It’s a measure of how thoroughly miserable the weather has been that I just used the barbecue for the first time this year. But today it feels like summer.
I just did some lamb, tomato salad and potato salad. The lamb was marinated in olive oil, garlic, lemon and oregano for that Greek flavour. I came up with what seemed like quite a cunning trick for the salads, though: I boiled some Anya potatoes, drained the pan and left them sitting for a while in a French dressing (olive oil, wine vinegar, Dijon mustard, honey, salt and pepper). Then I poured that vinaigrette off the potatoes to use in the tomato salad, and chopped the potatoes and mixed them with mayonnaise and a bit of parsley. That way the potatoes absorbed some of the flavour of the dressing, and the dressing got some extra savoury flavour from the potatoes. I don’t know how much difference it made to the tomato salad; it was certainly tasty, but you can’t go far wrong with tomatoes, shallot, fresh basil and some French dressing. The potatoes were really good though.
Then I made some Frozen Breakfast ice cream, which would be a bit more radical if my typical breakfast was eggs, bacon, chips and beans. Or even toast and marmalade. But my current breakfast of choice is yoghurt, oats and honey; I put that in an ice cream maker and it was yummy. The freezing seems to bring out the sourness of the yoghurt, which I quite like. I toasted the oats a bit first in a dry frying pan to add a bit more flavour (which I don’t do at breakfast time), but I don’t think it was strictly necessary.
I suppose you could call it frozen yoghurt instead of ice cream, but that seems desperately 1980s to me. And it sounds a bit joyless and health-foody, which wasn’t the point at all. I certainly didn’t use low-fat yoghurt, which I think is the devil’s work.
Mmm. Toast and marmalade ice-cream. Now that’s an intriguing idea. Made with lightly toasted brioche, maybe.
Earlier in the season, most of the damselflies were blue ones; now they’re all blue-tailed:
This bit of south London is, slightly unexpectedly, a stronghold for the increasingly rare stag beetle. At this time of year you tend to see them flying overhead in the evening; but the weather has been so miserable that I haven’t really been outside much in the evenings. I did see one crawling across the pavement a couple of days ago, though. This, however, is not that species; it’s the more common lesser stag beetle, which is not nearly as big, and even the males don’t have antlers.
This is a hoverfly. Like most hoverflies, it’s a wasp mimic; they nearly all have black and yellow stripes, but they don’t sting. This is more spectacular than most, though; the large size and brownish colour are its attempt to look like a hornet. I think it does quite a good job, although looking at it closely like this it’s obviously a species of fly. We don’t actually have any hornets around here—I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one in the UK, although they do live here—so I don’t know how effective the mimicry is.
And here’s a holly blue. You can see the abdomen curled around on the ivy; presumably it’s laying eggs. It’s lives on the holly and the ivy, which is very Christmassy of it.
Well, I went to see The Seventh Seal. It was unusually busy for a Tuesday afternoon showing of a 50-year-old Swedish art film; presumably the cinema was full of vultures like myself.
Hel – sweet seal, originally uploaded by ella19.
I was disappointed to discover there were no seals in it, although there was quite a cute squirrel.
Really though, it was, as promised, a very good film. Two fairly random thoughts: if you’re going to plunder Europe’s medieval past for material, it’s so much better to end up with The Seventh Seal than Lord of the Rings. And although it did live up to Bergman’s reputation for being a bit grim, it didn’t feel gratuitously or affectedly grim.