yonmei

06:30 am: throat hurty dammit
My throat hurts. It's the kind of *ouch my tonsils are infected* clutching pain that used to happen to me once a year or so, and would often make me lose my voice.

Friend arrived, with milk, vegetable-cheese bake, carrot and coriander soup, 4 oatmeal rolls, a pot of carrot-and-coriander soup, and two strawberry tarts: Marks and Spencer have a foot outlet in the station and she'd figured we should just buy our food there. I contributed some delicious cheesy tear-and-share bread with garlic butter that I'd had in the freezer. Om nom nom nom, as they say on the Internet. Oh wait, this is the Internet.

She's here till Sunday lunchtime. Unfortunately it is raining, blowing a gale, and now both of us are coming down with colds. I don't think I gave her mine: I think she arrived with it. We will probably give each to each other. Great guest gifts.

I'm awake at 20 to 7 on Saturday morning because I needed some hot tea...



Tags: being ill, eating some delicious food, imaginary friend meetup

03:26 pm: Still ill
Friend arriving on a long-planned weekend visit this afternoon. Her train will pull in at 4:30: I've suggested she get a 22 to Ocean Terminal and I'll meet her there. She counterproposed that she ring me when she gets to Ocean Terminal and I direct her from there: also, she can buy milk on her way over.

Except I've been sitting in the house all day. Unfortunately it's miserable and rainy out. Also, if I go down to Ocean Terminal I can buy myself another fruit smoothie with a shot of echinacea, which, by the way, I still can't spell without looking it up.

However, good excuse to phone for a curry tonight.




Tags: being ill, eating some delicious food, imaginary friend meetup

02:22 pm: Apparently today is Hug a Vegetarian Day...
...why does that make me suddenly want to eat meat in a conspicuous and non-huggy way?

Except that would give me a stomach ache.

Oh the dilemma.

Why couldn't today be International Make A Vegetarian A Nice Cup of Tea Day?



Tags: eating some delicious food, i want a cup of tea and a tonne of sympa, tea

10:43 pm: What I did today
I went to Stockbridge Sunday Market via Eildon Street and Inverleith Park. I haven't walked down Eildon Street in years: my great-aunt used to live there. The new owners have planted a hedge in what was Aunt Margaret's garden, which lets them sit by the sunny wall sheltered from direct gaze by the street: it's a very specific and local hedge, because (I presume) they don't want to block one bedroom's view of the firework shows...

I went on through Inverleith Park, which has a pond on which several grown men were playing with toy boats. (There was a cluster of them by the bank, with their controls, looking very grim as if a toy boat was Serious Business. I suppose it might be, if the boat was attacked by a swan.)

There were rumours that Artisan Roast was going to be at the market, but they weren't, so I bought myself a plain and an almond croissant to eat in the office later (but I shall try to resist in future: they aren't making any reductions whatsoever given they're selling their pastries from a market stall, and good though their croissants are, they're not £3.30 worth of good...), and had an excellent lunch of Stir-fry Yaki Udon noodles from HaraJuku Kitchen. There is nowhere to sit down - the market is just a cluster of stalls along Portgower Road, which runs from Inverleith Park to Comely Bank - so I sat down on the pavement with my back against a sunny wall and managed my chopsticks quite nicely, considering I am way out of practice. (For years, I thought I didn't like "Chinese food": it was only after friends asked me to meals at Chinese restaurants that I discovered what I don't like is the state a stir-fried meal gets into when it's stored in little foil boxes for half an hour to an hour and then eaten steamy-soggy, greasy, and luke-warm.) I suppose I could have walked back to Inverleith Park without my lunch getting too cold: next time I might do that, if they're still there next time I go.

So then I walked back via the river path to find out what was going on at the Car Free day on the Shore.

What there was, actually, was even less than Stockbridge Sunday Market: a pen had been put up for a five-a-side football game that looked uncomfortably like a cage match (I suppose they really did need the cage wall on the side by the river, or they'd have lost their football sure as fate) and a set of stalls about energy conservation on the other side of the bridge. One of them was giving away free hessian ILoveLeith bags, so I got one, and another was letting you have a free glass of freshly juiced apple juice, if you cycled for about a minute or so per glass on an old bike that was set up to power the apple juicer.

...and then I went on to the office where I brewed myself up some coffee, ate my croissants, and watched Evita while I did data processing work for several hours. I took a break between five and six when I walked up to ScotMid and bought myself some tea, because the chip shop across the road was beginning to sing wistfully to me in its siren way, and when that happens, I should probably eat something more sensible.

But I got almost all the data processing done. It's got to be all done for the 24th. Yes, that's Thursday. I have too much to do, and if I got the bulk of it done on Sunday, I could half-watch half-listen-to a movie while I did it.

I first saw Evita when it was a musical in London in 1982: my drama class went on a three-day trip to London during which we saw an alarming amount of theatre, including Evita, The Cherry Orchard, and Barnum. Plus one play we got unexpected tickets for, because (probably) it was so awfully bad. I forget what else we saw. Of the three big evening plays, the one I remember vividly is Barnum: though the songs from Evita stuck with me longer. It was odd: I vaguely knew what the plot must be from having read more history of South America since than I had then, but I don't think I ever really followed the plot of the musical till I finally saw Madonna's film. I'm interested to find that the film doesn't name Che until the credits roll up the screen and you finally (if you didn't already know) find out who Antonio Banderas was playing. (The film does not pass the Bechdel Test. The only conversation two women have is between Evita and Peron's previous mistress, and since it's a conversation in which Evita is telling her she's getting dumped, it doesn't count.)

I also got an e-mail from my sister about next weekend: she's coming up for a visit.



Tags: eating some delicious food, edinburgh, films, just my life really, lunch, walks, work

11:28 pm: Ann Purna and meeting friends
I booked a table for 3 at Ann Purna and was only 15 minutes late to meet afrai and Cephas. They are both lovely, and the food at Ann Purna is delicious. I usually eat there with my parents, who have a fairly standard choice of food, so it was interesting to roam the menu a bit more adventurously with nice companions. Also, have I mentioned they are both lovely? I was a bit uncertain about meeting Cephas because sometimes the boyfriend/girlfriend of someone you like is not necessarily someone you also like, but it was like meeting Mr Sweetie, only younger. And with less beard. (This is the lovely melancharisbron's lovely partner. I just realised I probably should explain that.)

We walked back via The Forest, which was a bit crowded that time of night to have tea (also, afrai was totally full, she declared) but there is a small display of b/w photos of a road trip, which we looked at. And then I left them on Queen Street just below Urban Angel, and walked on home as it began to rain. I got home somewhat soggy and very tired. This is good (I am still tired) because I really need to sleep properly and wake at a good British time of day. Which is not 10-ish.


Tags: eating some delicious food, imaginary friend meetup

11:32 pm: I Missed Torchwood
I'm a bit upset about that, but only a bit, because I presume it's on again at some point (and I totally forgot it was on till I saw it on Twitter) and I'd been sitting at home feeling weary and bored and yarg until TS#1 rang and reminded me I'd meant to go to a fundraising dinner/launch tonight.

So I did. And I got a copy of the Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women, which I'd been wanting to get for ages - for £51.03. It was a blind auction kind of thing. And had a nice meal. And talked to nice people.

So. I daresay "Children of Earth" will be repeated at some point.



Tags: eating some delicious food, torchwood, yarg

09:15 pm: Yay personal failure yay
Once you get into evening time at Stirling station, the trains - while still perfectly reliable - are once-an-hour-too-bad-if-you-miss-thank-you-very-much.

And - having missed trains from there before - I know that it's really not worth it to get a lift back to solo's for the portion of an hour before you need to get back to the station. Unless it's actually blowing a gale or mizzling a blizzard. Or at least the nearest to blizzards that Scottish snowy weather gets in the lowlands.

But, on this occasion, we had pulled ourselves away from the aftermath of dinner in their favourite restaurant (buffet curry: beautiful enormous freshly-made nan breads, and red wine, and tarka daal, besides two beautiful and different vegetarian curries, and an array of delicious starters... we were full. And sleepy. But, we'd both set alarms on our phones (solo and self) and the Historian and solo walked me to shouting distance of the station, and I got there with 10 minutes to spare before the train was due.

So I wandered up to the bridge and played with the zoom taking pics of the hills, and mirror shots on the windows in the station, and then was trying for a good shot of their spiffy new bridge, and then ... I glanced over and saw that the 21:06 to Edinburgh was gathering speed and leaving the platform. (This is the Dunblane to Edinburgh train, stopping in Stirling for 3 minutes or so - two and a half of which I spent staring interestedly at cloud formations and bridges and entirely ignoring the platform behind me. *sigh*)

Yep. I managed to miss the train despite being on the platform, at the right time, and knowing that was the train I had to catch.

Oh well. It's a very nice evening, and my T-mobile dongle has coverage, and my laptop battery is fully charged, and altogether it Could Be Worse (except that the waiting room has evidently just had its daily scrub down, because it stinks of bleach rather: a very unpleasant smell to have in one's nose after eating delicious food.

I shall now get into Edinburgh about 11pm, instead of about 10pm, but there will still be buses running.

I took many photos at Aberdour today, which I shall upload ... er, later. Yay personal failure yay*.

*Very fine line stolen shamelessly from ruthi.



( their spiffy new bridge )

This and other photographs I took are available on Redbubble tagged Stirling or Aberdour.

Tags: eating some delicious food, i want a cup of tea and a tonne of sympa, just my life really

02:42 pm: Plockton is pretty
We had a long trip up by car, with stops in Perth (to collect wedding favours), in Dalwhinnie (which is twinned with Las Vegas, according to the sign at the pub where we stopped - where we had a very nice lunch, but saw no gamblers or white tigers), and in someplace I don't remember the name of because for two hours of winding hilly road I was feeling increasingly carsick and I didn't care where we were, or indeed appreciate how lovely the castle was, until I had breathed some fresh air and had a cup of tea and a cheese scone. But on the way out of the castle tea shop, I looked out over the sea loch at the castle and the hills and said in a bemused voice to the woman next to me, "It really is lovely, isn't it?" feeling a bit like Tommy Lee Jones in MiB where he confesses to Will Smith that the stars are beautiful, though he hasn't looked at them in years. Anyway. We got to Plockton and checked in and I found I had a room to myself (which I hadn't been sure about, because when they were booking us in January, I'd been asked if I minded sharing and of course I'd said No) and a nice bathroom just a few steps away, and a complimentary towelling dressing-gown to take those few steps.

So I wandered around Plockton, which is tiny and pretty, for an hour or so, and then came back to our hotel and we all had dinner*, which was lovely. My friends' friends are also lovely: it's very nice to meet them all. (I admitted to two separate people who asked, since everyone else present was thespian to some degree or another, that my sole connection with the stage was the O-Level Drama I did back when I was 15, and the drama group I belonged to for a year after that: I had met RiK when we were both in the same gay youth group, in 1984. Nobody seems to be prejudiced against non-thespians, though, which is nice.)

A sound night's sleep, followed by a lovely breakfast** - the food here is glorious, a focus on seafood, but there are enough vegetarian options to keep me happy for a longer stay! - and another wander round Plockton in the rain. I'd discovered this morning I could get online via the Plockton Inn's wifi, though T-Mobile has let me down. Then I went back to my room, packed up the half-bottle of wine I'd bought last night and not nearly finished, went down to the fish bar and ordered a vegeburger and chips, and took this and my wine up to a bench overlooking the sea and the houses, and ate and drank wine and admired the view and read The Guardian, and it was really very perfect. (The friends are lovely, but one can have too much togetherness, you know.) It's five past three. Time for another half hour or so wandering Plockton and taking more photos, then I need to come back here and dress for the ceremony.

I am very disappointed to hear that the Californian Supreme Court has decided that a majority vote in California can take a civil right away from the minority - I mean of course the freedom to marry, which has been established in the US as a civil right necessary to the orderly pursuit of happiness since 1967. I'm very glad and relieved, though, that they didn't decide to forcibly divorce the thousands of couples who had got married - and hope things will change for the better by 2010, if not before.

But I'd like to promote to your attention a petition to the UK Government (and ask you to sign it, if you're a UK citizen) to amend the Civil Partnership Act so that same-sex couples who want to register their partnership at a religious ceremony can do so.

*Grilled vegetables in pitta bread, followed by vegetarian haggis with clapshot (mashed neeps and tatties) and followed by Crannachan ice-cream. I'd ordered a bottle of very nice Merlot, thinking I'd share, but everyone else at my table was on gin-and-tonics or beer.

**Muesli with dried fruit salad, orange juice, coffee, brown toast, scrambled eggs which tasted like the eggs had been laid this morning, baked beans and a grilled tomato, more coffee, oatcakes.




Tags: being queer, breakfast is a good meal, eating some delicious food, evil american politics, ice-cream, just my life really, seeing friends, travel, wine

06:18 pm: Mmm...
Eating some delicious soup made with yellow split peas and various veg, and today I went to Portobello to have a turkish bath with Ajay, which costs £5.40 but is so worth it, especially in the old vaulted turkish baths they have there. And then Ajay and I had a swim, and wandered along the Promenade and found a new cafe called Beach House and were about to have lunch when Ajay declared herself Atkinsing and we had to leave, which was annoying, because I was hungry: but we walked up to the high street and had lunch from Kitchener Deli, which was lovely. (I had scrambled eggs and toast: Ajay had eggs and bacon.)

And then Ajay left to go meet up with her gran, and I wandered around the charity shops and bought Swallows and Amazons and a Cynthia Voigt I haven't read yet, and then Wee Ann rang me because we had arranged to meet in Portobello for tea: so we walked along the Promenade almost as far as the Joppa Road, and back again to the Beach House. Where we had nearly a perfect tea only they were out of Sticky Toffee Pudding, which Wee Ann adores. I had a cream tea with filter coffee and Wee Ann had the lemon drizzle cake.

And home to lovely soup: though I now have to go out again to meet up and talk serious talk with a couple of people about someone else's very bad situation. Oh well. There will be beer.

Tags: eating some delicious food, fight the diet merchants, just my life really

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.

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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, scones, soup

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

07:11 pm: Isn't it nice when things just... work?
I was walking home from meeting Atropos at the museum for coffee and natter, via Real Foods (bag full of healthy groceries in one hand, Margery Allingham in the other). And just as I was passing the primary school, five minutes from home, it came on to rain. Suddenly, in buckets. Before I got to my front door, my jeans were soaked, my socks were wet through, my hair was sopping wet.

(I had stopped to ring merlins_lair twenty minutes from home, having suddenly the feeling that this was the right time to do it: if not, I daresay I might have made it home on time.)

Fortunately, this morning, I had taken out a portion of the courgette and broccoli curry I've been working on. It was defrosted, and all I had to do was stick it in the microwave, run upstairs to get a towel, change out of my wet clothes, dry my hair, towel Gallus dry - and my curry was hot and ready. (This attempt was hotter than I think I want to go for normally, but very welcome when I had just been drenched in cold rainwater.)

Tags: eating some delicious food, gallus, weather