Friday, October 30, 2009
Consistancy of lentil soup
First thing on Tuesday, around 0930 that is, very impressed to take delivery of a couple of books from Amazon which I had ordered around 1200 the day previous. Given the shennanighans on the postal front, thought I would try for express delivery or some such. Amazon seemed to have various offerings on their front. At £8, it did not seem an unreasonable proportion of the total bill. So at 0930 the day following, a van from some outfit called Citylink turned up with large box containing two books. Both of which turned out to be OK, something one cannot always be sure of buying sight unseen.
Anyway, resolved to take more care with measuring in future, in order to bring some consistency to consistency. Then had the odd thought that the way forward would be to drill a small hole - maybe 1.5mm in diameter - in the side of the soup pan at the desired level. Water in the pan would then find that level, provided, of course, that one had a level surface on which to place the pan. During the cooking operations a plug would be a good idea. Something hard and plastic, the texture perhaps of lego. One of those plastic holders used for erecting candles on birthday cakes in the fifties would be just the thing. Going further, one might have several holes, each marking the proper level for some recipe or other.
On Wednesday, neck of lamb stew, with the large soup pan being repurposed as the large stew pan. Balance turned into soup for supper yesterday.
On Thursday, watched a slab of Wycliff on ITV3 (where the advertisements must be up to a quarter or so of the running time. Not as bad as the US but heading that way). Where the police side use a white board to draw a diagram of their case, with added pictures. Not something that Morse or Poiret stoop to; they believe that it can all be done with the little grey cells without the need for props.
All of which more or less, for once, determined my dream of last night. I was back in Cambridge and my mother was about - not someone whom I recollect being in a dream before. She had the bright idea, that when making neck of lamb stew, rather than cooking the greens separately, one just shoved a few heads of greens down the side of the stew, entire. I was rather shocked by this but did nothing about it, choosing instead to retire to the next room to examine the book which had just arrived. I had been looking for a biology textbook and chose this one from a catalogue. It turned out to be rather larger than I expected. To the point where it was not a book in the ordinary sense at all. One had a display contraption, rather in the form of a triptych, maybe 2 feet high by 4 feet across. The left hand panel (of the three) contained rows of nifty little plastic pockets. The idea was that each chapter of the book was printed on a little booklet, maybe 3 inches wide by 4 inches high, and one arranged the booklets of the book in the plastic pockets of the left hand panel. A piece of blue card in each pocket made it visually obvious when its booklet was missing. A neat little device, but taken as a whole, all seemed rather tedious. Not too sure that I had made a good choice although still trying to maintain denial. Then there were a whole lot of blank booklets, of the same dimensions, in which one made notes and which one stored in the pockets on the centre and right hand panels. There was some way of linking pockets, some sort of cross referencing mechanism, but I don't recall how that worked. Maybe in the dream it was just there, as an idea, without being condensed into a mechanism that stood some change of working. Ribbons or something. Some rather officious person comes to show me how it all works. Getting even more doubtful about the whole business and wake up.
# posted by Jim @ 1:14 AM 
