vital functions

[kaberett]

Reading. mauve, Simon Garfield, slowly.

Cooking Outside the Box, Keith Abel, impulse library loan. Skimming through fairly quickly; so far the most interesting thing for me is that the gnawed corn cobs one sometimes sees in woodland were probably poached by badgers or deer!

Watching. Adam found some bat cams. I am Hoping that Having Them On The TV In Background is in my relatively near future.

Playing. Couple of games of Scrabble with my mother!

Cooking. Two new recipes (ish): Jersey Royal and green bean istoo and tamarind shallots, both from East, slightly reworked from the versions of the recipes in the Graun. "Ish" because (i) we have run out of garlic, (ii) I only had half the required quantity of coconut powder, (iii) I used small onions instead of shallots, and (iv) probably several other thing I do not at this juncture recall, even though the cooking all happened a maximum of four hours ago.

I also provided hands for a butternut squash, chickpea and lentil stew, which we had with quinoa; and black bean patties with Misc Salad.

At home, today's bread was made using Shipton Mill's fig, spelt & pumpkin seed flour, which I bought a kilo of with our last order as an Indulgence. Between the ingredients for which proportions are listed and their recommendations for using diastatic malt, we are going to be Recreating This At Home once we've had our second and final loaf of the pre-mixed stuff (well, and once I've got around to ordering the malt...)

Flaked almonds are a tasty addition to the kale-butter bean-lemon-chilli-garlic thing, and I think black garlic works well.

And I think I have finally more-or-less got the hang of Instant Pot yoghurt. I'm mildly annoyed by how much I apparently want to strain the stuff, but we are v pleased with the outcome, and the whey is being used in sourdough.

Making & mending. A week ago on Sunday I dropped my phone and the screen finally died. On Friday A was heading into town so he took it along to get one of the phone shops to undo the T2 screws (!!! -- my screwdriver for same should be arriving in the next few days...) following which I established that I've bashed the thing about enough that getting the back cover off safely is actually remarkably Doable. Alas it wasn't anything as simple as just reseating some cables, so I'll be ordering a replacement screen & digitiser assembly and poking around its guts in more detail soonish, partly because I keep not backing up my phones and there's at least a few photos on it that I'd like to keep, and partly because having a viable spare phone would be nice. I'd be finding this whole thing lots more distressing if I hadn't gone "... fuckit!" and decided to take money out of savings to buy a Fairphone 4.

On another topic (I'm not sure this fits here, but I'm not sure it fits better anywhere else either...): I've finally consolidated all the post-60s stamps from the various corners o the Mouldering Ancestral Pile, and today I've been going through them, trimming off excess paper, and roughly sorting them. Biggest categories so far: pre-decimalisation British, post-decimalisation British, and Austrian. For the British ones, I've done a rough sort into "relevant enough to my interests that I might want to use them", "unused", "standard", and "special issue"; Austrian is subdivided into "keep", "unused", and "everything else". Other countries represented so far: Ireland, Belgium, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Australia and Canada (both of which took much longer to find examples from than I expected), the USA, and then (to my significant surprise) Mexico, Nigeria, South Africa, and -- date of issue 1984 -- Laos. I have absolutely no idea why Laos circa 1984 is in there but it is.

Growing. Nowt new sown this week, but I dug up a couple of blackcurrants and replaced them with jostaberries; peppers various continue to hatch; and I utterly failed to get my act together to pinch some of my mother's thyme and rosemary.

Observing. Still not seen the bat yet this year, in part no doubt because I Cannot Cope with having sunset in my peripheral vision and our relevant windows face west. (Soon. Maybe.) But! we did see an unexpected back-garden pheasant (female), which was fun!

Comments

[simont]

Having bat-cams on the TV: while eating dinner, dinner, dinner, dinner, I trust?

[davidgillon]

back-garden pheasant

*Boggle*

[cesy]

ded

[doseybat]

bat cams!