Lost opportunity

If I'd had my phone tiny mobile computer with me, I could've taken such a photo this morning.

I was leaning on the gate at the level grade crossing, waiting for the train to pull out of Sunnyvale station and blast past; and I heard a horn from the other direction, but not a locomotive type at all, just a regular road-going auto horn.

So I looked around, and there was this pick-up truck I've seen a few times now, chuntering happily along the rails. It's some kind of maintenance vehicle, I guess: it has wheels for the rails and wheels for the road, and sometimes when it reaches the crossing it turns off the tracks and drives off up the road.

Not today. The train came out of the station; the truck kept following the track in the opposite direction; they passed each other with polite honkings. I've never seen that before, I don't suppose it happens often at a crossing; and I could've got a picture. If my phone photographic device weren't at home, recharging. Hey-ho.

Kitchen diary: what goes hand in hand with trial...?

It is perfectly okay to experiment on your friends. I am fully resolved on this.

For lunch I had devilled mushrooms and lamb's kidneys, with fresh kaffir lime leaves snipped into the sauce (thanks, Alene!). That worked very nicely, and I'm keeping it to myself. Nobody I know would like lamb's kidneys, oh no.

T'other day we found a cabbage on our doorstep. (Thanks, John!) It is a mighty beast, and I have shredded it; and I bought beef in this curious American cut they call boneless ribs, and chunked that up and browned it, and I have laid layers of cabbage and beef alternately on top of a bed of thyme and rosemary, and poured beef stock* and red wine vinegar over all, and it's going into a low oven for a long time and we'll see what the yogi think. It may be horrible. But there will be cute little fingerling potatoes on the side, and maybe broccolini because you can never have too much crucifer, even though the cabbage is vasty. (I"m going to check after an hour, in hopes of working more cabbage in as it cooks down; we really do have a lot of cabbage.)


*Decades ago, I remember being terribly impressed by the woman in front of me in the butcher's queue, who was buying a piece of brisket just to make stock with. I'd probably moved on myself by then from the stock cube to the bones-simmered-with-veg, but the notion of buying actual meat simply to make stock had evaded me thus far. Now, though? Now I have a slab of beef stock in the freezer that, yup, I made with beef ribs bought for that purpose. Actual ribs with the bone in, that is. Cost me about two dollars, and it's fabulously good stock.

Verb: sap:*

Interestingly, pot-lids fresh out of the oven tend to be almost exactly as hot as the pots themselves. That might be worth bearing in mind.

*Blackwell's bookshop in Oxford used to have polite notices here and there, headed Verb: Sap: and saying, as near as memory retains it, "In former and happier times, we were accustomed to University tutors coming in at the end of the academic year with long lists of those books they had taken but unaccountably neglected to pay for. Alas, we can no longer be so trusting..." and so on, to the obvious conclusion. I really enjoyed that notice; so much more cultured than the bald "Shoplifters will be prosecuted"...