How to annoy Chaz, without even trying...

[desperance]

Well, you could be me, and keep leaving the heat on under my most expensive pans. For hours'n'hours. Grr.

Or you could be a cat, either of the cats, and keep leaping like thunder onto my desk and sending things that belong there plummeting to the floor. Grrr!

Or - today's favourite! - you could write a cookery book, and give all the dishes complicated names that list half a dozen of their crucial ingredients - and then you could index them with no more discrimination than a simple alphabetical order. Which would, for example, mean that Gin-Laced Pork and Pig's Liver with Cinnamon and Cloves is indexed - yup - under G for Gin. And nowhere else. Aurrgh! This does, since you ask, render the index entirely useless. And thus, pretty much, the book. I may have to re-index it my own self, picking out the useful things like, y'know, Pork. With a P...

Comments

[gauroth.livejournal.com]

Indexing these days is remarkably shoddy, sometimes little more than a reiteration of the recipe names (I'm looking at you, Covent Garden Soup Co.) It's a technical skill, but I suspect the publishers are too miserly to pay for a decent job.

What are we supposed to do when we have, say, half a pound of carrots, one pork chop, some spuds and 2 pints of sour milk because the fridge has broken down? (Answer: gratin savoyard with pork bits and carrots - oh, and two elderly tomatoes. Ditch the milk one lump at a time.) At least with years of practice I can rustle something up; but it is much more reassuring to have a recipe to follow - except for Delia's Salad Nicoise, which is revolting.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

except for Delia's Salad Nicoise, which is revolting

Attaperson. I am myself of the anti-Delia tendency. What's particularly wrong with her Salad Nicoise...?

[frandowdsofa.livejournal.com]

She is the AntiChrist.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Not cranberries, surely?

[gauroth.livejournal.com]

I think it's the texture - too many eggs and potatoes, not enough lettuce and anchovies. It's slimy-and-sweet rather than sharp-and exciting. Mind it's all a matter (quite literally!) of taste! I don't like her 'taste.' Give me Nigel Slater any day!

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Whoo, yeah. I do not to my knowledge cook Delia; I cook Nigel often.

Delia upset me very early, by giving a fine impression of someone who actually doesn't like food very much. She doesn't taste as she goes, y'know? Apparently it's because she has a dislike of seeing people eat on TV, but it comes over (to me) as a prissiness, a distaste for the process she's engaged in. Also, this habit of saying "there. That's how to make perfect..." [whatever it might be], as though there was only the one way, and any other would be inferior. Snarl...

[gauroth.livejournal.com]

Nigel is a Domestic God. His recipes always make me want to dash to the cooker immediately. Delia is wrthy and boring and patronising and leaves me wanting to phone for a takeaway.

[frandowdsofa.livejournal.com]

I am partial to the teeny weeny different colour strips of postitnotes, poking out of the recipe page. You can cross-reference your indexing, then.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Ah, machine indexing. I hate it when that happens.
Meanwhile, down here, Mooncat is sitting on my mouse...

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Hee. Of course she is. Sometimes Barry sits on my mouse, generally when my hand is on it also.

Mac's preferred desk-trick is to Copy Barry, and spread himself between keyboard and screen - just that, when Baz does it, he curls up neatly under the halogen lamp and goes to sleep. When Mac does it, he sprawls on his back and waves his paws around, and presses keys that did not want or ought to be pressed, and I find myself with eighteen iterations of a live helpdesk to delete...

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Free text search spoils us for anything else.

Also, Chaz does recipes? Who knew?

[desperance.livejournal.com]

C'mon, you've seen the bookshelves. I have more recipes than ... than ... oh, than somebody who has a lot of recipes. I don't necessarily cook 'em, but that doesn't stop me looking. If I don't look, I fall back on a relatively small repertoire of favourites more often than I experiment.

Right now I have a fridge full of shin beef, and I was looking for curries. I found that index ... discouraging; and then I found a head of fresh wet garlic that I'd forgotten about, and some white kidney beans; and now I'm thinking chilli. It's a default position, but hey.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Chaz haz books; yes. Chaz reads books; well, of course. Chaz requires recipe in order to cook; nit so much so.

But yes, recipe to nudge us away from the old favourites, we know that one. Shin beef + kidney beans = cholent.

[brisingamen.livejournal.com]

Today, I was sitting in the kitchen with X, drinking tea, while Chia roamed the worktops (she's old, it's a triumph she gets up there at all). At which point she climbed onto the book I'd been reading, fell off, headbutted the mug of tea I'd left on the counter and covered me in a tidal wave of what had been rather good tea. X observed that he wouldn't have believed it if he'd not actually witnessed it. I was too busy wringing my jeans out to be available for comment.

[wakaba-chan.livejournal.com]

I managed to set my steamer on fire the other day! Now my kitchen smells of burnt.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Oh noes! (Bamboo steamer, stainless steel steamer, or Device That Steams? I could very easily set the first on fire, but after that it gets progressively more impressive as a notion...)

[wakaba-chan.livejournal.com]

Bamboo steamer - the water in the pan ran out and I only noticed when the flat smelled suspiciously of fire.