home made food and witch books
Christopher, here is the rhubarb cake recipe.
Friday 20 April
breakfast: poached eggs. Favourite Handyman made them.
lunch: variously, across the four of us, salami, hummous, raw carrots, marmite or nutella sandwiches, le snak or snak logs, leftover potato cake from yesterday, salmon and vege wrap. I prepared it all in advance, except for the salmon and vege wrap which I made fresh for myself when I got home.
tea/dinner: turbot, rice and veges (broccoli, carrots, onions, cherry tomatoes). Favourite Handyman cooked it. He pan fried the turbot which he had coated in egg and then in a herb and crunched up cornflakes mixture. It was beautiful. We used el cheapo ordinary cornflakes, but I expect you could get equally good results with gluten free cornflakes.
I didn't eat all my rice as the children and I went to see Laksmi today. My joints have been a bit inflamed and I'm not going to wait for them to get worse. Laksmi wants me to cut back on carbs and sugar. I think she wants me to try and cut them out, but 'cut back significantly' is the language I'm using at the moment. My sugar intake isn't particularly high, but I do like myself some bread more than is optimal for my particular body. Laksmi also did some body work on me which helped enormously, though I struggle to find the right words to explain it. I think there was quite a bit of visceral manipulation. Mostly we were too busy talking for me to notice exactly what she was doing - nobody who knows me face to face will be surprised at this.
I finished Witch Child by Celia Rees tonight. It is aimed at teenagers, but I enjoyed it. The protagonist is a witch in the 1650s in a time of intense persecution of anybody suspected of witchcraft. I want to read more, and so I'll be looking out for the sequel at the library soon. It's a long time since I read/watched Arthur Miller's The Crucible, but I thought of it again this evening, and in turn of Barbara Kingsolver's Lacunae, exploring the parallel treatment of communists in 1950s America. I wouldn't suggest that Witch Child has the depth of either of these two texts, but it's not unthinking nonsense either. I seem to have a witch theme on my bookshelf at the moment, with Susan Fletcher's Witch Light awaiting me. Note the implicit organisation of a bookshelf. I've always had bookshelves for my own books, but now I also have a bookshelf by my side of the bed, where I can keep library and other loaned books, magazines, a dictionary and atlas for the crossword and a few other texts which I'm prone to reading frequently in bed (like Fit For Real People, due to my unending project to help myself translate flat sewing patterns into three dimensional shapes). It's a great improvement on the previous ever growing morass on the floor.
Tomorrow, I plan on making buckwheat pancakes. Ever since last week's beautiful gallette and crepe at Nelson's La Gourmandise, I've been keen on recreating the experience. Right now, such home made adventures fit well with saving for a car which goes up hills without getting hot and engine-stinky, but also the chances of such a place opening up in Wetville are pretty slim. I learnt to make good sushi because when we moved here, it was impossible to buy. Same for sourdough bread.
Is this a life bereft of all reference to the outside world while I just think about eating? No, but what else is there to say about the corrupt government as it lays (and lies) in the immoral bed of Skycity? I wish I had something erudite to say about the sale of the hillside workshops in Dunedin, but I do not. As the news comes in this week as I cut and peel and saute to the not quite dulcet tones of Mary Wilson in our kitchen, I remember what I have read about the Caversham project looking at the history of that special part of South Dunedin, and find it awfully symbolic. I look up Erik Olssen, Professor Caversham himself, to see if he is still alive and working. Indeed he is, and his most recent title, which I shall ask the Wetville library to order, seems to me to add to the pathos: An Accidental Utopia? Social Mobility and the Foundations of an Egalitarian Society in Southern Dunedin, 1880-1940, University of Otago Press, 2011. I heard the union rep on the radio suggest it could work out to be a good thing, this sale of the workshops. I hope so.
Friday 20 April
breakfast: poached eggs. Favourite Handyman made them.
lunch: variously, across the four of us, salami, hummous, raw carrots, marmite or nutella sandwiches, le snak or snak logs, leftover potato cake from yesterday, salmon and vege wrap. I prepared it all in advance, except for the salmon and vege wrap which I made fresh for myself when I got home.
tea/dinner: turbot, rice and veges (broccoli, carrots, onions, cherry tomatoes). Favourite Handyman cooked it. He pan fried the turbot which he had coated in egg and then in a herb and crunched up cornflakes mixture. It was beautiful. We used el cheapo ordinary cornflakes, but I expect you could get equally good results with gluten free cornflakes.
I didn't eat all my rice as the children and I went to see Laksmi today. My joints have been a bit inflamed and I'm not going to wait for them to get worse. Laksmi wants me to cut back on carbs and sugar. I think she wants me to try and cut them out, but 'cut back significantly' is the language I'm using at the moment. My sugar intake isn't particularly high, but I do like myself some bread more than is optimal for my particular body. Laksmi also did some body work on me which helped enormously, though I struggle to find the right words to explain it. I think there was quite a bit of visceral manipulation. Mostly we were too busy talking for me to notice exactly what she was doing - nobody who knows me face to face will be surprised at this.
I finished Witch Child by Celia Rees tonight. It is aimed at teenagers, but I enjoyed it. The protagonist is a witch in the 1650s in a time of intense persecution of anybody suspected of witchcraft. I want to read more, and so I'll be looking out for the sequel at the library soon. It's a long time since I read/watched Arthur Miller's The Crucible, but I thought of it again this evening, and in turn of Barbara Kingsolver's Lacunae, exploring the parallel treatment of communists in 1950s America. I wouldn't suggest that Witch Child has the depth of either of these two texts, but it's not unthinking nonsense either. I seem to have a witch theme on my bookshelf at the moment, with Susan Fletcher's Witch Light awaiting me. Note the implicit organisation of a bookshelf. I've always had bookshelves for my own books, but now I also have a bookshelf by my side of the bed, where I can keep library and other loaned books, magazines, a dictionary and atlas for the crossword and a few other texts which I'm prone to reading frequently in bed (like Fit For Real People, due to my unending project to help myself translate flat sewing patterns into three dimensional shapes). It's a great improvement on the previous ever growing morass on the floor.
Tomorrow, I plan on making buckwheat pancakes. Ever since last week's beautiful gallette and crepe at Nelson's La Gourmandise, I've been keen on recreating the experience. Right now, such home made adventures fit well with saving for a car which goes up hills without getting hot and engine-stinky, but also the chances of such a place opening up in Wetville are pretty slim. I learnt to make good sushi because when we moved here, it was impossible to buy. Same for sourdough bread.
Is this a life bereft of all reference to the outside world while I just think about eating? No, but what else is there to say about the corrupt government as it lays (and lies) in the immoral bed of Skycity? I wish I had something erudite to say about the sale of the hillside workshops in Dunedin, but I do not. As the news comes in this week as I cut and peel and saute to the not quite dulcet tones of Mary Wilson in our kitchen, I remember what I have read about the Caversham project looking at the history of that special part of South Dunedin, and find it awfully symbolic. I look up Erik Olssen, Professor Caversham himself, to see if he is still alive and working. Indeed he is, and his most recent title, which I shall ask the Wetville library to order, seems to me to add to the pathos: An Accidental Utopia? Social Mobility and the Foundations of an Egalitarian Society in Southern Dunedin, 1880-1940, University of Otago Press, 2011. I heard the union rep on the radio suggest it could work out to be a good thing, this sale of the workshops. I hope so.
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