Sunday, September 14, 2008
Culinary adventures
The BH was not happy when I mistakenly told her that we were running out of pearl barley, with the result that we now have more than a kilo of the stuff in our not enormous cupboard. So, I have to think out of the box. How are we going to shift the stuff? Now, it being Friday, it was a baked cod day. So I thinks to myself, pearl barley is a cousin german to rice. So why not have boiled pearl barley with the cod, rather than rice or mashed potatoes - these last being our usual form. So pearl barley it was. Soaked the stuff (4oz per portion) for several hours and simmered for one, tasted somewhere between oatmeal porriage and easy cook brown rice. Entirely satisfactory and thought to be slightly cheaper than rice. I suppose the complication is that it takes a good while to cook. Not exactly fast food.
Then, having some barley and cod left over at breakfast time, thought again. Fried the cod, skin side down in a little butter and water. Remove cod from pan, skin, bone and flake. Stir into the cold barley. Return the whole lot to the frying pan to heat through. This time one gets a version of kedgeree, again entirely satisfactory. At least that is what I am saying to the BH. But will I ever do it again?
But an entirely unsatifactory experience on the way home from Tooting. Usually, with the aid of a few jars of the warm, flat, amber liquid of choice, if I gaze at a mottled surface like a railway platform, the surface of a road or the floor of a Southwest Trains passenger carriage and lose focus a little, I am able to project all sorts of interesting and very realistic images onto said mottled surface. There are enough random features onto which one can hang realistic images. Now while I think projection is the technical term for this sort of activity or experience, the word has too active a ring. One does not call up images to order, rather they condense, out of the ether, on suitable features of the surface. And once locked on, it can be quite hard to shake the image off. Most commonly but by no means exclusively, more or less grotesque human heads. One can also do the same trick gazing at one's shoes or the clouds. But on this occasion it was not working at all. Maybe I had taken on the wrong sort of amber liquid.
On the same occasion, I learn that the facilities management team at Raynes Park station must have decided that the shiny new railings installed at the time of privatisation needed to be trespasser friendly, unlike those at most other stations. That is to say, at most other stations the railings are made out of pressed steel strips, maybe 6 feet long, with the top cut into three unpleasant looking spikes. I would think that forcing the strips apart - twisting a bit of rope around them would do the trick - would be a lot safer than going over the top. Here, the railings were only about four feet high, made out of 1 inch tubing rather than pressed steel strip, and with a nice rubber bung, finished off hemispherically, to protect any trespasser who might be legging it over from any damage from the rough end of the pipe. So why so thoughtful?
Any why have a fence at all? British Rail in the bad old days had managed for a long time without them. Was it all part of a drive to keep revenue up and free-loaders down? Was it part of a drive to discourage youth from clambering around the line and hurting themselves? Did the insurers of the new owners of the stations insist on their being fenced off as a condition of providing cover? Was the wife of the chairman having an affair with the fencing contractor and was wanting to throw her fancy man a few bones? I don't suppose I will ever know. Far to lazy to mount the sort of effort I suspect would be needed to find out for sure - particularly, as with many decisions (or at least the sort of decision I was involved in, when in the world of work), the decision emerged out of a cloud of consideration with it being hard to say exactly which consideration had what impact. Rather like when gazing at the railway platform earlier in this post: the mood of the meeting suddenly locks onto a decision, the force is with it and that is the end of the matter. One writes the story up after the event, nice and tidy, but the story does not always bear much relation to the discussion at the meeting.
Contrariwise, I used to work for a chap who always liked to have one hard reason for doing something. One nice, clean reason that was either true or false. Or being pedantic, condition A being true was necessary and sufficient reason for doing action B. So if A was true you did B and if A was false you didn't. A nice clear path to decision. Not more than half a side of double spaced A4. I have rarely liked reducing decisions in that way. So much seems to get left out.
Then, having some barley and cod left over at breakfast time, thought again. Fried the cod, skin side down in a little butter and water. Remove cod from pan, skin, bone and flake. Stir into the cold barley. Return the whole lot to the frying pan to heat through. This time one gets a version of kedgeree, again entirely satisfactory. At least that is what I am saying to the BH. But will I ever do it again?
But an entirely unsatifactory experience on the way home from Tooting. Usually, with the aid of a few jars of the warm, flat, amber liquid of choice, if I gaze at a mottled surface like a railway platform, the surface of a road or the floor of a Southwest Trains passenger carriage and lose focus a little, I am able to project all sorts of interesting and very realistic images onto said mottled surface. There are enough random features onto which one can hang realistic images. Now while I think projection is the technical term for this sort of activity or experience, the word has too active a ring. One does not call up images to order, rather they condense, out of the ether, on suitable features of the surface. And once locked on, it can be quite hard to shake the image off. Most commonly but by no means exclusively, more or less grotesque human heads. One can also do the same trick gazing at one's shoes or the clouds. But on this occasion it was not working at all. Maybe I had taken on the wrong sort of amber liquid.
On the same occasion, I learn that the facilities management team at Raynes Park station must have decided that the shiny new railings installed at the time of privatisation needed to be trespasser friendly, unlike those at most other stations. That is to say, at most other stations the railings are made out of pressed steel strips, maybe 6 feet long, with the top cut into three unpleasant looking spikes. I would think that forcing the strips apart - twisting a bit of rope around them would do the trick - would be a lot safer than going over the top. Here, the railings were only about four feet high, made out of 1 inch tubing rather than pressed steel strip, and with a nice rubber bung, finished off hemispherically, to protect any trespasser who might be legging it over from any damage from the rough end of the pipe. So why so thoughtful?
Any why have a fence at all? British Rail in the bad old days had managed for a long time without them. Was it all part of a drive to keep revenue up and free-loaders down? Was it part of a drive to discourage youth from clambering around the line and hurting themselves? Did the insurers of the new owners of the stations insist on their being fenced off as a condition of providing cover? Was the wife of the chairman having an affair with the fencing contractor and was wanting to throw her fancy man a few bones? I don't suppose I will ever know. Far to lazy to mount the sort of effort I suspect would be needed to find out for sure - particularly, as with many decisions (or at least the sort of decision I was involved in, when in the world of work), the decision emerged out of a cloud of consideration with it being hard to say exactly which consideration had what impact. Rather like when gazing at the railway platform earlier in this post: the mood of the meeting suddenly locks onto a decision, the force is with it and that is the end of the matter. One writes the story up after the event, nice and tidy, but the story does not always bear much relation to the discussion at the meeting.
Contrariwise, I used to work for a chap who always liked to have one hard reason for doing something. One nice, clean reason that was either true or false. Or being pedantic, condition A being true was necessary and sufficient reason for doing action B. So if A was true you did B and if A was false you didn't. A nice clear path to decision. Not more than half a side of double spaced A4. I have rarely liked reducing decisions in that way. So much seems to get left out.
# posted by Jim @ 6:26 AM 
