A triumph of vegetable variety (at least at lunch)

We had a stand out meal today at lunch time. The Thai green curry vegetarian option started in an unpromising fashion -a beige viscous goo containing obvious yellow lumps and green bits.

The tasty, though sadly not photogenic, green Thai curry

However, as ever appearances were deceptive. The curry contained 11 different vegetables (mange tout, courgette, aubergine, green pepper, red pepper, yellow pepper, sweet corn, butternut squash, spinach, chives, onion) though neither Steffi or I had all 11 (Steffi got lucky with the onion and spinach). Using the vegetable crispness test we were also able to determine that there were at least two generations of vegetable present. The mange tout peas were excellent and crispy however the green beans were soft and, we suspect, recycled from yesterday. So there was an element of getting-rid-of-the-leftovers ness about the curry but none the less it was really good.

Dinner was always going to struggle to live up to lunch but none-the-less it put up a valiant effort. The mushroom risotto was slightly plain but not bad. It was "decorated" with some leeks which was perhaps a mistake however. The leeks looked a bit like they do when I fry them for slightly too long at home. On mature reflection we felt they probably had the taste and texture of burnt grass. Still this shouldn't detract from a highly serviceable risotto.

An "honest" mushroom risotto, set off nicely with some peppers and tomatoes from the salad bar

Workwise we continue to progress. We've now done large scale maps of one really fresh granule and two old ones (somewhere between one and forty two days old) together with detailed areas of each of these. Beatriz arrived from Leeds today and is currently making standards. We'll run these next and then proceed to our last granule - another fresh one. By tomorrow lunch time we should have finished with the granules leaving two and bit days for data processing for me and snow algae work for Liane and Steffi. Only after we've processed the standards will we be really and truly confident that we've caught our elusive prey - the lesser spotted ACC.