Who is Sunnyvale, what is she, that all her friends defend her?

This may be the best dot sign dot ever, to appear on our street:

Kale salad

This is just a waymarker in the ongoing progression of my kale-salad-for-Karen, where the process is today:

Take a bunch of dino/dyno/lacinato kale (it goes by other names also, but, y'know: even I have too many pseudonyms to list effectively), strip out the stems and chop the leaves to postage-stamp size (bearing in mind that postage stamps come in many sizes, and so do my chopped leaves).

Mix up a dressing of olive oil, lemon juice, cumin, salt & pepper, dress the salad liberally and massage the dressing into the leaves, vigorously. Leave to stand. (I have tried overnight, and I have tried one hour, and I'm not sure there's a significant difference.)

When you're ready, halve a handful of cherry tomatoes, and toss those in. Matchstick a carrot, and toss that in. Peel and deseed half a cucumber, slice into half-moons and toss those in. Roast a handful of pine nuts (last time, peanuts; next time, almonds) and hold those back.

Toss together everything in the bowl, top with a ripe sliced avocado and the pine nuts. Then, if you're us, drape crisp bacon attractively over all.

Today's reading is taken from "Genius" by James Gleick

Physicists made a nervous truce with their own inability to construct unambiguous mental models for events in the very small world. When they used such words as wave or particle - and they had to use both - there was a silent, disclaiming asterisk, as if to say: *not really.


I find myself curiously enchanted by the notion of the silent asterisk, a footnote without text.

On the other hand:

The atom of Niels Bohr, a miniature solar system, had become an embarrassingly false image. In 1923 ... already he and his colleagues could see the picture fading into anachronism.

I do understand the use of simplicity and metaphor in teaching, but even so: I find myself increasingly annoyed by the fact that this was still the image of the atom that I was being taught fifty years later, without a hint that thinking might have moved on from this model. I only took physics as far as O level: that they were lying to me might have been an influencing factor. Or be kind, say rather that they were holding back on the really interesting stuff that might have engaged me further. *shrugs*

Marginalia

In other news, I love this vehicle with an unholy love - especially when I see it pootle past a train. Or turn off the rails onto the road at a grade crossing. It's liminal, amphibious, intersticial, ambiguous. Neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring. *lovety-love-love*

Patchwork pastilla

I've probably roasted more chickens in the last couple of years than in my whole life hitherto. I like roasting chickens. And there's generally half a bird left over, which gives me a carcase and giblets for stock and the parson's nose and the oysters and nibbly bits of skin'n'stuff and of course the liver for chef's perks - and still the best part of half the meat, to do something else with.

Left to myself, I'd just fling it into a wok with lots of rice and veggies and chillies and soy, and sizzle till gorgeous. Top it with an egg, and that's dinner. But m'wife is not so fond of all-in-one fry-ups as I am; she likes to balance more veggies against less rice, and like that. So I look for other things to do with leftover chicken, and the pastilla (or bastilla, or b'stilla) looks like becoming a regular.

I have numerous recipes, all of which start with uncooked chicken of one sort or another; so I have been forced - forced, I tell you! - to improvise, to mix'n'match and invent my own process. Which, at the moment, goes something like this:

Shred the meat off the chicken. Heat the oven to 400F, and toast a handful of chopped almonds.

Chop an onion and a leek (or similar), and sizzle in a little oil with garlic and fresh ginger. Add half a teaspoon each of ground ginger, cinnamon, cumin, coriander, and a full teaspoon of sumac. Salt and pepper at will. Add a couple of cups of chicken stock, and simmer until thoroughly soft.

Drain off the liquor, and reduce to one cup. Whisk three eggs with a couple of tablespoons of honey, and whisk that into the liquor over a low heat until it thickens up. Add back the onion mixture, and all your shredded chicken meat.

Melt a lot of butter, and fetch out a pastry-brush.

Butter a nine-inch cake tin or similar, and build up three or four layers of filo pastry, buttering between each sheet. (Important note: if you forget to take the roll of filo pastry out of the freezer until round about now, and find that barely a third of it has defrosted in time, that's perfectly okay; tear off those third-sheets and overlap them as you lay them down, they'll be fine. I may have done that exact thing this exact day, so I know whereof I speak.)

Scatter half the chopped almonds across the buttered filo; pour in your chicken/onion/egg mixture; scatter the rest of the almonds; lay over more sheets of filo, buttering as you go, and fold in all the edges that overlapped the tin.

Slide it into the oven, give it twenty minutes at 400 and then another twenty at 350, and you're done. Tonight I'm serving this with buttered gingered honeyed carrots, green beans and mushrooms.