pumpkinstrokemarrow

BH unearthed something called basa fillets from the bottom of our rather full freezer. These describe themselves as fresh water white fish from Vietnam, via that well known fish merchant, Young's. (Who describe themselves as purveyors of fish for life. Not quite clear what or which life they mean here but it sounds good). So having done our own fish stocks in, it seems that we are now doing in those of the Vietnamese, who are perhaps short of hard currency with the Chinese having muscled in on the cheap labour manufacturing scene. In any event, it was abundantly clear that the basa fillets were destined to be manufactured into a sort of kedgeree, along the lines previously noticed. That is to say, simmer fish in water - which process produced lots of white froth of the sort I usually assume to be salt. So what about this fresh water business? Remove fish and add white rice. Simmer then drain. Meanwhile cook some finely chopped onion in butter, termeric and black pepper. The termeric for colour rather than for taste. Flake the fish into the rice, stir the mixture into the fying onion, leave on low heat for 15 minutes or so, serve and eat. Apart from the fish flaking in rather an odd way, fibrous rather than flaky, quite unlike salt water white fish from the North Sea, the kedgeree was fine.

Followed later the same day by a variant on the beef strogonoff theme. Make a sauce with butter, chopped onion, chopped tomatoes and mushrooms. Cut a slice of rump steak, across the grain into peices about 1cm by 2cm by 3mm. Fry - or rather boil - the steak in a little butter. Drain off the liquid into the sauce. Meanwhile cook some white rice. Bit of green salad on the side, without any dressing. But no curly cabbage. The idea being that by not cooking the meat in the sauce it retained a more independant, steaky flavour that might have otherwise have been lost. Which it did, but it was a little dry. I think if I do this again I will stir the cooked meat into the sauce, rather than draining the liquid from the cooked meat into the sauce.

In between times, have a bit of old school nostalgia, biology variety. Thinking about all those spirogyras, amoebas, buttercups and white dead nettles which occupied so much time when O-levels were O-levels and had not been dumbed down to the bog standard. Then got to thinking about an optional small water animal which, for some reason, we did not do. But I could not bring the name of the thing to mind. Was it a nautilus? An amphi something. Perhaps an amphioxus - but on closer inspection that turned out to be a rather basic sort of fish. Not the right sort of thing at all. Then I thought maybe a hydra. Closer inspection of that revealed a whole herd of animals, including jelly fish, sea anemones and coral, known as cnidarians, radially symetrical but without the alimentary canal running from front to back. Just a single opening. Also that, with one odd exception, an animal is a cnidarian if and only if it has one or more cnida - a cnida being a greekish word for a cell sized harpoon. The odd exception is a sea slug which cheats; it aquires its cnida by eating jelly fish. The cnida of the jelly fish then migrate, in full working order, into the ruff on the back of the slug. It seems that it is very unusual for a group of animals to be defined by such a simple if-and-only-if rule.

Now the fresh water hydra is a reasonably complicated thing - a lot more complicated than a spirogyra or an amoeba. So not completely convinced that this was the missing animal. So off to the library to consult some biology text books. Where I learn that children no longer learn about spirogyra and amoebas. And the text books had a quite differant feel to that I remembered. Apart from there being a lot more pictures the content seemed to have moved on. Much less on looking at specific animals and vegetables and much more on generalised processes - such as respiration - and some on current fads such a genetics and ecology. But then a neighbour, hearing of my problem, was able to come up with an O-level biology textbook from the relevant era. Which contained amoebas, spirogyras, buttercups - and hydras. Not quite the animal that I remembered but it must be the one. And the old textbook was not as differant from the new one as I had thought, looking at the new one first. The old one had chapters on things like respiration too. Maybe the big differance did reduce to the quality of the illustrations. There were also lots of test questions, reproduced from O-level examination questions - the O&C board which I sat getting a fair look in. But how much revision would it take to get me through the examination of my day again? I suspect I would be OK on waffle, but poor on detail like the number of sepals or the organisation of the stamens of a buttercup. So maybe I would do better on a modern examination, which I suspect to be less keen on the antiquated collection of useless facts and much more into waffle...