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food+drink

Culinary Adventures #105: Jerusalem Artichoke Soup

Our Jerusalem artichoke plants have done amazingly well. A couple of weeks ago the gardener lifted one of the (dozen or more) plants. This resulted in half a bucket of the best looking, and enormous, tubers I’ve ever seen. (Top tip: don’t lift them until you need them as they don’t store for ever like potatoes.)

As I’ve said before, when I was a kid (in 1950/60s) my parents grew artichokes in a small piece of poor soil and got a reasonable crop. Ours, this year, have been in good soil and well watered so no real wonder they’ve done well. We’ve already decided to grow them again next year.

muddy Jerusalem artichokes

We’ve still not got to the end of this first batch, despite several rounds of roast artichokes (just scrub them, cut them if they’re too big, and roast them in hot oil; no need to cover them, and they’ll caramelise a bit).

As a change I decided to try making soup. As usual with me what I did was a combination of two recipes from the intertubes.

Jerusalem Artichoke Soup

Ingredients

  • At least 500g Jerusalem artichokes
  • 2 tbsp olive oil
  • 25g butter
  • 1 onion, chopped
  • 1 floury potato (about 150g), chopped small
  • 600ml vegetable stock or chicken stock
  • 3 tbsp double cream, plus a little extra to serve (optional)
  • 1 tsp truffle oil (optional)
  • salt and black pepper (to season)

What to do …

  1. Scrub the artichokes well (they’re very good at clinging to mud) and chop into small pieces.
  2. Melt the butter & oil in a large saucepan, and add the onion, potato, artichokes, and some black pepper. Cover the pan and sweat gently for 15 mins, stirring now and again.
  3. Pour in the stock, cover and simmer for another 15 mins until the vegetables are completely tender. If it looks too thick add a few splashes of dry sherry and/or a glass of white wine.
  4. Whizz the soup in a food processor, or with a stick blender, until very smooth.
  5. Return soup to the pan. Add the cream and truffle oil; season to taste with a little salt and more freshly ground black pepper; stir together well and return to a very gentle heat for a couple of minutes.
  6. Serve the soup in bowls, with a swirl more cream and any other topping of your choice (should you wish), and crusty bread.

Notes

  1. When preparing artichokes, look them over carefully and remove any damage. The ends of tubers can rot, and any damaged areas will be discoloured (red/brown).
  2. Another top tip: Despite what a lot of recipes say, do not peel artichokes. If you do they’ll just go to mush; the flesh gets very soft and you need the skin to hold them together (although not such a problem with soup). Added to this they’re knobbly, so a pain to peel as you don’t want to lose a large part of the tuber.
  3. Unless you’re going to cook the artichokes within minutes, drop them in some water (add some lemon juice if you like) as the cut surfaces go brown quite quickly (like apples).

The soup was good and substantial. I think we might do it again.

amusements, history

December Quiz Questions

Again this year we’re beginning each month with five pub quiz style questions, with a different subject each month. They’re not difficult, but it is unlikely everyone will know all the answers, so hopefully you’ll learn something new, as well as have a bit of fun.

December Quiz Questions: 17th Century England

  1. Who is celebrated for having failed to blow up the King in 1605?
  2. What was given to King Charles II in 1661 and abandoned by the British in 1684?
  3. Who succeeded Oliver Cromwell?
  4. For what is Nell Gwyn famous?
  5. How many monarchs reigned over England in 17th century?

Answers will be posted in 2 weeks time.

memes, personal

Unblogged November

Wed 1 Whatever it was, I have no recollection of it.
Thu 2 So that storm. What happened to it? Yes there was quite a bit of wind, and some rain; and it wasn’t very warm. But nothing like what we were promised. But then London was in the eye of the storm for most of the daylight hours, which is possibly deceptive.
Fri 3 N’s new laptop was delivered today. That’s me occupied for the next week setting it up.
Sat 4 Blasted fireworks. Cats very unimpressed. Yes I know it’s Guy Fawkes weekend but … the people very close to me (I didn’t bother working out exactly who) spend half an hour early in the evening letting off a continual round of very loud cannons, with lots of quieter popping in the background. We could easily have been in a war zone, with mortar fire being returned by snipers. These things aren’t cheap; considering everyone is supposed to be struggling I don’t know where they get the money to send up in smoke.
Sun 5 Well much to my surprise, Guy Fawkes Night turned out to be relatively quiet with only a handful of short, somewhat muted salvos.
Mon 6 Phew! We’re solvent again this month despite almost hitting the credit limit on our main credit card – but then if you will go buying expensive PCs, not to mention all sorts of stuff in advance of Christmas! Although the money for the PCs has been siphoned from a savings account (one which still pays pathetic interest).
Tue 7 My new PC turned up today. But they can’t supply the screen I wanted (ETA is January!!) or my second choice. So a refund in order and I’ll buy the second choice from Amazon, saving all of 3p!
Wed 8 God what a miserable, dark, wet day. Anyone would think it was November.
Thu 9 It’s the story of my life at the moment … a large chunk of the day spent putting my new PC together and starting to install everything. Why, oh why, do Windows updates take so bloody long? And they don’t tell you what they’re doing but half the time just leave you with a blank screen for it seems like hours – so you think the whole thing is broken. At least put a little message there, and change it every 5 minutes. It drives me mad.
Fri 10 Another bloody miserable November day. It really is doing my head in this year.
Sat 11 And so we come to the awfulness of Remembrance weekend. As regulars here will know, I’m with Evelyn Waugh who described it in the 1930s as “a disgusting idea of artificial reverence and sentimentality”. I find it sickening.
Sun 12 There’s more noise here tonight, for Diwali, than there was last weekend for Guy Fawkes. The infidel are clearly burning off the money they tell us they don’t have.
Mon 13 After four weeks of buggering around with PCs and laptops I finally got my new PC installed yesterday, and pretty much working OK today, although still a few wrinkles to iron out. At last I can see some clear desk space, and I’m not working on top of two keyboards, two mice and a rats nest of cabling. I also picked the last of this year’s chillies – another 30! – and got most of the plants (some this year’s which weren’t great, and the very old ones which are now past it) off the study windowsill: the cats and I can now see daylight and birds!
Tue 14 A day spent trying to catch up on the stuff I’ve ignored for the last few weeks. And still having to fettle options and settings on half of the computer software.
Wed 15 Main meal number four from Sunday’s duck: roast on Sunday; cold with bubble & squeak on Monday; duck-herd’s pie on Tuesday; and today I cooked the carcass for stock and made duck, leek & lentil soup. Not my best ever soup, but a good feed nonetheless. Why do I always find soup so difficult; I’m missing a trick somewhere.
Thu 16 Most of the afternoon spent writing and scheduling regular blog posts for next year. Will I be around to see them all?
Fri 17 Well this is scary. I’ve now finished writing my scheduled in advance blog posts for next year – all except for 4, which I can do next week and need a bit more hand-crafting.
Sat 18 An interesting, and successful day. A good and useful doctors’ patient group meeting in the morning, thanks in part to a new member rattling some cages. And a good pasta, beef & tomato dish in the evening, washed down with a decent bottle of red, and followed by Christmas pudding (yes, really!) cream and Armagnac.
Sun 19 Up betimes. But why? I feel sure something must have happened today, but it surely passed me by. A singularly dull day. And so to bed.
Mon 20 Had a fit of the medicals today. First N to her consultant at Hillingdon Hospital – successful in that we’re getting things scheduled and can go back to consultations at Hammersmith Hospital (much nicer than Hillingdon). Then late this afternoon to Pinner to get the wax vacuumed out of my ears – a definite result, even if it did hurt the wallet.
Tue 21 Reaping the rewards of getting somewhat dehydrated on Saturday and yesterday. Woke up with sinus aching all round my face; and feeling completely lethargic.
Wed 22 Comes the gardener for the first time in weeks to do some tidying up. He lifted one of the (dozen or more) Jerusalem Artichoke plants; result half a bucket of the best looking, and enormous, tubers I’ve ever seen. As I’ve been saying, when I was a kid we grew artichokes in a small piece of poor soil and got a reasonable crop; these have been in good soil and well watered so no real wonder they’ve done well.Jerusalem artichokes complete with mudThat good selection is no more than a third of what we pulled today.
Thu 23 Head down all day doing website updates for the literary society; isn’t revising and updating web pages so incredibly tedious! Not helped later on by a fight with Windows which was insisting on using Bing when I tell it to use Google. Gah!
Fri 24 I just don’t know how to pull myself up and out of this depression. I’m really struggling to do anything at present. I know it is partly the winter. But over the years nothing I’ve tried seems to have done any good. Are the antidepressants helping? I don’t know but dare not try coming off them. Talking therapy (CBT, counselling, hypnotherapy) doesn’t work on me – partly because my brain is too active. SAD light therapy has been tried at least twice to no effect – might have to try it again, in desperation. Be active? How when the depression won’t let me? I’m still convinced there’s a magic switch somewhere in my head, but I’m buggered if I can find it. Oh, and now my brain thinks it’s Saturday.
Sat 25 Another super literary society talk, which I hosted. One day we will get the videos online!
Sun 26 I finally finished updating that one web page for the literary society site. It’s only taken me 5 years!
Mon 27 27 is an interesting number.
US President number 27 was William Howard Taft (1857-1930), president 1909-1913
27 is the cube of 3 (ie. 3x3x3) and it has a number of other mathematical curiosities
Element 27 is Cobalt whose compounds make blue pigments and give blue colours to glass etc.
There are 27 bones in the human hand
There are 27 books in the New Testament
There are 27 Nakṣatra or lunar mansions in Hindu astrology
Tue 28 Well that makes life easier. We rescheduled our dental checkups which were due tomorrow. Not only has our usual transport cried off (unwell) but I have a nasty wheezy little cough (not obviously Covid; negative test) which the dentists won’t want taken to them. So I ended up having a fairly quiet day for once.
Wed 29 A lovely bright sunny morning; a dull grey afternoon; dark before teatime; and not very warm. We’re promised much colder weather over the next few days, although the Weather People don’t really seem to know how far south it’ll get. But there’s a large Shepherd’s Pie in the oven (enough for today and tomorrow) so that’ll warm things up a bit. And I feel artichoke soup on the horizon for the weekend.
Thu 30 Another bright sunny morning but with a really stiff frost – the first of this winter, I think – which was really nice to see.
arts, beliefs, environment, food+drink, history, links, medical, memes, science

Monthly Links

Well then … Here we go with another collection of links to items you didn’t know you didn’t want to miss.

Science, Technology, Natural World

In the latest of the grand space projects, NASA has retrieved a couple of hundred grams of an asteroid and dropped it back to Earth.

Now we’re coming down to the top of a 22,000-foot volcano where Earth’s highest-dwelling vertebrates have been found

Japan has a new island thanks to an underwater volcanic eruption.

Still on the fiery nature of Earth, there’s been a swarm of earthquakes happening in Iceland, which likely precedes a volcanic eruption.

Still on earthquakes, a researcher, at the Vatican Library, has found a 500-year-old Hebrew note which reveals an unknown earthquake swarm in Italy.

Now to the natural world …

Serotine bats (above) have surprised scientists by being the first known mammal to have procreative sex without penetration.

Staying with rodents … experiments suggest that rats may have the power of imagination.

In the Amazon there’s a somewhat horrifying parasitic wasp (below) with a huge head, and it is just one of over 100 newly discovered species.

This is somewhat bizarre … it seems that starfish are just a large, flattened head, with no body. [££££]

Health, Medicine

Scientists seem to have worked out why some people get headaches from drinking red wine.

And now we have three items for the female population …

In the first, OB/GYN Dr Jen Gunter tries to once and for all explode the myth of menstrual synchronization.

Dr Gunter then looks at the sense in poking garlic up your vagina.

Finally academic sex researcher Dr Kate Lister tests oral probiotics for vaginal health. [££££]

Sexuality

And now on to actual sexuality … in which Dr Emily Nagoski looks at some approaches to sex for the disabled.

Expert sex therapists suggest the usual 20 ways to revive your flagging libido.

Environment

On the interaction between wild pigs and golf courses.

Social Sciences, Business, Law, Politics

Why is there this assumption British voters become more Conservative with age – and is it true?

Let’s obscure the players’ genders and then see how men’s and women’s soccer compare.

Art, Literature, Language, Music

Archaeological finds are revealing that art is much older than our species. [LONG READ] [££££]

There’s a boom in people taking up life drawing.

History, Archaeology, Anthropology

Near China’s “Terracotta Army” archaeologists have uncovered the remains of a 2000-year-old sheep-drawn chariot.

Moving west, a large number of clay stamps used to seal Roman documents (above) have been discovered in Turkey.

Meanwhile off the coast of Sardinia divers have discovered around 50,000 Roman coins.

A cartographer has created a London Underground style map of Britain’s Roman Roads.

Excavations around Sutton Hoo in Suffolk continue to turn up suprises. One latest find is the remains of what might be an early 7th-century temple.

Coming gradually up to date … A hoard of medieval pennies dating from the reign of King Stephen has been found in Norfolk.

In Germany they’ve found a centuries old grave containing a skeleton with four prosthetic fingers.

Dr Eleanor Janega takes reveals the real story behind the killing of Joan of Arc.

Forensic research proves that the Ancient Ram Inn in Wotton-under-Edge (above) is old, but not as old as is made out. [LONG READ]

London

Here’s a look at the life of Wenceslaus Hollar who is best known for his panoramic views of 17th-century London (below).

Food, Drink

The convoluted story of the sandwich called Gua Bao. [LONG READ]

Lifestyle, Personal Development, Beliefs

Mathematician Kit Yates looks at whether the time has come to stop changing the clocks twice a year.

Cheese-rolling, straw bears and weird rituals: one man has made it his life’s work to record the whole of British folklore, and he now has a massive collection.

There’s a collection of walks around the UK’s strange and sacred sites.

Returning to sex researcher Dr Kate Lister, she’s written about growing out her pubic hair for the first time in 20 years. [££££]

Shock, Horror, Humour, Wow!

And finally, in a surprise revelation it has been discovered that a supposed Yeti hair actually belonged to a horse.