I don’t know why, but I completely forgot to mention that I saw Mogwai last week. Clearly it’s becoming such a common thing that it’s no longer worth remarking on!
They were on at the Corn Exchange in Edinburgh, which is a grim aircraft hangar of a venue — all concrete floors and high ceilings. Helen and I went for tea at Wannaburger before heading out there, and just as we got off the bus I got a call from Martin (who had bought our tickets) to say there had been some generator failure and the doors were remaining closed for another hour or so. I was a bit worried they might cancel altogether. They’d already had to cancel the end of their US tour recently because the drummer’s pacemaker broke skin…
We met up in the Corn Exchange Bar until a replacement generator turned up. Thank god we didn’t have to wait outside the whole time. I would have been considerably more irritable after an hour in the rain. The quick turn-around meant neither of the support acts got to do sound checks, so there were lots of adjustments mid-song.
Support groups were Errors and Fuck Buttons. Former quite good, in a Kling Klang/Battles kind of way. Fuck Buttons were a bit annoying and incredibly loud. Felt quite addled by the end of their set.
Went to the back of the crowd before Mogwai started. The volume was more than enough for me, and Mogwai are super-keen on the strobes and other energetic lighting. In the old days they’d just break out the strobes for the last song of the night, Like Herod or maybe My Father, My King. No more! Nowadays it’s a “sod the electricity bill” approach to stage lighting.
I’m having trouble remembering what they played, it was not yesterday. Batcat was really good. Powerful. Almost go as far as saying a “rock” song. On the other end of spectrum, Christmas Steps was breathtaking. I love the way the crowd went instantly still the moment the opening notes were played. Of course they spoiled this by breaking into rapturous applause a good two minutes before the song ended.
I’d heard rumour they had been playing Mogwai Fear Satan again, with Barry Burns’ flute getting a look in, but not this time. But I’ll be back and so will they.
I’ve just been reading through the blog from the Kamikaze Cookery people and I’m pretty disappointed to be honest. They don’t apparently seem to like food. Rice apparently “tastes okay”; peas, likewise, “taste okay”. And all the recipes from various books that they do seem to turn out really badly. Why is it we never have these problems?
I’d like to think that a food blog would be a tad more excited about food than this. I know Helen is a lot more enthusiastic than that, and I’m pretty sure it comes across in her writing.
After reading the caption on this silly Daily Mail article I decided to do a quick Google experiment. Searching for “storm in a X-cup” with quotes and replacing X with various sizes, to see which is the commonest storm type. (I also used an instead of a where relevant.)
At the weekend I was suckered in to buying more books. Cos I like ‘em.
The Steep Approach to Garbadale by Iain Banks
Iain Banks’ most recent general fiction book, though sometimes the lines are quite thin between his mainstream and science fiction. I don’t know much about it, though apparently its working title was “Matter”, which is coincidentally the title of the book he released after that…
Matter by Iain M Banks
Yeah, this one, in fact. It came out at the beginning of the year but I’ve held off because I don’t like buying hardback books. They look all out of place beside my second-hand paperbacks. I guess that’s what happens when you “catch up” with an author’s output. It also means I’ve got several different book cover styles for the same author, which I find ever-so-slightly infuriating.
The Princess Bride by S Morgenstern (abridged by William Goldman)
I had a conversation in the pub with Bex a few weeks ago about this. She recommended the book as being much like the film but also better. And also explained the conceit behind the authorship — that S Morgenstern is a fiction invented by Goldman. And I’m glad she did explain this vital fact, or I’d be wandering around holding the “abridged” version and looking for the original.
I’m currently about 150 pages into Matter and enjoying it, though finding time to read is harder when you don’t commute on public transport. Sitting on the sofa with a book is nice, but nicer still when the room is cosy to match.
On Sunday I went out to hunt for a spice mixture and found nothing in the end. I did learn that the new Jenners food hall is a travesty of absurd proportions, which apparently only sells whisky and shortbread. And you know how hard they are to buy in Edinburgh. But no Ras el Hanout in the shops nearest the flat. Which is really annoying, because I saw some in Lupe Pintos on Saturday afternoon but thought we already had some…
On the way home after my failure of a shopping trip, I hid from the rain in Waterstones and picked up a copy of Crust, the sequel to Dough by Richard Bertinet. Bread porn!
Last night I sat down to watch the included DVD, which has a guide to making a sourdough ferment, a sourdough bread, and brioche. Brioche! Ah, how incredibly fat I could get eating brioche… there has got to be some reason I can invent for me to make a batch of brioche. They looked like a lot of work but were rather beautiful in the end, so I’ll have to come up with an excuse, however tenuous.
(In a related situation, I haven’t yet made the doughnuts from Dough. I need some hearty appetites to feed and a way to heat oil to the right temperature. We don’t have a chip fryer and when we made fried goujons and later calamari we were a bit hit-and-miss with the temperature of the oil. We don’t have a thermometer that would cope with that kind of heat.)
There are still many recipes from Dough that I want to try, so I certainly won’t be abandoning it. Crust instead has more unusual breads — like the afrementioned brioche, as well as bagels and pretzels — rather than the everyday stuff. There are also more tips that help to clarify a lot of what was written in the first book, and presumably teaching tips he’s learned since opening his school in Bath. Crust seems to be a very good complement to Dough in that regard: more focus on technique, theory and longer, more complicated recipes. You can feel free to learn what you can from the “difficult” book but apply that to the more straightforward recipes in the other.
The temperature this morning was colder than I would have wanted. At some point I think Christmas might happen. And there are a selection of heartier loaves that I’ve been leaving off until the weather begins to get this way. I even owe Nick a loaf of something that I can’t recall. It was brown with interesting things in it — shallots may have been one of the ingredients. (But then again he owes us about a million cooked meals by now so I probably shouldn’t feel too guilty.) Time to buy in another load of flour and crank up the oven…
On Friday night Emily mentioned something interesting from her exciting adventures in Excel programming — you can only nest up to seven IF statements in a cell for conditional processing of data. This seems an annoying arbitrary limit, but then again, seven IF statements should be enough for anyone.
I can’t think of any circumstances where I would use seven nested statements, but I guess if you’re fitting it all in a spreadsheet cell you have a limited set of ways to approach the problem.
It seems there are a lot of other people out there who hit the 7-statement limit and ask for help. Actual help seems thin on the ground. One commenter suggests CHOOSE:
CHOOSE(position, result1, result2, ..., result29)
I don’t know if this would have solved Emily’s problem or not. She wanted something for a 10-value range but that’s all I can remember. So I’ll just invent a scenario that seems plausible. Cells A1 to A20 contain scores out of 5. The maximum value for the whole lot is 100. If we take this sum and divide it by 10, we divide the whole range of scores into ten-point increments, numbered 0 to 9. We add one and use this value to look up the respective value in the list to the right. 1 gives the first result, 2, the second and so on.
I don’t know if there are more subtle or flexible ways of approaching this problem that (a) don’t have arbitrary limitations and (b) don’t require dropping into VBA. Answers on a postcard.
The domestic economy, like the one in the wider world, has apparently collapsed. We have both been ill to varying degrees since the weekend. I had Tuesday off, and Helen left work early this afternoon in order to keep an appointment with a large blanket.
In this time the house has filled up with dirty dishes and snotty hankies. It’s amazing how quickly entropy takes over.
We have not done any significant cooking since the weekend. But tomorrow we’ve got visitors so I hope we’ll be feeling up to it. I plan to start some dough tonight before going to bed. But now, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is on telly.
It’s too bad she won’t live! But then again, who does?
Coverville episode 381, from November 2007, contains a cover of All Along The Watchtower. The host does his very best to drive home the importance of this particular track to the ending of season three of Battlestar Galactica.
But it’s been a long long time since I last heard that track, and it totally escaped me when we got round to watching the season finale. I kept completing lines, thinking “this is funny, why are they all saying Dylan lyrics?”. Even when the song become part of the soundtrack I still didn’t make that leap. I am clearly an idiot.
But aside from that, exciting stuff! Now I really want to dive straight into season four but that would be bad. We should watch Razor first.
Last night we all went out to A Room In Leith, which was called The Waterfront when I visited with my work early last year. Food was good, though they’d run out of potato wedges by 8 o’clock so all the steak eaters got asparagus instead. Most of my table had some kind of steak, apart from Emma’s swordfish and my coley. I’d never heard of coley before but it was really tasty on its bed of scallops.
The restaurant is just one room, and the rest of the building is a nice pub with the appalling name of Teuchter’s Landing. It has a dizzying, indeed terrifying, selection of whiskies for sale. Which goes some way to explaining why I didn’t get my ciabatta started until about 10.30 this morning. Pounding dough on the work surface, Bertinet-style, is a lot less relaxing with a drink-induced headache. Thankfully the bread came out really tasty and soft, though not as pretty as I’d hoped. I have trouble with the shaping of my loaves but it’s not something that’s cheap to practise — there’s a lot of preparation involved before you get to the shaping stage.
I’ll let Helen tell you about the rest of the food when she’s good and ready. At the moment we’re both feeling sluggish and brainless with cold symptoms. There probably would have been nothing better than watching more Battlestar Galactica this evening. I’m becoming more desperate and thus more tempted by the Seasons 1-4 + Mini-series + Razor boxed set.
After last week’s unfortunate and not well-received brunch we need to make amends. The first thing to do is to make some nice bread to compensate for the Nigella bread which was quite nice but chock full of allergens. Nuts, as they say.
So I was up a wee bit earlier than usual to start a biga for the bread. A biga is a stiff mixture of flour, water and yeast which you let sit for a day in its bowl. By the end of this the yeast has created a light, bubbly mixture that’s a bit like dough. You can then build up a proper dough around this base for bubbly breads like ciabatta, which is what I’ll be making with it tomorrow morning.
