Lis and I are terrible influences on one another. But we have fun.
So, yesterday, at around 3 o'clock, Lis's boss told her that nothing productive was going to get done, so she should go home early. So she did, which put her on Rte 1 Southbound before five. Which meant that she could stop into that interesting-looking store, Union Jack, which closes at 5 PM, so we've never gone in before. It's a British import shop. So, when she got home, she told me that it looked neat.

Today, we went over there together. And I decided, arbitrarily, that we would spend $20 on British-type food and stuff.

We got:
A packet of lamb-and-mint flavored crisps.
2 cans of shandy (one for me, one as a present for my father, who likes shandies. 11% beer. Which means that it's, what, 1% alcohol? That's like as alcoholic as orange juice.)
1 can of Irn-Bru, because I've heard Dee and Ford talk about the stuff so much that I had to try it.
1 can of dandilion-burdock root soda
1 package of pudapams.
1 Mars bar.
1 package of oat cakes.
1 tinned toffee pudding.

We ate the lamb-flavored potato chips in the car on the way home. They were really good, which surprised me. I thought they'd be nasty; they weren't. Dandilion-burdock root soda tastes like bubblegum-licorice soda, and is therefore nasty. Irn-Bru tastes like dandion-burdock root soda mixed with artificial orange soda. I kind of like it.

A British Mars bar taste like what an American Milky Way bar would taste like if they used decent chocolate. Why is British (and Canadian) chocolate so consistently better than American chocolate? Do Americans actually not taste that, for instance, Hershey's is crud?

The shandy was shandy-like, and quite nice, even if it was totally artificial and had saccharine and stuff like that in it. I still liked it.

Two days ago, I made up a curry-like-object for dinner. It consisted of potatoes, a package of frozen cauliflower, some frozen peas, a big-ass can of chickpeas, lots of curry powder which was a brand we'd not tried before but which smelled good, flaked coconut (the kind that you use for desserts that has sugar in it), rasins, and probably some other stuff that I can't remember. It turned out really well. Lis had it for dinner two nights ago, and lunch yesterday. So we decided to fry up some pupadoms and have them with more curry today.

I looked at the instructions and I told Lis, "Um, you're the one who's involved in fanfic writing of British stuff -- I need a translation."

"Oh? Of what?"

"This says that after I heat up the oil, I need to hold the pupadoms under it using a fish slice. I'm hoping that's different in English and American, 'cause, otherwise, I don't wanna have any pupadoms anymore."

A "fish slice", it turns out, is a "spatula", which made more sense.

So I boiled some oil and held the pupadums under it using a spatula, and they fried up and balooned out to twice their original diameter, and then got all crispy-crunchy-greasy-yummy.

And we had curry and pupadums and it was good.

But, you see. . . then we had this thing of peanut oil. And there was still some left. And Lis said, "What happens if we deep-fry an egg?"

So I cracked an egg into a glass and poured it into the boiling oil, and, after a couple seconds, I turned it, scooped it out, and served it to Lis, who ate it. Basically, it tasted like "deep fried thingy."

Then she suggested deep frying a cookie, which we did, and it ended up okay, I guess. But it wasn't a very good cookie to begin with, so it ended better than it started.

Lis also wants me to point out that we melted the plastic spatula. And I caught a paper towel on fire.

And, in a couple of hours, we'll go to Mystery House for Shabbat Eruv Xmas.

ETA Okay, we boiled the tinned toffee pudding in its can for 35 minutes, then served it.

Ick. It tastes . . . tinned. Which I suppose it's unfair to expect it NOT to do so, as, in fact, it IS tinned. Lis is still eating it, though. But that's because she's the sort of person that things that deep-frying an egg is a good idea.