6 posts tagged “cooking”
a very close friend in sydney got married on saturday. i couldn't go because it basically ended up being a choice between getting to her wedding and djeli being able to spend christmas with his boys, and seeing as his eldest is turning 16, it's going to be the last christmas he'll be able to spend with them while they're still (officially) children, so it was really no choice at all. that, and i'd like to make my very aged great-aunt happy (and my other rels) by turning up for christmas for the first time in 4 years. the other hard decision was that if we'd gone to the wedding i'd have been able to be there for my da's 75th birthday. so i feel i'm missing out and letting people down this year. i just hope christmas can make up for that.
and today i'm home with a sort of fluey thing which has collided with the tension headache i've had for the past 2 weeks now, which my masseuse started doing something about on sunday (45 minutes of her pressing hard on a knot, saying "does that hurt?", me going "aargh!" and her saying "ok, tell me when it stops hurting". fun) and which will obviously continue through at least one more session, so there's been a lot of pain and general feeling-sorry-for-myself.
on the plus side, there's been the joy of on-demand tv. i totally forgot to watch the first episode of merlin on whatever night it was on (saturday?) so i got to catch up with that (bbc iplayer. looking pretty good, i think - good escapist stuff anyway and has giles from buffy in it and gwen from torchwood in the first episode too so that has to be a recommendation), then treated myself to two episodes of the river cottage road trip and ... erm ... 7 episodes of the second series of jamie at home (all on 4od), all of which i missed when they were on the telly proper. which i probably shouldn't have done because it set me off pining, not for the fjords, but for the time when i could cook whatever i fancied and actually entertain my friends properly - in ways involving exciting combinations of flavours, varying textures, puddings and no brown rice.
i've begun to realise, in short, how very far away my old life is - between the wedding and the sorry state of (my) food today (although, i made an exciting discovery in the form of sumac at a food festival we accidentally tripped over on saturday), it feels like a fantasy that i used to be able to just cook quiches and casseroles and sausages and bacon and white rice and meringues and make my own marshmallows without thinking twice about it or feeling guilty. and i feel quite distanced from most of my sydney friends, mostly because a lot of them don't really do email and can never be bothered to read any of my blogs or check my photos or anything while i, on the flip side, loathe and detest telephones only slightly more than i loathe and detest facebook, which seems to be the only social networking site most of them frequent (why?? why??? surely you have better things to do!). and true, i do have this blog linked in to my facebook account, but i'm pretty sure nobody's actually reading it from there. i would love to be proved wrong...
i should say that while this distancing does make me sad (especially where food is concerned - jamie oliver cooking rhubarb and custard souffles in front of me was kind of the last straw there) there are good things about it too. i've managed to cast off the shackles of the assorted expectations i was labouring under and reach a not-even-but-improved balance between dayjob and real work - lately i've even managed a few days where i've been able to fit in a little composition before going to work which has felt just brilliant; i'm a lot more adventurous with food now, especially vegetables - i've learnt to cook with and eat fresh chillis, capsicum, radishes (home-grown!), spinach, and salmon. we've set up our own vege garden too, which has been pretty successful (too successful in places - next year we will apply the lessons learnt in the areas of staggered planting times and thinning out) and resulted in our own spinach, radishes, zucchini, peas and peas, with cucumbers, spring onions, carrots and tomatoes still to be sampled. oh and djeli's brussels sprouts which we are hoping liberal spraying with malt vinegar will save from the horrible bugs they have on them without resorting to chemicals.
i find it interesting that since i have been on this diet (which, while it does get me down on a regular basis, i have to say has created pretty spectacular results - i've lost 14 kilos since february, been sick much less often, have significantly more energy than when i started and have started writing again after about a 3-year patch of composer's block) we have bought 9, yes 9, new cookbooks, most of which i can't eat very much out of at all. which is frustrating but also in a wierd masochistic way makes me feel some semblance of culinary normality. i haven't baked anything in 8 months, which is something unheard of for me, yet still i collect every issue of the waitrose food magazine that comes out (one day those giant toblerone cookies will be made), check every month's new recipe cards and the recipe books just keep piling up. the latest acquisition (from saturday) is the london cook book, which is a delightful mish-mash of recipes - from a classic english fry-up to chinese dishes, iranian food, a recipe for making fresh ricotta - all sorts of things. marvellously random. and now that i've discovered that it doesn't seem to exist on the web, i'm even more glad we lashed out on the day rather than thinking about it and then finding that it couldn't be found.
we had a beautiful day on saturday - it was very nearly perfect. stunning autumn weather and the design festival was on so once we'd gone to euston and djeli had bought his train tickets for the week (the car is poorly and languishing in the auto hospital so he's reduced to trains to get to telford and then taxis to and from work because there's no public transport where he's living) we donned our explorers' caps and set off for the wilds of peckham rye to go to a tiny but quirky student design exhibition, then headed back to blackfriars and across the river to the oxo wharf to potter about the design shops - some very very cool stuff there - well worth exploring. djeli found a wooden sculpture thing listed in the festival guide as being at the southbank centre, so we strolled up along the river, past the second-hand book stalls (we were very strong and didn't even peek) and in hunting for the sculpture, we came across this food fair, which felt rather cruel with chocolate ice cream and venison sausages and assorted other culinary delights i wasn't allowed, but there was also the man selling sumac who had a little dish for people to taste (which was great, because i'd heard of sumac but was a little nervous about what it would taste like - the answer is "very good"), someone giving away slivers of sheep's cheese, a snacks company promoting their new wheat-free breakfast cereal (very yum. the little bit of honey was a tad naughty, but it was very tasty and otherwise pretty much right on diet) and then there was a sort of lecture-with-samples on orchards and the joys of britain's many hundreds of apple varieties. i don't think i've eaten so much fresh apple in years! and after that we bought the cook book and decided we really ought to head home.
oh dear. i seem to have rambled completely off course with this post. i guess that's what happens when i try to write these things at - eep! - midnight. grovelling apologies to anyone who's actually read this far. i will try to do better...
well, today i had my first attempt at cooking with real cranberries. i thought i'd try out a recipe for cranberry syrup from tessa kiros' apples for jam. it looked simple enough - take cranberries, moosh them about with some sugar, add boiling water, moosh some more, strain and let cool. what it failed to mention was that the cranberries were actually as hard as little bullets. i don't know if that's how they're supposed to be, but mooshing them was somewhat like popping bubble-wrap made of steel. anyway, the end result is a pretty colour. tomorrow we'll discover whether the flavour has been worth the effort!
today's carol is another by an australian composer, but this time an original carol rather than an arrangement, and by my teacher, peter sculthorpe.
still in my recovery phase which means i'm pretty uninterested in anything i'm not already familiar with - rereading books, rewatching movies, reading tried-and-true favourite websites, listening to music i know really well which puts no demands on my brain. but at last i'm finding myself getting interested in new recipes anyway, and so today i tried a new one: chocolate and cranberry biscuits from tessa kiros' absolutely stunningly gorgeous book apples for jam.
and wow. i think i have a keeper here. pretty much definitely not a kiddies' biscuit, i'd say (in spite of what tessa says about her kids loving them, but with a chef for a mama, i guess they try all sorts of stuff) - with the tart cranberries and bitter chocolate, encased in a light, crisp, buttery-but-not-too-sweet biscuit, these are simply grand. and terribly christmassy. and, for me, one of the excellent things about them is that while they are delicious, they're also not the sort of biscuit i can't stop eating, so will be excellent for daily treats without completely blowing the diet.
i've never used dried cranberries before. or for that matter fresh cranberries - certainly the fresh sort never seem to have been available in australia. these biscuits used the dried ones - i could only find them with cinnamon on them, but the result was still excellent and the tiny touch of cinnamon worked well. we also bought fresh cranberries because the same book has a recipe for a cranberry syrup (basically cordial) which sounds fabulous and we have some fizzy water left over from summer taking up space in the cupboard. ah - happiness!
UPDATE: yes, the freezing worked well. they defrosted pretty quickly and have cooked up nicely, so i hereby declare these a success as freezer bikkies. huzzah!
the last couple of days have been really good and now i have actually been enthused about my piece and started hacking up bits of recordings to make the tape part.
on thursday, dejli and i went out to a music technology expo at olympia. i did feel rather a fish out of water, as i'd expected, being probably just about the only exclusively classical musician in the place (well, it felt like it anyway) but I learnt some stuff and had a great time just wandering about drooling at all the equipment and wishing i played the guitar or had any sort of aptitude for creating pop music. one of the demonstrations we saw was a girl with a guitar demonstrating some sort of foot-pedal contraption that not only adjusted the sound of her guitar, but also gave her instant on-the-fly backing vocals by transposing what she was singing. amazing stuff. i watched a bit of a masterclass on mixing and picked up some tips but mostly just drifted about. talked to the musician's union and peered at some bits and pieces and had a long chat with the chap from sibelius which was very enlightening - it's come a long long way since i reviewed version 1 for sounds australian! and i got a show special on a subscription to computer music magazine - 3 issues for £3 then 30% off for the rest of the year - which i was happy about :-)
and then when they kicked us out of the expo, we went to hammersmith and saw hot fuzz. i'd been a bit unsure about this movie - the trailer looked good, but the synopsis sounded like a classic displacement story and i was a bit worried it would fall flat on its face. but no. and no with a vengeance. i haven't laughed that much in a movie in a very very very long time. i think i even guffawed at one point (fortunately the cinema was mostly empty so this didn't really affect many people). the splatter element surprised me at first, until i remembered that it was made by the same people as shaun of the dead which explained a lot. and now i have to see that film, i think.
yesterday was quite low key. i drew eggs.
i made lemonade. i went for a walk. i made pizza (yes, the dough included) which turned out awesomely, if i may say so - prosciutto and mushroom with a big bowl of lettuce to wash it down. i played around with the musique concrète tutorial in the latest issue of computer music and then played around with the tape part for my satie song arrangement. i've been given permission to use bits of recordings from the fabulous cylinder preservation and digitisation project site, among which i found this gem:
wow. i have got sooo much done this past week. it's just incredible. for the first time in years and years and years - basically since i left uni in 1995 - i actually feel alive and like i'm a valuable member of society.
this week was my first full, 'real' week of being a proper composer (i'm not counting the week before christmas because it was all packed with pre-christmas errands, or the christmas/new year week because i was away, or last week because it was only half a week :-) and i can't believe how much i've achieved already. if i count in the three days of last week too, i have:
- finished the last of my two-part inventions
- started at last on the satie arrangement i was supposed to do six months ago but couldn't find the time to even think about
- joined westminster music library (hours of amusement to be had there, oh yes)
- been to two art exhibitions (turner prize at tate britan and the awesome fischli & weiss at tate modern)
- caught up with two friends
- baked my first-ever chicken pie
- made mushroom soup
- cleaned out the fridge
- tidied the entire house, including inside a number of cupboards and rearranging all the enormous bookshelves in the loungeroom
- dismissed our cleaner (which required the consumption of much trauma-consoling chocolate afterwards)
- listened to a ton of music
- been to the movies
- renewed my australian music centre membership (so i can keep up with any composer opportunities that i could be writing stuff for)
- worked out which piece i'm sending in to spnm's shortlist next week and checked that it fits the requirements (which it does)
- updated the musical examples on my website, posting three new sound files and one score extract
- sent off the website address to my potential commissioner (crossing fingers now that she likes what she hears)
- cancelled my subscription to gramophone magazine
- cleaned up all the rubbish that had started to float round the garden
- unblocked the outside drain which had got all choked up with leaves
- drew stuff.
i'm sure there was more too - updating of blogs, reading of articles and so on, but this should suffice to give an idea. i'm rather pleased with myself :-)
it was great in particular, going back through older music i've written to pull together the new sound files for my site. it's been like revisiting old friends. i was especially pleased to be able to pull together a semi-ok midi realisation of this piece, egg the first, which was one of the more stylistically mature pieces i wrote in my last year of uni.
i'd forgotten how much i like it, and going through the score to make a proper working playback version made me rethink the (currently almost unplayable) notation, so i'm going to work back through it and see if i can't make it easier to play and get it some performances.
ooh what a lovely weekend it's been, apart from the horrible cold which has curtailed some of the homebody fun i'd had planned. it's been ages and ages since i've really cooked, what with having been away for 2 weeks, not having cooked the week before that and djelibeybi doing most of the cooking while his no. 2 son was staying with us, so i felt the need to cook overwhelm me this weekend, and i just let it.
to start with: new kitchen equipment demands to be used, and as i just got a whizz-bang handmixer thingy (with chopping, whisking, blending and vacuum-packing attachments), i really *had* to think up something to make. i was kind of pining for all the fantastic food we had in greece, so it's sort of accidentally turned into a bit of a theme for the week:
- friday night: avgolemono soup - chicken soup with egg & lemon. a little too lemony perhaps (they were quite large lemons) but very tasty and nice & easy to digest for a couple of invalids like us
- saturday: homemade lemonade (yes, i know not actually greek, but as my drink of choice while in greece was a "lemonitha", it feels greek to me) and in the evening, lamb steaks with homemade tzatziki (yay for the handmixer thingy!) plus assortment of veg
- sunday: pita bread for use in homemade gyros tomorrow night.
this last caused some... interest. i think my recipe was perhaps a tad inaccurate, or maybe it's just my lack of mastering of the fan-forced oven, because the first couple of batches swelled up like balloons - and stayed that way! when i pulled them out of the oven, they were great crispy footballs, and it was immediately apparent that no amount of trying was simply going to deflate them. so i took photos of them instead... and then decided they were "pita crisps" and broke them up and chucked them in a bowl. i may tip some garlic butter over them and pretend it was intentional. heh.
still, there were some that have turned out sufficiently pita-like (by reducing the oven temp by 40 degrees and almost halving the cooking time) to be useful for tomorrow night's greek fast food, so crossing fingers we get the desired effect!
