Monday, November 19, 2007
Water, water everywhere
and not a kipper in sight. A wet run to Cheam this morning, sufficiently so that maybe two thirds of the drains on Howell Hill were blocked or overflowing and that by the time I came back, the drain deglugging lorry had appeared to sort out underneath the railway bridge. I also caught the Cheam baker in flagrante delicto - that is to say taking delivery of some cakes from a wholesaler - and I had thought that he did everything himself. But, as it is with nurseries, I guess it is hard to match the costs of a modern factory in a back shop bakery.
Coming down Epsom High Street on the way back, the sun came out. The whole world seemed bright, clean and clear - the wind and the rain was all forgotten. Reminded me of the same renewal one gets out on the hills after rain. Most exhilarating.
The missing reference at the end of the last post was Eccl. c1.v9. And the quote was very nearly right.
Another word play, this time from the BH. She was leafing through Uncle Tom and came across the phrase about Topsy just growing. Or just grew to be more exact. So along with sold down the river, Uncle Tom is responsible for at least one more common locution: "just grew like Topsy" - popular at least in the contractor circles I used to move in. Topsy in the book presumably alluding to the chaos that Topsy brought with her, from the very old topsy-turvey - the topsy bit apparently being short for top-side (as opposed to underside or underneath) and the turvey bit being obscure. Presumably the attractive rythmn of the thing had as much to do with it as any prior meaning. Poor that I did not pick this up myself.
Yesterday was a brisket day - 9 pounds or so of brisket on the bone - the butcher at Cheam having volunteered to procure same. Up at 0400 to put the thing in the oven, wrapped up in tin foil (joins in the foil and bone in the brisket uppermost), and cooked the thing for 11.5 hours - a personal best. Served with mashed potato, swede, carrot and curly cabbage. Gravy the juice from the joint, untouched apart from draining off some of the fat that came with it. Wine from Chile. Very good it all was too - although not good for too much afterwards. Flavourwise it competed with the much more expensive fore rib - although the differance in price is eroded by the amount of electricity used and the amount of waste on the brisket. We will see how it does cold and then the plan is to make rissoles out of what it left. Something I do not recall ever having - although BH says it was a staple in the middling sort of restaurants that one used to use in the early sixties before they invented Italians. A good way for restaurants to recycle left overs from one day to the next. Very eco and unwasteful it was too.
The gooseberry plants turned out not to be pot reared. They had been grown in the ground and simply packed with some compost stuff into pots for sale. The neat little pot covers being there to keep the roots damp. In any event, all in now and they should do better than the pot bound pot grown variant. And just to rub in how much I had paid for the things, a neighbouring allotment holder gave me three blackcurrent and three gooseberry slips, also all in now. We will see how many of the them take - ought to do 9 out of 10 or so (pro rata). The blackcurrent slips stank of ribena - despite being in a dormant state - so we will see what the plants smell like in due course, if we get that far.
Starting to think that I need an editorial assistant for this ere blog. I suspect that I am running on about the same thing more than once, having forgotten the earlier occasions on the latest. Doesn't look to clever from a serial reader point of view and there might be inconsistancies. But I can only rarely be bothered to check. Must get a gopher.
Coming down Epsom High Street on the way back, the sun came out. The whole world seemed bright, clean and clear - the wind and the rain was all forgotten. Reminded me of the same renewal one gets out on the hills after rain. Most exhilarating.
The missing reference at the end of the last post was Eccl. c1.v9. And the quote was very nearly right.
Another word play, this time from the BH. She was leafing through Uncle Tom and came across the phrase about Topsy just growing. Or just grew to be more exact. So along with sold down the river, Uncle Tom is responsible for at least one more common locution: "just grew like Topsy" - popular at least in the contractor circles I used to move in. Topsy in the book presumably alluding to the chaos that Topsy brought with her, from the very old topsy-turvey - the topsy bit apparently being short for top-side (as opposed to underside or underneath) and the turvey bit being obscure. Presumably the attractive rythmn of the thing had as much to do with it as any prior meaning. Poor that I did not pick this up myself.
Yesterday was a brisket day - 9 pounds or so of brisket on the bone - the butcher at Cheam having volunteered to procure same. Up at 0400 to put the thing in the oven, wrapped up in tin foil (joins in the foil and bone in the brisket uppermost), and cooked the thing for 11.5 hours - a personal best. Served with mashed potato, swede, carrot and curly cabbage. Gravy the juice from the joint, untouched apart from draining off some of the fat that came with it. Wine from Chile. Very good it all was too - although not good for too much afterwards. Flavourwise it competed with the much more expensive fore rib - although the differance in price is eroded by the amount of electricity used and the amount of waste on the brisket. We will see how it does cold and then the plan is to make rissoles out of what it left. Something I do not recall ever having - although BH says it was a staple in the middling sort of restaurants that one used to use in the early sixties before they invented Italians. A good way for restaurants to recycle left overs from one day to the next. Very eco and unwasteful it was too.
The gooseberry plants turned out not to be pot reared. They had been grown in the ground and simply packed with some compost stuff into pots for sale. The neat little pot covers being there to keep the roots damp. In any event, all in now and they should do better than the pot bound pot grown variant. And just to rub in how much I had paid for the things, a neighbouring allotment holder gave me three blackcurrent and three gooseberry slips, also all in now. We will see how many of the them take - ought to do 9 out of 10 or so (pro rata). The blackcurrent slips stank of ribena - despite being in a dormant state - so we will see what the plants smell like in due course, if we get that far.
Starting to think that I need an editorial assistant for this ere blog. I suspect that I am running on about the same thing more than once, having forgotten the earlier occasions on the latest. Doesn't look to clever from a serial reader point of view and there might be inconsistancies. But I can only rarely be bothered to check. Must get a gopher.
# posted by Jim @ 3:28 AM 
