Beef and leek (and cumin) stew

Well, this was something of a desperation throw together on Sunday as I'd bought some beef for casseroling and had some excess leeks. So, with a big thanks to Michelle for the idea of using ground Cumin in heroic quantities, here was the result, which I found really palatable and as I wanted something which just required re-heating for a few days to give me a little break from cooking from scratch every night...

Hing-greedy-ments

• 3 large leeks sliced into 1/4-1/2" slices (including the green bits still in the staff)
• 2 medium onions chopped
• 2 medium sized carrots, sliced (1/8" slices)
• 400 grammes of potatoes, cut into 1/2" chunks
• 440 grammes of casserole steak, sinew removed and cut into 1/2" chunks
• 200 grammes of lardons
• 2 large tomatoes, skinned and deseeded and chopped up
• 3 medium mushrooms, brushed clean and chopped (you guessed) into 1/2" chunks
• 1 bouquet garni
• 1 tbsp of ground Cumin (jeera) (or more - make sure everything has some)!
  
• 3 chillis (50K on Scoville) finely sliced - NOT deseeded
  
• 3 cloves of garlic
• beef stock as needed
• 200 ml of red wine
• Juice of 1 lime
• 10 dashes of Nom Pla (Thai fish sauce)
• 30 grammes of leaf coriander chopped up

In a big casserole,

1. Add the lardons to some sunflower oil and gently fry for a while (ca 2 mins)
2. Then add the beef and continue frying until lightly browned
3. Add the cumin and stir in until every piece of beef has got some
4. Add the onions, garlic, leeks and chillies and carrots and turn over until all coated in oil, fry gently for a minute or so; repeat with the remaining veg
5. Add the red wine, the juice of the lime, the Nom Pla, and top up with the beef stock (a beef bouillon cube will do fine) until almost at the top of the ingredients, add the bouquet garni
   
6. Put the casserole into the oven and cook on Gas Mark 1 for 4 hours;
   
7. Then reheat at GM 4 for an hour when you intend to eat it, adding the coriander with 20 minutes to go.

I shall be doing this one again as it's great for Winter days; no need to cook the potatoes so, if you're health conscious, just add some fresh green veg to round it out. Cumin marvellous!

Update: I did this again, following this recipe last weekend and I can honestly say that I really, really like this - you don't actually need the tomatoes. I reckon also that for my palate a little more Cumin works... (1.5 tbsp next time) .

Haiku

I remember when I was first struck by the power of poetry. Always shy, I - 6' by 11 years old; I had trouble talking to girls, boys too. I wrote poetry; on the fly (so to speak) for petals unfurling. Always flattered these were; dunno why, came off the back of my mind - a gift that prospered with tarot and star scrying.  I had trouble seeing through surface, but haiku helped; like a mirror for a troubled mind. Fixed the things that moved, set free, the things that should be.

Bones ache, skin breaks and
things happen. never mind -
So happy now I's olden times.

More things fixed and more moving. Joy.

Dorset Naga Chillis

This is going to be a mega-short post; I made my usual chilli con carné recipe (elsewhere in the blog), but for the chili element I took the plunge and bought some Naga chillis (5 chilli marks) - not cheap 10g for 74P. But I'd been eyeing them for some time and wondering whether they were worth it.

Chopped up they probably made about a half a teaspoon full (I also used about 8 ordinary chillis (2 chilli mark)). And they do actually add something of a real feeling of heat and flavour to the dish. But do be very careful when cutting them up - I washed my hands five times and still there was a trace of it on them! My view: worth it!

Addition: I've just looked up the Scoville rating for these and they're 923,000 on the scale! Blimey, no wonder I needed so little. That's some 19 times hotter than what I usually use and I don't feel such a wuss for washing my hands so much!

Un-Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

Well, just a quick update. Seems I am now un-redundant for at least another six months. Which is something of a relief given the current job market as is and as is about to be; as I'm approaching (nay, rushing towards) 60 and with cropped white-grey hair, it's not exactly as though I am in the best demographic age-wise. The odd thing is that I have stunning references (I read them and wonder who is this paragon of an employee!) from my past jobs going back to the 1970s. And for 25 years I never actually applied for a job, I was always head-hunted.

And this is over different careers and industries - librarian, computer support specialist, CBT producer, designer, trainer whiz kid, and latterly all-singing, all-dancing office manager (before you ask, I manage myself). The consistent thing that appears through all are words like 'responsible, articulate, professional, reliable'. And oddly they're right, but what I don't understand is why everyone else isn't at least three of those things. Oh well, it's nice to have as your resumé 'a good egg'!

The past is always with us

A while back I embarked on the slightly dim-witted exercise of tracing back as much of my family tree as I could find using on-line resources. I also had my recently inherited archive of material from my mother, with all the usual certificates. A strange exercise which took me right into the heart of Dickensian London; the great majority of my ancestors lived in the tenements and stews in Clerkenwell, Shoreditch and around St Pauls.

What fascinated me was seeing that my great, great grandmother was, in one census, a matchbox maker - this was piece work almost certainly for Bryant & May and unbelievably hard work at that - they had to make about 1,000 boxes a day for pennies; if they didn't meet their target, they lost their job. The big 'advantage' of this was that the materials were collected - pre-dawn - and then worked on throughout the day, the rest of the family helping in one way or another and delivered in the darkness at the end of the day.

Her husband was in the print, as they say. At that time she had three children; she, her husband and they lived in one of these tenements and were one of seven different families all of a similar size living at the same address. They had no running water, toilets were outside and non-flushing, lighting came by candles and heating by coal. I know this tenement, from my research, had a cellar area (which flooded occasionally) and three floors, with about 3 rooms on each floor of various sizes. In square footage this is about half that of my current abode, 34 people lived in these conditions in that space.

It's barely credible, but it happened and it was commonplace. Common in every sense of the word. Disease (not a surprise), infant mortality rates of over 50%, were prevalent. Unless you had talent or money, that's where you ended up. But, and this is the big but, it shows you how bad conditions were in places like Lincolnshire and Norfolk that walking to London was preferable to remaining! The Irish part of my family came from Wexford at around the time of the great potato famine - a bit difficult to determine exactly who was who at this time, because two of my maternal ancestors were brothers, wait for it, both named Albert John - one was named Albie, and the other Bertie*. They married two sisters.... Ellen Mary and Mary Ellen. It doesn't help that I only have the documents for one of these unions, and that my mother couldn't remember which was which when she was alive!

I managed to get back seven generations before coming across a real showstopper - a female ancestor with a surname that doesn't exist - the registrar even put down two surnames for her on the marriage certificate. Which is another window into the past, because both she and her husband signed with a cross.

The reason it's a slightly dim-witted pursuit is that none of my generation in my immediate line has any children or prospect of children, but I still found it fascinating. What triggered the post was a segue from using Google map pictures to try and find a place in London and was minded to have a look at my earliest remembered front doors. These were my two grandfathers' doors in Fleetwood Street, Stoke Newington. We called one 'pink grandad' and the other 'green grandad' after the colours of the doors; thanks to Google I can now report that the green door is now blue, but, 55 years on, the pink door is still pink! Amazing.

*Bertie Knight was for many years the producer at the London Palladium. For some really odd reason which is lost in the midst of time, he and my grandfather fell out, so I never actually met him or my cousin Paul Knight who, until 2003 was a prolific producer of TV dramas. Odd how life goes

Sic transit

Lord - I hope I haven't used that heading before... Just a quick note to explain lack of posts; a combination of holidays, car breakdowns, computer breakdowns and being served notice of redundancy has paradoxically made me rather busy, which I rather anticipate lasting until well into November... Worry not, friends that also read this - I am quite OK!

Stranger things in heaven and earth ...

Long ages ago, when I was in my middle twenties, newly divorced (1st time around) with not a clue how to start a conversation with the opposite sex (the last time I had done so with any intent to further things into a romantic relationship had been when I was sixteen), I renewed my interest in astrology, tarot and the divinatory arts. In all honesty, mainly to provide a starting point in conversations with girls. I'm a bit reticent about recounting anything about this period in case I come across as a total nut job. But then again, perhaps I am...

I started casting horoscopes (and don't even dream of asking, the answer's no) when I was in my middle teens, after my early Christian* period (you know, suddenly you try and turn yourself into a holy vessel for the lord to come and complete you, when what you need is a good screw, if only you'd realise it) and still, as one does, searching for answers. There's something about being a teenager - that mixture of searching and rebellion - which means that you're very prone to finding answers, ways and places that your parents have never (you believe) prospected and can never understand (you think). So, quasi-scientific divinatory trappings are very attractive.

Astrology falls into the quasi- bit. It takes serious effort and study to learn about it and cast a horoscope. Not to mention serious time - I eventually got a basic natal horoscope down to about 15 hours effort. So, given that amount of effort, there must be something real about it? And indeed, many of my horoscopes were uncannily accurate, even down to one barmaid, after I'd left her horoscope behind the bar, reading it at the start of her shift and saying to the landlord "sorry, got to leave now". It took some explaining that all I'd done was a natal horoscope. Without going into detail, it showed two people - a public and a private, very different, personae. Different enough, with some Saturnian stresses with Pluto, to indicate serious psychological problems even down to schizoid tendencies; enough certainly for me to recommend that the more positively indicated trends be pursued as a matter of urgency and seriousness. I also did one for my brother, that showed that he was going away for a dirty weekend; when he turned red, I was amazed! He denied it in front of my parents, but later admitted that it was true!

So I was pretty convinced by the time I got to casting the horoscope of my closest friend. I started reading the interpretation to him and looked at him, he looked at me, and I had to say "Yep, it's accurate as the stars lie and yep, it's b******s". We even got on the phone to his parents to make sure he hadn't been a born via a c-section (which can change the time/date of birth considerably). Nope, it was accurate according to best books and wrong, just plain wrong. (It also showed that I had been honest in my casting, though!)

As a sixteen year old I did a tarot reading for one of my mother's friends, which had the Tower [Struck By Lightning] reversed in it, something you really, really hope not to see, I translated this as that someone close would pass away. She had an elderly relative who was on the way out, so it was almost acceptable as an interpretation. Almost because the Tower overset is simply the worst that can happen - her husband committed suicide three days later. Walked into the Thames. And that was the true interpretation.

Sometimes these psychic, quasi-scientific methods of divination work. But in limited circumstances. I have my theories about what actually happens and even some yet more quasi-scientific reasons as to why they might work.

But, do I want to know the future anymore? Do I want to uncover any more horrible surprises. No thanks.

*The Scientology period lasted 30 minutes while I was being chatted up by this gorgeous, but as eventually became clear, loopy, acolyte in the Tottenham Court Road. She was part of a group proselytising for the 'movement'. I'd read L Ron Hubbard as a very bad science fiction writer and I had now discovered that he was a very bad religion maker!

The Dark Side of the Moon

You know it's going to happen, but you forget all about it until it does. It's like those times, years ago, when spaceships used to go round the other side of the Moon. You'd wait by the TV/radio, praying that you (and they) could survive the wait; and eventually you know it's going to come to an end...

A combination of the World Cup and Wimbledon occurs once every four years; a bit like Saturn in retrograde, it swamps the airwaves and dominates all TV coverage. And it's here again - that void where the TV crackles into life briefly for Saturday Kitchen and then off again. Ghods - even Celebrity Masterchef, would be an improvement, anything *he whimpers*

I had a nightmare

Very occasionally, over the years, I have stumbled (or rather thumbed with the remote) upon this horrible programme. It's called Big Brother. The title is derived from that puling idiot George Orwell's book 1984, a man obsessed with himself to the exclusion of any knowledge of his own lack of writing talent*. Bleeaagghh. And now, a programme has been running (which is mercifully going to come to an end - please god nothing like it is shown in its place) for some number of years which I have studiously avoided.

Where the Victorians had freak shows, we have this place on Channel 4 for the socially inept and damaged called... you guessed it. The same motivations that caused the Victorians to flock and point at the physically deformed and damaged drive people to watch this horror show. Whilst setting the TV to instantly come on to Countdown in the morning, I forgot this televisual excrescence would be showing and the aptly-name creature 'Shabby' was on the screen for about 45 seconds. During that 45 seconds she managed to underline and magnify every prejudice that I have about this orgy of self-aggrandisement. The fact that she has called herself 'Shabby' (I assume) speaks volumes about the mental time-bomb that's inside what passes for a mind. Am I alone in thinking that she seriously needs psychiatric help? I don't know if there's some sort of prize for staying in this asylum, but it wouldn't be big enough to keep me there! And why on Earth do people voluntarily watch it?

*And yes, I did have to study him for A-Level

I had a dream

I had a vivid dream last night (don't worry, not that sort), which for once stayed with me. I dream weirdly in that I tend to dream storylines (strange, I know):

At the time of the first Jovian-Earth wars the Earth defence forces, the Angels, were very much getting beaten by the more powerful Jupiterian ships - the technology required to get out of the gravity well of Jupiter and sustain Jovian life meant that high-speed, high-G manouvres were child's play for them. At the time of the First Incursion, when three of the Jovian fleet dived into the Pacific (a cataclysmic event for the Pacific rim countries, taking an artificially stimulated earthquake to open and swallow them), the Angels' high command had built in deep space a generation ship (the Argo) to explore for a new home in space.

Before even the first generation was born, in the depths of interstellar space, a gigantic old spaceship, apparently lifeless, drifted just off the route of the Argo. The speed of the Argo could not readily be altered, so a small exploration craft was dispatched to discover what it could, with its largely male crew on board. The motivation was clear, if we were getting beaten in our own back yard, we needed any technologies or help we could get.

Exploring the giant hulk was an eye-opener. In the first instance, much of the ship was simply mothballed. We spent days, patching the solid infrastructure and making it airtight and restoring artificial gravity - the hull must have been through an Oort cloud at some point. But as well as the plasteel type components, there were cushioned rooms, strange lenses and long lift shafts with no lifts - it was intriguing and the debate was fierce. We couldn't help feeling that the knowledge represented here was worth our sacrifice to retrieve it.

And then, one day, working on a hatch at the top of a lift-shaft, my harness broke and I fell, slowly at first, but with the ever-increasing speed of an unhindered object - the lift shaft was about a mile high and I hit the bottom at great speed. And was swallowed into the soft padding at the bottom. I thought "I must be dead", but in the darkness I could feel movement, terrifying movement, because I had been working on my own and sparing my colleagues my tuneless singing, had had the radio switched off and no-one could find me. Then I could feel my facemask being removed and then immense pain...

I went unconscious.

Sometime later I awoke and was startled to find that I was in darkness, free of pain and with a great sense of warmth; I remembered falling and realised that the hatchway at the top of the lift shaft was in fact a lightwell access point for when the starship was near a star so that it could collect energy. Rapidly, schematics and knowledge of the organo-plasteel giant spaceship came to mind and also a strange feeling that it was right that I had been attempting to help the ship as a passenger. The ship was grateful.

Slowly I was exuded to the surface of the organic light-collector, with my facemask replaced . I had no concept of time, but when I surfaced I was able to activate my radio and contact my very surprised shipmates.

Woke up at this point, drank some water, went back to sleep...

It turned out that the spaceship was also a generation ship, but of an entirely different star-spanning civilisation; the ship had been built as a partner in the enterprise and its AI was surprisingly organic.

Plot from here: months passed, an idyllic bond with the ship was formed; the giant nuclear furnace still sustaining the ship and us, we gradually got it moving towards the nearest star so it could be re-fuelled.

After a number of years we came across another wreck; two of us explored and returned, acting strangely - we quarantined them and they disappeared into the ship; warfare then broke out in our Utopian home, within the ship itself as the evil intelligences that had subsumed our shipmates migrated to the ship's nervous system... This was a war to the death as the intelligences now knew where we had come from and could backtrack us to Earth.

And I woke up finally for the morning at that point! Mr Blackbird was singing his heart out as he does and it was5.50 am and a sunny morning on Earth... Fortunately free of malign intelligences or giant Jovian spaceships causing havoc in the Pacific!

Word play

I received the following email which lightened my day - I hope it does the same for you: These are the winners of a New York Magazine contest in which contestants take a well-known expression in a foreign language, change a single letter, and provide a definition for the New expression.

HARLEZ-VOUS FRANCAIS
Can you drive a French motorcycle?

EX POST FUCTO
Lost in the mail

VENI, VIPI, VICI
I came, I'm a very important person, I conquered

COGITO EGGO SUM
I think; therefore I waffle

RIGOR MORRIS
The cat is dead

RESPONDEZ S'IL VOUS PLAID
Honk if you're Scottish

QUE SERA SERF
Life is feudal

LE ROI EST MORT. JIVE LE ROI
The king is dead. No kidding.

PRO BOZO PUBLICO
Support your local clown

MONAGE A TROIS
I am three years old

FELIX NAVIDAD
Our cat has a boat

HASTE CUISINE
Fast French food

VENI, VIDI, VICE
I came, I saw, I partied

QUIP PRO QUO
Fast retort

ALOHA OY
Love; greetings; farewell; from such a pain you would never know

VISA LA FRANCE
Don't leave your chateau without it

AMICUS PURIAE
Platonic friend

L'ETAT, C'EST MOO
I'm bossy around here

COGITO, ERGO SPUD
I think, therefore I yam
(OK, more than one letter)

VENI, VIDI, VELCRO
I came, I saw, I stuck around
(OK, another exception)

ICH BIT EIN BERLINER
He deserved it.

ZITGEIST
The Clearasil doesn't quite cover it up.

E PLURIBUS ANUM
Out of any group, there's always one asshole

Actually thought of one of my own:
COGITO, ERGO TUM
I think, therefore I eat

Avatar

After all the hype, I thought I ought to watch this - I wrote my dissertation on the history of SF and still insanely feel I ought to keep up with it. In brief, if you have a sense of wonder and love beautiful things watch it. If you get ticked off by bad science and not very shining dialogue, don't.

Because of the latter, commented on by many reviewers, (and true), I hadn't watched the film. So I wasn't prepared for the fact that it was both wonderful and beautiful. Whoever was responsible for it did a brilliant job of the art direction. Being old and cynical it takes a lot for me to suspend disbelief, but the sheer gorgeousness of the colours, the wonder of the ideas, drew me in and I really, really enjoyed it.

But as I say, if you want your plot realistic, your science sensible, then beware! Because although portrayed as SF, the fact is that it is fantasy; the mechanisms of science fiction are there, but the science does not hold up! Don't let it spoil your enjoyment, though, it didn't spoil mine!

Cats

No, not the musical. Every so often I have a problem in that one or two of the hordes of cats (7 in the houses of just the immediate neighbours and a further 6 within 15 yards) has taken to doing its daily dump on my paving. Now I like cats, a lot (I also like dogs, as well), but there is a problem here in that the normal discouragement method I use in the garden involves removing the labels from litre bottles of tonic and filling them with water - for some reason it makes our feline friends uncomfortable. However, I can hardly use that method where I park a car!

But so far I have tried chili powder across the paving - which works until it rains, whereupon the little blighter is at it again. And I'm still struggling to solve the problem via non-lethal methods... sigh.

What I don't understand is why this is happening; why the normal cat tray training has broken down and the thing has taken to shitting all over my parking space. I wouldn't mind so much if it kept to one spot, but it moves around and if I get in after dark, there's a chance I'll step in it and nothing, nothing smells worse. At one time it used to use the patch of ground which I grow my bluebells and poppies in, which wasn't too bad, but I suppose the abundant bluebells have displaced it. Time to search t'internet - I'll try and remember to let you know if I solve the problem.

Thyme for pork and cider stew

I made this yesterday and for once, came back for seconds. Normally when I cook, by the time I've finished, I am not that hungry... however, the long slow cook at the end really helps. I just happened to buy a vacuum sealer and a mass of pork which I'd cubed, then sealed and frozen. I found a similar recipe with things like honey in, which I am not keen on. I also wanted more of a bite and had bought some Cannellini beans some time back which needed using. Beware though, even with the extractor full on, the smell of this cooking in the oven (especially the heavenly Thyme) is phenomenal!

Serves 3 to 4-ish

• 600ml (1 pint) Chicken Stock
• 250g Lean Pork, cubed (I used loin steaks)
• 300ml (½ pint ish) Cider
• 1 x 4 oz can Cannellini beans
• 1 x 4 oz can of Kidney Beans (both drained)
• 2 Medium Carrots, sliced
• 3 Leeks, sliced
• 2 Sticks Celery, sliced
• 1 Medium Onion, stuck with a few whole cloves
• 1 Bouquet Garni
• 16 good splashes of Worcestershire Sauce
• 1 Chilli (not birds eye), finely sliced
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 1 tsp of Thyme
• 1 clove of garlic, finely chopped
• Salt and pepper

1. Place the pork into a le creuset or similar cast iron casserole into the heated olive oil and fry until the fat runs.
2. Drain the beans and add to the pork.
3. Add the cider, onion, bouquet garni, carrots, leeks, celery, Worcestershire sauce and chilli. Top up with the stock (I use a knorr stock cube for this)
4. Gently bring to the boil, cover and put in the oven for about an hour on GM3, taste, adjust the seasoning and then reduce to GM1 and cook for a further hour (or whatever!)
5. Remove the bouquet garni and serve when ready.
6. Prepare some new potatoes by removing any gnarly bits or really dirty bits and eyes. Cut into equivalent sized bits and put into saucepan, pour remainder of the stock in and top up with salted water.
7. Serve with peas and the potatoes.

I made this lot with the intention of freezing some of it, but plans change and I am soooo going to eat the rest tonight!

Spring at last

Well, I can at last report that, 6 weeks late, my bluebells have made their appearance...

Sadly, just as I got organised on Friday to get the shot done, the Sun disappeared behind clouds and it's still hiding. So, rather than wait and miss the short flowering...

The big leaved monster in the middle is the poppy, which was cut right back before the Winter.

In the back garden there's a weird flowering shrub that will not stop flowering; it flowered until about the end of December and in February, with snow on the ground, there are still flowers on the insane bush. It is pretty much sheltered from the elements in the angle of a wall and the shed.

Typo extra-ordinary!

Just in case you don't follow Chef Hermes latest post I thought I'd post directly. I think that Penguin Australia are now looking for a new proof reader! And another one spotted, but since corrected was from the Telegraph:

After a meeting of Cobra, the Government's emergency planning committee in Whitehall, the Prime Minister announced that HMS Ark Royal and HMS Ocean were being made available to help thousands of Britons strangled, most notably in France.

Best board game?

I have a confession to make. I am a games-playing fanatic; but only certain sorts of games. I like games which require some intelligence. Challenge me to a game of Scrabble and, provided I agree with the dictionary in use (and not to use the ridiculous new rules that allow proper names - take it for granted the vitriolic rant that would take over this post, flay the skin from the publishers, see their blood tumbling down the slopes of a Mayan temple - oh, that's D&D, isn't it, or conceivably the Call of Chthulu.) I meet up with friends of mine every so often and over the last 20-30 years certain games have stood the test of time; there's just two or three of us most of the time, so we're precluded from playing things like Diplomacy which is better played by post anyway. The games that make the shortlist are: Dallas (not the horrible M&B board game, but the company owning diamond shaped board version, which is also known as Cartel), Britannia, Shark (a financial abstract shareholding game), sadly, Acquire makes my list but not my friends list, The Game of Quotations (not recommended for anyone born after 1972 - it was published in 1987), Hare and Tortoise, Elephant Parade (without the sound effects, purleese).

It pains me to say it, but the one which I love is Britannia, where you have a number of races and nations who make their appearance over time; being made of stern stuff, we're quite happy playing for about the 6-7 hours it takes for history to unfold from the Roman invasion to the potentially devastating end of game invasion of the Normans. It is actually quite difficult to see who is winning until quite late on (a bit like Dallas) and for that reason, your interest is sustained quite easily. The reason why it pains me to say it is that Lew Pulsipher is responsible for the design of the game and he and I have history ;-( ... You do need to be something of a games fanatic to play it though as the rules of the game take a lot of reading and re-reading and even on the last outing we realised we'd been playing one interpretation wrongly. What is really clever, is that it is not necessarily the big invasions that provide the best return in terms of victory points, but sustaining the small races like the Welsh, the Caledonians (who the hell are they?) and the Brigantes - all tough nuts to crack because of mountain ranges.

But if you're not into die-hard games playing, then I can really recommend Shark - this is because it has a combination of strategic elements that are very simple in operation, but which repay thought. Or for the sheer fun miring an opponent's elephant in a water crossing, then Elephant Parade, is the game - but don't play it with anyone who treats it as real life!

Still fighting the machine

I haven't gone away; I spent a weekend reloading everything only to find that there are three unrecognised device drivers. So the machine limps along waiting for me to have another spare weekend! I have got rid of the wretched Nero though. Meanwhile I've been adding to other blogs and to the DS fora (it's right but it sure looks wrong). Pondering a game post... (not food, but about the excellent Britannia).

Dreck

Hi all, viz my post on my destabilising PC, now mysteriously blue screens (aptly named Blue Screen Of Death) more often than not on boot, but reboots OK. The BSOD message tells me that in order not to damage your files it's stopped everything and to contact your technical support (and like most home users, that's me). As all the stops appear to involve random components and the machine does run long enough for me to establish it's not a virus or rootkit or similar I really am now faced with rebuilding the software. Hence 'dreck'. This is partly because I will now be limping along until I can get sufficient time to spend the 2-3 days needed to do this. So it will be back to my old IBM Thinkpad.

The only upside is that I can ensure that all the rubbish that the machine was shipped with as standard (?both? open office and Office 2007???) and especially the horrid Nero which appears to do nothing for me at all (apart from pre-empt file associations)... Fortunately I have my own copies of stuff like Roxio for burning DVDs. I also suspect that the Audigy board ain't that great and am getting more and more tempted to swap the Xonar sound card into it...

And as for backups, I'm now probably the most backed up person in the world (DVD + external SATA array, dual mirrored disk) which means that the data is backed up 3 times over at least once a week! The only real aggro is the MS setup stuff for Outlook, OE and so on, as these are painful to extract and do. Sigh. And I suspect that Civ IV, which keeps CTD-ing (Closing to Desktop) after about 25 minutes (better than the 3-4 minutes it was with Nero running) with a send error report message, may be a culprit... Sigh

Anyway, this is simply to explain what is likely to be a long silence, as these rebuilds are never, ever smooth.

Deposing Nero burns Rome, your PC, but not BT

If you're not mildly techie, do not read on, only heed the warning not to install Nero Essentials!

Just a very quick blog; I spent most of the weekend and part of last night trying to revive my file associations. Let me explain; I have a lovely new quiet PC - after having mistakenly thought that a water-cooled PC would be quiet (it's like having a swimming pool pump next to your ear), I decided that I would go for quiet. And it is; it also came with Nero Essentials pre-installed. Now I used Nero some 5 versions ago without any problems, but I started noticing some persistent activities in terms of programmes checking stuff and doing stuff in background.

So I de-installed Nero; then did it again, then searched on the web to find that it needs a utility (as a side-note, this is a really well-known problem) . To quote their own blurb "The Nero General CleanTool has removed all selected Nero entries from your computer." Well, actually, no it hasn't - my StartUp inspector shows that there are still four entries in the startup routine that refer to Nero files that are no longer there. So I have to go into the registry and remove the entries manually - a tricky process.

So, after 5 hours of effort I thought 'killed it" - good. And then I noticed that one of my icons had changed; it was a humble Word 2000 file. I double-clicked on it and it then asked me to search for the appropriate application. Word and Office 2007 aren't there!?! What the **** Hmmm. So I check that Office 2007 is still installed - it is. I then see that there are an awful lot of file associations that have disappeared.

Apparently, Nero Essentials, grabs file associations on install unless you tell it not to. And if you install stuff (as I had) afterwards, when it updates itself, it grabs all the file associations, including those you told it not to grab in the first instance. So when you double click on an icon, it goes through Nero first! As the recommended solution appears to be to deinstall and reinstall everything, I am now havering between trying to live with it, doing as it says or a factory settings reboot, a deinstall, nuke Nero Essentials and then start again. Oh, and that means a series of downloads of updates for Windows and Office 2007 that amounts to over a gigabyte on a 0.5 Mbps broadband line. Update: 25/2: Office 2007 Repair recovers the Office associations - now for the rest!

And that brings me onto BT. Spit. They rang me last night offering cheap broadband. They are the clowns who've split my line down to provide capacity for other numbers in the area to the extent that I now have a maximum theoretical line speed of 1Gb, which works out for contention reasons to between 0.5 and 0.8 Mbps. When I raised this with the caller (who I'd already roasted because I'm registered with the TPS; her response that I was one of their customers was squelched by the fact that I'd said on all and every communication not to use telephone) she still persisted on trying to use my time and telephone line to sell me something!

Re, the bandwidth, I've tried Oftel and also lodging a fault report, but nothing works.

Taste and Cobblers

I thought I'd do a quick review blog, but it's turned into a bit of a monster. But first an aside; I used to read in my teens some 4-8 books a week, sometimes many more; even in my late thirties and forties I read at least one book a week. And then, working with computers and print for such a long time got to my eyes and I had to wear reading glasses. The point of this is that I now select very carefully what I read - part of this is that I get headaches when I read, so it has to be worth it.

So to "A Taste of My Life" by Raymond Blanc. (Corgi books, £8.99 pbk) I've always been fascinated by this man; why did he come to the UK, why has he stayed, how did he get started - it's a fascinating story. But, don't expect a connected narrative; it is more a collection of stories, ideas and recipes and is very cleverly put together so that each informs the other in the sequence of his life. I'm guessing that M. Blanc does not get much time for writing and wants to make it count!

I found particularly interesting some of the general comments on cooking; Chapter Twenty-four is called Thought and is about salt and seasoning in general. And not the least is the observation which I have known, mutely, all my latter cooking life, that when you add seasoning during the progress of the cooking, it will differ in strength and effect. I know that's obvious, but boy, does it need saying. With some dishes if you forget an ingredient it behoves you to think long and hard about the effects of adding it in later; garlic and salt are two things that spring to mind where the effects are totally different, if added at the start or at the end.

The insight into his childhood and French country life is fascinating to a francophile like myself (and for more of the same in visual form, watch the beautiful and poetic Etre et Avoir; it's subtitled, but very much worth watching).

His final chapter is about the future and particularly the future in terms of the food chain and what and how we get our food. The mere mention of the word carbon footprint raises the spectre of things like responsible eating! Which brings me on to something I bought from my local Tesco's. I was looking for some reasonably dense-fleshed white fish to cook - going past the counters I spotted Pangasius hypophthalmus or River Cobbler as it's known in English. I read the label (I do that nowadays, even if it means laboriously taking my glasses out of their case) and discovered that it was farmed fish from Vietnam. Now I knew it was from Vietnam, because I'd watched Rick Stein's Far Eastern Odyssey. But I hadn't realised that it was also farmed.

So I thought I'd try it. It comes in fillets and the structure of the flesh is firm, but there are what appears to be sorts of, hmm, ligaments running in the same way that bones would run, so I guess this this is why there are nil bones in it. After unwrapping the fish I saw that it has a slight pink tinge to them, but don't have a fishy smell; in fact hardly any smell at all.

The bony ligaments (for want of a better word) are held together by one central ligament, which I decided to remove, so making two half fillets; I then cut the remaining into chunks. Now this is a really solid flesh and the ligaments that remained are quite evident when you cut them and also when you eat the fish. I tried these twice - once by giving them about 12 minutes cooking (with other ingredients) and once about 8 minutes cooking. For my taste (given that I use a lot of SE Asian spices in my cooking) the former is better as the extra 4 minutes helps to break down the ?collagen in the ligament thingies. There's a springy texture when you bite into it which I found disconcerting when cooked the 8 minute time.

One review by Tune57 on Ciao gives the following method: "Having not tasted them before, I decided to keep the cooking of them relatively simple by dipping them in flour and then beaten egg before coating them in fresh wholemeal breadcrumbs, mixed with some lemon zest and a little dill. These were then lightly fried in a little olive oil for around 5 minutes on each side, before being devoured alongside a green salad and some new potatoes.

The flesh of this fish turned a delectable ivory colour once cooked and had a lovely clean, juicy and delicate taste, not that dissimilar to Cod or Sole, but without the hefty price tag."

I've since googled around and come across some horrifying stories of food poisoning, polluted environments, and so on. A bit reminiscent of the salmon with sea lice stories that applied to one particular farm and hit the livelihood of all those farming salmon. Given that we eat fish like sole, cod and monkfish that spend their lives sucking the bottom of the seas around our coastline, I think it behoves us to try and keep a sense of proportion!

I think air miles may be more of a problem than pollution, but the amount of sustainable fish available in the UK is pretty limited and the bottom-feeders like cod, monkfish or plaice are already very much at risk. When did you last see plaice in any quantity (wonderful with beurre noisette and new potatoes)? But unlike Tune57 I felt river cobbler was more of a carrier food than having any special merit.

Creation of the Devil

I know it's hard to credit, but every so often I try, again, an ingredient I've disliked before. Semolina is one such. A variant of this which gives me the gag reflex even just thinking about it is couscous - so bad they named it twice. It always tastes to me as though it's slightly off and has the texture of sawdust.

Semolina I first encountered in the pudding form at school; it was the horrible white viscous liquid into which you put jam in the vain hope that it would magically transform into something edible. It never did - we called it frogspawn, and with the jam, bloody frogspawn. (Go to the head's study, boy, and request three; three whacks across the top of the thigh with a slipper - very very painful.) Yet another reason to hate the verdammt stuff. There was a small group of fellow pupils who loved it and the rest of us hated it; boy was it fat time for those who did.

But I've found a satisfactory use is to coat something with when you want a crispy crust without the pain of making breadcrumbs. It also has the advantage over breadcrumbs (proper ones) in that if you're putting it onto something damp, it doesn't soak all the dampness up and become claggy, if you're frying straight away. I'd heard of this before on TV cheffy programmes and I have to say, this wheeze works rather well.

A Samurai wakes

The strangest thing; (forgive typos - getting used to one of those shaped MS keyboards) and was reminded by Meemalee's latest blog entry of how much I have loved and been perplexed by things Japanese all my life. My father hated the Japanese with an absolute passion - understandable one of his friends died in a Japanese PoW camp. I don't need to expand on that, I hope. My next peripheral encounter was with a biology teacher, a really nice man who had the misfortune to teach in a Secondary Modern who loved to torment teachers. One of the things I am proudest of in my life is that I found out his background (tortured in a Japanese PoW camp where his nerves were destroyed by three years of captivity) and managed to persuade even the nastiest of the members of my class to leave him alone. And yet, and yet, I could not believe that a race that could produce Hokusai could be all monsters...

Some years later I read Clavell, who managed to get into the way of life; and that lead to Jessica Salmondsen and Tomoe Gozen, Cherryh (who is so influenced by Japanese culture), and finally to Ghost in the Shell - oh Ghods and that unlocks the key to the Japanese soul I think - the Manga to some extent, which is so fatalistic and so expectant of disaster, but which like Origa's stunning initial theme (goose bumps here - playing it now), gives the lie to the character which is, I think, controlled passion. The music for the manga is brilliant.

The control is everything and the concentration on it is so at the heart of their soul that almost everything else is either a disguise or rebellion. My bro was a very high-ranking officer in a Japanese bank and I worked with another Japanese bank for a short while - they are absolutely immersed in control structures. But they worship those who can find new paradigm for that control. They will follow and look within their culture for those to follow. When social structures break down, they look for individuals and the credos they put forward. But they also love? respect? the breakaway individual, the ronin*, the loner and outsider who provides a different perspective.

*And the resonance of Japanese ideas and culture is filtering into our own; try the switching perspectives in the eponymous film - stunning performances by all the cast, but for me Robert de Niro's best film and also the film which made me realise what an excellent actor Jean Reno is. Gods - I even recognise the steps outside the cafe. The picture is courtesy of Invisible Paris - a blog which I wish I'd found before I went there!

Thanks MiMi, a really valuable capsule of a post...

Damn, damn, damn - I've gone and bought the sound track to Ghost in the Shell II - at nearly £30 - I must be mad... time to get plastered so I can't type.

Pas du Vin?

Every so often I have to go to France; sadly nowadays I go on my own, but it's worth it. I drink three or four glasses of wine a day and at UK prices that would be prohibitive. So I make a trip every three to four months and stock up.

This is very cost-effective. In the UK, 110 bottles of the stuff I buy would cost me £352. I've just spent a total (including all goods, wine, petrol and crossing) of £242.50. Besides that, I also bought enough ground coffee for me to have a pot of coffee filter coffee every day for 4 months, a bottle of old Calvados, and another of old Armagnac, which are not easy to find in this country. Also 3 cans of artichoke hearts, a St Agur (addicted I am), some finely sliced Serrano ham, 2 jars of Amora dijon mustard which is brilliant for cooking, 3 litre bottles of extra virgin olive oil. Oh, and a baguette.

I've therefore saved about £110, ands got 4 months supply of spirits, coffee. Free. Note to self and others though, that olive oil is no longer the massive saving it once was - the saving is only £1 a bottle, whereas you still save pretty much £2 a bottle on wine.

I live in Aylesbury (as does the bear), so having got up at 5.45 am and leaving at 6.30, I got through the tunnel, went twice to Carrefours (that quantity of wine you can't put in a trolley, it's two trips) and drove back and had racked the wine and put everything away by 2.30 pm. Amazing (distance driven 256 miles).

Now I'm going to go and drink some of it!

Sometimes you just want to share

This is a very short and ultra-quick bloglet (month-end and very busy), but I was having an afternoon cuppa and punting around for something non-work related (been here 8 hours and still a couple more to go) and stumbled across a really beautiful piece of writing.

The article is Olive Oil Barons from the Guardian. Read and enjoy!

A tale of two series

Some time since the last blog... all sorts of reasons. I keep thinking, I must mention that, I must mention that... and then various things crop up, like the recent daily car slaloms into and out of work, amidst carefully timed traffic road works that take an extra hour out of my day.

During the interregnum two new cooking shows have started up - the Hairy Biker's Mums know best series and the cooking biography of Delia Smith, Delia through the ages. Quite an appropriate pairing as Dave Myers has a much-advertised thing about the sainted Delia. Oddly enough, when I was younger I really rather fancied her - something I didn't tell any of my compatriots.

Let's deal with the HBs first. I love their stuff normally and think that they do a lot of good for both cooking and for local produce in this country. Their Food tour of Britain I'm hoping will encompass the rest of Britain soon. I really applaud the personal warmth they bring to their shows. However, I am not a fan of the latest series and I can't quite put my finger on why. It may be because they feel very, very bitty and they do not hang together very well. It may also be because, much as I loved my mother, apart from steak and kidney pudding, she was an absolutely awful cook. She would boil cabbage until it disintegrated...

A little aside, back in the 50s, the first Fray Bentos steak pie in a tin appeared; Mum didn't bother to read the instructions apart from the temperature and cooking time. She put it in the oven (which had a glass safety door). Some time later we heard a dull THUMP; a wail of despair; when we got to the kitchen the outer door had blown open and the ceiling, walls and floor and Mum were covered in bits of safety glass and Fray Bentos pie...

So Mums don't necessarily know best and sadly they don't produce the best television, either, in this format.

Watching Delia was fascinating, because the biog series has the advantage of putting her career in context (and that context is also the backdrop to my own life). Anyone old enough to remember Fanny Craddock will know just what a breath of fresh air Delia was. The reason why she was so good and continues to be a favourite through various generations, is that she tells you how to cook the ordinary food of everyday life. She is the equivalent of my Good Housekeeping: The Cook's Classic Companion book (get the older versions, not the updated version which loses some of the standard recipes in favour of more complex stuff which others do better). I do use Mastering the Art of French Cooking, but more often it's the Good Housekeeping book that I refer to.

Why should what Delia's biography be so much better than Mums know best? Well, I think it's because there's a story to hang the programme and series together on. Sadly, although The Mums on the HBs show are very good at what they do (and I did like the look of Gameelah's Samosas), there is no overall story, just an inaccurate theory and a ragbag of recipes. Sorry boys, I love your work, but not this one.