Late breaking vegetables

 After I'd written the previous post, my Misfits market box arrived.

Flour and oats from the extras department, and various fruit and veg. ncluding a mango, which doesn't seem to be showing up here.  I've decided that my mid morning fruit doesn't always have to be an apple, big departure there.  It can be a kiwi fruit, or a helping of blueberries,  bit of mango, very daring.

Greens of various kinds taking a cool bath to crisp up the lettuce, revive the cilantro which it did, and wash grit off everything, broccoli, scallions, amazing how much grit you wash off this stuff.

Some of this will be my Friday night salad.  And Saturday and probably Sunday, too.

I haven't bought cilantro in ages, and, not being one of the people whose genes dictate that it tastes like soap, was interested in having a bit right now.  It will go nicely in green soups and salads, but I wondered if there were any other uses.  I love the smell of it on my fingers after I've been handling it.

So I looked up cilantro recipes.  And found a lot of them, where there were 52 ingredients, multiple processes, and a bit of cilantro sprinkled on top at the end.  Which reminded me of the recipe I found in Wisconsin in the early 60s, for Beef Curry.  Now, a true Brit, I'd basically lived on Indian food for years at the uni, and the spices were just fine, which pleases my Indian neighbors who, when they want to share food, ask a bit anxiously if I can do spices. So I thought Beef Curry would be good, since I'd got to be a dab hand at chicken curry before we emigrated, and I was now in the land where there was excellent beef.

And found that it was basically a beef stew with one pinch of curry powder added in at the end. Which is no more a curry than my Auntie Mary, mythical lady, is a movie star.  Perfectly nice beef stew (this was back when I ate beef before going off it) but not a curry by any stretch.

However, this was in the days when salt and pepper were  the staple condiments and the sort of mild mustard you got on hot dogs was considered pushing out the boat a bit.  It was also the bad old days where a salad could consist of various veggie-adjacent items in green jello.  Over which we will draw a veil.

So there will soon be soup and various ways of eating veggies, and I think I will finally make those flour tortillas with the authentic flour courtesy of Chris, and stuff them with cheese and salad things, and who knows what else may occur to me. And I'll call them Cilantro Tortillas. You'll get the blow by blow as I do it, unless you get lucky. And there will be blueberry muffins. And possibly an apple crumble, those being Granny Smiths. And now that I have enough flour, maybe even bread will happen.

Speaking of shopping adventures, I try to hold down how much I ask Handsome Son to pick up for me at the store, so I thought I'd order a bunch of boxes of tissues online.  And got the usual confirmation, and expected date of arrival.  Then a later one.  Then a later one.  Then, sorry, it's running behind. Then it will be there tomorrow.  Then today. Then, sorry, it's lost, please click here to process a refund unless you want a replacement.  Since they hadn't done so well with the first try I clicked for a refund rather than wait all over again for a replacement.  That was yesterday.  Today the carton arrived.  Who knows what they'll say tomorrow.

My kitchen smells like an old fashioned produce store.  Like the greengrocer's shop I grew up with.  Or the horse drawn cart that came around the streets, big white horse, housewives used to save crusts for him. 

It's the smells that trigger memory.  Like Proust's madeleine waking up the reptilian brain.  Did you know there's a perfectly wonderful graphic novel about the first part of Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Perdu?  It's brilliant, the graphics totally getting the concepts and conveying them movingly. It's in my library. It's also in English, sorry, should have said that. I'm hoping they continue with a second volume, but it must have been very time-consuming to make the first volume, so possibly patience will be useful here.

Tech is good. Journeys and madeleines of sound

Just musing today, hot summer afternoon, home reading Alexander McCall Smith, easy reading for summer, and noticed how much better it is to read when you can easily look up the references in ways not possible years ago.

Usually in my case it's to music I'm not familiar with and the characters are, meaning the writer is too, so I like to get the sound surround effect of knowing what they're hearing.  I do this all the time with Donna Leon, the opera and particularly Handel aficionada, found myself listening to many a Handel aria,  because her characters refer to it, and now it's happening with Smith.

What happens is that as soon as a character refers to a piece, or an artwork, I instantly seize my tablet, and find the music or the painting on YouTube, and it's surprising how often it's there and easy to find. 

Today it's Isabel Dalhousie and Jamie, the musician, remembering a concert of early music they attended.  They mentioned a song I don't know, though I know a lot of Elizabethan music, so I went in search.  

And found glorious Alfred Deller, a voice I hadn't heard in decades, right there on YouTube, with his consort, singing all the medieval and Renaissance pops. I have sung a lot of these, in various choirs as a kid and at the Uni, and play them on recorder as often as not nowadays.

But there was Il Est Bel Et Bon, large as life, lovely funny song about a young wife admiring her husband's kindness and his feeding the hens, making silly noises at them.  She's reporting this to her mother in law, as it happens.  This may be strictly fantasy, knowing the early period, but it zoomed me right back to uni, where I sang this song, in the first sopranos of our Madrigal Chorale.  We even made a record, very proud of ourselves, long since lost in the many moves I've done, but still imprinted in memory.

And the Wraggle Taggle Gipsies O, even further back, to school. And more songs,  and more recently, Three Ravens and others from the early music period, back to early days of learning recorder, as an adult, and now I've outlived most of my co learners. Remembering Arda and Dominique and Jenny and more.

Anyway, these are the sudden precipitous journeys your mind goes off on when you read, at least mine does. Like Proust's madeleine, but with sound.  Do you do similar things with music or references to paintings?  

I think a lot of us might do it for literary references.  Isabel, in the Smith books,  is batty about Auden, please, why, and she lards a lot of her dialog with quotations, which she then goes on to explain, Lord, save me from people like Isabel in real life.  It's okay to quote, but the explaining is, well, not so. Good she's safely shut inside books..in fact she's an irritating person, which may mean I've read enough of her for now.  But all the same, I did look up the Auden references.