Chaz'z Busy Day. By Chaz.

[desperance]

Today I got up early, and wrote a couple of pages of a short story before coffee-and-teacake breakfast [a note to the curious: yes. Barry does like teacakes. Barry likes teacakes to the point where he doesn't want to wait for me to toast them and feed him bits, even with butter on; he exfiltrates them from the breadbin and takes 'em straight]. Then essential e-mailing and mailpackets, including sending off the opening chunk of New Book to agents hither and yon, for first opinions (nervous? me? nah...). And so to town, to queue for ever in the post office, my UK agent being still offline after a tale of unending moving-home catastrophe; then to the Lit & Phil to check proofs; then to the pub. For a business meeting, thank you very much. One pint. One.

And then shopping: shopping everywhere, all across town, for everything.

And so home, and a blitz in the kitchen: white chocolate torte and a spicy oxtail stew for tomorrow, confit of partridge for indeterminate future eating. The oxtail is a Spanish recipe, and an experiment; I felt I had to make it, straight up-and-down as per instructions, simply for the sake of the final admonition: "Serve this with bread alone, as only peasants eat potatoes." It's not just a Spanish recipe, it's a damn hidalgo recipe. I wonder if the Germans have Junkers recipes? Etc. Recipes as a tool of social criticism: discuss. Do not add water or overheat, as this will impair the argument.

Oh, and I cooked my own supper too, while all that was going on. Then I left the stew stewing in a v low oven, while I swanned off to the opera.

Not too much to do tomorrow, now (I do like this kind of dinner-party, where I have every excuse for cooking ahead). I'll go into town for the farmers' market, see if I can pick up something nice for starters. Oh, and lift the fat off the stew. I'd roast some vegetables in it, if that weren't so blatantly to defy the hidalgos. After that, God knows. Fret, I expect. It'll all be horrible. Or I'll start meddling with the stew, in defiance of the recipe, and we'll end up with a boiling cauldron to transfer across town (one of the many good reasons for preparing in advance being not to travel with loose hot liquids, which is bad, and I used to have a scar on my wrist to say so [acquired from a pot of boiling coffee, when I walked into a porter on Oxford railway station while looking at the steam-trains with my dad; it's vanished now, abruptly, after forty years, and I feel like I'm missing an old friend]).

Comments

[handworn.livejournal.com]

Recipes as a tool of social criticism: discuss

On the one end of the spectrum, the Romans are eating roasted, stuffed mice, or whatever kind of mice it was, to show that they could afford it, and afford cooks enough to make something like that good. On the other end, we have people like these hidalgos turning up their noses at anything just anyone can afford, tasty or not. Two differing models of food snobbery.

One wonders whether Paris Hilton et al. eat French fries, which surely anyone can afford.

[badgerbag.livejournal.com]

Why don't we eat mice? Nice, fat, grain-fed mice. I bet they're tasty, like quail.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

These days, it may be that thing we have against eating the family pet; why don't we eat guinea pigs? (Rabbits we do, I grant you, but I think that's exceptional.)

Or it might just be a size impracticality; the dormice the Romans ate are significantly larger than yr average country mouse. Not much meat, even on a plump little squeaker.

Midshipmen in the sailship navy did famously catch and eat the ship's rats...

[handworn.livejournal.com]

I vote for impracticality. Formal dinner cutlery arrangements are bad enough without adding a pair of tweezers to each place setting.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

I second that thought - and I speak as a man who has been asked to tackle a plateful of tiny snails, still in their shells, swimming in a tomato-and-garlic sauce, with no more equipment than a knife and fork. It isn't possible, and it is messy. Very messy...