"Come Dine With Me" and "Bike Stuff"

Have you seen the "Come Dine With Me" programme? Well this week we (as in me and the 3 kids, Mrs Turbo Man said she didn't need to join in as she cooks every day!) have decided that we would all take a turn at preparing a 3-course meal and we would judge it accordingly. Today was my turn and after a bit of a panic over the menu (including a desperate appeal on TriTalk for simple to prepare menus) I decided on the following:

Starter - Big mushrooms with prosciutto and parmesan cheese with a green leaf salad and shredded carrot.

Main course - Lemon and tarragon chicken with new potatoes, brocoli, peas and carrots with a garlic butter, tarragon and white wine sauce.

Dessert - Strawberries and bananas with Cornish fresh cream ice cream.

So how did it go? Well, apart from timings (there was about an hour gap between starter and main course!) the preparations went OK. However, it all started to go horribly wrong when I served the main course. I put the potatoes and sauce on the dining table and asked Mrs Turbo Man to take the chicken through. Somehow, in placing the chicken on the table, my lovingly prepared sauce was spilled all over the table. And I mean all over. Cue massive sense of humour failure! :-)

Anyway, we recovered from that and the food itself was really good; I'm sure the sauce would have been the piece do resistance but you can't have everything. The dessert was lovely; fresh fruit with a bit of naughty ice cream. This was washed down with a nice glass of wine and followed with some Toblerone and coffee. Yum yum. Our eldest son takes his turn tomorrow - home made lasagne followed by chocolate cheesecake, I'm looking forward to that.

After dinner I started work on my TT bike. I put the new tub on my new deep rim wheel, stripped the handlebars of the bar tape and took the brake levers off and chopped the handlebars down to size. I was going to cut the tribars down as well but the shape of the tribars is not constant along its length so the bar end shifters would no longer fit, so they have had to stay the same. I then changed the rear mech and was going to change the bottom bracket but couldn't find the bottom bracket removal tool. I know I have it somewhere and it's somewhat frustrating not being able to find it. I also need some cable cutters to finish it all off - that will have to wait for tomorrow.

Anyway, after a week of total rest training starts tomorrow for the 2009 season. I will take a couple of weeks to ease into it and then it will be time for some serious bike training and a little bit of swimming and running. Take care folks and train smart!