Looking Out To Sea

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.

Nick’s masked birthday party last week had a large cask, courtesy of Stewart Brewery. The beer didn’t all get finished on the night, so Nick ended up decanting the remains into whatever containers were lying around and brought us a two litre bottle of beer when he visited.

It’s flat now, and not very exciting to drink any more but it makes great bread. I used a recipe from Crust, the “ale and yeast poolish”, and made four small loaves. There is still a lot of beer left, so I’ll need some other means to use up the remainder. If there are no better ideas I might try stewing with it.

If I’d been sensible I would have started the poolish for this bread early so I wouldn’t be baking last thing at night. Best laid plans, etc. Whatever the regrets about timing, the loaves turned out beautifully. I haven’t had much practice at shaping loaves, so they were a bit haphazard. But this turned out to be a good thing because the varying shapes of loaves reacted differently in the oven, and I got a much better impression of how the bread reacts in general.

Specifically, the two loaves which were more compact and loaf-shaped developed a really beautiful burst and a tantalising crust. They expanded up instead of out, which is an effect I’ve been trying to achieve for some time. The two that were more baguette-shaped (flatter and longer) spread apart where they were slashed, rather than bursting up the way. I consider this a very tasty and successful experiment. We’re learning here!

I’m still not completely sure how to maintain the crispy crust after I pull the loaves out of the oven. When I made the pain de campagne last week I didn’t care about the state of the loaves because I wanted them to go stale for the fondue. So I just left them out. And the crust stayed nice and crunchy. So should I stop putting the bread away until they’ve had several more hours to cool? Helen reckons that the heat and moisture inside the bread gets trapped when the bread is trapped in a container, and softens this the crusts again. This seems reasonable to me. Or maybe the only reason the pains de campagne had nice crusts was because they were baked for longer? Something to experiment with on the next attempt.

I gave one loaf to Nick, along with the money I owed him for the beer. (Sorry for being late in my debts!) The recipe suggests that it’s good with a cassoulet and a glass of red wine. Helen improvised a not-cassoulet from the wrong type of beans and some very old sausages from the freezer. It turned out rather fantastic in the end.

I can’t imagine the pain actors must go through when they’re being layered in latex for 5 hours before shooting for things like Lord of the Rings. Especially if, like John Rhys Davies, you learn that you’re allergic to the make-up that you have to wear every day of filming.

My own face is layered in paper and glue at the moment, in a hopeful attempt to have a beautiful, original, exciting mask for a Masquerade Ball, chez Nick. There is still peeling to come, and then the artistry begins. But what kind of mask and, therefore, what to wear on the rest of me? As much as I’d like to go for a very traditional masquerade ball attire, that’s not so easy to knock up from the stuff we have to hand.

excel wall
©

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.

=CHOOSE((SUM(A1:A20)/10)+1, "nothing", "tiny", "small",
                            "ish", "nearly", "halfway",
                            "just over", "decent", "v.good",
                            "excellent", "awesome")

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.

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.

Ciabatta di Como
©

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.

It may be hard to tell, but we’re doing a metric crapload of cooking at the moment. I know, you would never have guessed. The real trouble with cooking (apart from the time, and the expense and the motivation and…) is finding people who want to eat food! Hard to believe, but people apparently have lives and obligations which take precedence over free food. Can’t understand it, myself.

Luckily Nick had no life excuse and came round to help us with a Thai curry this evening. We had a good laugh and great food, which you can read about on Helen’s blog right now.

That means we’ve done at least one recipe every day this week, in case you were having trouble with the numbers. Obviously that might not seem odd — doesn’t everyone eat several times a day? — but let me tell you it’s fraught with difficulty. Getting someone round for a relaxing evening and still getting through a recipe was quite gratifying. We often end up very stressed when there are lots of people coming for a meal, which probably makes everything seem all the more awkward.

I guess that’s the perils of entertaining.

On Monday evening I skipped off to Glasgow with Martin to see Sun Kil Moon, one of the side projects of US singer-songwriter Mark Kozelek. The gig was at a place called Stereo, which sounds like it might be a nightclub but turned out to be a vegan cafe with a stage in the basement, all situated at the far end of a damp side-street.

The music was proper melancholic Americana. All about unrequited love and dead boxers. The band made sure never to crack a smile during the whole performance, or to accidentally look like they were enjoying themselves.

Kozelek’s voice sounds just like it did on the records, though I’m not really sure how to describe it. A strange smooth, strained quality. It was really apparent on Monday night, though hard to describe. Brilliant show, anyway.

Tuesday night we got into another Nigella that had been hanging over us, though I haven’t got round to blogging it yet. Wednesday we went to The Stand Comedy Club. It was a charity fundraiser night for a cancer charity, but we went to see Emily (and Ella, Francis and some other people who I can’t name right now), who has just moved to Aberdeen.

Comedy was reasonable but not great. Last time we were at The Stand in Glasgow it was a weekend show but was even more variable in quality: the best was better but the worst was terrible. After the gig we went to the pub and I dropped Coke all over the table and my seat. And not even in an amusing Woody Allen way either, just the ordinary sugary fizzy liquid way.

Squared circle tea cup
© Ben Haldenby

We were invited out by a friend for “a cup of tea” last night. The cup was actually made of glass and the tea of the Sauvignon blanc variety from Chile. A bit bold for a Tuesday night but there you go.

After the second “cup of tea” I moved onto actual tea, and a slice of lemon, basil and poppy-seed cake. I’d never tasted a cake with basil in it before. Really good stuff. When I get a free moment maybe I should make some more cake.

In fact, Nick mentioned the other night that The Breadwinner are doing classes in cake, pastry and breadmaking. So maybe I’ll just get Nick to make all the cakes instead. How’s that sound, Nick?

I need to concentrate on the breadmaking anyway. I had intended to do some last night, but found I was short on flour and had the above invitation, so put it off. I did bake two more pains de mie on Sunday night, which make good sandwiches for lunch.

Finally, on the subject of food and cooking, this is how the Nigella challenge looks at the moment:

Recipes to go      103
Days to go         126

We’re not quite at the one-a-day stage yet but we can’t afford to start slacking. We are 46% through the book and 66% through the year. We got through two recipes last night and there will be at least another one tonight. At this stage we have to start planning things with a bit more precision. It would be very easy to end up with some very awkward banquet dishes to work through in the last few days of the year.

We will probably be calling on volunteers. If you think you’re up to the challenge, of course.

On Monday the talk at Cafe Scientifique was given by New Zealand’s contender for the 2010 Winter Olympics in the skeleton bob sleigh event. He’s also doing a PhD in related areas — studying how the sledge interacts with the ice, and how the drivers’ wind profile and helmets affect their performance.

It was a damn interesting talk. We had to rush off to catch the final performance of the Antonion Forcione Quartet, but it would have been really great to stay behind and ask more questions.

The film we saw before was as good as I remembered, though Helen slept through it. Last time I took her to see a Japanese film she said it wouldn’t happen again. So it’ll be A Fistful of Dollars and Magnificent Seven from now on!

Nick was waiting in the queue for Forcione when we arrived, so we got good seats (in the third row, left of centre). There were two annoying guys behind me that would gasp and squeal and exhale sharply every time Antonion Forcione did something impressive (which of course was all the damn time). I really didn’t appreciate this running commentary. It got to the point where I would cringe after every display of virtuosity because I knew there was going to be a ridiculous exclamation from behind my right ear.

Show was awesome though. Band were really tight and enjoying themselves too. Apparently he’s been playing the Edinburgh Fringe for about 17 years now… see you there next year!

In completely unrelated news, we received a flyer through the door on Sunday for the Islam Festival in Edinburgh, that had been running concurrently with all the other festivals in August. Including a 3-day conversational course in Arabic! That would have been seriously cool — where else can you get nine hours tuition in beginners’ Arabic for fifteen quid? If we’d received the flyer when the festival started instead of when it ended that probably would have been the impetus I required to ask for time off.

There’s a lesson — don’t hand out flyers after the event has finished.