kaberett | Entries tagged with inveterate reader of the graun

so we're getting a lot of beetroot in these veg boxes, right. (beetroot, lest we forget, being a food that I Don't Like, or more accurately that I have historically Disliked and have gradually, since... about 2010...? been rehabilitating.) we are nearly at the point where we have run through all of the beetroot recipes in East except the beetroot-and-yoghurt-rice (which we are going to make at some point) and the beetroot-and-ginger soup (which we likely aren't because we are routinely eating root veg stew for lunch), so I am turning to Other Cookbooks for More Ideas.

the various Ottolenghi cookbooks that we own are not particularly useful -- yes I could make a bicolour roast beetroot salad, but A is suspicious of most of the other ingredients and it'll still need a lot of padding to be dinner.

okay, thinks I, and starts digging through the various other ridiculous cookbooks on my shelves, and it is in the Terre à Terre cookbook, which I picked up from a charity shop in York lo these many years ago for three quid, that I strike more-or-less figurative gold. after a fashion.

this is a cookbook I have owned since 2015 and have yet to actually make anything out of, though I occasionally flip through it and enjoy the pictures and go "hmm, maybe--" and. WELL. it contains a recipe entitled Himmel und Erde: "apple and cheddar potato latkes, baked beets with dill and caraway oil, spring slaw and iced horseradish cream".

I have horseradish at the allotment that we are not personally inclined to eat and that needs using somehow. I have enormous quantities of dried apple, which the recipe very much does call for. and after I have made Meera Sodha's clay pot noodles with smoked tofu I will still have 250g of red beetroot that needs using!

... Himmel und Erde (which usually refers to a decidedly different dish, so I do keep tripping up on that) calls for 180g of red beetroot! and, also, 180g of golden beetroot. (this is the less-figurative part.)

so, obviously, this week's grocery order contains yellow beetroot! probably 650ish grams of them, of which I have plans for 180ish grams ('twas on a Monday morning...) and this weekend's plans include, in addition to "maybe finally rebuilding the greenhouse", "horseradish soured cream ice cream". I know, courtesy of Ruby Violet, that despite my usual suspicion of horseradish I quite like at least their version of horseradish ice cream -- not enough to have done more than taste it in the shop, but at least sufficient to be pleasantly surprised by the sample.

obviously, at the point at which I'm making one recipe from this ridiculous book I'm not going to stop there, so I have also chosen a dessert. it involves custard and tiny individual steamed puddings. (I did look through the starters but decided that none of them appealed Sufficiently to convince me it was actually a good idea to cook a three-course meal for six.) possibly I will set Adam loose on the cocktail recipes at the very end of the cookbook!

and anyway that is the very long-winded explanation of how I nearly wound up buying more dill seeds despite, as it turns out, already owning two packets of dill seeds! because Waitrose have apparently stopped selling packets of frozen dill and I am indignant about the cost of fresh, but this ridiculous recipe requires 75g of same, and obviously anything I plant now won't be ready in time to use on [checks watch] Friday, but this entire ridiculous adventure the purpose of which is using up excess beetroot has apparently convinced me that one of my gardening priorities this year is growing enough dill that I can freeze a bunch of it myself given! that the market! is apparently! unwilling! to provide!

and while we're on the topic of dill: never forget the spindly menace.

goodnight.

the Graun on the topic of mozzarella (this has more-or-less worked for me, I just need to? be slightly braver???)
an overview of whey
an overview of the ricotta process

That is, they are presumably in there somewhere, but they have Retreated Into Their Shell and are Not Coming Out.

Meanwhile, in another part of the forest:

Karen Armstrong on the myth of religious violence (circa 2014)
A camel through the eye of a needle, and other wild tales of translation
Mount Taranaki (Aotearoa) has been granted 'living person' status
Brutalist cuckoo clocks ("Cuckoo Blocks")
Book and the Dragon: a tiny nine-page comic about queers and libraries and dragons (silveradept, I thought particularly of you)

The Graun is just wrong, on so many levels, and it's sort of endearing. They're correct about the Bird's, of course, but I absolutely categorically disagree with many of the conclusions they come to.

All else aside, they don't even mention pears, and they go for almonds as an addition to the crumble rather than the much-more-obvious hazelnuts.

(They do also give a shout-out to a recipe for gluten-free crumble topping, in case you're interested, but it does contain eggs and nuts.)

NEW HORN CASE NEW HORN CASE NEW HORN CASE. I have been meaning to get one for Literally Years -- basically since I got this horn, in fact -- because my horn... doesn't actually fit... in the case that was supplied with it... such that I had to remove a slide every time I put it away, and this massively raised the barrier to doing practice at home. More recently, the zips have been gradually giving up. SO. On Saturday A accompanied me on an exciting adventure to Paxman, whose step-free entrance is hilariously locked up at weekends so Everybody Learned Something, and I now own a case that (a) my horn fits in, (b) has working zips, (c) fits on my lap much better for wheelchairing, and (c) is BLUE. Detachable-bell, space for a mute, I totally failed to spot it on the website, props to Paxman for pointing it out to me (it was actually slightly cheaper than the thing I'd gone in expecting to buy).
Because Borough Market is right there if you've visited Paxman, we had excellent fresh pasta for lunch (I had the pumpkin and ricotta tortelloni; they were brilliant). Further inspiration for the Surprise Charity-Shop Pasta Machine, etc. I just looked up how to make tortelloni.
On Sunday I finally got around to adjusting Lightweight Wheelchair: I'd extremely belatedly spotted that the pushrims were on the wider of their two settings, and if I moved them on to the narrower the chair would probably need slightly less finessing to get through the front door. However, changing the setting involved removing the tyres and inners and both layers of rim tape, so I didn't get around to it until Sunday afternoon (sat on the picnic bench on the decking in the sunshine, with the patio doors open). I only holed one of the inners, promptly remembered that set of tyre levers always does that, and added them to the charity-shop pile! The chair fits through the door comfortably! My wrists are still somewhat sore (my hand strength isn't great and these are Schwalbe Marathon Plus on 1" rims, okay), but I am pretty pleased with myself, and with finally living somewhere that all my chairs are actually trivially usable. Give or take getting another cushion so I don't gotta swap them around as much.
I absolutely adore The Ruin of Angels (the latest in Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence, the first five books are available as an ebook omnibus for under a tenner, highly recommended) to the point that I'm researching what the blue mineral most likely to be local to Kavekana is so I can Have A Relevant Theological Necklace. (I'm gravitating toward sodalite, but have tweeted the author to ask...) (... and he hasn't responded but I did on Etsy find an Exactly Correct pendant bead so, er, whoops? Whoops.)
I am having Feelings about the latest Check, Please! and partnership and mutual support and interaction. (Cup I - Playoffs, future Alex.)
When my baby brother got into the van at Bristol Parkway on our way down to Cornwall the other weekend, he handed me a milk chocolate trilobite that he'd picked up at a museum because it was a trilobite and obviously. Naturally I have not yet been able to bring myself to eat it, so I keep finding it when I'm shuffling things around in the kitchen and grinning again.
PASTA PASTA PROOF-OF-CONCEPT PASTA. Ricotta tortellini with sage butter; and then we ran out of ricotta, so tagliatelle with Italian Hard Cheese, pepper and Parsley From The Tub On The Patio (which is looking very cheerfully established, HURRAH). Turns out tortellini are actually easier than tagliatelle at least at the proof-of-concept who-cares-if-they're-all-the-same-size stage; I have learned Many Thing and am looking forward to trying again, and am genuinely impressed with how well the dough worked given that I arrived at it by eyeballing a Graun How To Make The Perfect... column and then fiddling with ratios to achieve a quantity I thought we could actually eat.
Having seen Night At The Museum 2 doing the rounds on Tumblr (specifically the scene with the Tuskegee Airmen and Amelia Earheart), when I stumbled upon Night At The Museum in a charity shop for £1.10 last week I jumped upon it, having got the two confused. Happily, today I discovered the sequel for £1 in a charity shop, so next time I am feeling Sad and want to Curl Up On The Sofa Watching Something I have that lined up. I will cry.
I continue Greatly Enjoying Pokemon, and am particularly smug because today I took part in a raid and ended up with a Suicune with shit IVs, so I... caught it on my second Pinap berry, for 12 candy, because double-candy event. (I will explain this in more detail if anyone is actually interested & doesn't understand!) (Also I really need to write up my Fascinating Sociological Study in Pokemon Go at some point, but for now suffice it to say that the person I've most made friends with is currently ill? And I ran into her mum outside the sorting office yesterday morning, and we had a brief chat about the world, because obviously.)
I am about to embark on a His Dark Materials reread, not least because A has acquired us tickets to An Evening Of Conversation in the relatively near future, with ticket price including a copy of The Book of Dust -- so given how hideously behind I am on new releases, I think I'm just going to do the reread and then read the new one once I have it. But AAAAAAAAH. :D

The Red Turtle is a collaboration between Studio Ghibli and Oscar-winning British-Dutch animator Michaël Dudok de Wit. Having premiered at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, it's had a general release in the UK this week.

me_and spotted a poster in one of our local stations; I've just started showing him the Studio Ghibli back catalogue; he suggested going. (It's Ghibli! It's turtles! These seemed like good things.)

The Guardian, in one of many rapturous reviews, says:

Suffice to say that the official one-line synopsis of The Red Turtle – "the milestones in the life of a human being" – rings entirely true; the cycle of birth, death and rebirth is expressed with piercing clarity.

... which is sort of accurate, but very telling about expected audiences, and reviewers, and... everyone involved in the thing.

( 'ware spoilers! )

To be clear, I'm glad that I saw it: I loved the animals and the textures and the ways in which one got to know the small island; I loved the atmosphere and the great sweeping shots of tiny people against a vast expanse of sea and sky; I loved the detail of the glass bottle that washed up on the shore, echoing a much earlier barrel.

I just really wish that it didn't, in framing itself as universal, once again write the experiences of anyone who's not a factory-default man completely out of the story.

On Tuesday I turned 27;

me_and got me a set of lockpicks and a practice padlock, and took me to Ottolenghi Spitalfields for dinner.

The morning of, they called A to confirm the booking -- and, he tells me, followed up with "... and there's a note about a wheelchair in the booking...?" So, naturally, he braced, and was very pleasantly surprised when what they actually wanted to say was "... we've got a folding ramp and we can get it out for you."

We arrived. "Just one moment," said front-of-house, and went to get the ramp. They did not try to grab me as I was going up it. "Through this way," they said, and showed us to a table for two that was easy for me to get to, adjacent a wall neatly out of the way of everyone's path, with the sensible chair already removed for me to just slot in.

This is much better than even fancy restaurants normally manage; I was -- we were! -- impressed.

Also, they fed us really very well.

( Read more... )

... and then, after a little extra faff involving buying one of the cookbooks, they got the ramp back out and held the doors open and cheerfully let me back out into the outside world, with some commiseration about the part where it had started drizzling gently. However, as I said to A, while it might not have been the best kind of rain it was definitely in my top five, so I was absolutely fine with that.

I had a lovely evening and was delighted; A has, as mentioned, been before and been a fan, so I rather suspect more visits are (however sporadically!) in our future.

Unrelated (except insofar as it's about food, and specifically pistachio cake): someone I know tweaked last month's Smitten Kitchen pistachio loaf cake recipe to include blackberries and lemon.

Teal cakes, via azurelunatic
a cardamom bun recipe I want to get around to trying
"Kitten-sized extinct 'lion'"
Geoscience Australia partners with Google to showcase Australia's natural history (thank you to elizabeth_fitz for bringing this to my attention!)
The importance of being disabled, a Graun article by James Beddard, who me_and and I saw in Threepenny Opera last weekend; I was initially dubious about Wheelchair Use On Stage (not least because last time I saw it and it wasn't me it was in Wicked; and in this instance, people were swapping around who was using the chair, but... yeah, no, disabled actor playing a role in the National Theatre)
UK Border Control being unsurprisingly but still terribly awful, on which topic I really need to work out a phrasing to write to my MP, for all the good it will do
Who, if not you? is a guide on addressing racist abuse/violence in public, which I have seen linked around a fair bit in the aftermath of the Brexit vote.

Paella (and various other rice things) by Yotam Ottolenghi; Clare Ptak's lemon yoghurt spelt cakes.

Turns out

me_and has two Yotam Ottolenghi cookbooks (Plenty and Plenty More, for those of you who care), probably acquired as gifts at some point, to which he'd been sort of oblivious up until I pounced on them on Monday night while we were working out where my boxes of books should live temporarily.

(He proceeded to go to one of the Ottolenghi restaurants on Tuesday night and really liked it; we'd walked past a different branch on Sunday and I'd pointed it out, and there was one just down the road from a gig he was going to, so he decided to give it a go.)

Ergo I have established that Ottolenghi, unlike basically every other recipe I've found during this particular set of experimentation, agrees with me about actually boiling the dairy (see also). ( seriously nobody is as interested in this as I am )

Vanilla shortbread cake; spiced quince cake, and pear, chocolate and hazelnut cake; the Nigel Slater lentils also don't sound terrible; and of course several of the things from this week's theme of charred.

Meanwhile cake #2 is a mild horror that as far as I can tell has been designed precisely to make

me_and think it's a good idea: it is, in essence, a purple maths-themed beetroot-dust pavlova and I'm gently horrified.

eta smitten kitchen just posted an unholy mashup of puttanesca and shakshuka. I have capers and oregano and thyme and parsley in and I am so here for this.

1. I got to the end of this Graun article on how to make meringue before I clocked the title. (I am having an Erudite Discussion about Meringue on the book of faces, you see, or at least a discussion about whether or not they ought be chewy and how one goes about achieving effects various. It is a source of some frustration to me that Molecular Gastronomy, a copy of which

deborah_c gave me for... a birthday Some Time Ago, mentions meringues only in the context of putting them in a bell jar you then PUMP ALL THE AIR OUT OF, because it is fascinating on a great many topics -- how to make pastry with chocolate! the physics of boiling dumplings until they rise to the surface! -- and mysteriously lacking in tedious detail on this one.)

2. I have decided that macaroni cheese is much improved by steaming a head of cauliflower over the top of the pasta water (chopped into florets & the stalk into chunks) and mixing it in. This is perhaps obvious but it had not previously occurred to me, and I am a Fan.

3. Smitten Kitchen posted a recipe for roasted sweet potatoes and chickpeas, and linked onward to an article about the perplexing USois use of "yam" and "sweet potato". I am enlightened. (I will promptly forget it again, no doubt, and discover it once more In The Future and be delightened again, but I can't quite see this as a downside.)

4. ... and a bonus, edited in post-facto because my mum just put it on facebook: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's potato peel soup. YOU'RE WELCOME.

You're welcome.

... because this is now the second time I've cooked it, and I made exactly the same set of modifications, so I might as well write it down so as to have the recipe the way I do it next time instead of having to reconstruct it from several different sources again.

Heavily modified from the Graun and the BBC, because of course it is. (But seriously, though, who puts cornflour in meringue. WHAT IS IT FOR.)

( Read more... )

It's a facsimile copy of Nairn's London, bought from the Graun bookshop because of course, and the blurb is

'A record of what has moved me between Uxbridge and Dagenham', Nairn's London is an idiosyncratic and intensely subjective meditation on a city and its buildings. Including railway stations, synagogues, abandoned gasworks, dock cranes, suburban gardens, East End markets, Hawksmoor churches, a Gothic cinema and twenty-seven different pubs, it is a portrait of the soul of a place, from a writer of genius.

The Graun review features the line It is a wonder in itself. Compact – 280 pages with index – and yet enormous in scope, it is a detailed vision of a city, and what a city should be like, that has never been bettered.

They've met me three times.

In small text in the middle of a banner, approx:

  If you're reading this,
         you're inquisitive. Free thinking.
You're curious about other perspectives,
     determined to develop your own.

Or you thought this was one of those
                 Poems on the Underground.

... for theguardianmembership. They have absolutely met their target audience, and know exactly what they are doing.

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30

who only by moving can balance

only by balancing move

amusement-at-self

[food] Cheesemaking

[linkspam] My nipples are essentially indistinguishable from an extremely disgruntled turtle

[food] further on the topic of rhubarb crumble

ten good things

[film] La tortue rouge (The Red Turtle) (2016)

In which I am very impressed by Ottolenghi Spitalfields, and also I am a cube

some of the things I have been looking at, in interstices--

[food] mooooore recipes to try at some point

[food] I am seriously not yet bored of talking about custard

Recipes from the last few Grauns that I'm vaguely into the concept of

[food] and now for something completely different

The Graun today, feat. Tamal Ray and recipes

[food] Lemon meringue pie

... I just opened my present from the in-laws in order to write a thank-you note and now I'm crying

tube ad that made me smile

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