![[23/52] Logs by kcm76](https://farm3.static.flickr.com/2702/5816258568_fe3e2b214f.jpg)
[23/52] Logs, a photo by kcm76 on Flickr.
Week 23 entry for 52 weeks challenge.
At the King’s Head pub, Bawburgh, near Norwich.
The King’s Head has been known for many years for it’s good food. It’s well worth a visit for good gastro-pub food. Chips to die for! And for a good selection of local real ales – the Adnams is especially good.
Bawburgh is a pretty, small village just a handful of miles to the west of Norwich, just off A47 outer ring road.
For one week only Kate Takes 5 has this week handed over the Listography to Keith at Chronicles of a Reluctant Housedad. And Keith is asking us to think about our five finals: final farewells, final suppers, final resting places, etc. So here are five thoughts about some final things for me …
Final Supper: Lamb Sag Madras with Bombay Aloo, Cauliflower Bhaji and Lemon Rice.
I love curry in almost all its guises. So almost any curry would do.
Final Drink: Several pints of Adnams’ East Green.
I was pretty nearly weaned on Adnams’ Bitter (well I was a post-grad at the time) and to this day it is their beers I enjoy the most. East Green is a recent eco-friendly brew which for me just has the edge on Adnams’ Bitter.
Final Words: “Oh fuck …”
Well what else is there to say?
Final Act: Hug Noreen and cry.
‘Cos I shall miss her and ‘cos I’ve not been a better husband and lover.
Final Destination: Hell.
Just think of all the interesting people there are to meet in Hell: Oscar Wilde, Emperor Claudius, Richard Feynman, Isaac Newton, Joseph Campbell as well as an assortment of artists, pornographers and thinkers. Should be a good party!
Noreen did us a scrummy tea last night using one of my oldest, simplest and best tested recipes: Microwave Kedgeree. As you’d expect from me it’s a bit different, so here’s the recipe. If you don’t like fish there are some options at the end.
Microwave Kedgeree
Serves 4 normal people or 2 gluttons
6 oz (180 grams) Long Grain Rice
3 or 4 large Eggs
12 oz (350 grams) Smoked Haddock
2 or 3 Tomatoes (roughly chopped)
2 medium Onions (sliced)
2 cloves Garlic
Butter (or Extra-Virgin Olive Oil)
8-10 Black Olives (optional)
Pepper and Herbs (fresh if possible)
1. Hard boil the eggs and cook the rice.
2. Cook the fish in the microwave with a little butter.
3. Braise the onions and garlic in the microwave (3-5 minutes on 100%) with a little butter.
4. Meanwhile flake the fish, shell and chop the eggs, drain and rinse the rice, roughly chop the tomatoes, pit and halve the olives.
5. Mix everything together in a large serving dish.
6. Season to taste with pepper and herbs and dot with butter. (There will probably be enough salt from the fish.)
7. Heat through in the microwave for 5 minutes on 100%.
8. Serve and eat.
You could actually do this with any smoked fish, although I think kippers might not be the best option. Or you could even try a version with pancetta, chorizo or beans (just omit step 2 if you start with a ready cooked ingredient). Another option is to use mushrooms instead of tomatoes.
Slightly late with this week’s Listography entry, as proposed by Kate Takes 5. This week it’s all about products — specifically those top five products you couldn’t live without.
So in the interests of not frightening the horses natives, here’s my sensible list:
Laptop or PC. I don’t mind if I have a laptop or a desktop PC; I’m happy using either; both have advantages and disadvantages. But I’m a fish out of water without instant access to the intertubes and all my documentation.
Bed. I need my sleep. I need oil tanker loads of beauty sleep and even then it doesn’t do any good. Bed for me is a haven; not just somewhere to sleep but somewhere to relax, read, think and even on occasions watch TV. Yes, we still live very much in student mode, even 40 years after the event!
Camera. I always carry a camera. You never know what you’re going to see. Mostly it’s dull, but very occasionally it isn’t. And I like photographing people and the odd things that go on around me; especially people. Even at home my camera sits to hand on my desk.
Beer. Well we’d better have something to sustain us. I don’t drink a lot of beer these days; I’ve switched mostly to wine in the interests of trying (and failing) to lose weight and control the diabetes. But I love beer and couldn’t do without the occasional fix. And anyway, what else does one really want to drink with curry?
Glasses. As in spectacles. I’m as blind as a bat without my glasses, which I’ve worn since I was about 14. They are such a part of me that I don’t know I’m wearing them, so I’ve never even bothered to think much about having lenses — and not too much point now as I’d still need reading glasses. I like my varifocals; unlike many people I’ve never had problem with them.
So there you are. What are your top five things you couldn’t do without.
Number 5 in my monthly series of “Ten Things” for 2011. Each month I list one thing from each of ten categories which will remain the same for each month of 2011. So at the end of the year you have ten lists of twelve things about me.
Here’s this week’s selection of words that have caught my eye in the last week …
We’ve replaced the time we used to spend cooking food with watching people cook food on TV.
[Fiona Yeudall quoted in “Foodies: Are food crazies getting their just desserts?”, The Globe and Mail, 19 March 2011]
“No data yet,” he answered. “It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgement.”
[Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes]
It is important to reflect on the kindness of others. Every aspect of our present well-being is due to others’ hard work. The buildings we live and work in, the roads we travel, the clothes we wear, and the food we eat, are all provided by others. None of them would exist but for the kindness of so many people unknown to us.
[Dalai Lama]
London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.
[Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes]
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
[Richard Feynman]
I grew convinc’d that truth, sincerity and integrity in dealings between man and man were of the utmost importance to the felicity of life.
[Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography]
If it’s not fun, you’re not doing it right.
[Bob Basso]
Marshall’s corollary to the last: If it isn’t fun, don’t do it.
![[12/52] Delirium](https://farm6.static.flickr.com/5052/5565191572_f90d6a9d9d.jpg)
Week 12 entry for 52 weeks challenge.
This was a grab shot from the car while waiting at traffic lights at Greenford Broadway last weekend. I was attracted by the wonderfully colourful primulas (they must be Primula locus-concilium they are such a favourite of local authority Parks & Gardens Departments) in the Spring sunshine.
This wobbly processed form is about how I saw the picture at the time as I was just starting a high fever from some nasty flu-cum-bronchitis-bug-thingy that seems to be doing the rounds here at present. This bug is nasty. Noreen is now four weeks into it and is still not 100%. I thought I’d got away with it (just had a bit of malaise for a few days when Noreen was first down with it). But no, it mugged me and I have spent a large part of the last week snuggled under the duvet trying to get rid of a fever and graveyard cough and feeling like … well let’s not go there. I now feel bodily coldy; still totally depleted of everything both mental and physical; still with a cough, although that is going slowly; but today almost no voice.
But then I have just put away a hearty salad of pulled lamb, lamb’s lettuce, tomato and avocado with a couple of large glasses of white Burgundy (first alcohol in over a week!) which does somewhat restore the soul if not the body.
Yesterday’s Times reprinted an interesting essay written by one Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher under the title Love in a Dish. As the introductory blurb says: “Couples who delight in food will delight each other: it is as true now as it was when food writer MFK Fisher wrote this essay on cookery and intimacy in 1948”. Although the article is now deeply un-PC (and American) the essential sentiment is indeed still relevant today.
As the article is hidden behind a paywall (so I can’t link to it) here are a few key extracts.
Brillat-Savarin,who amused himself in his old age by writing The Physiology of Taste […] concerned himself mightily with the problem of married bliss. He wrote many paragraphs and pages on the importance of gastronomy in love, and told […] that happiness at table leads to happiness in bed.
A mutual enjoyment of the pleasures of the table […] has an enormous influence on the felicity that can and should be found in marriage. A couple […] who can share this enjoyment “have, at least once every day, a delightful reason for being together […] have an unfailing subject of conversation; they can talk not only of what they are eating, but also of what they have eaten before and will eat later, and of what they have noticed in other dining rooms, of fashionable new recipes and dishes, etc. […]
Brillat-Savarin felt […] that a man and woman who share any such basic need as the one for food will be eager to please and amuse each other in the satisfying of that need, and will do what they can to make the basically animal process enjoyable. “And the way in which mealtimes are passed […] is most important to what happiness we find in life.”
[…]
It seems incredible that normal human beings not only tolerate the average American restaurant food, but actually prefer it to eating at home. The only possible explanation for such deliberate mass-poisoning, a kind of suicide of the spirit as well as the body, is that meals in the intimacy of a family dining-room or kitchen are unbearable.
[…]
At home, fatigue and boredom would sour the words they spoke and the food they ate, and the words would be hateful and the food would be dull as ditchwater and drearily served forth. […]
And having failed so completely to satisfy in harmony one of their three basic needs, it cannot be wondered that the other two, for love and shelter, are increasingly unfulfilled. There can be no warm, rich home-life anywhere else if it does not exist at table, and in the same way there can be no enduring family happiness, no real marriage, if a man and woman cannot open themselves generously and without suspicion one to the other over a shared bowl of soup as well as a shared caress.
[…]
A healthy interest in the pleasures of the table, the gastronomical art, can bring much happiness. […]
In Richardson Wright’s Bed-Book of Eating and Drinking, he wrote in a discussion of the delights of supping in the kitchen, that more meals served on oilcloth by the stove might be one way to “stabilise our American marital status. I hold to the lowly belief,” he went on, “that a man never knows the sureness of being happily married until he has… cooked a meal himself”.
[…]
“The first sign of marital trouble is when a man or woman finds it distasteful to face each other at table. … I am convinced that a man and wife with congenial appetites and a knowledge of foods and cooking have the basis for lasting happiness.”
[…]
Even steak and potatoes, when they have been prepared with a shared interest and humour and intelligence, can be one great pleasure which leads to another, and perhaps — who knows — an even greater one.
In fact I would be tempted to go a step further and suggest that anyone who cannot enjoy food cannot truly enjoy life.
MFK Fisher’s Love in a Dish and Other Pieces is due for publication by Penguin in April 2011; it can be pre-ordered from Amazon.
As mentioned a couple of days ago, we seem to have eaten particularly well this week. By that I don’t mean that we’ve been especially lavish with 27 course meals of caviare, asparagus and hen’s teeth in aspic. It’s just that our single course, evening meal has, each day, been a proper and usually interesting repast; none of this “ploughman’s stuff” (good though bread and cheese can be).
Here’s what we’ve eaten as “meal of the day” over the last week:
The curries were washed down with industrial quantities of Gin and (low calorie) Tonic; the other meals with wine.
The two beef dishes on Friday and Saturday were because I bought a good, reduced price (because of short use by date) piece of organic beef at the supermarket on Friday. This made me amend my original plan for Friday of Smoked Salmon and Pasta Salad.
Like all our cooking these dishes were made from fresh ingredients and in our own idiosyncratic way designed to be healthy(-ish), and quick & easy to do on the hob at the end of a working day. No buggering around with difficult cream sauces, 29 steps, three ovens, a grill and spun sugar. Good food doesn’t have to be difficult, over fancy or time-consuming; and quick food doesn’t have to be unhealthy.
Just as well, mind you, that we’ve eaten so well this week as I shall be condemned to survive of gutless rubbish next week as I have a series of medical tests (postponed from 2 weeks ago) which mean I have to have a special diet for a few days. Bummer!
(Recipes available on request.)
I’ve been thinking a lot about food this week. Which I suspect is because we’ve had a week of eating exceptionally well – more of this in the next couple of days, I hope. Not un-naturally my thoughts turned towards curry.
I love curry. I’ve been eating curry almost as long as I can remember and I always have loved it. I’ll eat almost any meat or vegetable curried. Lamb or beef are the favourites. Pork would be my last choice of meat; somehow it never seems to quite work when curried. But I’m not keen on prawns in curry – their flavour is too delicate – and I’ve not been impressed the couple of times I’ve tried curried fish.
I’ll eat curry as hot as you care to make it. I regularly used to make vindaloo when I was a student, and I do still occasionally, although I generally don’t eat vindaloo in restaurants as one never knows quite how stunningly hot they’ll make it or how good it will be; Madras is a safer bet in terms of hotness and goodness until one knows the restaurant. I’m not so keen on the mild, sweeter styles like Kashmir, but that’s because I dislike sweet with meat. I love coconut in curry although we tend to avoid using it due to the high fat content.
And curry to me means Indian sub-continent curry. I don’t dislike &ndash indeed I do rather like – Thai green or red curries but for me they don’t have that quintessential curryness. The same applies to other hot spicy dishes from SE Asia – they’re good but not really quite like curry.
I don’t mind whether my curry comes with rice, or nan bread, or (preferably) both. I’m not a great one for the traditional accompaniments to curry. Mango chutney is horrible – it’s sweet with meat again and also sweet with vinegar, neither of which I like overly. But I do quite like raita or yoghurt or even mayonnaise. At home we most often eat chopped banana and/or chopped avocado as an accompaniment to curry – they work surprisingly well. Curry is always washed down with either a couple of beers or industrial quantities of gin and tonic. Never wine. I know many people say wine is OK with curry but it doesn’t work for me.
We make curry at least once a week, and it is always different as we usually blend our own spices – well really it’s more like just chuck in random amounts of a few spices; nothing scientific – depending on who’s cooking and how we feel. The two constants are turmeric and chilli. When you grow your own chillies you can vary the chilli flavour and hotness easily. We tend to avoid pre-prepared curry pastes as they are really much too oily, although the flavours are good. Like almost everything else we eat we always cook the curry from scratch: fresh meat and fresh veg. And it is very often accompanied by Noreen’s special lemon rice – seriously good!
We don’t eat curry out very often these days. Sadly most Indian restaurant curries are far too oily and thus high in calories, and as one has the tendency to over-order we therefore tend to over-eat. Moreover curry houses are establishments which, as a general rule, I don’t trust with their hygiene unless I know them or have been given a solid recommendation. If I am eating in a restaurant I will usually have either Dall (lentils) or Channa (chickpeas) as an accompaniment – something I never bother to cook at home.
What I don’t understand, though, is why an hour after eating curry I always feel the need for something sweet. Not a horrible sticky Indian pudding. More like a couple of chocolates; just a mouthful; a couple of chocolate covered Turkish Delights hit the spot well. Why this craving for just that mouthful of sweet after curry? Anyone got any ideas?