Saturday Evening Post

[shewhomust]

Apparently, this is Real Breadmaker Week; I learned this from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in this morning's Guardian, though by the time D. read out this information, I had already fed my shoggoth and was kneading flour into today's loaf. It probably says more about me than about Hugh F-W that I find him profoundly irritating, but my fake sourdough is nothing like as laborious as his: the ambient yeasts in the vicinity of River Cottage seem to be particularly demanding.

Mine are much more easy going, as witness, I made up that batch of dough, then went out for a quick visit to Arbeia Roman fort (beautiful small objects made of jet! a black cat who patrols the herb garden! oh, and a Roman fort, of course...) and lunch at Marsden Grotto. Came home, knocked back dough, did other things, came back, kneaded it again and put it in a tin, left it to recover. Set it to bake while we watched Doctor Who, and what results certainly looks like a loaf of bread. The proof is in the toasting, of course, but I am pretty confident. Which is why the bread blogging has fizzled out - I continue to bake, but it's less dramatic (I was very pleased with the hot cross buns, even though I forgot that the recipe required egg: the buns were fine without it).

Busy in the kitchen before Doctor Who, I was thinking about previous episodes: we've had David Warner, we've had Diana Rigg, it's like Morecambe and Wise, you don't wonder what the show will be like this week, you wonder who the big name star will be. This turned out to be correct, but I hadn't expected it to be the writer. I enjoyed the REDACTED chess-playing automaton (though there was a moment where REDACTED FOR FEAR OF SPOILERS and durham_rambler and I shouted as one "You've touched it, now you must move it!").

The internet conspires to remind me that the OED has lost a book: first the Quotation of the Day mailing list, then steepholm links to Guardian piece: Meanderings of Memory by 'Nightlark' appears in 51 entries for the dictionary, but no copy of it can be found, and the OED has issued an appeal.

Meanderings'R'Us, and this led me in two directions. The first was the reflection that the OED, being compiled from citations sent in on slips of paper by a large number of volunteers, was a pioneer of crowdsourcing.

The other is that Earl Grey tea may not be as aristocratic as we thought.

Comments

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Suffice it to say that if we can identify Nightlark, we will no doubt have found Jack the Ripper...

That's a very good point about the OED and crowd-sourcing! I can't off-hand think of an earlier example (assuming that Wanted posters don't count).

[desperance.livejournal.com]

The other is that Earl Grey tea may not be as aristocratic as we thought.

Whut? But! We elevated a whole damn statue to the man, on the strength of his tea! (Today is apparently all about Newcastle statuary; I can speak of nothing else.)

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

We elevated a whole damn statue to the man, on the strength of his tea!

The OED site actually says: "He served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in the early 1830s, but is most famous today for his association with Earl Grey tea..." - which tells you more about fame than it does about Earl Grey.

[hunningham.livejournal.com]

I'm with you on Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, although he's not as annoying as Heston Blumenthal. I still remember a recipe for homemade chips which took 48 hours start to finish.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I quite enjoy Heston Blumenthal, purely as performance. I not only don't want to cook from his recipes, I'm not even interested in eating his food - which may be why he doesn't irritate me!