Looking Out To Sea

Severely snowed out today so SICP study group was cancelled. I’m using the time in the house to make stock with the bag full of lamb bones and bits that have been sitting in the freezer for many months. I think I will make some kind of soup with it later, preferably one with lots of chunky vegetables and other interesting bits. I’ve also got a bunch of beetroot in the fridge which I intend to make into beetroot and chocolate cake, because it was so tasty last time I made it. (And I want to do it in a cooler oven since 190°C blackened the outside without cooking through when I made it before. That was the only occasion when the skewer test has been useful to me.)

Back to the topic of the study group. Reading SICP is deceptively easy at times. Each step is a simple progression from the last, such that each idea seems obvious and trivial. Then suddenly some trivial new concept makes no sense at all and you find yourself backtracking through pages of explanation to find some firm handhold from which to start moving forward again. Most of the time I feel that I’m not learning anything but I realised today that some things which were not intuitive in the past are now familiar and natural. I was reading The Arrow Calculus and realised that I could understand all of the notation and type rules for lambda calculus and arrows given. It was the environment stuff in particular that felt “obvious” in the way that it wouldn’t have in the past, and I’ve been doing a lot of interpreter writing and environment-jigging in recent weeks with SICP. It’s all coming together.

It was Helen’s birthday last week and, as per tradition, she took cakes to work her tutorial group at university.

She was too busy studying so I made the cakes (this was okay, as in recent years she has ended up making cakes for me to take to work on my birthday, so this was repaying the favour), and had a bit of fun with them.

I had been following one person’s escapades with baking cakes inside cakes, such as brownie inside muffins (really) and thought I would take a first foray in that direction. I made some fairly plain cupcakes but buried some chocolate balls (slightly larger than a malteser) inside each one. The chocolate balls were Hallowe’en treats that each came individually wrapped in “eyeball” tin foil. Then when I was trying to work out how to ice them Helen suggested using icing pens to write on them. Then she went to bed and I sat down to work some words out.

My first thought was to take Word of the Day for Helen’s birthday for the last ten years (I had ten cakes to decorate) but I couldn’t easily find a list going back that far. The easily-searched sites (like wiktionary) weren’t established long enough to have ten years of archives!

My second thought was nonsense words, and this was even harder. I would have to look through the published works of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear in order to find some really good ones. Good nonsense words, ones with a nice feel and pleasing sound, are harder to find than you might think.

In the end I settled on cake words. What I actually did was search the installed dictionary for some nice cake words, and then fill in a few more from memory. (I didn’t like griddlecake or coffeecake and thought the latter should probably be two words.)

$ grep cake$ /usr/share/dict/words
cake
cheesecake
coffeecake
cupcake
fruitcake
griddlecake
hotcake
pancake
shortcake

Once I had my words I removed the cake part and iced the remaining prefix/suffix onto each bun. So I had a bunch of cakes with the words “pan”, “beef”, “short” and so on.

Now Helen tells me that when she opened the tin on the following day no-one could understand what these words meant. They sat and thought and came to no good conclusions, until someone finally said:

Well, I’m going to have the “beef” cake — oh

I was glad to have provided a little bit of mystery. :-)

We’ve been doing this book group thing for over a year now and one thing that’s become really obvious is the way that potluck events don’t scale. Or at least, the way we do them ends in tasty tasty disaster.

The problem is that each person brings a dish which is enough food for more than one person. Nobody wants to supply enough pasta salad for only two or three people if there’s eight people in the group. So each person caters for their own conception of the group. (Last time I made a dozen pretzels, because I didn’t want anyone to go without. But there’s a good amount of eating in a pretzel…)

If there’s three people and each brings enough for three people it works out fine. Each person eats a small portion of three different dishes. If there are six people each person will attempt to get six different portions onto their plate. Now a portion has a reasonable lower limit, and so people just end up piling their plates higher. They just have to eat more if they want to taste everything. Then there might be things which are just very tasty, and so people go back for seconds. I mean, it’s just sitting there in front of you, it would go to waste otherwise, starving children in Elbonia, etc.

And then you realise that some of the group brought chocolate cake, brownies, fruit pies and you haven’t even seen that stuff yet. Your stomach is folding around the edge of the table and you’re worried about being charged for two fares on the bus home.

So you have to exercise terrifying self-constraint with portion size or — gasp — not taste some of the dishes. Potluck events are a menace to waistlines and dignity everywhere.

If you’ve never seen real naan made in a tandoor it’s hard to imagine the strangeness of the procedure. Stretching out a thin piece of dough and attaching it to the walls of a dangerously hot clay oven for a few brief minutes. But it works marvellously to bake thin bread like naan, and produces a unique combination of smooth even flatbread on one side and charred blisters on the other.

The method I used was a combination of Madhur Jaffrey’s recipe and Heston Blumenthal’s baking technique. Heston Blumenthal, for reasons best known to himself, uses a chemically-leavened dough which seems more suited to scones than bread so I didn’t bother with his recipe. But the technique of heating two baking stones face-to-face in the oven seemed worth pursuing. You use one stone for baking the bread while the other reflects heat onto the outside of the naan. If your oven can do it you could experiment with the grill at the same time for extra direct heat.

I ran out of time to let the bread rise properly when I tried this recipe, which resulted in a stodgier less elastic product than I was hoping for. But the fact that naan is spread extremely flat before baking means it’s quite resilient to under-proving: in essence it becomes a slightly fluffier unleavened bread like a pitta or something.

The baking was great fun. I had my two pizza stones face to face in the V shape prescribed, the temperature of the oven at maximum, and a tea towel with my teardrop shaped naan sitting on it. Real tandoor chefs seem to use a small cushion to attach the dough to the walls of the tandoor, so the tea towel was a good approximation which worked really well. I could push the dough hard onto the stone and it would stick firmly. After 3–4 minutes I pulled them out and put the next one in. The flat side was evenly brown and the bubbly side had a nice organic texture and browned bubbles. Pretty authentic looking.

It tasted quite nice, and the sour note of the yoghurt came through quite well. Less time restrictions would have produced an even nicer texture, I’m sure. My next foray will involve flavourings, which I had neither the energy nor time to investigate on this occasion. Garlic looks like a good place to start.

I don’t know if I ever saw it the first time round, but I saw Tron this evening. Now I’m fully prepared for the sequel when it appears.

A few friends came over and we got fajitas from Los Cardos across the road — and despite the utilitarian appearance the food was pretty good. The staff were friendly too. I got a “fajita burrito”, which is kinda what I’d call a fajita if I was making it at home, except they loaded it with rice as well as the usual fried onions, peppers, cheese, salsa and spicy chicken. (There are a number of other fillings available besides chicken, including haggis…) The food was more or less what you’d make yourself, simple but plentiful, and they had big, good quality tortillas which seems to be the hardest part when it comes to make-your-own fajita meals.

The film was weird as all hell. I borrowed the special edition with audio commentary and a separate making-of disc — I wonder what explanation they’ll have for some of the stranger scenes. Some didn’t even seem to connect at all to the rest of the story. It certainly wasn’t what I expected. I knew there was action in light-striped arenas that probably represented some gaming system, but I didn’t realise that most of the protagonists would be computer programs. Needless to say, if you know anything about computers you have to plug your ears at some points or risk bursting into entirely inappropriate laughter. The plot is a bit like The Lord of the Rings (take the magical item into the evil overlord’s domain to free everyone from tyranny).

The sequel — coming out in December I think, so aiming for the family Christmas market I suppose — follows the action twenty five years later in the same inner-computer environment. Hopefully they won’t be relying on the crutch of dazzling graphics and spectacle instead of coherent plot. But that’s probably a foolish hope…

Helen’s out tonight because one of her colleagues is leaving the lab, so she didn’t get to see it. Maybe we’ll watch it tomorrow with extras before I give the DVD back.

I’m not long back from Greener Leith’s latest evening community talk. This is the second event I’ve been to, held in the Kirkgate Community Centre at the foot of Leith Walk. Last month was about hedgerow foraging which was quite interesting — I bought the book! — but I haven’t really followed up on any of the notions it inspired. It is much easier to just buy the book…

Today they were continuing the food theme with a talk from Donald from the local convivium of the Slow Food movement. Last month’s talk was very well attended so it was quite embarrassing to realise that I was the only person in the room that wasn’t (a) a presenter or (b) on the Greener Leith organising committee. I was “the public”.

I don’t really have much to say about Slow Food as an organisation — they are bound up by some vague notion of anti–fast food but don’t define themselves particularly. Most of their members internationally are local food producers and independent farmers of one type or another. There are a lot of them, and they have a big meeting once every two years to celebrate their strange unity, but they are not really important for Leith.

Leith has not much in the way of wheat fields or cattle so the focus locally is obviously on the more urban concerns — local producers and retailers, and hooking them up with each other and the general public. Getting people to investigate the bakers rather than Tesco, and getting the local farmed produce into the hands of people who live in Edinburgh.

Since there were so few of us in the room it was just a chat rather than a presentation, and the presenter brought some small examples of local produce — a loaf of sourdough from the Manna House and some bottles of Stewart Brewery beers. We talked (well, they talked; I mostly listened) about local food issues and small ideas to change the way food is seen.

The most concrete, and actually quite interesting, idea that was mentioned was a Slow Food Table at the Leith Gala. Try to get as many people to contribute something to a table of food which people are encouraged to sit at and take time to eat. Provide a contrast to fast food served elsewhere at the gala. Maybe there will be more of this?

Of course the real problem with food, locally and in many urban areas, is that so many people have been disconnected from food for so long that, even if given a plentiful and cheap supply of good food, they don’t know what to do with it. Trying to bring together local professional chefs and schoolchildren has not met with much success. I have no real solutions to offer, other than to note that the people who sell fruit, vegetables, meat and fish must have some passion for it, and should be consulted. (Obviously I’m ignoring the supermarkets in this, but there are a fair number of “high street” food shops in Leith which fit the butcher, greengrocer, fishmonger archetype.)

Well, I have volunteered what I can and hopefully come June we’ll have a plan to put into execution for the Leith Gala.

We’ve had so much success with recipes in the last few years that it’s sometimes easy to forget that some recipes are useless through and through. If you’re not very familiar with the general idea then it’s easy to get dragged far from the path by a instructions that are confusing or just downright wrong.

That’s what happened to me last week when I tried Scrummy Chocolate Swirl Shortbread from the Green & Blacks Chocolate Recipes book. I couldn’t really remember what the process for shortbread was so I just followed the instructions and ended up with something useless quite demoralising. I later checked Delia and James Martin’s respective recipes for shortbread and confirmed that the recipe in the Chocolate book is utter bobbins. Compare:

• Cream sugar into butter, then add flour.
• Mix dry ingredients then rub in butter.

The first one gets you a stiff dough, the second ones gets you breadcrumbs. And at that point there’s not much you can really do to pull it back — it’s not easy to decrumb crumbs.

I’ve just tried again, ignoring the mixing process they suggested in favour of Delia Smith’s instructions, and they seem much better. They’re cooling at the moment. Now I get to revisit the original recipe and mark it up for future occasions. I’m not sure if I should write proper instructions, or just score the whole thing out with “Wrong! Consult Delia!”. That would be more satisfying.

Just back from a cracking night at Calistoga, Californian restaurant hidden in a side alley of Rose Street. You know, just down past the ‘sauna’.

We’re away tomorrow and for the long weekend, in Glasgow for a wedding. It’s going to be a bit new. Ostensibly a Muslim wedding but with certain obvious heresies — the groom’s family are Chinese, so there will be pork or chicken’s feet at the meal, possibly both. Because that’s tradition too.

Well, whatever happens the bride and groom are lovely people and I wish them all the best. I hope the events go without a hitch (apart from the obvious one). Here’s some Bell X1 to see you out, extolling the virtues of tea to a Boston audience and singing Flame.

Last weekend we holidayed in Galloway. (Actually, it’s now two weekends ago because it’s taken ages to get the photos online.)

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A few days ago I followed a recipe for ricotta and blueberry buns from one of those supermarket cookery leaflets. I was beset on all sides by problems (like the ricotta in the fridge turning out to be mascarpone) but eventually got there.

They are… okay. I don’t really know what I would do in future, but they need several things done to them. First, they are too well done on top. They are all beyond golden, into that phase we shall call “browned”. I made some of them pinched together around the filling like a sack, and some as smooth round domes. The domed ones would be better if glazed. The messy-looking ones are better unglazed, but are still too dark.

The muffin cases aren’t a great idea. The dough doesn’t separate well from the paper, so I should maybe use the parchment that the recipe asks for. I just thought it seemed like too much of a hassle.

I’d really like to do them again so that I can undo all my mistakes. But I’m less motivated to make doughs at the moment because the flat is so cold that the yeast takes forever to activate. All proving times seem to need doubled. Maybe we just need a warmer flat!