Good morning my lovelies. W7 is taken a much needed break from everything, and will be back in two weeks.
Until then, take care and enjoy life.
If he can do it, I can, and set out to making my own caviar. I made two types, Cointreau (clear) and White Port wine (golden), but I guess you can make it from just about anything that sets in the cold: fish stock, Madeira and onion gravy, fruit juice, ale, be my guest.
It’s actually pretty straight-forward to make, although I will admit its a bit of a palaver. But, you’d only do it once in a while, and you won’t make more than a teaspoon for each of your diners. Just like with real caviar.
Step 1:
Find a flat bottom bowl or dish that can take two fingers deep of vegetable oil. For once, use the dullest, least aromatic oil you can find – I used what I buy for maintenance of woks and non-stick pans and pots. So, pour two fingers deep of said oil, cling film it, and deep freeze it for 3 hours.
Step 2:
Check how your oil is doing. It must still be fluid, but more like thick honey.
Step 3:
Make the caviar mix. You might want to reduce the port wine, or clarify the stock. Make sure it is cold, then add just enough gelatine to set it. For my first Cointreau and port wine caviar experiment, I did nothing, just added gelatine.
Step 4:
Remove oil from freezer, and slowly drip drop after drop of the caviar mix into the vey cold oil.
Step 5:
Let sit for a couple of seconds, in which time the oil chills down each caviar pearl, and sets it. Then take the pearls out (using slotted spoons, forks, whatever), clean with kitchen paper and greaseproof paper.
Serve as fancy decoration. Or, mentally put it onto the list for The Alice Project, for those of you who know what The Alice Project is. It’s still alive!
This week, or rather since the previous reporting, our home cooking menu included these nice dishes:
Seared rack of lamb, served with rose potato dauphinoise and green beans, followed by mini strawberry cheesecakes,
One-egg omelettes with smoked salmon, served with a mixed garden salad and courgettes. A favourite quick-fix.
A Spanish meal (reported earlier), consisting of Gazpacho, Sea Bream with risotto, and Crème Catalan. This will see a repeat performance shortly.
Tomato soup, followed by Greek-Roman Freestyle: rosemary rump steaks with Greek salad and Tzatziki. Always one of the best ways to stabilize a marriage.
Watching Celebrity Masterchef 2010, a friend new to Masterchef asked about Gregg Wallace what is he doing there?
Hmm. Interesting question. He co-presents, in the wake and in the shadow of John Torode, so what’s Gregg’s role? He’s Dr Watson, that’s what he is.
I believe it really was Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle who invested the classic duo: the genius lead figure, and the friend or assistant who asks all the questions on our behalf, and sometimes translates for us poor simpletons, when the detective head presenter goes into cryptic mode.
Amazing that most mystery novels or TV productions follow the same scheme. I hadn’t yet realized that the scheme goes far beyond the mystery novel. Think Breakfast TV, presented by a couple (where the woman adopts the role of the stupid blonde for unclear reasons), Masterchef, Nature Watch, Jamie Oliver’s Kitchen programme, …
Fascinating. A toast to Sir Arthur!
Welcome back. You come at the right time, because I have an important question for your:
It’s hard to soar like an eagle when you’re surrounded by turkeys, they say, and I guess it is true. But, does it apply to chickens, too?
Chickens kept for meat or egg production have some of their wing feathers clipped. Subject to the clipping, this prevents take-off, or makes flight very lopsided, thus preventing flight. Now, what if you don’t clip the wing feathers? Like, a chicken might escape, find a like-minded cockerel, lay fertilised eggs, and then what? Would the offspring learn to fly and soar like an eagle?
Chickens are pretty large birds with pretty small wings, so I guess it wouldn’t be a very elegant sight, maybe more a turkey-style flapping up into the nearest tree, and a slowed-down gliding type of fall back to the ground in the morning.
(And no, I haven’t been watching too much Chicken Run, but I have been looking after the neighbours chickens.)
Hugh Dennis pointed this out just a few nights ago. Well, it was on Dave, so it could have been the 17th repeat, but anyway, here goes:
Men’s life expectancy is approximately eight years less than women’s, according to the Office for National Statistics. Therefore, Hugh argues, men should be allowed to retire approximately eight years earlier than women, allowing both for the same duration of a restful age in retirement.
I like it!
I had to wait for an hour to see the doctor, who was running late, so I had plenty of time to read in Tom Holt’s brilliant May Contain Traces of Magic, and had plenty of time to admire my surroundings and fellow patients or patients-to-be.
One single woman, pensively chewing on a bag of chicken and tarragon flavoured crisps. Everybody else came as a pair, possibly the patient-to-be and the driver – don’t know.
Also don’t know what the hell those people talk about all the time. I mean. Honestly. It’s not normal. Blokes, on top of it. You sit at the doctor’s for an hour with your best mate, the one with whom you exchange twenty text message and five emails every day, and you use up your free mobile phone minutes, and you still have something to say while waiting for the doctor?
I really don’t get it.
I have never been a great small talker, and the meaningless chit-chat is not my thing at all. I don’t get it. Even if chit-chat isn’t my favourite thing, what the heck are those people talking about? There’s only so much weather to discuss, and I will boldly claim that they weren’t discussing Hegel or Kant or quantum physics. Even a devoted followed of soap operas or the rugby or the philatelists’ society, what more can be said? Every day, every hour?
I find quantum physics hard to understand, but its a walk in the park compared to human nature. I best stick with Tom Holt.
… the best that I could find on my dining table:
Tomato soup in fresh bread bowls (coz’ its so nice, and tomatoes are fairly cheap and flavoursome around this time of year), followed by extra lean grilled Venison fillet, served with not so lean Sauce Béarnaise and roasted potatoes. Pudim flan. A fantastic treat, every single course.
Salmon, steamed in rice vinegar, served with a Chinese-esque vegetable stir fry and cinnamon fragrant rice. Always nice to refresh the pallet with some Asian fusion wannabe food.
Lemon and thyme roasted venison sausages, served with Ratatouille and saffron rice. Good and heart-warming. Nigel could have done that.
Thai Green Curry with fragrant rice. Fairly simple and rewarding.
(A lot of rice this week, but you’ve got to note that the past week’s menu isn’t always 100% chronologically correct or complete. Also, since the acquisition of a Tefal rice cooker some months ago, our rice consumption definitely has gone up.)
For the missus’ birthday supper, I was foolish enough to offer that she should choose a country.
Hmm, she says, how about… how about… Uzbekistan?
I shouldn’t have asked. Uzbekistan. Yoghurt, root beet, herring, sour cream. Spinach, mushrooms, beechnuts and wind-dried beef or venison. Hmm, interesting. Actually, maybe we can make this work, but it seemed wiser to put this first suggestion away as a joke.
OK. Choose another one, I said, and she replied with Spain.
Now that was an interesting choice. At first, I thought Spain. Easy-peasy, but coming to think of something original, tasty, Spanish yet not the much beloved Paella…? Exciting. This is the resulting menu:
Uzbekistan is next up on the list of countries to try.
Turns out that I don’t have a designer alarm. Or, maybe my alarm has a very dumb designer, and I guess in all probability, so does yours. Goes like so:
Assigned wake-up time: Beep-beep-beep-beep
Me: groan, roll over, press snooze.
8 minutes later: Beep-beep-beep-beep
Me: groan, roll over, press snooze.
8 minutes later: Beep-beep-beep-beep
Me: groan, roll over, press snooze.
…
How stupid, how plain, how unimaginative is that?
When I grow up and get to be an alarm designer, my alarm comes with increasingly shorter snooze intervals (8 minutes, then 6, then 4, …), while the alarm volume and duration increases with each iteration. At maximum forte level, the snooze button disables itself, and you need to physically remove the batteries to stop the damn thing.
Oh, and the easily accessible operation is snooze. The off button would have to be the smaller and harder to find one – unlike my mobile phone, which has this particular detail wrong.
That’s what I call a well-designed alarm.
One particular detail about my recent hospital visit fascinate me though. It goes like this:
Whenever health professional A hands over a patient to health professional B (which, as it turned out, happened quite a lot), they need to go through a ceremonial dance to confirm that A brings the correct patient, that the correct wristband is still attached to said patient, and that B then obtains the correct patient.
It seems a little over the top, but I am sure the ramifications of cutting off the wrong part of the wrong patient could be unpleasant. So, OK, I go along with it. Not that I have a choice anyhow, but you’d wonder with all that scrutiny applied, at least they could try to do it right? You wish:
Sir, are you Mr so-and-so?
Yes.
Sir, are you born on the such-and-such of year so-and-so?
Yes.
Sir, do you live in this-and-that street?
Yes.
There were times when they could have asked whether I am the Queen of Sheba and I’d have said yes. Everyone who ever read a mystery novel knows not to ask suggestive questions. How hard is it to ask
What’s your name, sir?
A new BBC sci-fi drama series. Hmmm. I have not seen some similar series that might have been half-decent and worth watching for a bit of innocent entertainment. Typically, I miss the first few episodes and then fail to jump onto the running train later in the series. The one that I did watch and enjoy was discontinued after a short while. Maybe I was the only one enjoying Defying Gravity.
So, when The Deep was announced, I thought I should watch the first episode. After all, it is a British production, and thus stands a chance of being less silly and stereotypical and boring, with more plausible characters and all that, compared to pure American productions.
Ah well. The Beep missed a good chance here, but missed by a couple of miles. Frustrating:
A mostly inexperienced grew of mainly psychologically unstable young people with unknown qualifications (presumably, scientists), embark on a deep diving mission (The phenomenal depth of 2000ft is noted at 25:40 into the first episode. So much for sci-fi deep diving). The whole mission starts just 6 months after the catastrophic failure of the previous mission – that alone being implausible enough.
A long string of implausible events and details follow, acted out by equally unconvincing characters. At the end of the first series, the crew faces “that big thing” which now hovers above them. It could be alien. It could be a giant Russian foreign nuclear space deep sea station. It could be the new submarine Taliban division. It could be anything, but it is already certain not to be convincing or original.
Good lord BBC. Give me a few days, a room to think, and two creative free-thinking co-thinkers. We’d think up a better story-line for you.
This week, I’ve been eating a mixed bag of nice home-cooked food, a quickie on the run, and various things at various invitations. But, my food diary since my last public culinary navel gazing goes a few weeks back, so let me teleport you to the second week of July. That week, I was mostly eating…
Pork loin medallions with fresh garden courgettes and rice a casa,
Tomato soup in fresh bread bowls, crispy roast chicken on roasted cherry tomatoes, served with sage tagliatelle, followed by Tarte Tatin and (commercial) vanilla ice cream,
Pizza and beer (with home-grown basil and chard, but the own mushroom production isn’t catching on due to a lack of horse manure, unfortunately),
One egg omelette (personally laid by Barbara and Margot, the neighbour’s chickens), with Salade Du Jardin and prime organic Scottish Angus rump steak,
Thyme and lime roasted venison sausages, served with steamed new potatoes and a Madeira onion gravy.
Life is hard.
Funny that in all those many years, I never had surgery done, not as far as I remember anyhow. Well, now I have. The surgery was a low-risk thing and, as such, no cause for anxiety and worries, but it was very interesting to experience the whole thing.
First, the check-in to my day-case hospital treatment. I approached the receptionist, stating my name and claiming that I had a reservation for a room with sea view. Turns out they couldn’t deliver the sea view, but a nice long view overlooking a park and golf course, then the new Wembley stadium, with the London Skyline at the horizon (the docklands with Canary Wharf and the London Eye were clearly recognizable). So far so good.
Then, a long series of being fussed over. Temperature, pulse, weight, medical history, lunch menu choice, blood test, and similar jobs kept me entertained for a while, until I was laid down flat on my back, wheeled through the hospital, asked to breath deeply, and then be told everything was over.
(Followed, of course, by a a couple of hours of boredom until discharge.)
Fascinating.
