Sunday, February 10, 2008
Fresh fish
Another round of baked cod on Friday - which turned out very well. So well that I was moved to dilate in Tooting about it, only to be informed that sea fish cannot be eaten too fresh or it tastes terrible. One has to give the ammonia time to blow off or something. Sounds quite plausible but I have never heard of such a thing before and I have heard of people grilling fish on the seashore as they catch them. And, from experience, fresh mackeral - as in hours old - taste a good deal better than shop ones. More digging needed again.
Discovered that chicken stews - the technical term might be fricassee - are much improved by the addition of some smoked haddock. Not altogether sure whether the improvement was due to all the salt in the smoked haddock or to the fish itself. Certainly chicken breasts seem to need something to gee them up a bit. One then wonders why it is that sea fish do not taste salty. If vertebrates are 90% water and sea water is 30% salt one might think that they should do. Now where do I find a fishy salt analysis?
And talking of vertebrates, the DT tells me that fish need about 1.5 grams of carbohydrate feed to make 1 gram of fish. Chicken 2.5 grams and cows a princely 8. So clearly growing cows is not the way forward if we want to feed the starving millions. But why is it that fish are so good at turning carb into protein?
The DT - along with the rest of the media - certainly went into a twist over the Arch Bish remarks about Sharia law. When I first saw it, I assumed that he was saying something relatively innocuous like it is quite likely that someone else's legal system, one that has grown up somewhere else and in differant circumstances, has something to offer. Maybe they have come up with some better way to handle child criminals or divorce (although the latter seems a bit unlikely given the Sharia approach to rape) . Or some neat way of dealing with fraudulent carpet sellers. I dare say that, in their day, both Sharia law and Jewish law were quite advanced - compared, say, with what passed for law in this country in the year of our Lord 1000. However, he seemed not to be saying that at all. It seems that what he was saying about was parallel jurisdictions. Now this, while more contentious, is perhaps not so off the wall. We used to have ecclesiastical courts to deal with matters of that sort and commercial courts for that sort of thing. In fact, I think we still do. So given that our criminal justice system is not doing so terribly well at the moment, might it be worth giving some thought to whether communities could elect to have their own justice for matters which affected only themselves? Provided, I guess, that there was always appeal to proper justice? Would we want to dilute the state's monopoly on the use of legal force and coercion? And we do not want to return to the lynch law which pertained in parts of the UK not so long ago.
Which takes me back to my latest Trollope where I find a discussion of the merits of the party system we have now. Do school children still have time for this sort of thing? I seem to remember that in my school we did give this sort of thing a modest outing, along with RI and music. In any event, a subject worthy of discussion. In those days - the 1850s that is - people worried about whether MPs voting for the party line was proper. Whether it would not be more proper to vote according to one's belief rather than what the party higher ups had decided? Or in the case of Blair and Brown, what some little coterie of hangers on at No 10 had decided. At a time when MPs were not paid but ministers were, was it proper for an MP without money but with views to take the government gold as a minister but to keep his mouth shut. What do we buy with our party system? The benefit of a loyal opposition whose duty it is to oppose everything because opposition is needed to sharpen proposals up? I don't remember when I last saw the Guardian give this sort of stuff an outing, let alone the DT.
Trollope was cunning enough to interleave all this with plenty of romantic interest. So there was something for everybody. I wonder what the profile of his readers was? Were there more of them that read Dickens or Eliott?
Discovered that chicken stews - the technical term might be fricassee - are much improved by the addition of some smoked haddock. Not altogether sure whether the improvement was due to all the salt in the smoked haddock or to the fish itself. Certainly chicken breasts seem to need something to gee them up a bit. One then wonders why it is that sea fish do not taste salty. If vertebrates are 90% water and sea water is 30% salt one might think that they should do. Now where do I find a fishy salt analysis?
And talking of vertebrates, the DT tells me that fish need about 1.5 grams of carbohydrate feed to make 1 gram of fish. Chicken 2.5 grams and cows a princely 8. So clearly growing cows is not the way forward if we want to feed the starving millions. But why is it that fish are so good at turning carb into protein?
The DT - along with the rest of the media - certainly went into a twist over the Arch Bish remarks about Sharia law. When I first saw it, I assumed that he was saying something relatively innocuous like it is quite likely that someone else's legal system, one that has grown up somewhere else and in differant circumstances, has something to offer. Maybe they have come up with some better way to handle child criminals or divorce (although the latter seems a bit unlikely given the Sharia approach to rape) . Or some neat way of dealing with fraudulent carpet sellers. I dare say that, in their day, both Sharia law and Jewish law were quite advanced - compared, say, with what passed for law in this country in the year of our Lord 1000. However, he seemed not to be saying that at all. It seems that what he was saying about was parallel jurisdictions. Now this, while more contentious, is perhaps not so off the wall. We used to have ecclesiastical courts to deal with matters of that sort and commercial courts for that sort of thing. In fact, I think we still do. So given that our criminal justice system is not doing so terribly well at the moment, might it be worth giving some thought to whether communities could elect to have their own justice for matters which affected only themselves? Provided, I guess, that there was always appeal to proper justice? Would we want to dilute the state's monopoly on the use of legal force and coercion? And we do not want to return to the lynch law which pertained in parts of the UK not so long ago.
Which takes me back to my latest Trollope where I find a discussion of the merits of the party system we have now. Do school children still have time for this sort of thing? I seem to remember that in my school we did give this sort of thing a modest outing, along with RI and music. In any event, a subject worthy of discussion. In those days - the 1850s that is - people worried about whether MPs voting for the party line was proper. Whether it would not be more proper to vote according to one's belief rather than what the party higher ups had decided? Or in the case of Blair and Brown, what some little coterie of hangers on at No 10 had decided. At a time when MPs were not paid but ministers were, was it proper for an MP without money but with views to take the government gold as a minister but to keep his mouth shut. What do we buy with our party system? The benefit of a loyal opposition whose duty it is to oppose everything because opposition is needed to sharpen proposals up? I don't remember when I last saw the Guardian give this sort of stuff an outing, let alone the DT.
Trollope was cunning enough to interleave all this with plenty of romantic interest. So there was something for everybody. I wonder what the profile of his readers was? Were there more of them that read Dickens or Eliott?
# posted by Jim @ 11:42 AM 
