Well, I voted Lib-Dem, for several reasons but not least because the higher their share of the national vote, the stronger the case for voting reform.
If a split centre-left vote results in the Tories winning this constituency, I will be kicking myself, but it probably won’t happen here.
And the fact I had to make that calculation is exactly why we need voting reform.
The filling is basically Raymond Blanc’s lemon tart recipe with passionfruit instead of lemon.
I put the passionfruit through a sieve to get the juice and then put a couple of teaspoons of the seeds back in for decorative effect and a bit of crunch.
The plugin which automatically fetches links from delicious.com and posts them to this blog went wrong last night. So it seems like as good a moment as any to stop posting them to this blog altogether, since they are all posted to A London Salmagundi as well.
If you want to keep reading the links but have no patience for all the other bits and pieces I post to Salmagundi, you can also find them at delicious.
Just a little reminder about Salmagundi, my new internet scrapbook of appealing, interesting and curious things, like this C19th French dentist’s window display…
…a man carrying a horse, a medieval penis tree, and the incredible nymph navy that swiped a Nazi destroyer.
These are some general thoughts about cooking; things I wish someone had told me when I first started. If you’re wondering about my credentials to be handing out that kind of advice… well, I don’t have any. I’m just a keen home cook. So take it with a pinch of salt.
This is how to make a stew:
Peel, chop and brown some onions. Brown some chunks of meat. Put the onions and meat into a casserole. Put a glug of wine (or water, or whatever seems appropriate) into the hot pan the meat was fried in and while it boils away a bit, scrape up the sticky brown goodness from the pan; pour that into the casserole as well. And some stock, a few vegetables, some herbs (perhaps a few bay leaves, sprigs of thyme and parsley stalks) and some salt and pepper. Leave it in a low oven or over a low heat for a few hours.
None of that is difficult.
I don’t want to be glib about this; I know that when you first start cooking, even quite simple things like peeling, chopping and browning an onion can be intimidating. Everything is new to you so you’re never quite sure you’re doing anything right; you’re not particularly comfortable handling knives; the onions make you cry; you’re not quite sure what level of brown you’re aiming for.†
You’re never going to remove that learning curve completely. But we’re talking about a pretty manageable level of difficulty here.
Admittedly, not all dishes are easy; some things are technical, or require very precise timing, or have a chance of going dramatically wrong. But not as many as you might think. It’s entirely possible to avoid all that difficult stuff and still have a whole repertoire of delicious recipes that you can use to impress your friends/colleagues/in-laws/potential bedmates.
I’ve got a new little side project, Salmagundi, which is a Tumblr-powered short-form, scrapbooky type blog-thing where I can post assorted bits and pieces — photos, links, amusing cat videos — that I find on the internet. A web-log in the original sense.
Which probably means I’ll stop the automatic link posts here, and keep this blog for longer text-based pieces, although I won’t actually make that change until it’s been working for a bit.
I think it looks quite spiffy on a Mac; it’ll look slightly less spiffy on a PC, not least because it relies heavily on Helvetica Neue Light. And on any version of Internet Explorer older than IE8, you’ll just see a message telling you that your browser sucks. In your face, Microsoft.
There is a link to it (Tumblr) in the sidebar on the right. Or you can subscribe to the RSS feed.