pumpkinstrokemarrow

More adventurous, had a go with veal yesterday, something I do not recall cooking for forty years or so. Sliced off a miniature rump steak shaped piece of meat. Bashed between cellophane to double its original area. Fry some chopped garlic and bashed black pepper in regular rape seed oil. Do the veals for two or three minutes each side, which resulted in an accumulation of an interesting pinkish froth. A prettier version of the froth you get when boiling up pork bones. Serve with mashed potato and cabbage. Not bad, but not sure that I would not rather have calves' liver and bacon for the money. Maybe next time I will try the egg and breadcrumbs version, avoided on this occasion because of FIL's breadcrumbs aversion.

Thinking of the lentils lurking in the top cupboard, we had occasion to check up on moths the other day. The point at dispute was whether it was the moths or their worms which did the damage. Mr G. found an article on the subject which was quite unequivocal. It's the worms that do the business, with the moths, generally speaking, having no mouths. They only exist to mate and lay eggs. Slightly off-putting to think of fat white worms creeping about one's cupboards and carpets. Coming back to lentils, the article went on to say that as well as fibre fond moths there were also dried food fond moths - to the point where any dried food - flour, rice, beans, lentils - was vulnerable to attack. What do the org-food crowd do about this I wonder? No fumigation with dodgy organo-phosphates for them. How did the Neal's Yard people get on in those far off days when they had a very basic warehouse full of sacks of stuff in Neal's Yard itself? When their staff had long hair and quite possibly smoked during their lunch breaks?

The adventurous vein must have been quite strong as a varied the route home from Cheam today. So instead of heading straight back to Epsom headed up Malden Road towards Worcester Park, in the hope of finding a golf shop to buy one of those see-thru plastic peaked caps without a top to keep out the low flying winter sun, which had seemed particularly trying on the way to Cheam. Trying to the point of being dangerous as one swung around a corner into full sun - and blinded. All too easy to hit or be hit. However, no golf shops in Cheam and the road ran a long way downhill, with me starting to fret about the haul back up again. So chickened out of Worcester Park and turned left at the A24, pushed over a modest hill to the west of Nonsuch Park, over the lights to Ewell and so home to try the (plaited. The unplaited version has been off for a few weeks) chollah, it being Friday.

Got to pondering about the digital books at the University of Adelaide mentioned yesterday. Chapter 3 of Volume 3 of 'A la recherche' on a single web page? In my English copy this chapter runs to 151 decent sized pages with smallish type. So went back to check, and while the text seemed a little thinner than the Scott Moncrieff translation, didn't actually find any missing chunks and didn't have the patience to check properly. Maybe they have just used a more recent translation which has settled on a less luxurious style. Unfortunately, the meta-data for the text was a little thin. I couldn't find anything about what edition they had scanned and OCR'd. Although the FAQ section did explain that scanning and OCR'ing was reasonably error prone.

The good news is that I could down load a copy of 'Finnegan's Wake' more or less in one piece. The last time I tried to do this I had to bring down text in some unpleasant online format a page or so at a time. All very tedious. The catch with this latest discovery being that one loses some of what Joyce wrote in the clean text format. Some of the material depends on the layout on the printed page and this has been lost in transcription to html. Perhaps, if one was fussy, one would have both the image and the transcription. The catch being that one would need a big screen to do justice to the thing. Maybe simpler just to stick to the book since I have a perfectly good reading copy. And, to be fair, this is only an issue with a very select band of famous writers. So it is an issue with some Sinclair Lewis but not with any Marcel Proust.