Easier-access hill walking

Seriously cool idea. The Malvern Hills Easier Access Trails are level and quite wide, so would be suitable for most wheelchairs, motorised wheelchairs, walking aids, and baby pushchairs. Also, there are benches everywhere so you can stop often for a rest and enjoy the view. The car parks at the trailheads also have reserved disabled parking bays. There’s more info on the easy access trails here. Major kudos to the Malvern Hills Conservators for this one.

We went to the Malvern Hills this weekend, and while I couldn’t get far from the trailhead, I did get a lovely view of the Severn valley, while my family went on ahead.

(Also, the “Just Rachel” ice cream, sold at various points in and around Malvern, is not to be missed.)

–IP

Snapshots from a Latin American country (iv)

We made dulce de chocolate. That’s chocolate. From scratch. Also known in Spanish as “tableta”, when it is used for melting into hot milk or water for making hot chocolate. S., who works for my Abuela knows how to make it, so my Abuela asked her to show her, my Tía, and me.

We started with semillas de cacao. S. toasted them, then tipped them into a large heatproof bowl and set us to shelling the the cacao beans.

S. then mixed the shelled cacao with sugar to taste (there was much discussion of how much sugar constituted “to taste”. S. clearly thinks we are nuts for liking our chocolate on the bitter side) cinnamon bark broken into small pieces, and a wee sprinkle of water.

Then it needs to be ground very finely, she explained, so that the grains of sugar are no longer visible. Abuela produced the food processor, much to S’s skepticism — S. does not believe in food processors. She does believe in el molino — the neighbourhood mill where people take their corn to be ground for tortillas, or their cacao mixtures for dulce de chocolate. S. turned out to be right — the food processor didn’t grind it finely enough, so it was taken to the molino where it was ground to a paste. My Tía and I have speculated as to whether using honey or disolved panela (aka jagree) instead of sugar would eliminate the need for very fine grinding, but we didn’t get a chance to test this theory. When we asked S. what she thought of the idea she only said indignantly “No me vayan a cambiar la receta!”

Once the paste is made, S. showed us how to spoon the paste onto greasproof paper and shape rectangular bars, which we then put into the fridge to harden.

S. took some of them home for herself and her family. I am quite certain that the first thing she did with them upon getting home was to melt them into milk with at least as much sugar again as they already contained. What sloppy and ungrateful students she must think we are, wanting less sugar in unevenly ground chocolate. She was nevertheless thanked profusely for her teaching. We’ve been eating masses of delicious chocolate since. And the house smells all of toasted cacao.

–IP

In which I pretend to camp and consider a new vocation

This weekend just past, the Existentialist and I decided to escape some cotidian nonsense and go camping.  But with it being a bank holiday weekend, everyone and their auntie seemed to have the same plan and there appeared to be no campsites in the land with space to pitch a tent.  So we booked into a B&B in a small village near a big loch, switched off the lights, and read AS Byatt’s Possession to each other by torch light, pretending to be in a particularly sturdy tent.  In the morning we went to sit by the loch.

Wandering back through the village from the loch to the cafe we’d picked to have lunch in,  we passed the village butcher and spent a few minutes gazing admiringly at his chops and homemade haggises (the Existentialist, you may recall, is The Original Carnivore).  It was at this point that it occured to me that being a butcher might not be a bad living.  You’d be surrounded by food, people would come to you for advice on their braising beef, and would ask you to sharpen their kitchen knives*, you get a really big fuck-off meat cleaver as part of the job so no one would try it on with you, and you’d never want for lamb mince.  And some nice lamb mince is not to be sneezed at.

–IP

*Some people are confused by this.  They needn’t be.  You are much more likely to be injured in the kitchen by using a blunt knife which requires more pressure and might slip more easily, than by using a sharp one (unless you’re being an idiot with the knife, in which case it’s the general stupid that is the hazard, not the sharpness of the knife).  Also, chopping onions or meat with a blunt knife requires a lot of effort, and my ol’ dad taught me that one should never take nonsense from an onion, because if you start taking nonsense from onions, there is no knowing where you’ll end up.

You eat what you are

There’s this restaurant where I occasionally go when I really really need a hot lunch. It’s relatively cheap and does good food With Vegetables In.

The way it works is this: There are a selection of hot foods and a selection of salads that one can pick as part of a main course. You pick a plate size (medium or large — main courses are priced by plate size); a medium plate consists of either two hot dishes and one salad, or one hot dish and two salads. There are also a selection of deserts and other “extras” which are priced separately.

So the other day I asked for a medium plate with a broccoli dish and spanakopita (they have a gorgeous spanakopita), and a portion of fruit salad; whereupon the nice waiter explained to me that fruit salad only counts as salad if you have it on your main plain with your savoury food. If, however, you have your fruit salad on a separate plate, it counts as dessert and you have to pay extra for it (but you would get another “real” salad with your medium plate). Since I quite fancied the fruit salad, and all your food gets mushed together inside your tummy anyway, I agreed to have my fruit salad on my main plate. Whereupon the conversation went like this:

Nice waiter: Were you born somewhere tropical?
Me: Sort of. California. But I have lived in more tropical places. How did you know?
NM: I have a magical Tropical Person Detector. See, only people from tropical places ask for fruit salad on their main plate. It never fails.
Me: Hmmm.
NM: No, really. Every time someone asks for fruit salad on their main plate, I always ask, and it’s always somewhere tropical.

It reminded me a school art class, when I was working on a still-life painting, and my teacher stood watching me for a little while before saying:

Teacher: Are you from somewhere hot?
Me: Yes, why?
Teacher: You paint predominantly with cold colours. I had a classmate at art college who did that, and he was from the tropics.
Me: I hadn’t noticed. You’d think it would be the other way around, wouldn’t you — people from hot places would paint with warm colours?
Teacher: I guess the longing for a glass of ice water runs in your blood, or something.

–IP

In praise of naked cucumbers

Praise be to:

1. Scotland’s Co-op for selling naked cucumbers; they expect to save 8 tonnes of plastic per year in so doing. I’m pleased about this, and hope it gets extended to other unnecessarily-overpackaged produce, and retailers. Tesco’s habit of placing their “Finest” range tomatoes in protective plastic trays and then wrapping the whole lot in plastic bewilders me. This is a good example of a little step that can make a big impact and doesn’t inconvenience anyone much. Not that I’m opposed to changing habits for environmental welfare, mark you. Just that I recognise that there are some adjustments that some people are not able to make.
2. LED headtorches. I got the Existentialist an LED headtorch for his birthday. This is a partial experiment. Firstly, we are hoping that it will be useful for him when he travels and stays in hotels/friends’ houses where the default is fluorescent lighting, and he can then turn off the fluorescents in his room and just use the headtorch instead.* The experimental bit is this: we’re hoping that he may be able to use the headtorch in public places where fluorescent lighting is default (eg, university lecture halls). Possibly if he can illuminate just his desk/notes with the headtorch, the fluorescent ceiling lights will be less bothersome. That’s the hypothesis anyway. We’ll see how it works. If the experiment is successful, I may invest in a headtorch too in the hopes that this will increase the amount of time I can work productively in the labs without getting migraines.
3. TENS machines, and all the people who have recommended them to me. The Existentialist got me one for my birthday, (also as an experiment). I tried it for my back, and the first few minutes felt weird, but I definitely felt better after 15 minutes. Yay! I am so pleased at having another non-medicine option for pain.

In other news, my research group and I have finished and submitted our project. It is done done done! Ask me anything you want about variational analysis of verb inflection. Go on, I dare you.

I only have two minor gripes:

1. I will never ever be able to believe statistics again. Not unless I’ve processed them myself and even then I’m not so sure. You would not believe the stats I have been crunching this week, to make something comprehensible out of what can only be described as a mess. I mourn the lost era of innocence and simplicity. But at the same time, the mourning is tempered by the fact that I’ve never been so fascinated by a problem in my life. I don’t even mind that I’m losing sleep, waking with urgent and important thoughts about multi-variate analysis that I cannot then remember upon waking. I worry that I may be becoming another spaced out obsessive academic, with all that that entails.
2. I’m exhausted. I do mind, actually. I know that contradicts the above, but there we go. Possibly a proper academic or a logician (or both) will have to sort that out. Maybe there should be an Academic Theory of Truth, or possibly an Academic Logic to accomodate that sort of contradiction (or non-contradiction, as the case may be) in very specific domains.

–IP

*For those who don’t know, both the Existentialist and I are sensitive to fluorescent lights, due to unrelated chronic medical conditions. Mine is migraines — I find I am sensitive to changes in light intensity and, when migraines are starting or when I have lower-key continuous headaches (which may be several days a week) I am sensitive to fluorescent lights.

Is there a plant heaven?

Pierre the potted cilantro was doing so well. He had such lovely flowers and sent out lots of new shoots, and the flowers lasted for weeks, and when the flowers were finished, big fat seeds grew in their place. But now Pierre has collapsed and gone a sickly yellowish. He looks decidedly Under The Weather. And I just want to know, in case the worst should happen, what plant-heaven is like.

Is it like aubergine masala? Or more like carrot soup?

–IP

Going bananas

…About plantains. Which are not to be confused with bananas. Plantains are much larger and firmer and are not eating raw. Asian shops stock them, and when picking your plantains you must either pick ones that are yellowish-green or that are brownish-black (really, don’t be afraid of black-skinned plantaines. They are not rotting, they’re just ripe), depending on what you are planning to cook.

Ripe plantains can be fried or baked and eaten either with a savoury meal or as a dessert. Green plantains can be used in soups or can be made into fritters called “patacones”.  Mmmmmmm yummmy.

I bought three lovely ripe plantains yesterday. I baked one (drizzled with veg oil and sprinkled with mixed spice and cinammon, and baked at 200C for 30 minutes, turning occasionally) and had it with a supper of arroz y frijolitos.

The other two I used to make plantain bread. I sort of made the recipe up as I went along, as all the recipes I found online were for making more cake-y plantain bread, and I wanted something non-sweet. So here’s how I made it:

1. Preheat oven to 160C.
2. In one bowl, mix 2.5 cups of self-raising flour with 1 heaped teaspoon of baking soda (bicarbonate of soda) and a generous pinch of salt, a sprinkle of mixed spice, and a handful of sunflower seeds. One could also add raisins.
3. Peel and slice 2 ripe plantains and place in another bowl. Mash them and then mix with two beaten eggs. Add a drizzle of olive oil and half a cup of milk, and mix.
4. Add the plantain-and-egg mixture to the flour and mix to form a thick not-quite-liquid batter. Pour into a greased loaf tin. It does rise a little while baking, so do not overfill the tin. Be careful to wipe away and drips of batter so that they do not burn.
5. Bake for an hour (ish) or until the top is golden-brown and firm and springy to touch. After removing from the oven, turn the loaf out of the tin, and allow to stand on a wire rack to cool.

And that’s it! It took about 5 minutes to make the batter. I’ve just had a CP* slice, and it’s not bad. One could probably use roughly the same recipe for a sweeter plantain bread, substituting butter for the oil, and adding some honey or brown sugar.

Enjoy.

–IP

*CP = chef’s perk

More vegetarian maoism

Continuin in this vein, I made a brisket last night. Meat is addictive, man. In my first year I hardly ate any because I kept looking at the price. Then I calculated how much I spent on fruit and veg, and decided that if one buys cheap meat, it is possible to spend no more than if one were being veggie. But once you start eating the damn stuff, you keep craving it. I blame the Existentialist, who is The Original Carnivore(TM).

Anyway, I digress. I was talking about brisket. If you are a hadcore brisket chef, you don’t follow the recipe I am about to disclose. You do some cunning thing with a barbeque and extremely slow cooking a day in advance.

I am hardcore about many things, but brisket-chefing is not one of them, alas. I used a rolled brisket from the supermarket (just over £3 for just under 1kg of meat). Here’s what I did:

1. Preheat oven to 150 degrees C (for a fan oven)
2. Thinly slice one large onion, cut a small onion in half, and shell aproximately one head of garlic.
3. Rinse the brisket and pat dry with paper towel.
4. In plenty of olive oil, fry the sliced onion and garlic cloves with a bit of fennel seed and paprika. When onion is transparent, add one bottle of ale, or enough to completely submerge the brisket (I used Wychcraft because that was what I happened to have at the time), and bring to a boil.
5. Add a teaspoon of honey, a bay leaf, a few cloves, salt, and peper to taste.
6. Place the brisket in a deep casserole dish or oven-proof pot, and place the halved onion with it. Pour the ale mixture over it, cover, and place in the oven.  Remember, the brisket must be completely covered in liquid or it will dry out.
7. Cook for aproximately 4 1/2 hours, turning the brisket over from time to time.
8. When tender, remove from oven and allow the brisket to sit for 20 minutes or so.
9. Place the brisket on a carving board, and pour the sauce into a saucepan.
10. Bring the sauce to a boil and wisk in one teaspoon of flour or cornstarch or a flour-and-fat mixture to make a gravy Simmer til it thickens, and optionally boil it to reduce it.
11. Slice the brisket thinly and serve with the gravy.

I made roast sweet potato and carrot-and-neep mash to go with, and fresh bread to mop up the gravy.

–IP