Freewheeling Andy
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Posts posted by Freewheeling Andy
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I really recommend goose for people who are bored of turkey.
Although this year there may be too many in the house for a goose - and I've been trying to find out abuot brining turkeys before cooking them. It sounds like the thing that suddenly changes the bird from bland to wonderful.
I expect it will be roast tatties, beans, a parsnip/carrot mash and sprouts on the table with the goose. I hope we get roast parnsips but I'm not sure there's enough room in the oven.
Also on Christmas Day:
German sweetish wine, maybe a spatlase.
White burgundy
Decent bordeaux
Dessert wine (loupiac/sauternes)
Vintage port.
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Hopefully:
Game casserole on Christmas eve evening.
Smoked salmon,
Goose
Christmas pud on Christmas day "lunch".
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Oh. Sorry.
Pierogi dumplings (which are sort of half-way between ravioli and dumpling). Golonka pork knuckle. Golabki stuffed cabbage leaves. Bigos pork and cabbage stew. Kielbasa, smoked grilled sausage. Zurek, fermented buckwheat soup. Barsch betroot soup. Smoked cheeses, grilled.
Basically, very heavy on the meat and cabbage, and then some potato.
Ate one meal in a Jewish restaurant in the old Jewish quarter of Krakow and had the most fantastic piece of carp, which was flavoured with something, although I don't know what.
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No.
Mostly simple.
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I've just spent the weekend eating. Polish food is lovely. But it's very very heavy, and now so am I.
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Tomorrow I go to Poland and get to eat pierogi and golonka and stuffed cabbage.
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You're not the only one somewhat exhausted after drinking too much on Saturday.
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Ahoy there. Good to see that you can sit at a computer today.
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Well, this reinforces my prejudices - people I know who enjoy the books I enjoy said much the same about The Lovely Bones (and even people who enjoyed it told me not to read it because it was just make me very angry). I shall leave it alone.
I also agree that the "Next Lovely Bones" trail on the front of Time Traveller's Wife almost put me off buying the thing. It's not the first time that a recommendation has almost put me off a book that turned out to be good.
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I'm worth less than the books. The books, together, cost
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Damn. I was trying so hard to read books faster than I bought them, but the remainders/discounts section of my local Waterstones sold me:
How The Universe Got Its Spots by Janna Levin
and
Monturiol's Dream:The Submarine Inventor who Wanted to Save The World by Matthew Stewart.
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Ditto, do not read, etc...
But, Mau, if he had told Clare to hide the guns one of two things would have happened - either Henry's past and future are (and were) always immutable, because that's the nature of his time travel, and there was never anything he could do. His future was always going to happen.
But worse, if he messed with the past he could ruin his present, he could change everything, and it might mean that he never met Clare, and never had Alba, and was that a risk worth taking?
One aspect that interested me was the way the Henry led up to the end of the story in the manner of the terminally ill. I saw parallels (which were obvious) of people with terminal cancers, trying to tie up all the loose ends.
I did wonder, in particular, though, whether he was inordinately mean telling Clare that they'd meet again in the distant future. Because that might be the thing that puts her life on hold, that leaves her waiting for him rather than going off and doing other stuff of her own.
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Ah. I read the last third of this in the middle of the night. What a fantastic book. I think the more I think about it the happier I am with how well the book worked, how well it avoided the big paradoxes.
What really got me was the way that it made clear that for Henry at least the future and past were fixed and immutable, but that what was going to happen to him began to crystallise over the preceding years from his earlier visits. And the story crystallised that future, too, slowly. I'm still intrigued that he didn't ever try and change the past, though, just to see what would happen.
Although it was a love story, I didn't think it was particularly girly, really. It's clearly not a driven action book, but the characters weren't particularly girly (even Clare and Alba seem to be quite tomboyish).
There were some technical points, such as the lottery incident, where Henry seems to travel forwards when he chooses to, and clarify things about the past, even though in theory he really struggles when travelling forwards.
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It's also very small, the collection.
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The fantasy stuff is not for me, and never really was.
I couldn't work out whether "The Curious Incident Of The Dog..." was a kids' book or an adult one.
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There's a museum upstair in a library in my corner of London, called the Cuming Museum. It's about 5 minutes walk from home.
In the Cuming Museum there is almost nothing. It's basically aimed at schoolkids and has a mix of "This is what London smelled like in mediaeval times", "This is what a dinosaur is" and "Here's a poster from a balloon show somewhere nearby in 1800".
But also in the museum is the Lovett collection. This is very odd, because it's pretty much not on display. It's just in a bunch of drawers in the museum, with almost no signs. It is a collection made by the brothers Lovett, of lucky charms and superstitious objects of late 19th century and early 20th century London. Crows feet and teeth and lucky combs and that sort of thing.
Quite peculiar.
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I've not got much further in, thanks to too much alcohol abuse and too many hangovers, but I've a real problem with the implied Calvinism of the whole thing so far - Henry knows what he's going to do, anyway, so why couldn't he just sit around and wait for it to happen, rather than participate in the doing? Wouldn't you experiment to see if you could break your own past, and see what happened?
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Hmm. I'm only 30 pages in (been busy the last few days), but I'm already getting deeply frustrated with the usual time-travel paradoxes. It'll be interesting to see if the book tries to resolve them. I'll say nothing more for the time being, and I guess I don't want anyone to tell me. It's just a broad comment at the moment.
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London
This a big smelly town, which was built on some marshy land on a river in the south of England. It's got a fair bit of history, has been burned down a few times, and rebuilt, and has some interesting buildings and some very horrible ones. Lots of people live here, and most of them are actually rather nice and friendly, if a bit weird. They have a reputation for being rude, but that's probably a bit unfair. Everyone is obscenely rich but quite, quite ugly, and the streets are paved with gold and dirt.
The people who run the world live here, working in an underground secret society that exist in tunnels attached to our underground railway. It is a continuation of the old East India Company, and they own everything on the planet, and pull the strings of governments. Living underground they've evolved to be only 3 foot 6 tall, and are very pale, and are blinded if they ever encounter real sunlight.
It is the best city on earth.
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As if by magic, it's changed (which is what comes from visiting the second hand book market under Waterloo Bridge):
The Final Solution by Michael Chabin
Snow by Orhan Pamul
Travels with Myself And Another by Martha Gellhorn
Oracle Night by Paul Auster
The Time Travellers Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murukami
Vineland by Thomas Pynchon
and the unfinished half of London - a Biography, by Peter Ayckroyd.
A Traveller's Life - Eric Newby
Eminent Victorians - Lytton Strachey
Fragrant Harbour - John Lanchester
The Age Of Kali - William Dalrymple
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Ah. Michelle has me understood. It was just a bit more interesting than Andy's Books would have been.
The list has been slowly depleted and not added to. There's quite of lot of substantial books on the list, and I've not had much reading time.
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Because, well, they're magical books.
Some of them seem to be taking a while to read...
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I could lend you a couple of books if you do have nothing to read.
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The Time Traveller's Wife is next on my list. That's an interesting looking list, Lori. Nice and varied.
Christmas dinner...
in Food, Cooking & Recipes
Posted
Goose isn't really that adventurous. It's nice flavours, though, like a more flavoursome turkey. Not that gamey, so not very "difficult".
Does anybody know anything about brining birds?