Foodstuffs

We had guests for dinner last night: Ann Cleeves (author of the books behind Shetland, for those of you watching along in the UK) and her husband Tim ("the best birdwatcher in Britain", for those of you watching along at the feeding-stations). And I had all these onions, so I made French onion soup as hitherto discussed; and I had access to good lamb leg-steaks (I am still surprised by how hard it is to find lamb hereabouts, and how much it costs) and baby artichokes, and I found a recipe for a Jewish-Italian dish of lamb and artichokes in a lemon egg sauce - but then I found a recipe for a roast leg of lamb with artichokes and wine, so I sort of chopped and interchanged among 'em. And we ate it with saffron rice and sugar snap peas and the first fava beans from the garden - which were teeny-tiny and sweet and delicious - and there was sourdough and garlic breads on the side. And then there was a chocolate sour cream bundt cake for dessert, which was one of those occasions where I used different quantities of different ingredients but I was still following the recipe, honest...

And I might just have made a terrible mistake, because I thought I'd heat up leftover soup for lunch, and I did, but then I didn't remember its being quite so peppery, not to say downright chilli-hot when I knew I hadn't put any chillies in it because it's French onion soup and I followed the recipe I always do, as previously discussed - and then I worked it out on my fingers. That saucepan I used to heat it up? Was not the clean saucepan I took it for, but the saucepan I'd used to boil up the sriracha sauce before bottling it. Uh-oh. (The soup is now about the heat-level of a truly hot hot-and-sour soup, which I think is delicious, but I'm not quite sure how Karen's going to take it. If she does.)

Well, damn

History can be very disappointing. The term "vexillologist" was not coined until 1957, which rather militates against its use in a story about nineteenth-century flagwaving. Tho' I suppose one proto-vexillologist could coin it in the fiction, and another could laugh him out of the idea, for it is a very stupid word (and does that hybrid thing of mixing Greek and Latin roots, which the purists amongst us* have been known to frown upon).


*including, obviously, me