No bread made this week.
Friday night supper: ven pongal (South Indian khichchari from Jack Santa Maria's Indian Vegetarian Cookery.
Saturday breakfast rolls: basic buttermilk, 50:50 Marriage's Golden Wholegrain and Sharpham Park Baker's Blend Spelt, rather good.
Saturday lunch made blinis to have with gravadlax. Niiiice.
Today's lunch: dried ancho ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished Jo Walton, Ha'penny and went on to Half a Crown (2008): the whole sequence as good as I remembered.
Which is not what I could say for the first in a series of thrillers about a woman PI in California in the 80s that I read back in the day and picked off the shelf to see how it had held up, and, readers, it had not, so gave up.
( Read more... )

Sitting and watching video content on my computer, unless it's really, really short.
But I was thinking of making an exception, because, hey, Ursula K Le Guin:
PBS’s Documentary About Ursula K. Le Guin is Free to Watch This Week
- except, apparently not in the UK?
Whinge, moan.
Though this is not the first time I have had similar disappointments ( Read more... )

What I Read
Finished Rainbow Bridge.
Read Aliette de Bodard, Of Dragons, Feasts and Murders (Domain of the Fallen 3.5) (2020) - might be me, a bit underwhelmed with this one.
Gwyneth Jones, The Grasshopper's Child (2014) - re-read, and think this was better read in a gulp, as I did the first time round (I think there was some matter of a long ( Read more... )

My dearios may have been aware, over the past, oh, maybe it amounts to a couple of months? of a terrible whingeing noise emanating herefrom about A Thing I was solicited to do -
- at fairly short notice to a rather tight deadline and rather strict parameters and involving various things over which I had no control -
- and going forward with ( Read more... )

While Oliver Burkeman's column today appears to be about the canard that denying oneself small treats in the presents means that Some Time In The Future you will be able to afford to buy your own place, it's actually and more interestingly about the value of small pleasures, and that thing of things that promise to be indulgent pleasures but don't ( Read more... )

What I read
Finally got to the end of The Last Man (would it be a spoiler of an 1826 book to say, 'does what it says on the tin'?). Makes one realise that reading must have been quite different when you could not pick up a book and have some general idea, from the cover, the blurb, or the first chapter, roughly how it would go from then on, but ( Read more... )

I made some significant effort to get to this exhibition, which closes today.
I'm not sure quite what the rationale was for having this exhibition at City Hall, a building in what I would tend to define as the corporate-soulless mode, with particularly intense security arrangements to enter.
Not that it was what I consider much of an exhibition, ( Read more... )

To the best of my knowledge, up until today I had never eaten Quorn.

Today, for an assortment of reasons, I had for lunch something that was described as Vietnamese style curry with Quorn.

This was not an experience I am likely to repeat.

I thought to myself, how bad can it be, and doubtless the curry element will predominate.

The curry would ( Read more... )

Does anyone, anywhere, talk like this? The speaker and his listener are both from the same European country and therefore, one assumes, will already have some general idea of when it granted female suffrage:
'It wasn't until women won the right to vote, well into the twentieth century, that they were even allowed to attend the shareholders' ( Read more... )