yonmei

12:10 pm: Snow and shimmerhands
I noticed last night that the skin on my hands was horribly cracked and dry. (It may not have helped that I kneaded a batch of bread before I went out: professional bakers use gloves when they knead dough for a reason. (It is slightly something not to think about that, ever since my dad started to make bread at home, the vast majority of the bread I have eaten has contained (if only in tiny quantities) flakes of dead human skin lost to the dough. Er. Too late: I think I just thought of it.)

My hands were dry and cracky when I got to work, but I have some Body Shop cranberry shimmer lotion, which works well for moisturing but leaves dry skin looking silvery - rubbed into non-dry skin, it just leaves a faint shimmer sheen, but dried skin and, uh, scabs (I have a healed-over blister scab on the palm of one hand from shovelling snow before Christmas) take on a really metallic effect from all the lotion they take up. I is robot!

I left the backpack with my lunch in it in the meetingroom where I had a meeting this morning, but FreshStart is having a fraught meeting in there with someone, I don't want to interrupt it. I am munching rice-cakes from last year instead. I want my soup!



Tags: lunch, weather, work

05:14 pm: I don't like to brag, but...
I had lunch with threeoranges today, and you didn't. I win. And she gave me a copy of Affinity, so I win a bit more, too.

Also, it is Friday, and I get to leave the office now, and this week is almost justabout nearly over.

( lj cut for silly surrealist lyrics meme )

First generation egg:
Second generation egg:
Third generation egg:

Tags: books are what i read, dragon eggs need clicky, imaginary friend meetup, lunch, silly memes

09:13 pm: throat hurty ow ow CHOKE
I felt fine up until two hours ago. Well not fine, but at least not like my throat was a small tight painful knot that I couldn't swallow past. Ouch.

I had picnic lunch with friend (after stopping to buy coffee at the police box stall, and discovering that the coffee maker who knows me well enough to ask "your usual?" and get it right, on farmer's market Saturdays, is also at the coffee Tardis in front of the cathedral on Sundays) and then walked over to the station with her, and walked home.

Made broccoli/pea soup. Did washing-up. Pottered.

And about five hours later, my throat shut down. OUCH.

Tags: being ill, coffee, lunch

11:41 am: Tamarind and Tomato Soup
I decided I would feel better if I had an early lunch.

Since I started getting a box of organic veg delivered fortnightly, and am in possession of a slow cooker and a stick blender, I tend to think of "vegetable soup" as, well, the thing you do with vegetables you can't think what else to do with. I have on occasion made a really bad soup (not nearly as often as I have made a very dull soup) but mostly the soups I make are fine: tasty, nourishing, good for lunch or dinner, worth sharing but not particularly exciting.

Once in a while, though... This is the soup I made last night:

( recipe )




Tags: house md, lunch, my recipes, soup, tamarind, tomato

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

09:23 am: I made purple vegetable soup
The soup isn't purple. One of the vegetables that went into it is purple. The others were potatoes, parsnips, and onions.

The soup is actually the ugliest green I have seen in my long experience of making vegetable soups.

I hope it's tasty.

I'm going to Surichi Too for lunch.

Tags: just my life really, lunch

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

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

02:43 pm: Someone Very Wise once said...
...that the only way to be certain of catching a train is to be late for the one before it. This is Very True.

I missed the train I meant to catch at 14:05. Curse. I haven't done this in ages. Still, it is not the end of the world: it enabled me to do some necessary e-mailing in a handy Internet cafe, buy some superglue to fix (hopefully) the belt buckle of my rucksack (you do not realise how much of that weight rests on your hips until the buckle goes and it all goes on your shoulders) and check my sister's address from the convenient Private post I made of necessary addresses on GJ.

Also, I have had a cappuchino that wasn't worth the caffeine, but I resisted the baked potatoes from the excellent baked potato shop because I have a packed late lunch ALREADY, which I am looking forward to now no end. And because I have missed the train I meant to catch, I have no seat booked now, so safer not to buy something complicated like a hot baked potato with loads of salad and hummus and garlic butter... no.

I shall be half an hour later getting into Sheffield, but I am getting there.

Tags: family stuff, lunch, sheffield