Looking Out To Sea

The year of the cookery challenge has ended now. That’s a whole recipe book, experienced and tasted and documented. I don’t know if it’s the kind of thing you do more than once. There is someone out there who did a meal from Rachel Ray’s 365 Day No Repeat Meals book, but quickly gave up after trying another (less strenuous) cooking challenge. With the knowledge it can be done, the actual doing becomes less interesting…

But we are by no means “done” with cooking itself. How could we be? The plan this year, he says tentatively, is more freeform. We have seen what it is to cook a cookery book. But we are still surrounded by recipes that we have never tried — many other cookery books, recipe cards from supermarkets, not to mention the innumerable recipes written on the bags of flour, sugar, spices and flavoured syrups. (I’m not going to include the “serving suggestion” printed on the Honey Loops packet, which amounts to cereal in a bowl with milk. Though sometimes Rice Krispies has a recipe for chocolate krispie cake.)

We intend to reduce our meat intake a bit, because the quantity that Nigella demanded wasn’t really sustainable. It’s expensive stuff if you want to buy meat that’s worth eating. We intend to set up a box scheme to ensure that we have a steady and ample supply of vegetables. Less meat, more vegetables.

The King of River Cottage
© Gary

To add a bit of tension to this plan, we also plan to use the River Cottage Meat Book and Fish Book more fully. You can see how that might not fit elegantly with the plan to consume less meat. But I hope we can spend the money we do on less fashionable meats and less popular fishes. That seems to mean irregular and bony cuts of meat and fish with unknown names that get landed anyway. I’m sure we can find something interesting.

I wander past many fishmongers and a butcher on the way to work, so I feel sure I can pick up some cheap bits of this and that. My only concern is that if I buy something I won’t have a recipe I can consult in order to pick up the appropriate ingredients on the way home that evening. I can’t really justify buying another two copies to keep on my desk at work!

Which leads us inexorably to PDF books. Why oh why don’t all reference books come with a CD? It would be brilliant to have a list of recipes and their ingredients in a searchable format. All those people with PDAs and swanky phones can load them on for use in the shops and the rest of us can keep them on USB pens, hard disks or wherever else we’ll need them. For a very long while Helen had a note pad dedicated to scribblings of recipe ingredients when she was in full challenge mode. How much easier it would be if the list was already on computer. Even my original transcription of the recipe and chapter titles onto the Challenge page would have been quicker and (as it turns out) contain fewer mistakes.

It’s possible to buy some books in electronic format, but that’s not really what we’re interested in. We already own the real thing, and very nice it is too. We just want the hard work of transfer to computer to be done by someone else. And let’s be fair, it’s not like we’re asking for something very outlandish — the data starts on computer in the first place. (Unless you want to convince me that all these books are typeset by hand.) However, it’s probably as likely to happen as CDs coming with usable MP3s alongside the audio.

Now you must excuse me, I have a muffin from a supermarket recipe card to make!

For her birthday in October I bought Helen the Sharpe box set that was available at the time. Sean Bean as the soldier in Wellington’s army fighting through Spain to Napoleonic France, from the books by Bernard Cornwell. The films (because that is what they are: each episode is 90 minutes long) are excellent fun, but that’s not why I’m here.

I wanted to bring to light the man who plays Dan Hagman in the series, John Tams. He sings the theme song, Over The Hills and Far Away, and incidental songs at regular intervals while the regiment are marching, waiting, sitting by the campfire or burying one of their friends. His aching voice really holds the stories together and makes the viewer feel like they’re there.

John Tams is also, as it turns out, an award-winning folk singer. I stumbled across a compilation of his songs while shopping on Christmas Eve, and it’s been one of the delightful musical discoveries of the season. Have a look for him.

Nothing much happening at the moment. Christmas is Done and Hogmanay is next on the list. The final meal of the Nigella Challenge is scheduled for lunchtime of the 31st December. Can you believe we’re on schedule to succeed?!

Until then, check out the updates Helen’s put up for the past week. This should make up for the radio silence. The question remains — will the last blog post be up before the year finishes?

Just a quick post about Broken Angels by Richard Morgan, the second novel (that I have read) starring Takeshi Kovacs. It’s a more avowedly space operatic, dealing with galactic politics, planetary uprisings and ancient alien civilisations. By contrast, Altered Carbon was very grounded.

This story has a very concise plot: it’s a quest novel. The aim of the quest is to get through a warzone and claim an ancient stargate-like device, and the starship that’s accessible through that gate. All the typical quest elements are there — gathering together a crew, getting funding (I bet Gandalf didn’t have that problem) and transportation, having a saboteur on board, and so on.

The interesting bits, for me, were again related to the author’s continued use of “black boxes” for personalities, and the ability to insert those personalities into new bodies at any reasonable point. The concept of death becomes less forbidding, especially to the soldiers who constitute most of the supporting characters. Death is like computer-game death: just wait to be respawned and jump back into the fray.

With all this fake death, of course, there must be a Real Death, when your “black box” gets destroyed too. And for some reason, a Real Death in the story seems so much worse than real death. I guess because we’re not used to thinking in terms of body death being separate from personality death. Coming to terms with the fact that being killed isn’t so bad is a very large hurdle to overcome. That there is something worse than being killed seems really difficult to fathom.

The two-thirds point of the book reaches proper mind-blowing scifi proportions. Space is big, according to The Guide, so I guess spaceships must also be big. I find it hard not to enjoy the absurd scale of such vessels. It’s one of the Iain M Banks traits I’ve always liked: the ability to completely pull the rug out from beneath your sense of perspective.

Nick mentioned Altered Carbon to me the other day. He said he found the killing objectionable in some way. I don’t remember the details of what he said. The scenes he cited didn’t particularly bother me. Both Black Man (which I read first) and Broken Angels contain scenes which, to me at least, are much more disturbing. If you are particularly squeamish about torture I advise you stay away from these books. In particular, I think there’s something more terrifying about computer-mediated torture. Something about the fact that there is literally no chance of appeal, because the machine isn’t designed to relent or be merciful. I find that idea much more disturbing than a firefight.

Last night we had a grand Christmas party. We had about 20-odd people in the end, though a few notable exceptions. I’m glaring at you, green jumper boy.

As with all things that happen at the moment, the focus of the preparations was the food. We had a significant list of recipes that we wanted to tick off, and we did fairly well. The only major loss was the mincemeat parcels, but we compensated for that in another way.

Matthew was really kind and agreed to help us out for the preparation work. He came round in the middle of the afternoon and worked hard to bring everything together. It certainly wouldn’t have been possible without his input. If you were there and had any of the mince pies, apple pies or the mulled wine you can thank Mat for them. I don’t know what I will do to repay him, but he certainly deserves our heartfelt thanks.

A few months ago Kirsten emailed me to ask for a cranberry bread recipe to pass to her mother. Until last night I didn’t know how it had worked out, so I thought I would try my hand at a loaf with cranberies in it, because they’re quite the Christmas fruit. I used two of the recipes from Richard Bertinet’s Dough, making something suitably Christmas-party flavoured. I removed the nuts from the Pecan and Cranberry Loaves, and moulded them like Poppy Seed Stars. I didn’t have any proper dried cranberries, but I used the same weight of “craisins”, which is a cranberry-heavy dried fruit mix. The result was very tasty… almost like eating bread that had jam already spread on it.

The mince pies that Matthew made (from a recipe in Nigella Lawson’s Feast, so it doesn’t count towards the challenge) were made with cranberry mincemeat supplied by Nick. I’ve a suspicion that the recipe he used for that mincemeat also came via Nigella Lawson too. There’s something terribly incestuous about it all.

I’m very happy that so many people brought a decoration for the tree. We’ve got wire-basket stars and baubles now, and gingerbread trees with coloured-sugar windows, and jangly-legged snowmen and even a festive red double helix. On top of that we’ve inherited several bottles of wine and many packets of crisps, not to mention all the leftovers of pies, popcorn, olives and chocolate. We even have a 1.5 litre bottle of white wine which is probably too big to be chilled in the fridge.

Thanks to everyone who came, and especially to everyone who helped out in some way or another. You’re all great.

In an effort to make myself more adventurous (or at least, less reticent) in the kitchen I’ve lately been throwing myself at cooking with abandon. Often I have no idea what I want to eat when I pour the oil in the bottom of the pan. It just comes together as I work out what I’ve got.

This evening I started off with a large frying pan liberally coated in garlic oil, half a green bell pepper cut into strips and a couple of coarsely chunked spring onions. I fried them at some heat until they didn’t need it any more, by which point I had realised I need some protein and found smoky bacon in the fridge. I dropped the onion/pepper mix on a plate, keeping as much of the juice in the pan as possible and fried a couple of rashers of bacon, coarsely cut with a pair of scissors.

I think at this point I realised that I’d need some carbohydrate and bulk, so started boiling the kettle to make pasta. There wasn’t much water in the kettle but I was only cooking enough fusilli for myself, and I’m a light eater. The water went in fairly quickly and was hot enough to throw the pasta in within thirty seconds I think. At the same time I turned off the bacon, while I approached my next problem.

I started to think about sauce. I should really have something to coat my pasta — what I had at the moment wasn’t really crisp enough for a stir-fry, but it wasn’t wet either. I found a jar of stiff Thai paste for making soups, on the top shelf of the fridge door. I threw in a teaspoon of that and tried to get it to dissolve in the bacony garlic oil. After a few minutes I realised it would help if I added heat, which I did.

The peppers and onions went back in while I hunted around for a slosh of red wine to add to the liquid. Couldn’t find any. Oh well, gave up, started clearing up some of the mess. Checked on the baguettes that are proving on the table. Go to put more music on. Find a nearly-finished bottle of red wine hiding amongst the shopping bags on the table. Victory! A bit of that goes in, gently cooking away.

By the time the past is completed, the red wine has formed a slightly sticky, caramel-looking juice around the peppers and bacon. I throw the whole lot into the drained pasta and slosh it around in the pan to coat everything.

This is the disastrous cooking that I do. Honestly, it tastes quite good: spicy but also sweet. There’s probably a million things I could have done better. But it was quite tasty, so I’m satisfied.

I accidentally came across this video yesterday about bread, and the “Real Bread Campaign”. (The video is from the Do Lectures which seems to be something to do with Howies, the clothing company. I haven’t watched any others yet.)

If you can’t be bothered watching it yourself (and honestly, I don’t particularly recommend it) he:

• talks about industrial milling and bread-making
• makes threatening and evidence-free comments about “enzymes” in your food
• suggests you start baking your own bread

I originally thought to mention the enzyme thing more, but it’s just tediously overdone on this blog I think. Just stop using vague science words in the hope you can make things sound dangerous. All it does is diminish any potential credibility you might have had.

I much preferred the last few minutes of his talk, when the subject settled on bread-making, community, and all that rousing stuff. I do like the idea of a Real Bread Campaign as a parallel to CAMRA, the real ale campaign. They are dealing with something fundamentally different though, so I don’t know what lessons can be learned from the real ale movement.

I recently came across this rather nice post about bread making from someone who obviously likes their bread and the process of making it, and explains it all in a cheerful fashion. And finally a short video on how they made bread back in the 1980s:

I’m now watching CSI: Miami at twenty past eleven. I haven’t eaten anything in two days and the bar has become quite low regarding what I watch. So it has reached the point where David Caruso, sunglasses, and some nonsense plot involving both programmers and skateboarders, seem reasonable. At the same time.

Looks like we’ve got — sunglasses off — a hokey plot — sunglasses on, look to middle distance.

The Christmas food adverts are getting more and more torturous. All those hams, chocolates, Yorkshire puddings and roast potatoes are driving me mad. Also, the knowledge that we have chocolate pistachio fudge in the fridge is preying on my mind.

I’ve seen a lot of references to FingerTrees around but not much explanation of what they are or where they should be used. The common reference is to 2-3 Fingertrees suggested by Ralph Hinze and Ross Paterson in Finger Trees: A Simple General-purpose Data Structure, so that seemed the best place to look.

There is also a working implementation published of 2-3 Fingertrees on Hackage (version 0.0 at time of writing), so between the two I should be able to work out the details for this structure and glean some idea of where to use it.

For the non-programmers, I include a video of Radiohead’s Treefingers, which I was sure was called Fingertrees when I started writing this post. If you search for “radiohead fingertrees” you’ll see I’m not the only one!

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So that was the first big weekend of the summer…

Starts Thursday as usual with a canteen quiz and again no-one wins the big cash prize. Later I do my sound bloke routine by approaching Gina’s new boyfriend to say that he shouldn’t feel that there’s any animosity between us and then I even go and make peace with her. I shouldn’t have bothered. Then on Friday night we went through to the Arches…

There was only one car going, so some of us had to get the train. We got through quite late. Then we went to a pub to take the gear. There was no problems getting in — we saw some others waiting down the front of the queue so we skipped in. It was a good night, everyone was nutted and I ended up dancing with some blonde girl. I thought she had been quite pretty until last night when Matthew informed me that she had, in fact, been a pig. When the club finished we wandered the streets for a while until we got to this 24-hour cafe but I didn’t like the look of it so we left and got a taxi back to Morag’s flat. I couldn’t sleep, so I sat about drinking someone else’s strawberry tonic wine and tried to keep everyone else up.

Then at ten o’clock in the morning we went downstairs to buy some drink. We had intended to watch the football in the afternoon but we’d passed out by then and slept right through it, awaking to find that England had won two-nil. Then we went to get the train home and had a few in the Station bar. We had some stuff left from the previous night’s supplies so when we got home we decided to go down to John’s indie disco. Same story as Friday — lots of hugging, lots of dancing etc. etc. I couldn’t sleep again so went up the park to look at the tomb, taking a detour through the playpark. To get in we had to climb over a ten foot steel fence, which resulted in severe bruising of our hands, legs and groins, but we had a good laugh on the stuff, especially the tube-slide, which probably doubles up as a urinal for drunk teens. Then we walked through the woods to have a look at the tomb. It was a big disappointment, but the mist on the lake was cool.

Sunday afternoon we go up to John’s with a lot of beer in time to watch the Simpsons. It was a really good episode about love always ending in tragedy except, of course, for Marge and Homer. It was quite moving at the end and to tell you the truth my eyes were a bit damp. Then we watched these young girls in swimsuits have a water fight in the street. “Taping this, aye?” We went up to the pub about ten. It was busy for a Sunday night, lots of people we know, including my first ever girlfriend who I still find very attractive, quite frankly, but I didn’t really speak to her. She’s probably still a bitch, anyway. Her friend Gillian was there, I had a chat with her, she was still quite pleasant. At the same time I watched Malcolm make some terrible attempt to try and chat up a girl we know called Jo. He made some remark about her skirt that was barely there the previous night or something. I couldn’t sleep again that night, thanks to some seriously disturbing nightmares… Matthew says I should cut down on the cheese.

“Went out for the weekend, it lasted for ever, high with our friends it’s officially summer.”

I got some sleep eventually on Monday afternoon. It was a beautiful day, and later that evening Malcolm introduced me to the power of Merrydown — £1.79 a litre, 8.2% — mmmm… Judith and Laura came round later and we sat in my back garden and drank. Then Matthew came round and we went up the town.

It’s officially summer.