The first thing I did this morning was make my pancake mix:

* 6 tablespoons of plain flour

* 2 eggs

* half a liter of milk

My top tip for removing any lumps in your pancake mix is to pour it all through a sieve and keep stirring until those lumps disappear. I ate my pancakes with some savory grilled chicken and a glass of orange juice — delicious.

Here’s a good recipe for buttermilk pancakes on Google Knol.

Readers should be assured that I don’t spend all my time either cooking or eating in upscale restaurants. I have been in the bunker figuring out site architectures, user interfaces and matching algorithms. It’s just a lot more fun blogging about food!

In my next incarnation I would like to return as a restaurant critic with a naturally high metabolic rate and no genetic dispositions towards diabetes, heart disease, cancers etc. I think. Then I could eat to my heart’s content and enjoy it!

I’ve had to temporarily unpublish my 2009 World Economic Forum and Happy Chinese New Year 2009 posting because it seems to have attracted spam comments — despite me removing all the tags and changing the title. It attracted 150+ spam comments a day which were extremely annoying and unexpected since none of the other postings have attracted any spams. This makes me wonder some more about how SEO technologies and spambots work as well as how they crawl for content to attach onto and waste people’s time! 

Spam and I have an extremely poor relationship. Like most people, I HATE it.

My worst experience was agreeing to sign up to a third-party service from the company I registered several domain names with and initially bought their hosting package with. That third-party service was to submit my domain to the top search engines (or SEOs). Subsequently, I decided NOT to renew the hosting package and actually paid money to transfer my domain names to an alternative provider which has a much stronger anti-spam policy.

Why?

Well, I never imagined that paying to submit my domain names to top search engines would result in floods of spam to the email addresses associated with those domain names. I simply thought it would mean people could search for the domain names and it would appear on the first page of any Google / Yahoo / MSN search.

I certainly did not expect 25,000+ spam to appear in my email boxes, within literally a weekend, that I then had to manually delete — a complete waste of time and extremely annoying. Thankfully, the spam which the 2009 World Economic Forum post attracted was not on that scale but to me 10 spam messages in my Google and Yahoo! accounts are bad enough. Anything over 25 spam a day in all the various email accounts and social networks I signed-up for is simply not good news.

Since I try my best not to produce low-quality content or waste other people’s time I can’t understand why spammers like doing what they do. There’s simply no intelligence, discern or consideration in what nonsense they bulk into their message to try and sell whatever inappropriate material they want to sell.

Mostly, I can’t understand any companies who would intentionally want to attract spam to their site as a trade-off of being ramped up in search engine and user traffic metrics.

Today I had lunch at Joel Robuchon with my friend, GC. We sat at the table on the right shown in this publicity shot for the restaurant:

The interior was mostly comprised of mahogany and rosewood with suffused warm lighting and contrasting orange-red accents in the shape of jars of pickled red chili and carrots. I noticed that on the walls next to us were raw spices, sealed in by glass panels to look like Modernist Art. This was pretty neat.

Food-wise, I had the langoustine fritters to start and then lamb cutlets with mash as my main. Both were perfectly cooked and delicious, and it struck me how the fritter casing was almost the same as a Chinese spring roll’s. [Btw, my mother is famous for her spring rolls which are packed full of giant tiger prawns, vermicelli, black ear fungus and herbs. She tends to make batches of 250(!) spring rolls at a time, which are eaten over 3 days during Chinese New Year].

Anyway, in the afternoon we did some music shopping before heading for his office where we scoped our online art project some more. We have some seed capital, some pieces of art, some finance + art sector friends and contacts with us on our adventure, and some end objectives. The details will be finalized over the coming weeks and months, but essentially I’m responsible for the technology and social network aspects of it.

Plus I’ll be calling upon senior people I know and/or have worked with at some of the investment banks to sponsor an art exhibition or two in a major city or two. Thankfully, my friend Marta will be here from Spain in a few weeks’ time so I can ask her for some advice. She previously worked in the sponsorships team of a big telco and her Uncle is CEO and Chairman of a telco giant which has developed some interesting online assets.

First on my list of bankers, I’ll be approaching a Deputy Global Head of Wealth Management and a Head of Corporate Strategy (Americas). I originally met them back in 2000 and it will be really interesting to speak with them about art instead of cost/income ratios.

Meanwhile, tomorrow I’ll be cooking a huge spaghetti bolognese. As much as the French food tasted wonderful the portions were so tiny that I’m now completely hungry!

UPDATE

Here’s that spaghetti bolognese I made first thing this morning in my wok after I did the laundry:

There’s enough to last this entire weekend — LOL. Oh and I marinated my sugar-sambal spare ribs too for grilling tomorrow night. It’s great to have haute cuisine treats but to stay firmly in favor of good old home cooking and comfort food too!

On Sunday 1st, a good friend of mine called me from Italy and asked what the weather was like in London. I replied it was sunny but incredibly cold outside which was why I decided not to go to the annual Chinese New Year parade and show at Trafalgar Square. To this, my friend said we’ll need to go shopping for warm wooly socks for me. 

Well…….that was the day before about 8 inches of snow fell in London! Apparently, it was the worse “snow event” in 18 years.

Here are two photos contrasting a cherry blossom without and with snow in the garden:

Whilst it tumbled outside my windows I came up with a list of apparel which I’d need to survive if the snow continued to fall:

* UGG boots

* Shapka hat

* thermal socks

* ski jacket

As it was, non-existent transportation on Monday (no buses were running and only one metro line was operating a service — Victoria) plus warnings about treacherous conditions for cars meant that I stayed indoors and simply layered the clothing on: six layers on top and two layers of trousers.

It was so cold that the olive oil I normally cook with congealed into viscous globes of saturated fat in the bottle! I was glad I’d made the crab on Saturday and refrigerated some of it, had some whole wheat pasta and other groceries in the cupboard and the fridge because it meant I didn’t need to venture out to buy food. The cold made me hungrier which I suppose is the body’s natural defense mechanism: want and store food to build up the fat against the chill.

It made me concerned for my elderly neighbors and how they were faring, so I checked on them and other than the cold they were doing fine which was good. Everyone’s central heating is now switched on at full capacity.

The British Chamber of Commerce estimated that GBP1.2 billion of business income was lost on the first day and up to GBP3.0 billion will have been lost during this snow spell. Moreover, about 2000 schools were closed throughout the country. I think some of that GBP1.2 billion will be recouped elsewhere, e.g. heating bills, electricity bills from watching more TV and making more cups of tea/coffee/hot chocolate/malt and online retail sales.

It’s interesting how Britain reacted to the snow. My Aunt in Canada gets snowfall up to her thighs (3 feet) every year and the transport still runs etc. 

It was great for some people to have an unexpected day off work, but to others it was a nuisance because they had no alternative; schools were shut so they had to arrange alternative childcare, i.e. stay with their children themselves. The parks and hills were filled with families spending fun time together, building snowmen and sledging and shrieking with joy which was really heart-warming to watch. 

I love the snow, especially when it’s freshly fallen and deep. However, I’m not so keen on the slippery black ice we have to navigate on the pavements the day after. I almost slipped and fell 3 times and had to reach for the odd fence, wall and tree to steady me!

Meanwhile I saw an elderly gentleman crunching his way over the ice like it was nothing. Brilliant.