pumpkinstrokemarrow

Continuing to take advantage of the very advantageous pricing of chickens at the moment. BH is getting 5lb chickens for £5 on a regular basis. Which provides 2 meals for three people plus soup or stew. Not only do big chickens taste better than small ones but they are also much better value than anything on offer at Cheam. Just as well for them that one can get tired of chicken.

So yesterday the stock from the most recent 5lb chicken was turned into a wet stew with a tenderloin and a half, two onions, two green peppers (large), mushrooms and orange lentils. Stock simmered for maybe 3 hours, stew 2 hours.

This was followed up by a cheesecake, the sort of cheesecake which involves pastry and cooking. Not to mention cottage cheese and sour cream. Fairly bland in taste and very filling, but good texture and very good overall. Far superior to the things you tend to get in shops made with jello and digestive biscuits. Why is there no market for proper cheesecake? All that food flannel, all those billions of cook books, all those millions of viewing years of reality cooking TV - and still no cheesecake.

Now finished the Troyat biography of Tolstoy, first reported on 12 September. Sufficiently impressed to order up my very own hardback copy - the one I had borrowed being a rather battered Pelican biography in paperback - from Abebooks. The hardback turns out to be a perfectly serviceable hardback from the late sixties. Made by Longman in the days when hardbacks were real books with pages sewn in signatures, which open properly and which stay open without having to balance a plate on top, not just glue bound blocks of paper with hard covers replacing the soft covers. And it has more pictures than the Pelican version.

The mystery of where all the detail came from has been solved. I now know that both Tolstoy and his wife were long term diarists, committing their innermost thoughts - the sort of stuff most of us would hesitate to tell an analyst never mind a social worker - to paper for reciprocal reading. One of many odd aspects of an odd - but long lived - marriage. I think that all these diaries are now lovingly preserved for public access in some Tolstoy museum or other. Maybe they form part of the 90 volume collected works? It is going to need something to whack it up that far given that the sort of stuff read in this country would probably fit in 9.

I also now know that Tolstoy was a very strange bird as well as being a very great novelist. Largely self taught with all kinds of strange ideas about all kinds of things. A great hypocrite who disapproved of all kinds of things into which he was big himself. So, for example, a big voice for the downtrodden peasants - while not freeing his own serfs until the Tsar did it for him at emancipation. A big exposer of the rottenness of the old regime and many of its works. Big into communitarianism, vegetarianism and other non-violent ideals. The evil of money. The evil of money grubbing merchants buying up great chunks of the country from the aristos.. All of which brought him lots of devoted disciples and a correspondence with Mahatma Gandhi who was banging some of the same drums.

Ideals which rather marred some of his books. So surprised to find that his late story 'Hadji Marad' was pleasantly free of preaching, while being both a good story and good commentary on the times. A story which retained much sympathy for the romance of the Caucasian bandits who continue to plague the Russians to this day. Despite his ideals of non-violence. Now returned to 'Anna Karenina'. Where I observe much more honesty about sexual matters than most of the contemporary English greats manage. Which last don't seem to get much beyond the unwanted children of seduced working girls. But without (Tolstoy) needing to get into the sort of gory details which many modern writers seem to think are necessary. A decent reticence - both as regards gory details and preaching - while saying enough to make the point. A trick he had forgotten by the time he got to 'The Kreutzer Sonata'.