yonmei

05:49 pm: Bleeding gently, but there's cake
Period started this morning. I had run out of coffee. I downed two paracetamol and made myself kasha with garlic and chili for breakfast.

(And before he left, Transamurai left me a piece of cake he'd bought to treat himself - fabulous gooey chocolately nut cake.)

My new sinus medication is making me cough, I think - at least, I have a persistent cough that was awful just after I started taking it, and is better now, but still persisting. But I can breathe! And this is a plus, definitely. Breathing is good.

I had a whole list of stuff to get done in June, and though I haven't totted it up (I should, yes) I got not a lot of it done, and I put that down to the depressing effects of Not Being Able To Breathe Proper.

I am a bit ranty. This may be because I am also right now completely bloody (well, not completely, but you know what I mean: I am bloody and bloody-minded and bleeding ungently, do not cross me) but it's also that there is a whole stack of stuff to be ranty ABOUT, not least something I cannot write about properly till next week: the Home Secretary's completely split-personality attitude to hate crimes against LGBT people. It's bad that LGBT people in Britain should be intimidated and abused.

But it's perfectly okay for LGBT people in countries like Iran and Syria and Jamaica to go in fear of their lives - they should just learn to "conduct themselves discreetly", you see.

I have a friend coming up from York this weekend: she was going to arrive tomorrow night but fecal matter has hit fan and it won't be till Friday night. Reason for visiting: a friend (of hers, not mine) is getting married on Sunday, and she was invited to the wedding and figured she could cadge free accommodation with me. Which is lovely, because it will be great to see her again and have a chance to talk properly.

The friend of a friend is marrying in the Hindu temple, the Mandir, which is about a mile and a half away - the other side of Leith Walk. I have blagged an invitation - well, permission, perhaps, since I gather the wedding service is open to all. (There's going to be a long reception/dinner afterwards, to which my friend is invited, and I'm to slope off sharpish.) I've never been to a service in a Hindu temple, and I am a complete religious tourist: I'm really looking forward to it.

I note, though, that the Mandir's website mentions "actively discouraging discriminatory behaviour on the grounds of race, religion, colour, nationality, age, gender, marital status or disability". See what's missing? Yeah, so do I. Ah well.

Tags: angry queer, eating some delicious food, just my life really, seeing friends

12:57 pm: Lunch is lunch: eggzactly.
For lunch, I am having an aubergine which I cooked in butter with garlic and tamarind paste, and brown rice. It is delicious.

It also the first time in ages, I realise, that I have had a lunch which I cooked properly - that is, more than just nuking something from the freezer or making myself a quick salad wrap - and it is good. I am rewarding myself for the effort *g* with a glass of white wine.

I went out to the farmers' market this morning and from the Arran Cheese stall I bought, as planned, a round of smoked garlic cheese for me to nibble on, and a small round of Arran ale and apple cheese to take to Ajay's barbeque tomorrow, and then a piece of plain mature cheddar with which I can make cheese scones for the bakesale, and then, completely unplanned (because if you buy four pieces of cheese you get a "free" packet of Arran oatcakes) I got a piece of smoked mature cheddar, which I love. Though it would have been cheaper by a pound or so just to buy the oatcakes. Still.

The bakesale is hopefully happening next Saturday, assuming I can get someone else to be the cash-box person. The person who said she would do it now appears to have too much going on in her life to do so. :-(

I also bought two boxes of eggs from the egg stall, and then discovered that the venison stall was also selling eggs more cheaply - I could have bought a dozen extra large for the same price I paid for a dozen large. The difference represents, at a guess, the difference between keeping a flock of hens for a living, and - as I think the venison farm does - keeping a flock of hens for the purpose of providing eggs for the household, and selling the overflow in good months.

And that, besides the latte, was all I had, but a £1 leftover which I spent on half a kilo of Jerusalem artichokes. (The aubergine I had for lunch came in the vegetable box delivery.)

And I found out about ostrich eggs!

There is an ostrich farm which does burgers at the market. Last time my nephew was here, we were walking through the market, and he asked me whether they also sold ostrich eggs, and if so, if you could cook one - he envisioned a giant fried egg on an enormous pan. The stall was quite busy when we were there, so I didn't suggest we stop off and bug them - we could have if we were buying burgers, but as we're both vegetarians, it would have been just an annoyance at a busy time. But I was there early enough that no one was queuing up to buy a burger, so I asked.

They do not sell ostrich eggs. The value of a fertilised ostrich egg is about £20 - it's about 22-26 times bigger than a hen egg, the owner told me. (So buying a fresh ostrich egg would be a most expensive way of buying egg: even a free-range organic egg costs no more than 42p an egg for the extra-large, and if you wanted to buy 2 dozen you could get them cheaper.) They take the eggs as soon as laid and put them in an incubator: after a fortnight it's clear whether or not the egg will hatch, and if it won't, they take the egg out of the incubator and drill holes to remove the contents (a messy job, he said, which I could understand: by that time the egg must be pretty bad) and they sell the empty shells for "about £5" - the eggshell is quite thick and hard, and local artists and businesses buy them to decorate and re-sell.

If I wanted to buy one, he said, I would need to order it in advance so they could bring it to the stall. I told him I would be in touch: I'd love to get my nephew one. He may or may not want to paint it - I don't know if that angle would interest him at all: but it would be an extremely cool thing to have, I think.

Apparently in the early days of the farm one of the employees took an egg home and his wife broke it (with some difficulty!) into a bowl, and used it for omelettes and baking: it tastes just like you would expect an egg to taste, apparently. (The flavour of eggs depending much more on freshness and what the bird has been eating than on the species: goose and duck eggs from a farm where they're fed regular feed taste pretty much like hen eggs, though I'm told free range duck eggs taste quite different.) Penguin eggs taste of fish.

Tags: bake sales, eating some delicious food, family stuff, lunch

01:51 pm: Ideas for What To Cook
I have a friend who is now cooking for his mum instead of the other way about. He outlined his cooking skills thus: "Sweet and sour chicken is fine, beef stroganoff ditto spaghetti bolognese and on a simpler level grilled chicken beefburgers and sausages. Hope this hasn't grossed out a vegetarian. The only meal I can cook that I could serve to you is cauliflower with melted cheese." (To clarify/update, I am looking for carnivorous help for this new-to-being-the-family-cook friend not so he can cook for me but to provide helpful resources for him to cook for him-and-his-mum... neither of whom are vegetarians.)

With this in mind, can I get ideas from my skilled, talented, and mostly carnivorous friends: recipes, labour-saving techniques, tips, tricks, ideas, meal plans, other?

Tags: eating some delicious food, friendship, you live longer overweight

01:16 pm: Insane Picnic
The sun is shining, on 1st July I'll be promoted (no more money, lots more work, honour, and significant amounts of What Fresh Hell Is This, WFHIT, I need an icon that says that...) and I want to have a picnic.

I invite you all! (This may have to be an imaginary picnic. Or a virtual one.) We will meet on Whinney Hill on Sunday 6th July, at noon, and stay there till we run out of (a) food (b) drink (c) the glorious view. (I have decided not to worry about the sun not shining or it raining.)

I have a clever container which is luggable in which I can bring ice-cubes and cold drinks. (I do not do fizzy sweet stuff with chemicals, so if you like Fanta or Coke or champagne, you need to bring your own supplies.)

Besides large quantities of orange juice, and lots of ice-cubes, and a litre of water, I shall bring:

A couple of bottles of wine. Red and white.
A large supply of home-baked rolls.
Butter and cheese and whole-grain mustard and chutneys.
Apples.

Also, if I figure out a way of transporting both, a flask of espresso and a carton of ice-cream so that we can have iced coffee, because there is Nothing Nicer.

What will you bring to my picnic? (While I don't myself eat meat or fish, I'm not actively opposed to other people doing it in front of me. I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals: I'm a vegetarian because I hate plants.)

PS: I have reasons to be depressed, but we'll talk about those later. Right now: picnic!

Tags: coffee, eating some delicious food, green in the city, imaginary friend meetup, weather

11:30 pm: Eight Treasures rice
I bought a bagful of "Eight Treasures Rice" from the Chinese supermarket midway down Leith Walk on Saturday. (I specify, because there is another, shinier one at the foot of Leith Walk: but I think the one halfway down is better - I see more actual Chinese Edinburgers shopping there, and the goods tend to be (a) cheaper (b) more varied.) I had actually gone in to buy a bottle of mushroom soy sauce, which is delicious on potatoes. (I also bought a bagful of untoasted buckwheat, and will report results - M. F. K. Fisher describes how to make kasha from scratch, starting by toasting the buckwheat, so I'd like to try...)

Anyway, the point of buying Eight Treasures rice, even though it's a long time past New Year, was to try it for breakfast (I added mango, apricot, coconut chips, and pineapple). It smelt/tasted very good hot: it required some willpower to put it in a covered bowl in a nice glutinous mound to cool for breakfast.

By the way, though all the sundried fruits are fabulous, the sundried apricots are really extraordinary. They taste much more intense and sharp than the usual golden fruits, but they're not tough or hard - they're perfectly eatable unsoaked. They're just thoroughly delicious.

I like buying Fairtrade products, where available/affordable/sensible: it is especially neat to be able to buy a Fairtrade version of something that I actually buy for practical nourishment, as opposed to Fairtrade coffee/tea/chocolate.

In other news (this has been a very foody post) no, I have no other news, mostly. At least, none to post in an un-flocked post.

Tags: eating some delicious food, food politics

12:40 pm: On lunching
Yesterday, instead of lunch, we had afternoon tea.

We started at two and we went on till nearly four, and after tea we sat around for over half an hour just doing nothing and smiling sleepily at each other and talking occasionally and reading bits of the Weekend Guardian.

(It was at the Howard Hotel in Great King Street. Costs £15.95 per person, you have to book in advance - though we rang Saturday and got a table without difficulty, so not far in advance.)

It was gorgeously delectable. There were finger sandwiches, various sorts, over half vegetarian. The bread was nice - not by-my-standards-good-bread, which is to say, not homebaked sourdough with stoneground flour: but decent-by-catering-standards bread. There were scones, which were still warm. There were little chocolate muffins with white chocolate filling (those were a little dry and crumby, but very chocolately). There were strawberry tarts with chantilly cream. There were tiny rich cakes to finish, and two tall thin glasses of a rhubarb mousse topped with whipped cream. And tea. Half a dozen choices.

And as I said: we ate slowly, delectably, enjoying each mouthful. It was all good. We took two hours over it. We were first there, so we chose a table for two in the window, with comfy but solid armchairs (not lean-back, but uprights) and ate and looked out of the window and talked about the luxury of the room and the service and class and sex and humor and family and Scottish/English class patterns and education and tea.

Today, for lunch, I had a baked potato and baked beans (bought at the chip shop across the road) and cabbage salad (brought from home) and for savoury a homemade vegeburger and a small piece of Arran cheddar with apple, also brought from home. I ate fast and was done in half an hour, including the time taken to walk over the road and get my potato and beans.

It was perfectly good food, what I had for lunch today. I wouldn't want to eat a lunch as rich as yesterday's every day. But I would prefer to take my time over lunch: I wish I did. I just don't, when I eat alone: except perhaps when I have a packed lunch to eat on a long train trip, when I am usually delving into the first bits by eleven thirty and may not finish till two. When eating out, or at work, or at home, if I eat alone, I eat fast.

Quite often I eat fast in company, too. But I can make a conscious effort to slow down and enjoy myself when eating with friends. Eating alone, I don't seem to be able to do that - except when, on a train, I know I am absolutely free to take my time because there is literally nothing else I could be doing, aside from getting from A to B, which I am already doing. (The same would probably apply, and more so, to long trips by plane - if the food was nice enough to want to linger over, which it isn't, and if the flight attendant let you, which they won't.)

When you lunch alone, do you eat fast or slow?

Tags: eating some delicious food, lunch, tea

09:55 pm: We ordered Chinese food
We were quite sensible about it. We ordered from the vegetarian menu. A portion each of the "small vegetarian spring rolls", and a beancurd dish (with mushrooms and cashew nuts) and a stir-fried veg dish (with Szechuan sauce) and two portions of egg-fried rice and a side dish of crispy seaweed and another of pancakes.

We were the only people eating in the restaurant, which is very plain on the inside: everyone else was ordering take-out.

We thought we were being sensible and then the food started arriving: two enormous bowls of the main dishes, and rice, and a plate of pancakes, and lots and lots of crispy seaweed, and eight pancakes (very thin, light, white pancakes, perfect for rolling) and the spring rolls were enormous - if those are the small ones, the big ones must be battleships,

It was all unbelievably delicious. I'd brought a bottle of elderflower wine, which was extravagantly good with the food, and we ate, and ate, and ate, and eventually we really did have to stop eating because we were completely, absolutely, stuffed full.

I said, as I was eating a pancake with beancurd and mushroom and cashew nut, and a few of the fried vermicelli noodles that the spring rolls had rested on, and a sprinkling of the crispy seaweed, "My mouth is falling in love with me."

The whole meal, including corkage for the wine, cost £36: we left £40 on the table (they don't take cards) and took the long route walking home. It was really, recklessly good, but I have got to remember for future reference that if I'm with someone and we just want a meal to share, one main dish, and rice each, and maybe pancakes, and one serving of spring rolls, and... oh, who am I kidding? I'd probably do the same again. It was good. Food is a lovely thing sometimes.

We drank about half the bottle of wine and I took the rest home with us so we might drink more of it tomorrow. It was delicious, and I will buy it again when next at the farmers' market.

Tags: eating some delicious food, friendship, seeing friends

08:39 am: I made soup!
In the box that came last Thursday there was a bunch of what I thought was coriander, and I tucked it into the fridge and have been planning happily the soup I would make with lots of fresh coriander. And this morning, I chopped a lot of onions, and one potato, and some green ginger, and a cute little chilli pepper, and a cupful of red lentils, and and then I took the bag with the coriander in it out of the fridge and opened it up (it stays fresh if and only if you leave it in the bag) and realised it was curly-leaf parsley.

Bugger.

What I would happily have made with fresh parsley is parsley scones, which are exceedingly delicious.

Oh well. At this point it was too late to go back, I was on the slippery slope down to the soup with no turning and no changing my mind, so the parsley went into the soup and, well, that's that. I'm sure it will be nice, it just won't be the same.

There was some leftover stock from when I cooked the beets, which I'd put in the freezer, so that's in the soup too. All in all, not that disappointing. I just need to be better at spotting my herbs by sight instead of sniff.

---
Update, 9:42pm, having just had the first bowlful. Eh. Would have been better with coriander. Needs Thai Yellow Curry Paste. Fortunately, that's what I have.

Tags: chilli, eating some delicious food, my recipes

12:45 pm: Being known
Today at the farmer's market I walked briskly through the market, as usual, noting which stalls were here and which were not, and stopped at the coffee stall at the far end (I usually do: the Torchwood coffee stall at the end nearer Princes Street is always the one with the longer queue). There was only one person ahead of me, and by the time I'd bought a copy of The Big Issue (Doctor Who! Captain Jack!) there was no one. The woman looked at me thoughtfully and said "Double latte, skimmed milk, medium size?"

I was slightly gobsmacked, but pleased, and nodded. "Yes."

She didn't remember whether or not I liked chocolate sprinkles. That was a relief. (I'll drink coffee with chocolate sprinkles, but I prefer it without... er, unless they're the really really posh sort that are just grated chocolate, in which case, yum.) It would have been somewhat disturbing if she had remembered even that. My last coffee till Monday morning.

I bought autumn oak leaf wine and elderflower wine, and the Arran cheese stall was offering 4 cheeses short-dated at £10 for 4, which is a total bargain so I bought them - which meant not buying a round of their chilli cheese, since although the cheeses will be good into May, that's definitely as much as I need probably until I leave for Germany. That's life. I did have a bag of the Crisp Hut's crisps with chilli-and-lemon, and ate half sitting down with a horseshoe cake from Falko and the remainder of my coffee. The horseshoe cake was delicious, almondy and chocolate: you can buy a markedly inferior drier version in packets, but this is how it's meant to be. Well worth it.

I also bought kamut wheat flour from Real Foods - a small batch of kamut sourdough is rising as we speak.

We drank autumn oak leaf wine at my sister's birthday dinner - I brought the bottle to share, and it was good. (We ate at the Coconut Grove at Tollcross, a Mexican restaurant I didn't even know was there, but it was delicious - recommended.)

On the way back, I took photos for my planned project of documenting the Leith Walk Themed Obstacle Course.

Tags: bread, coffee, eating some delicious food, nonphotos

12:05 pm: Flower pizza
There is a flower pizza baking in the oven for my lunch: it smells wonderful. (It's not 100% flowers, of course: but the filling includes nasturtium, golden marjoram, and lemon verbena flowers, as well as a good handful of the flower buds sprouting at the tips of my enthusiastic lettuces.)

Wolf watched me using the shears and the scissors in and on the garden, from a step or two down from the front door, and sometimes shouted at me in his little voice. I don't know what he was saying, but it was probably something like "What are you doing out there in the big dangerous world? Come in where it's safe and I can sit on you!" (He was sitting on me while I was writing most of the previous two paragraphs.)

GJ seems to be down. :-( [Update: oh, it's back up again. Good.]

The flower pizza smells really truly wonderful. The pizza dough was made with salsa and nasturtium petals in the mix.

Post-pizza update:

I ate it all. I am now too full - even though I used my small pie pan to bake the pizza, I usually eat only half of that and freeze the rest. But I couldn't resist this. It smelled too good. The slight green bitterness/savouriness of the mixed herbs/flowers, combined with mature cheddar and goats cheese: oh, it was fine. Why did I never think of doing this to a pizza before? (Primarily, I suppose, because this year is the first year ever that I have had so many fresh herbs growing in my garden just available for me to pick and use.) It looked pretty, too: the nasturtium petals were still bright yellow in the mix.

Tags: eating some delicious food, my recipes, wolf

11:12 pm: daegaer said fred
daegaer asked me good questions:

1. Have you ever eaten a meal so vile that it tempted you to brave the indigestion and go for a meat option instead?

( No. )

2. What would make you turn to a life of crime?

( A superpower! )

3. What is your favourite poem?

( I can never answer this kind of question.  )

4. You see a tourist wearing a t-shirt enjoining you to Remember Flodden Field - is there a snappy answer you make to said person?

( Their t-shirt, their problem. )

5. As a cat person, do you have anything good to say for dogs?

( They can really be terribly beautiful. )

Tags: eating some delicious food, fred, meme

12:02 am: Posted using <a href
Plaisir du chocolat! (chocolat Mozart!) <3 <3 <3

Tags: chocolate, eating some delicious food, edinburgh, seeing friends

10:19 pm: Pimping the LJ Cook Book
A post in food_porn today reminded me that I meant to pimp the idea of an LJ Cook Book to my friends-list. Check it out, and if you've a mind to, trib!

Tags: eating some delicious food

12:58 pm: David Bann's last night
Met my brother's new girlfriend, who is lovely. They're staying with me Thursday to Saturday. The food was fabulous as usual. We should meetup there again this winter.

Tags: eating some delicious food, family stuff

12:00 pm: Midnight in the mad bakery
I got in past midnight last night and remembered I'd planned to ice the orange cookies and to make cheese/mustard scones for a lunchtime fundraiser at Dementia Plaza today. Just cheese scones would have been fine: I could have whipped up a batch of scones and had them baked by one am. Icing the orange cookies too... I wasn't asleep till after two. Bah. Still, it meant I had time to clear all the booze out of my system, so that I woke feeling sleepy but at least not fuzzy-headed this morning.

The orange icing was good, though. The juice of an orange plus a capful of orange vodka, mixed with a lot of icing sugar. The cookies? Turned out more cakie than cookie - one of these days I will learn how to get the proportions of sugar, flour, butter, egg right, but till then I keep producing these big fluffy things. With peel that had been soaked in hot raspberry vodka for nearly 24 hours, and the zest of two oranges.

To dinner last night at green_amber's, with sneerpout and Pam WINOLJY. By some chance sneerpout and I had never happened to be in the same non-virtual room before, so it was interesting to meet her at last. It had been years (we had trouble working out how many years) since Pam and I had met - certainly we'd lost track of each other since well before 1997, when Pam went to York.

Dinner was fabulous: much wine (served in pink fluffy glasses), a delicious soup with fresh coriander, pasta with a rich mushroom sauce, and white chocolate key lime pie that was orgasmic. Pam and I both had a second helping. green_amber showed off her matching slippers as seen on Sex in the City. sneerpout noted that she was now drinking from green_amber's slippers. Pam WINOLJY admitted to a pink fluffy dressing gown. I wondered out loud about drinking wine from a dressing-gown.

A lovely evening on the whole, marred by two things: I'd walked over (and walked back, this time via Victoria Street where Pam WINOLJY was staying) and was breaking in a new pair of boots. Unfortunately this was overkill on my feet - the one hour walk to green_amber's would have been fine, but the same back again was too much, and this morning I have blisters, which is a sod. Also, the other thing, about which all I can say is: If you really feel that way about the past six years, all I can do is apologise. I'm sorry.

Tags: bake sales, baking, eating some delicious food, imaginary friend meetup