food+drink

Culinary Adventures #106: Camembert Tartizza

Here’s one I did some days ago. As usual it’s based on a published recipe, but modified.

WTF, I hear you ask, is a “tartizza”? It’s a cross between a pizza and a tart – well I had to find something to call this as it is a sort of a cross between a pizza and a tart.

Anyway, here goes …

Camembert Tartizza

Serves: 4
Preparation: 15 minutes
Cooking: 25 minutes

Camembert Tartizza, fresh from the oven
Camembert Tartizza fresh from the oven & still on its baking parchment

Ingredients

  • Plain flour, for rolling
  • 500g block puff pastry
  • 165g jar Kalamata Olive & Sun-Dried Tomato Tapenade
  • 250g French Camembert
  • 4-6 mushrooms, sliced
  • 2 handfuls cherry tomatoes (halved), or 3-4 tomatoes (sliced)
  • Bunch fresh parsley
  • Black pepper

What to do …

  1. Preheat the oven to 220°C/200°C fan/gas mark 6.
  2. Take a 30cm square baking sheet. Cut a piece of baking parchment a bit bigger than the baking sheet (3cm overlap on each edge is about right). Lay the baking parchment on the baking sheet and using a blunt object (eg. the back end of a spoon) score the parchment into the rim of the baking sheet. (This is to give you the size of the baking sheet.)
  3. Now put the baking sheet (but not the baking parchment) in the oven to heat up.
  4. Roll out the pastry to the size of the baking sheet (it doesn’t need to be neat) and place on the parchment within the marked area.
  5. Gently score round the pastry about 1cm in the from the edge; and prink the middle part all over with a fork.
  6. Spread the tapenade evenly over the pastry, leaving the edges clear.
  7. Cut the Camembert into slices no more than 5mm think, and lay them evenly over the tapenade.
  8. Top with the mushrooms, parsley, black pepper and finally the tomatoes – arrange as you like, random is fine.
  9. Glaze the pastry edges if you wish.
  10. Slide the pastry on its paper onto the hot baking sheet and bake for 20-25 minutes until golden and bubbling – but don’t overdo it as the tapenade will tend to singe round the edges.
  11. Serve cut into portions with a glass of wine.

Notes

  1. This makes a good, warm, supper. Alternatively allow it to cool and cut into finger-food portions as party food.
  2. This would also work with pesto in place of tapenade.
  3. Add garlic, onion, cooked meat, etc. if you wish. But avoid anchovies unless you’re using a non-salty pesto.
  5. If you find the quantity of tapenade is overpowering, just use about half a jar and spread it thinner.
amusements

Annual Impossible Exam

As is traditional, once again we bring you this year’s King William’s College General Knowledge Paper 2023-24.

For over a century the College has set an annual general knowledge test, known as the General Knowledge Paper. The pupils sit the test twice: once unseen on the day before the Christmas holidays, and again when they return to school in the New Year – after spending the holiday researching the answers. The test used to be mandatory but these days participation is voluntary.

The quiz is well known to be highly difficult, a common score being just two correct answers from the list of several hundred. The best scores are around 12% for the unseen test and about 70% for the second attempt – and of course the average scores are going to be very much lower than this.

The quiz is always introduced with the Latin motto Scire ubi aliquid invenire possis, ea demum maxima pars eruditionis est, “To know where you can find anything is, after all, the greatest part of erudition” – something my father always impressed on me as “Education is not knowing, it is knowing where to find out”.

You can find this year’s GKP on the King William’s College website at https://kwc.im/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/General-Knowledge-Paper-2023-2024-Questions.pdf.

I’ve not yet tried this year’s test myself, but unseen I don’t normally have many more clues that the KWC pupils!

Enjoy your Christmas!

music, personal, ramblings

A Secular Carol

Yesterday morning I happened into BBC Radio 3’s Breakfast show just after 08:30 – well actually I blame the alarm clock! Between two pieces of very mainstream classical music the presenter Petroc Trelawny played what he described as a secular carol. It was rather entrancing, but I didn’t catch what it was. And oh dear, it isn’t listed in the online playlist (it is now!). A quick email to Radio 3 got a very prompt answer …

It turned out to be the Halsway Carol, performed by a group called The Neighbours on their (short) album Winter (2020). The lyrics are by Iain Fisk, melody by Nigel Eaton. And no wonder it was entrancing as Eaton is listed online as “internationally renowned Hurdy Gurdy maestro”. It goes like this:

Lo for the tiding of the long night moon
Let the sunrise call about the morning soon
Short is the biding of the fading light
Sing for the coming of the longest night

North wind tell us what we need to know
When the stars are shining on the midnight snow
All of the branches will be turned to white
Sing for the coming of the longest night

A winter day, the summer grass turned hay
Frost in the field ’til the dawn of May
A summer’s light never shone as clear or as bright
So dance in the shadows of a winter’s night

Lo for the tiding of the long night moon
May the harvest last until the springtime bloom
Home is our comfort at the winter’s height
Sing for the coming of the longest night

All of the colours of the sunrise sky
Shine a light upon us, as the day goes by
Sun-setting shadows fading out of sight
Sing for the coming of the longest night

A winter day, the summer grass turned hay
Frost in the field ’til the dawn of May
A summer’s light never shone as clear or as bright
So dance in the shadows of a winter’s night

The Neighbours’ album Winter is available as a download from Amazon; it’s altogether a rather nice 30 minutes seasonal folk music. However I can find out nothing about the band.

There are quite a number of renditions of the Halsway Carol on YouTube, and I’ve listened to several. After The Neighbours’ version, I prefer this one from Jackie Oates.

And, just for my Godparents, there’s also a version on Northumbrian pipes. There’s also some basic sheet music online.

An unexpected delight! But who can tell me about The Neighbours?

ramblings

Monthly Quotes

It’s time again for our monthly round up of recently encountered quotes.

When you’re dead, you don’t know you’re dead. The pain is felt by others. The same thing happens when you’re stupid.
[unknown]

The world is full off horrible things that will eventually get you and everything you care about. Humour and laughter is a universal way to lift your head up and say: “Not today you fuckers”.
[Billy Connolly]

We agreed that the true enemy of man is not man. Our enemy is not outside of us. Our true enemy is the anger, hatred, and discrimination that is found in the hearts and minds of man.
[Thich Nhat Hanh, on his friendship with Martin Luther King]

If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.
[JRR Tolkien]

The finest clothing made is a person’s skin, but, of course, society demands something more than this.
[Mark Twain]

Time to remember the best voting advice I have heard – voting isn’t marriage – it’s public transport. You are not waiting for the one who is absolutely perfect. You are getting the bus. And if there isn’t one going exactly to your destination, you don’t stay at home and sulk you take the one going closest to where you want to be.
[unknown]

I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I’ll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.
[Isaac Asimov]

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.
[George Orwell]

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
[Blaise Pascal]

Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.
[Richard Feynman]

In capitalism, freedom is 80 brands of circus peanut.
[MK, @qualia.bsky.social]

It’s quite rewarding watching KCs, rather than journalists, go after politicians. They’re much better at it. No need to cultivate contacts, no requirement to ensure balance, no pressure to let them talk so they’ll come on the show again – just cutting right through the bullshit.
[Ian Dunt; https://iandunt.substack.com/p/matt-hancocks-broken-half-formed]

Some men improve the world only by leaving it.
[Oscar Wilde]

We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.
[Jimmy Carter]

Most of us have forgotten that we are nature. Nature is not something separate from us. So when we say that we have lost our connection to nature, it means that we have lost our connection to ourselves.
[unknown]

There are places, just as there are people and objects and works of art, whose relationship of parts creates a mystery, an enchantment, which cannot be analysed.
[Paul Nash]