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durham_rambler reads to me from this morning's paper of her recipe for "synthetic quince" (included in a Suffrage Cookbook, now reissued). Naughty Guardian: they spoiler the recipe, and they don't seem to be selling the book through their bookshop!durham_rambler reads to me from this morning's paper of her recipe for "synthetic quince" (included in a Suffrage Cookbook, now reissued). Naughty Guardian: they spoiler the recipe, and they don't seem to be selling the book through their bookshop!
April, week one
Apr. 7th, 2018 03:32 pmApril came in like a lion, shaking its snowy mane. Forecasts of snow settling on the higher ground did not specify that this included Durham rooftops.
By Thursday it had gone, and we had a beautiful spring day. It was my father's birthday, and we would have taken the opportunity to go out to Finchale, as we have in past years, but an old friend was passing through, and we so rarely see him these days (he has moved to France and Germany - yes, both at once) so we invited him to lunch and had much conversation about family and friends and bicycles and places and work and play and holidays and suchlike. One thing he mentioned is that one of the villages neighbouring theirs in Provence is much favoured by the British, which I would normally not find inviting, but the name of the village is Cotignac, and there is indeed a quince connection, with a confrérie dedicated to promoting the fruit (scroll down to see the members in their green and yellow robes) and a quince festival in October...
Today we are back in the grey and rainy season. We paid our last visit to Marks & Spencer in Silver Street - in fact we were too late, because although they are theoretically open today, the shelves are bare and shuttered. If you wanted to buy anything other than half-price chocolate, you were out of luck. A sign announced that "It's not good-bye..." and I was so close to scrawling on it "Oh, yes it is!" Marks clearly hope that I will go to their out-of-town store at the Arnison Centre, and it's possible I might do that occasionally, just as I occasionally shop for clothes at their Newcastle branch. But I won't be popping in midweek for odds and ends, and the loss of the city centre branch makes it that much harder to do all of my weekly shop in the city centre.
So it goes.
By Thursday it had gone, and we had a beautiful spring day. It was my father's birthday, and we would have taken the opportunity to go out to Finchale, as we have in past years, but an old friend was passing through, and we so rarely see him these days (he has moved to France and Germany - yes, both at once) so we invited him to lunch and had much conversation about family and friends and bicycles and places and work and play and holidays and suchlike. One thing he mentioned is that one of the villages neighbouring theirs in Provence is much favoured by the British, which I would normally not find inviting, but the name of the village is Cotignac, and there is indeed a quince connection, with a confrérie dedicated to promoting the fruit (scroll down to see the members in their green and yellow robes) and a quince festival in October...
Today we are back in the grey and rainy season. We paid our last visit to Marks & Spencer in Silver Street - in fact we were too late, because although they are theoretically open today, the shelves are bare and shuttered. If you wanted to buy anything other than half-price chocolate, you were out of luck. A sign announced that "It's not good-bye..." and I was so close to scrawling on it "Oh, yes it is!" Marks clearly hope that I will go to their out-of-town store at the Arnison Centre, and it's possible I might do that occasionally, just as I occasionally shop for clothes at their Newcastle branch. But I won't be popping in midweek for odds and ends, and the loss of the city centre branch makes it that much harder to do all of my weekly shop in the city centre.
So it goes.
Paimpol, a half-remembered town
Nov. 5th, 2017 06:10 pmWe chose Paimpol as the place to spend the second couple of days (of our four-day break) because it is well located on the north coast between Roscoff and Saint Malo, and because we had good memories of staying there on a previous visit. That time, we had booked a small hotel on the harbour front, and were disconcerted to arrive mid-afternoon and find the place deserted. But we found a café not far away, and by the time we had drunk our coffee, the proprietor had returned, and we took possession of a room whose window we opened to admire the sunshine glinting off all the pleasure boats in the harbour. I remember, too, a fish restaurant in one of the little streets of pink stone houses. There may have been an open fire; and when we asked what was the music we were hearing (could that really be Mick Jagger singing 'Long black veil'?) our waiter produced a CD of the Dubliners accompanied by their friends (and yes, it could).
( You can never go back... )
tl;dr version: In which we learn, at inordinate length, that my memory cannot be trusted (I'm pretty sure it was Paimpol we visited before...), and that eighteenth century voyages of discovery are full of amazing stories.
( You can never go back... )
tl;dr version: In which we learn, at inordinate length, that my memory cannot be trusted (I'm pretty sure it was Paimpol we visited before...), and that eighteenth century voyages of discovery are full of amazing stories.
London catch-up
Oct. 25th, 2017 05:55 pmWhat with travelling and such, I haven't been online for the last couple of days, and what with other things I'm unlikely to be online much for the next couple of days. So anything I have to say about Paimpol will have to wait (which may mean that it comes with more photos, when it does eventually come).
Meanwhile, we are in London. I am sitting at the kitchen table, and BoyBear is sitting opposite me, chopping onions for an aubergine and sweet potato curry for dinner. The light has almost gone from the garden, but I can still see the last quinces, the unreachable ones at the top of the tree, a tantalising cluster of golden globes (but the birds have probably pecked them hollow, we comfort ourselves).
And tonight there will be band practice, which we are allowed to attend.
Meanwhile, we are in London. I am sitting at the kitchen table, and BoyBear is sitting opposite me, chopping onions for an aubergine and sweet potato curry for dinner. The light has almost gone from the garden, but I can still see the last quinces, the unreachable ones at the top of the tree, a tantalising cluster of golden globes (but the birds have probably pecked them hollow, we comfort ourselves).
And tonight there will be band practice, which we are allowed to attend.
Culinary notes
Jan. 11th, 2015 09:34 pm- Nigel Slater fantasises about what he would do if someone left a box of quinces on his doorstep - and then gives two recipes, one of which is, effectively 'serve poaches quince with gorgonzola cream' (sounds good); the other is for Quince and panettone pudding, but the proportions seem off: the recipe specifies 1.2 kilos of quinces (peeled and cored weight) to 220g panettone (or brioche): that's a whole lot of quinces.
- Mistakes do happen. In yesterday's Cook supplement, Henry Dimbleby concludes his introduction to a digest of his 'Back to Basics' series with the words: "And, finally, we have not included baked potatoes in the contents because I was weong. I am so sorry to all of you who sent me photos of your ovens looking like a culinary crime scene. Baked potatoes really can explode if you don't prick them with a fork. Quite violently, it turns out." Oh, yes. Been there, done that, washed the T-shirt. I've typed out the text, because I can't find it on the Guardian's website (though the column in which he claims that the exploding spud is an urban myth is still there).
- We had haggis for dinner. Since we did a big supermarket shop rather than going in to Durham yesterday, it was some fancy brand, i.e. not MacSween's, and it was not as good. The casing was some dark thin plastic, and the contents dense and claggy - not unpleasant, but, as
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durham_rambler says, we'll be having the real thing on Burns Night. - On the bright side, since I was cooking a haggis in the oven (in a bowl of water, because that's what you do), I was able to observe the effects of putting a bowl of water into the oven while the bread is baking. Today's chestnut loaf was rising very nicely even before it went into the oven, so this isn't conclusive, but it does seem to have helped.
- This is further support for the hypothesis that the wetter the dough, the better it rises - and the harder it is to get out of the tin.
ETA: some quince links, courtesy of
cmcmck and browngirl: The NYT praises the quince, because there are quince trees at the Cloisters Museum. But there are more, at the USDA National Clonal Germplasm Repository in Corvallis, Oregon. Quinces seem to be having a moment, and there are several cookbooks (or cooking and growing) books devoted entirely to quinces. Barbara Ghazarian wrote one of them. She has a quince blog.There are heroisms all around us
Oct. 13th, 2012 04:45 pmOver at the SF Signal Mind Meld, desperance is among those talking about what makes a hero - in the literary sense, a hero as opposed to a protagonist. No-one who has read anything by Chaz Brenchley (or Daniel Fox or Ben Macallan) will be surprised that he comes to the conclusion that just as no man is a hero to his valet, so no character is a hero to their author: "We know too much: their inner drives, their hidden yearnings, what actually makes them step forward into the night. No one's motives are ever really that clean, that simple, that self-negating." Fortunately, because that makes them all the more interesting to the reader.
What makes a hero in the real life sense is much the same: I hate the idea that a hero can have no flaws, cannot be criticised. Since ideas never come singly, I wasn't surprised to come across this aspect of heroism this morning, though the source was unexpected: "We elevate people to the status of heroes in order to let ourselves off the hook: 'I'm just a mere mortal – I could never even dream of doing something like that,'" says Jarvis Cocker in the course of an exemplary review of Hunter Davies's latest trawl through John Lennon's waste paper basket (and it is an exemplary review rather than a hatchet job, go read it and see).
The Edinburgh book sculptures are being exhibited in a nationwide tour. I wonder...
Back home means urgent shopping - but in an unusually successful morning I scored a couple of birthday presents, a ridiculously sparkly jacket and the last quince in Durham.
The fifth thing which makes the post is that there is no fifth thing.
desperance is among those talking about what makes a hero - in the literary sense, a hero as opposed to a protagonist. No-one who has read anything by Chaz Brenchley (or Daniel Fox or Ben Macallan) will be surprised that he comes to the conclusion that just as no man is a hero to his valet, so no character is a hero to their author: "We know too much: their inner drives, their hidden yearnings, what actually makes them step forward into the night. No one's motives are ever really that clean, that simple, that self-negating." Fortunately, because that makes them all the more interesting to the reader.What makes a hero in the real life sense is much the same: I hate the idea that a hero can have no flaws, cannot be criticised. Since ideas never come singly, I wasn't surprised to come across this aspect of heroism this morning, though the source was unexpected: "We elevate people to the status of heroes in order to let ourselves off the hook: 'I'm just a mere mortal – I could never even dream of doing something like that,'" says Jarvis Cocker in the course of an exemplary review of Hunter Davies's latest trawl through John Lennon's waste paper basket (and it is an exemplary review rather than a hatchet job, go read it and see).
The Edinburgh book sculptures are being exhibited in a nationwide tour. I wonder...
Back home means urgent shopping - but in an unusually successful morning I scored a couple of birthday presents, a ridiculously sparkly jacket and the last quince in Durham.
The fifth thing which makes the post is that there is no fifth thing.
The wrong kind of quince
Sep. 1st, 2012 10:20 amCorrection of the week in today's Guardian:
The article is here, now illustrated with the kind of quince it intends - and actually, of course, no quince that fruits can ever be entirely wrong...
• The image accompanying Alys Fowler's gardening column in today's Weekend magazine is of the wrong kind of quince. The picture shown is the fruit of the quince tree, Cydonia oblonga, whereas Alys refers to Chaenomeles japonica, an ornamental plant commonly known as japonica or Japanese quince (Harvest festival, 1 September, page 69, Weekend)."The wrong kind of quince"? That's fighting talk! What they mean, of course, is that an article about the wrong kind of quince was inadvertently illustrated with a picture of the right kind of quince.
The article is here, now illustrated with the kind of quince it intends - and actually, of course, no quince that fruits can ever be entirely wrong...
