Yay! Radio 3 posted the playlist – the track I wanted is Hana by Asa-Chang and Junray. Incredible. And the tabla’s not sampled, it’s fer real. Wow.
Monthly Archive for June, 2002
Tried to find my celebrity match (don’t ask), and just got loads of Dutch women I’ve never heard of. Decided to get a male match instead – at least I know (vaguely) who Ben Affleck and Steven Soderbergh are.
I’m having a very accident prone day – was making some salad dressing at lunch time, stirred it a bit vigorously and spilled a load on my T-shirt (my favourite Hard Reality one – I really hope it doesn’t come out oil-stained). When I’d made the salad, I carried it upstairs… and tripped on the bottom step, smashed the bowl (another favourite) and got salad absolutely everywhere. Gill took pity on me and cleaned the steps. Unfortunately after a cleaning, they were a bit slippy (they’re varnished wood) because just now I went down to get a cup of tea, slipped on the top step and went flying, whacked my foot on the way down and it’s now swollen right up, don’t think it’ll fit in my shoe 
Heard a wonderful wonderful piece of music on Radio 3, Late Junction last night. It started… I can’t quite remember how it started, but it sounded very much like some musician who I had in mind at the time, I think it was kinda strings or something, but anyway that’s irrelevant. The strings (or whatever) were just a background sound, where it got incredible was with a Japanese man and woman’s voices, sampled, over a sampled tabla – the table matched each syllable of their intonation. They went through twists and turns of the same bit of text, gradually speeding up and building to a tabla-franzy. I’m desparate to find out what it was (I forgot what she said before the track, and she didn’t re-announce it afterwards) but the BBC haven’t updated the damn playlist page, gits! Ahh, hang on, they do have a Real Audio stream. Oh, except it doesn’t work.
Hmmm… this page is looking a bit devoid of pictures, so here’s one that might explain why Gill’s computer isn’t working entirely as expected.
This is absolutely wonderful – a random nonsense word generator. I’ve often wanted something like this before. OK, so I can’t remember quite when or why I wanted it. But I know I did.
Ooh, I almost forgot to mention, didn’t I, that last week (or was it the week before) I got NTK’ed for my piece on train toilets. (Oh look… I’m in this one too… completely forgotten about that, in fact, I don’t have a clue what it refers to).
Thanks to Scot for pointing me to Found Magazine – full of… found stuff.
I started thinking about cooking again last night – I haven’t cooked in months, and I think I’ve really missed that little bit of physically creative force in my life, it’s made me a bit flatter, a bit duller, a bit more depressed. So when I boiled up some sweet potato for Lola’s dinner, I started concocting an idea for something to make Gill tonight.
The idea worked, even better than I’d expected. And best of all, it was entirely my own thoughts, nothing from recipe books. Something to make me feel a little proud.
My big idea was for a main course, but when I realised it would be a little un-filling and lacking in protein I thought I’d better whip up a starter too. Simplicity itself – I’d got some pastry cutters, as I wanted to experiment making food that went in little circular mounds in the middle of the plate, and it was the best I could find to make it so. I just emptied half a tin of cannelini beans into a bowl, crushed them up a bit with a fork, mixed in tiny cubes of feta cheese, avocado and tomato, dribbled a little olive oil and lemon juice into the mixture, and spooned it into the biggest pastry cutter to make a nice little tower of beany-salad on the plate. As Gill mentioned, it could have done with a bit of mint, but I’m still surprised that it tasted as good as it did.
Anyway, main course… what inspired me was how good Lolly’s mashed sweet potato had tasted. Well, actually it was more crushed than mashed… I boiled the sweet potatos (organic ones, and white rather than the usual pink/yellow) with their skins on and then peeled the skins off after, and just crushed them up a bit. For ours I also mixed in some olive oil and quite a lot of toasted black cumin seeds. And then I floated it in a little sauce I invented – some shallot, red chilli, carrot and mango, softened up in a little ghee, then cooked in white wine and rice malt syrup with a tiny sprinkle of turmeric and ground cloves. And liquidised. It was scrummy, and the spicy-sweetness went nicely with the starchy-sweetness of the sweet potato. Oh, and I steamed a bit of asparagus and broccoli to go with it. Scrum.
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