Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Spring is here!
Having moved on from the frosts of last week, one would think spring is here. Seems balmy compared to last week - but maybe just about right for the time of year. A testimony to the speed of adaption. Good that it is so much easier to get out of bed and out of the house. Maybe even have a window open. Cranked the cycling gear back down to acryllic sweater and cotton windcheater. Ski jacket back in the cupboard for a while (hopefully).
Baked cod last week very good. Maybe cold is good for cod. It also yeilded the largest cod bone that I have come across for a while. Maybe 1.5mm across at the base and 4cm long, tapering to a point and gently curved. Maybe two bones fused into one at birth for some reason? At the same time as buying the cod, got some smoked haddock which was turned into a new dish. A hybrid of corned beef hash, chowder and cullen skink. This last we first came across, I think, in Mallaig - warm fish stew being just the thing on a bleak January day in the frozen North. But Mr G. informs me that the name comes from Morayshire, where a skink originally meant a soup made with shin of beef.
Boil a couple of pounds of potatoes for about ten minutes. Add a couple of haddock fillets - maybe a pound and a half of fish - to the potatoes. Continue for about five minutes. Remove, skin and flake the fish. Drain the potatoes, retaining the cooking water. Coarsely chop. In the meantime, fry up some streaky bacon and three medium onions in a little butter. Cook until soft. Stir the whole lot together. Add back a little of the water in which the potatoes and fish were orginally cooked. Place in covered dish in the oven and cook for a further 60 minutes at 180C. Serve with white cabbage. Good gear; everything intended at creation. But FIL thought it was 'interesting' and BH thought that it was 'salty' so it remains to be seen what they say when I offer to make it again. Maybe I shall have to wait for a time when they are out.
After that, knocked off the biography of Earnest Jones by Brenda Maddox, spotted in the TLS and helpfully provided by the Surrey Libraries reservation service (fee £1). I found her style a little tiresome at first, but one gets used to it and trundled through the book at a good speed. Left me slightly unsatisfied; would like something a bit more substantial. Maybe that is good; a book that leaves one wanting more has done its job. Jones clearly rather an odd bird, as were most of the early Freudians. Perhaps the old adage of never looking to an accountant's own accounts for a model account applies here. It also seemed that the chattering classes were much fewer in numbers in those days. They were all interconnected. That is to say, having first read about Frieda Lawrence in Sybil Bedford's biography of Aldous Huxley, where she gets a bad press being described as stupid and as a hopeless nurse (this at a time when hubby could have done with a good one), have now come across her again in psychoanalytic circles. It seems that she was the mistress of a very wonky Germain psychoanalyst, before moving onto a Nottingham professor and after that onto DHL himself. Jones reports her as being both beautiful and intelligent - but maybe as a scholarship boy from darkest Wales he was more impressed by the sister (or something) of someone who could put 'von' in front of his name than Huxley, born nearer the silver spoon. The von in question being the Richtoven (Richtofen?), the Red Baron of first world war fame.
I once turned up the three volume biography of Freud by Jones and passed it up. Now I ask Abebooks and find that, despite being a best seller in the fifties of the last century, getting a three volume unabridged job in one go is not on. I can get the three volumes peicemeal but that is not quite the same. Now although I pride myself on being a user of books rather than a book collector, not too happy about having three mixed volumes! In the meantime, off into Brenda's biog. of Nora Joyce.
Baked cod last week very good. Maybe cold is good for cod. It also yeilded the largest cod bone that I have come across for a while. Maybe 1.5mm across at the base and 4cm long, tapering to a point and gently curved. Maybe two bones fused into one at birth for some reason? At the same time as buying the cod, got some smoked haddock which was turned into a new dish. A hybrid of corned beef hash, chowder and cullen skink. This last we first came across, I think, in Mallaig - warm fish stew being just the thing on a bleak January day in the frozen North. But Mr G. informs me that the name comes from Morayshire, where a skink originally meant a soup made with shin of beef.
Boil a couple of pounds of potatoes for about ten minutes. Add a couple of haddock fillets - maybe a pound and a half of fish - to the potatoes. Continue for about five minutes. Remove, skin and flake the fish. Drain the potatoes, retaining the cooking water. Coarsely chop. In the meantime, fry up some streaky bacon and three medium onions in a little butter. Cook until soft. Stir the whole lot together. Add back a little of the water in which the potatoes and fish were orginally cooked. Place in covered dish in the oven and cook for a further 60 minutes at 180C. Serve with white cabbage. Good gear; everything intended at creation. But FIL thought it was 'interesting' and BH thought that it was 'salty' so it remains to be seen what they say when I offer to make it again. Maybe I shall have to wait for a time when they are out.
After that, knocked off the biography of Earnest Jones by Brenda Maddox, spotted in the TLS and helpfully provided by the Surrey Libraries reservation service (fee £1). I found her style a little tiresome at first, but one gets used to it and trundled through the book at a good speed. Left me slightly unsatisfied; would like something a bit more substantial. Maybe that is good; a book that leaves one wanting more has done its job. Jones clearly rather an odd bird, as were most of the early Freudians. Perhaps the old adage of never looking to an accountant's own accounts for a model account applies here. It also seemed that the chattering classes were much fewer in numbers in those days. They were all interconnected. That is to say, having first read about Frieda Lawrence in Sybil Bedford's biography of Aldous Huxley, where she gets a bad press being described as stupid and as a hopeless nurse (this at a time when hubby could have done with a good one), have now come across her again in psychoanalytic circles. It seems that she was the mistress of a very wonky Germain psychoanalyst, before moving onto a Nottingham professor and after that onto DHL himself. Jones reports her as being both beautiful and intelligent - but maybe as a scholarship boy from darkest Wales he was more impressed by the sister (or something) of someone who could put 'von' in front of his name than Huxley, born nearer the silver spoon. The von in question being the Richtoven (Richtofen?), the Red Baron of first world war fame.
I once turned up the three volume biography of Freud by Jones and passed it up. Now I ask Abebooks and find that, despite being a best seller in the fifties of the last century, getting a three volume unabridged job in one go is not on. I can get the three volumes peicemeal but that is not quite the same. Now although I pride myself on being a user of books rather than a book collector, not too happy about having three mixed volumes! In the meantime, off into Brenda's biog. of Nora Joyce.
# posted by Jim @ 4:48 AM 
