John's Quavering Pencil

Terry drove us south of Seaham harbour. After he parked the car Tom and I got our ruck sacks from the boot. We set off south down the cliff top path, with the sea on our left.

A typical view from the cliff path

We were following the railway line and several times we had to cross back and forth as the route looped inland through a densely wooded dene.

Criss-crossing the rail tracks

From time to time we decended to sea level, and we could see the rail track high above us running along the brick viaduct.

Down in the dene looking up to the viaduct

Early in the walk we paused to take a look at a limestone quarry, on our right; we contented ourselves with peering through the perimeter, padlocked fence.

Limestone quarry

In the woods there was a profusion of wild flowers. Tom spotted a rather splendid caterpillar, too, at one point. Tom and I talked about how inadequate we felt in terms of being able to name species in nature. When I got home, I looked through one of my reference books and this particular caterpillar seems to fit the markings for a drinker moth, and this is the identification I tentatively offer to you, my dear blogophiles.

Possibly a drinker moth?

As to the flowers in the hedgerows, I have a feeling that this specimen might be a dog rose but, once again, I am lacking in confidence in this regard.

A dog rose?

It is possible that you may not be aware of the Seaham-Shrinker plant. It’s large broad leaves grow up to waist height on stems that remind one of rhubarb sticks. It is imperative not to snack on the leaves, since the ingestion of even a small amount is enough to trigger the rapid shrinking of the animal or human who has been foolhardy enough to take a bite. I repeatedly told Terry not to do it, but he took no notice of my warnings. As you can see, Tom had to pick him up and carry him for a while until the effect wore off and he returned to his normal size.

Effects of the Seaham-Shrinker plant

At one point we got lost and ended up by the old pit shaft that used to be Easington colliery. The mine and the workings have been grassed over but the area remains barren of any serious attempt to landscape it in a creative fashion.

The old pit shaft at Easington colliery

We returned to the coast in order to pick up the path that we were looking for. On our way, we passed an old WW2 defensive fortification.

WW2 defensive fortification

We walked onto the beach and rested up for a bite to eat. The tide was not at its highest and there were plenty of small rocks exposed, out to sea.

Rocks by the beach at low-ish tide

I felt pleasantly exhausted by the time we got back to the car. We plan to do another walk in three or four weeks time. Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.

Tomorrow I am going out walking in the morning with my friends Tom and Terry. I have therefore made some small pies and have filled them with curried minced lamb. They don’t eat much when out during the day, so I have deliberately down-sized from the enormous Bolognese pasties I made last time we went out. I must admit that I am looking forward to having them for lunch somewhere out in the wilds. Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.

Preparing the lamb curry filling

Four little pies

I guess a blog should reveal the inner workings of the obsessive mind. As you know, I cooked a Julia Child recipe based dinner for my friends yesterday. It was a great success, in all respects: the company, the food, and the live music that we played later on in the evening. When I was an undergraduate I read Miller, Gallanter and Pribram’s classic book ‘Plans and the structure of behaviour‘; it has influenced my life ever since.  Indeed, my Ph.D. thesis was closely concerned with the concept of plan and the generation, execution, and explanation of action in bounded episodes of everyday stuff.  So, perhaps it will come as no surprise to you to discover that I plan my meals in some considerable detail. I see a recipe as being closely equivalent to a musical score. Clearly, the score will not produce music unless the musician has learned the various skills demanded and is well-practiced; only then can emotional expression and some degree of improvisation come to the fore. Just so with cooking.

For the meal I cooked yesterday for my dear friends Tony, Costello, Terry and Angela (not to mention She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Mentioned), I prepared two schedules: one focussed upon the week ahead of the dinner party, the other covered the day of the dinner itself. I have today learned that it is easy to paste such documents into my WordPress blog, direct from Word for Windows. So, my dear blogophiles, just for the record, here they are in their entirety.  As Julia might say…. “Bon appetit”

June 4^th 2011

Wheat-flour-free meal (corn flour or rice flour are alternatives).

Potage crème d’Épinards (cream of spinach soup) p.41

• Substitute corn flour for the wheat flour specified at the bottom of p.40 in the base recipe for watercress soup.
• Make the base ahead of time and freeze. Serve cold on the day. If necessary, add in a little more cream before serving.
• Rice cake croutons?

Gratin de pommes de terre aux champignons  (Gratin of potatoes and mushrooms)  p.160-162

• This is basically a quiche filling without the pastry case.
• Serve with boiled green vegetables (broccoli) and grilled tomatoes

Charlotte Malakoff aux fraises (Almond cream with fresh strawberries) p.643

• It will be necessary to make sponge fingers with rice flour or corn flour ahead of time. The fingers should keep for a few days, anyway.
• The charlotte will be served with strawberry sauce

Biscuits à la cuiller (sponge fingers) p.708

Made with rice flour or corn flour.

Sauce aux fraises (strawberry sauce) p.629

1 lb. strawberries

6 oz castor sugar

2 tbl. Lemon juice & cognac

PLANNING

Monday: Make and freeze spinach soup base (but not with the egg yolks and cream)

Friday: Make sponge fingers, strawberry sauce, and charlotte (store in fridge)

Saturday:

Morning: Finish soup with egg yolks and cream. Cool, and store in fridge.

Afternoon: Make the gratin, put it in the baking dish and halve tomatoes for baking with it

Prepare the broccoli

Sort out (bake)croutons plus rice cakes for Costello

Lay table and make up  flower vases

Evening:

Serve drinks; Put Gratin in oven

Serve cold soup (adding cream if necessary) together with the croutons (& rice cakes)

Put potatoes on to boil; cut lettuce leaves from plants in kitchen window box

Fry prawns in garlic; plate up with lettuce and serve.

Put broccoli on to boil

Plate up gratin, broccoli, potatoes and tomatoes; serve at table.

Unmould charlotte and serve with strawberry sauce.

Serve coffee

Notes for afternoon preparation

Skin tomatoes; place halved in baking dish with basil

Cook onions and sliced mushrooms in butter (season)

In large bowl: beat 4 eggs, crushed garlic, 2tbl chopped parsley, lemon juice, cream, port. (season)…

Blend in the cooked mushrooms

Put into oven dish & grate 3 oz cheese on top with some flecks of butter.

Ice-water to table; open wine to breathe

6.30 Arrivals

7.15 Start the meal

Bread rolls and rice cakes to table

Soup:  Serve with parsley garnish (add cream if necessary), bread rolls & rice cakes

X starts a 40 minute lead into the main course

X: Put gratin in the oven (40 mins); heat water for potatoes

X+15 = Potatoes on to boil; heat water for broccoli; and….

Prawns: fry in garlic & plate up with lettuce leaves & serve

X+30= Broccoli on to boil

Main Course

X+40=   Gratin: out of oven & plate up

Broccoli: strain & plate up

Potatoes: strain & plate up

Tomatoes: out of oven  & plate up

Charlotte: unmould & serve with strawberry sauce

Coffee

Summary of the meal (page numbers refer to Julia Child’s book):

Potage crème d’Épinards (cream of spinach soup) p.41

Fried garlic mushrooms on home-grown lettuce leaves (a sort of amuse-bouche)

Gratin de pommes de terre aux champignons  (Gratin of potatoes and mushrooms)  p.160-162

Charlotte Malakoff aux fraises (Almond cream with fresh strawberries) p.643

Biscuits à la cuiller (sponge fingers) p.708

Sauce aux fraises (strawberry sauce) p.629

I am having a few friends to dinner this evening. I am as fully prepared as I shall ever be and I shall start my final preparations in the kitchen as soon as I have this post up and running. I’m sorry about the title, but I shall be serving some garlic prawns on a leaf of home-grown lettuce as an amuse-bouche after the cream of spinach soup and before the main course of mushroom gratin with baked tomatoes and broccoli. I’m getting hungry just writing about it. Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.

The table is laid

A charlotte with almond cream and fresh strawberries

Things are not going well in the kitchen. The biscuits à la cuiller (sponge fingers) that I attempted to make with wheat-free flour turned out to be a disaster. They are not dissimilar to crushed meringue.  They disintegrated as I scraped them off the baking tray. I don’t understand what went wrong, unless the problem was the wheat-free flour. Meringues are made from egg white and sugar; my fingers had both egg yolks and flour folded into the egg whites. In the end, I was left with a bowl full of sponge finger bits.

Sponge finger bits

I go to the supermarket and track down a packet of wheat-free, gluten-free sponge mix. This is a singularly un-Julia thing to do; all that is required is to make a batter by adding egg and water. The problem is that I don’t want to make a sponge cake, I want to pipe fingers. I decide to add very little water. The mixture is a revoltingly sticky goo and very difficult to pipe. I bake the fingers and they come out of the oven looking like sponge rats. There just isn’t enough for the purpose of lining a Charlotte mould.

Sponge rats

I drive back to the supermarket and get another packet. I make this with the water and spread it out on a couple of baking trays. This time it bakes way too thin and flat. Once it has cooled, I dunk the cut sponge into a soup bowl of orange liqueur diluted with water. This makes the sponge slabs disintegrate. Everything is going wrong today. I press on.  Beat sugar into butter, whip cream and fold in and finish making the almond cream. I then attempt to assemble the charlotte. I stick some small strawberries into the almond cream and put another layer of sponge across the mould. If it falls to bits when I unmould it, I shall serve it as a variation of Eton Mess.

Now I am going to make the strawberry sauce to go with it. Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.

Cream of Spinach Soup

Today I am spending the morning in my kitchen, cooking the base for what will become a cream of spinach soup. I shall freeze the base that I am about to make and then defrost it over Friday night, ready for finishing off for the dinner I am making on Saturday for friends.

I look around the work surfaces and see a lot of mess and clutter. I shift the items that need to be washed up over to the sink and make some clear space for myself.

A clear work space

The first thing to do is to get that washing up sorted out (we do not have a dishwasher). I am rinsing the items under the tap and thinking about how I want to approach the morning. Should I regard it, for example, as a bit of a chore? That certainly doesn’t square with the book on Zen Guitar that I have been reading. I don’t want to start spouting a load of pseudo-Zen stuff here, but a better way to proceed would be if I take every step with care, and delight in what I am doing. I pause to look at the clean pile of stuff on the draining board. I’m glad I washed up first; the greengrocer at the market has to set out his stall afresh each day.

Washed up and ready to start

I open Julia Child’s book at the recipe for potage crème d’épinards (cream of spinach soup), which is based on her recipe for potage crème de cresson (watercress soup). I get a pan on for stock and hoy onion, carrot, herbs, and a good slurp of white wine into the water. I use bottled water because our tap water has a chemical taste and that won’t go away in the cooking. I tip out the spinach leaves and make a pile on the work surface: 400 grams.

400 grams of spinach leaves

I read the recipe. Julia requires the leaves to be chiffonade. This will take some time. I have come to a cross-roads. I could chop them in 5 minutes, maximum. I could cook them whole and puree the soup later. I am convinced that my dinner guests would not notice whatever way I decide to go. I choose to keep faith with Julia. I know this is going to be a challenge, but I need to enjoy it as such. I go and get a classical CD and put it on to play in my kitchen media unit. I have chosen the Brandenburg Concerto #1 by J.S. Bach. The music starts, and I take hold of my knife. I select a pile of leaves and place them ready for the cut. The CD player keeps jumping. I abandon the CD. I pause and think. I refuse to become annoyed. I have had the machine for about 20 years and I think it needs to be replaced at some point. I turn the radio on to our BBC3 classical station. The music is good, but there is interference. Maybe somebody is using a hedge trimmer or something like that, nearbye. I think about this for a little while. I decide to explore silence.

Leaves layered ready for cutting

I am chiffonading, something I seldom do. The pile looks enormous. I give myself a mental slap on the wrist. That sort of attitude will never do; it is most un-Zen-like. I decide that I must not think about getting to the end of the pile. What I need to do is focus on the present, on the here and now. Each leaf, each draw of the knife.

The chiffonade

The house is very still. Soon, I perceive that the silence is being filled. There is a quiet but rythmic muffled ticking sound, emanating from the kitchen clock. It reminds me of my paternal grandparents house: tick-tock, tick-tock. Soon, I realise that the kitchen rhythm section is more complex; the fridge freezer appears to be generating an improvised jazz solo across the beat of the clock. I can hear the sound of my own breathing, too. I check my watch. I have been chiffonading for 12 minutes. I decide that it would be good to make a cup of coffee and to sip that from time to time while I cut.

Coffee on the side

I am aware of the part that this part of the culinary preparation plays in the recipe as a whole. As I cut, and cut, I make the link to my experience of drawing a sketch of Orford castle. The sections of brick took me a long time and to do them was rather repetitive. However, I was rewarded for my attention to detail in the completed sketch; without patience the sketch would have had a different character and it would not have been mine. I feel good about making this comparison. I continue to focus on the present moment. If I have a thought, I let it go. In this way I avoid slipping into the world of daydreams. After an hour, I have finished. In the broader scheme of things, it does not matter whether I spend 10 minutes or 60 minutes chiffonading. Many folk routinely spend a lot longer than 60 minutes watching mind-numbing rubbish on TV. By way of contrast, I have had a very interesting experience this morning.

Cut, cut, cut, cut....

I melt some butter in a pan and sweat some chopped onion. Then I push in the chiffonaded spinach and leave that to wilt under a gentle heat for five minutes. At this point I stir in some rice flower and cook that through for a few minutes before taking it off the flame and beating in my strained stock. I simmer the soup base for another five minutes and then I am finished. I shall freeze it when it has cooled down, later today. I say that I am finished; that is not quite correct. If I am to bring closure to the Zen-kitchen experience, I need to wash and tidy up my stuff. First I eat an improvised snack made from the onion and carrot I used for my stock. Then I get squared away. One thing that occurred to me this morning was that I would very much like to find a bistro-style check table cloth to put on my round table in our sitting room. I have a very nice pale blue cloth that I use for the big 1×2 metre table I made but I shall not be assembling that on Saturday.

It is now time to practice some arpeggios on guitar. Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.

Today I set out, with my friends Tom and Terry, on the second of our country walks. We followed a footpath which wound around the woods near Lumley castle. We started by crossing the A1 motorway and then looping back on our tracks following a trail that took us underneath the motorway.

Crossing the A1 motorway

Underneath the A1

Supports for the A1 motorway

Tom and Terry stepping out into the countryside

It was strange to find ourselves in leafy woodland yet hear the drone of the motorway traffic in the background. There was an incongruous tension between the senses of sight and sound.

Into the leafy woodland

The A1 motorway, never far away

From time to time we caught sight of the motorway across the fields, only to move on into farmland, with the cows and the wild flowers.

Cow

Wild flowers

Barbed wire abounded, and there were notices aplenty warning us to keep out! Still, without trespassing, we were able to enjoy a measure of tranquility as we ambled along tow path by the river.

Barbed wire

The river

From time to time, we came across some exquisitely textured lengths of old brick wall; we always savour such moments.

Brick wall

Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.

Last night I made some short crust pastry following using Delia Smith’s recipe because I had a lot of problems with Julia Child’s when I made a quiche the other day. Today I made some Bolognese sauce with diced potato and used that as a substitute filling for what might otherwise have been a cornish pasty (well, I made five pasties). They turned out to be rather large. The idea is that I shall take them on a walk I am doing tomorrow with my friends Tom and Terry. I think I might need my 30L ruck sack for the job (as opposed to my 10L size). The pasties seem to have turned out well, although I think they would be better eaten with new potatoes and tomato sauce. I hope they won’t taste too dry when we are out in the woods.

Cornish pasties with a Bolognese filling

This morning I set about making quiche Lorraine. I had to adapt the recipe to accommodate She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Mentioned (SWMNBM) since she does not eat bacon. Julia says you can sautée diced cooked ham in butter and use it as a substitute for the bacon; I used diced chicken breast.

The pastry had been resting overnight in the fridge and so the first thing I did was to roll it out on my slab of marble. I brushed my flan tin with some olive oil and managed to get the pastry to fit well into the tin, pressing the edges into the fluted rim. I then followed Julia’s advice and put a sheet of foil over the pastry and filled that with baking beans. I then put the tin in the oven and baked blind for around 10 minutes.

Baking blind with foil and baking beans

When I lifted out the foil I discovered the base of the flan to be swimming in liquid butter. I was not prepared for this and not well-pleased. I stuck the tin back in the oven for another 5 minutes. This time the base pastry had ballooned up, despite my trying to prick it before I put it in. I pricked the base once more and the balloon settled back down. It still looked rather soggy to me but there was not much I could do about it. The sides were already starting to feel crisp.

getting ready with the filling

I put the savoury egg custard mixture into the pastry shell, put a few dobs of butter on top and put it in the oven to cook. Meanwhile I boiled some new potatoes and chopped some parsley to garnish them with when done.

Quiche with boiled potatoes and parsley garnish

The quiche and potatoes made a pleasant Sunday lunch but I came away with severe reservations concerning Julias pastry recipe and cooking technique. I have made a pencil note in the book to go back to Delia Smith for pastry guidance. The egg custard cooked perfectly and a knife came out clean when I brought it out of the oven. I should have checked the seasoning, though, it could have done with more salt. I really enjoyed the diced chicken breasts in the quiche but SWMNBM was not so keen. So, in the grand scheme of things culinary, I give it a 5/10. Speak to you later my dear blogophiles.

It is Saturday morning and an ideal time to crack on with another Julia recipe. Today I am making pâte brisée (short crust pastry). I shall take it to the stage where the pastry comes together in a ball and then I shall leave it to rest in the fridge until tomorrow lunchtime when I shall make a quiche. So here are the main ingredients.

The main ingredients

I have made short crust pastry before many times but today I am following Julia’s recipe closely, at least, as far as ingredients and quantities go. However, I am perfectly happy to deviate whenever I feel the need. For example, I prefer to grate the cold butter into the flour, rather than rub it in with the tips of my fingers.

Grating in the butter

I added cold water until the pastry came together. Perhaps I should have made a pencil note as to how much water I used but I did not think to do that at the time. I’ll put the pastry ball to rest in the fridge until tomorrow

Pastry ready to roll tomorrow

Well, I think I have just enough time to get this onto my blog before going off on a major supermarket trip. Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.