Thanks for Jan for telling me about Social Mobile Phones
Archive for February, 2003
Oh yeah, I finished the rest of the pasta dough. This time I was experimenting - made some ravioli; I didn’t have any instructions, but followed my instincts and my instincts seem to have worked damn well. Wouldn’t you just know it, the same night I made my ravioli Tony and Giorgio made some on BBC2 - turns out my instincts weren’t entirely right (Giorgio put his blobs of filling between two sheets and pasted them together before cutting the shapes, rather than cutting circles then filling and sticking as I did, and he stressed the importance of getting all the air out - probably the reason why I ended up with be-skirted footballs in my pasta pan - still, they sank down again afterwards, and seemed none the worse for it).
I filled my pasta puffs with onion, sage, mushroom and goats cheese… which works!
For a while now I’ve been wondering what to do with surplus but loved books. We’re contemplating the imminent downsizing of our life, and this is one of many things which we just have far too many of. The options so far have been
- Donate them to charity (only the other week I loaded the car with two or three-hundred books and drove them to the local Oxfam bookshop). Comes with a charitable warm glow, but somehow unfulfilling just dumping them all off and then… nothing.
- Sell them somehow - probably car boot or ebay, which is nice because we might get a little bit back for them, but books aren’t exactly a fast seller - people will only buy what they’re interested in, and that rarely meshes too well with what we are (or were) interested in - so I don’t imagine we’ll get rid of many or get rid of them fast this way.
- Give them to friends with a recommendation - something very nice about this one, but one only has so many friends, each with limited time, and only so many shared interests, and besides despite thinking about this occasionally over the last couple of years I’ve yet to give any away. I did try participating in a friend’s literary equivalent of the chain letter - send a book you enjoyed to the person at the top of the list, pass it on to six friends and in a few weeks you’ll have a whole new library of the best books in the world, but despite parting with a much-loved copy of The Good Soldier Svejk I sat by the postbox for months without ever seeing a single pamphlet in return (but I digress… I was talking about getting rid of books, not overburdening myself with new ones).
Anyway, I was just doing my usual 4am insomniac’s doze to the World Service when I heard about a better way than any of these - Book Crossing. Print out a label from the website, stick it on your book, leave it in a public place, and wait for (hopefully) somebody appreciative to pick it up and post their comments to the site. Beautiful. Every aspect of it appeals to me - the altruism, the chance introduction to like minded people, the fun and art of involved deciding where to leave a book, the randomness of who gets to find it, it’s perfect!
Let’s just hope the publishing industry doesn’t decide to come over all music-industry-like and try to stamp out this practice (yes, I know it’s not quite the same, that there’s only ever one copy of the book, but still… it shows just how fun sharing can be).
First thing tomorrow I’m gonna sticker-up my copy of American Tabloid and see if I can find somewhere appropriate to leave it. Lemme see… a grassy knoll? A…. book depository?
Mmmm… food again. Just tried out the pasta-maker which Linda bought for our wedding present. I had a bit of a sticky time getting the tagliatelli to come out right (it clogged a bit on one side), but although the pasta looked a bit, err, wonky, it tasted awesome, cooked up with some chopped green beans, tomatoes, smoked salmon, oregano and garlic. Now… if only I didn’t need so many bloody eggs - it took me 12 to make it (was supposed to be 11 - 3 whole and 8 yolks - but my eggs were medium rather than large and the dough was a little dry, so I chucked the extra one in. Also, their “serves four” would probably quite easily do six, unless they were eating nothing else with the pasta).
Does anyone have a good recipe for eight egg whites?
Wow, it appears I am one of Amazon UK’s top 1000 reviewers (joint 730th in fact!)
Isn’t that nice?
The last couple of mornings have been full of vivid dreams. Yesterday morning, I had a desperate need to get away. Discussed it for ages with lots of people before, on an impulse, buying a railway ticket to Edinburgh. On the long train journey, I felt increasingly guilty about leaving my newly married wife and family, and wondered about turning back. I compromised with myself - decided to stop off somewhere on the way rather than going all the way to Scotland. At first I considered Durham - beautiful place but… been there, I wanted something new. Newcastle could have been exciting, but I really wanted to get away from the hustle and bustle more. Then I hit upon a perfect solution - Berwick-upon-Tweed - OK, so it is in Scotland (I think), but not as much as Edinburgh is, and I remember being blown away by the site of it last time I caught a train through.
I remember very clearly the railway skirting around a hill above a river, which is really wierd because the real track is along the coast, but I see from the map that there is a dismantled railway that follows exactly the route I remember. I jumped off the train a couple of miles out of town and started walking - I was exhilerated, it was everything I’d expected and more, tufty hills with scots pines dotted around, and as I rounded the bend I spotted a beautiful old guesthouse on the hill overlooking the town. Outside, under the pines, were several cars that must have been pretty flash during the 70s - brown Jaguars and Rovers with orange interiors. There was an incredible ecstatic perfectness about everything that can only occur in a dream.
This morning, Holler had asked me to do some work - somewhat different from the usual. They had a whole load of cartoons, drawn by a famous cult figure, that I had to put words to. Thing is, there was very obviously a story going on in these pictures, and it was part of an ongoing work, with much already completed. So I had to stare at the pictures for hours, figure out each nuance, read all of the previous episodes, and meanwhile Jim kept asking me when I’d be finished. I just felt incapable of making any marks on the paper - we only had one copy of each - he told me to use a red pen so it wouldn’t show through if I had to Tippex it out - I said surely a pencil would be more sensible at first. And then… not only did I have to make up the words to go with the story, I was also the de facto letterer, something which I always perversely wanted to be when I was into comics, but now I was suddenly up against problems I hadn’t forseen, gauging the space for each letter, knowing exactly how many words were needed per frame, keeping the letters at the same size throughout.
It was a nightmare, so instead I got a bus, past Tower Bridge, through dodgy parts of East London, to the flat in Bow. Once there I discovered that a room had been turned into a swimming pool, but the floor wasn’t strong enough to hold the weight of the water. We struggled to come up with a way of lightening the load, knowing all the while that the floor could go at any moment, or it could (as I kind of suspected) last indefinitely. In the end we positioned all the house-plants at each corner of the swimming pool, and trailed roots into the pool so that they would suck some of the water out. Hmmm.
I’ve discovered a great new recipe courtesy of Madhur Jaffray’s World Vegetarian (a book I’ve raved about here before). It’s eggs poached in spicy tomato sauce, and although Ms Jaffray doesn’t suggest it as such, it’s a perfect brunch dish.
Just take a frying or sauté pan, slop some olive oil in, swirl around some dried chillies then add onion and garlic. Fry them for two or three minutes then stick the chopped tomatoes in - Madhur uses fresh ones, but despite a recent road to Damascus experience for me regarding fresh/tinned tomatoes (don’t touch the tinned ones, fresh is best - they make so much difference to a pasta sauce or baked beans) I think that tinned tomatoes really work here, being as they are such a breakfast-y thing. Reduce the tomatoes for eight minutes or so, then scrape the mix back at the corners and stick some eggs in the gaps (how many is up to you - I usually do two eggs per person - depends, of course, on the size of your pan and how much tomatoes you’ve put in too). Cover the pan and cook just long enough to poach your eggs (nice’n'runny for me).
You can also vary it lots - the chilli, onion and garlic are all pretty optional if you don’t like that kinda thing, and I usually add a bit of garam masala, sometimes some peas or other vegetables. It’s a really lovely gooey way to start a day late.
This page really isn’t ready yet but… what I did on my Wedding day (please check again soon for updates)
heh heh heh… new operator logo (on the right…)
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