pumpkinstrokemarrow

After a weekend of hotel and pub food, needed something simple. So started off on Monday evening with a vegetarian red lentil soup. Vegetarian in the sense that I did not use any bacon, just onion. And no carrot. Made up the flavour deficit with garlic and pounded black pepper with coriander. Results satisfactory.

Followed up Tuesday lunchtime with a light steak for lunch. The steak came from Manor Green Road and was described as sirloin. It came sliced off a large piece of beef, fresh out of its shrink wrap and not looking very pretty in consequence. Also rather large and rather pale. Nothing much like the sort of sirloin steak I was used to buying from Cheam. However, grilled as briskly as our electric grill can manage, it tasted a lot better than it looked. Moist with a good flavour, slightly let down by the texture which was not quite as grainy as it should have been. Served with Jersey Royals, sprouting brocolli and a 2003 Valpolicella Ripasso from the Montezovo stable (see http://www.montezovo.com).

Snoozed away the afternoon, then off to the Wiggers to hear Alexander Melnikov do the Wanderer Fantasy from Schubert, seven Fantasies from Brahms and twelve preludes and fugues (of the twenty four) from Shostakovitch. Plus a short encore. I don't think I had heard any of it live before and did not know the Brahms at all. But Melnikov, while not having flamboyant body language gave the music plenty of pep. And while he was not flamboyant he did have some interesting ticks. So at one point, during a pause, he noticed a speck on one of the keys and took down his handkerchief to wipe it away before resuming. A thing I had not noticed in piano before was that his left hand work quite often came over with the feel of a cello lead in a string quartet. The music also struck me as being very masculine in tone, which reminded me in turn of the absence of female composers on scenes past and present. What do w-libbers have to say about that?

All rather emotional stuff, especially the Shostakovitch, and I was quite tired by the end. So not now sure that I would have wanted to do all 24 in one sitting. While a chap a couple of rows up was scribbling notes on his programme through the whole of it and would no doubt have taken all 24 in his stride. Presumably a critic. But it struck me a bad manners to be visibly scribbling in this way; I can see the point if you have copy to get out quick and I do things of a similar nature myself on occasion, but one should not be caught at it.

Tried to recover my poise on a new sort of Soduko I had noticed in the DT, called Sujiko. I could manage the one called easy-peasy without too much trouble but got stuck on the one called improver.