes, mites, snails, lice
• Poison ivy, poison oak, stinging nettle
• Dry skin
• Jewelry
• Herpes
• Stress and anxiety
• Staph infections
• Psoriasis
• Sunburn
• Soaps and frequent hand washing

Myself i suffer from eczema which can be really annoying, the simplest way ive found to treat it was to keep my skin clean, or on really bad days to use cornflour.

There is a more technical version of course with what happens

Itching, is known as pruritus, it starts with some kind of external stimuli, including bugs, dust, clothing fibers and hair. Itching is a built-in defense mechanism that alerts your body to the potential of being harmed. In this case, it might be the potential of being bit by a bug.

Receptors in the dermis of the skin will become irritated. In a split second, these receptors send a signal through fibers in the skin to your spinal cord and then up to the cerebral cortex in your brain.

By scratching you are moving the irritant which sends a message to the brain that the irritant has been removed

I got this information from two sites, the links are below
Link1
Link2.
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Singing

I have joined a Community Singing Group im not really a great singer but its for fun, i used to be in a choir when i was around 11/12 years old in primary school i remember we had loads of practice and we had to sing at some school thing that was on later in the year, but then i grew lingual tonsils, after singing for a bit my throat gets very sore and i start to cough.


Anyhow we are being taught to sing through our diaphragm and not our throat, what we where taught was to breath holding under our breast bone.

After singing for an hour it seems that i had been using my diaphragm properly as it started to get sore, felt funny not being sore anywhere else but my diaphragm, when i told the singing teacher it was getting sore she was happy for me as she said i was learning to sing properly.

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Ballpoint Pens

These days almost everyone has used a ballpoint pen and dont really think about where they came from well im about to tell you all that information today

The first patent on a ballpoint pen was issued on 30 October 1888, to John Loud, a leather tanner it seems that the then-common fountain pens could not write on leather, his pen had a small rotating steel ball, held in place by a socket it was fine to write on leather and rougher surfaces but to rough to write on paper.

In the period between 1904 and 1946, improvements to the fountain pen were invented. A German inventor named Baum took out a ballpoint patent in 1910, and yet another ballpoint pen device was patented by Van Vechten Riesburg in 1916.

In these inventions, the ink was placed in a thin tube whose end was blocked by a tiny ball, held so that it could not slip into the tube or fall out of the pen. The ink clung to the ball, which spun as the pen was drawn across the paper though these proto-ballpoints didn’t deliver the ink evenly.

László Bíró, a Hungarian newspaper editor, had noticed that inks used in newspaper printing dried quickly, leaving the paper dry and smudge free.

He decided to create a pen using the same type of ink. Since, when tried, this viscous ink would not flow into a regular fountain pen nib, Bíró, with the help of his brother George, a chemist, began to work on designing new types of pens. Bíró fitted this pen with a tiny ball in its tip that was free to turn in a socket. As the pen moved along the paper, the ball rotated, picking up ink from the ink cartridge and leaving it on the paper. Bíró filed a British patent on 15 June 1938.

In 1940 the Bíró brothers and a friend, Juan Jorge Meyne, fled Nazi Germany and moved to Argentina. On 10 June they filed another patent and formed Bíró Pens of Argentina.

The pen was sold in Argentina under the Birome brand (portmanteau of Bíró and Meyne), which is how ballpoint pens are still known in that country.

With the new design licensed by the British, ball point pens where produced for RAF aircrew as the Biro; they found they worked much better than fountain pens at high altitude, the latter being prone to ink-leakage in the decreased atmospheric pressure.

To read more you can go here
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