Monday, May 12, 2008

Nails Day - Charity Shops - Chicken


Before starting on today I need answers about yesterday's tea. These fish kebabs (Lidl) were delightful and inexpensive but, as you will see from the enlarged picture, they are made from 'painted sweetlips'. I assume this must be a breed of fish which I simply haven't heard of and I've had no time to 'google' it.

Picture 2 is from yesterday at Attenborough and although the seeds look like dandelion-clock seeds I suspect they were from cow-parsley or similar.

I intend to e-mail the Nature Reserve to compliment Elle on the excellence of the arrangements. The feedback from the children and their parents has been first-rate.

This morning it was Y's 'nails day' so we nipped over to Carlton and I took my recalcitrant phone into Carphone Warehouse - again! This time it was because the warning noise for an 'appointment' had stopped working. It would vibrate but nothing more.

It took him 40 minutes and lengthy phone calls to fix it. Hence, time only for one charity shop !

But I did well. A small but efficient looking microscope. Noel Coward's 'Collected Letters', a reference book 'The History of The Church of England' (of academic interest only) and a selection of Christina Rosetti (for Y) who has already found the gem about 'you can take a horse to water but you can't make him drink'. Not many know the source of that reliable old cliché.

Then to The Cheesecake Shop for soup & ciabatta and then after a country-lane tootle, home. For main meal I roasted a free range, corn fed, chicken from Yorkshire. Delicious it was too. I can claim credit for cooking it moist and tender but the farmer deserves praise for the flavour. Well worth the money.

As you will see from Picture 3 we now have in kitchen window-sill residence, the three Basil Waiting brothers. I must remember to take one to AnonymousReg on Wednesday morning.

Comments......Bungus .... Eating squirrel would not be a problem for me, but it might be for Y - we've never discussed it. Recipes abound. One chap suggested stuffing them with peanuts, fat-balls, bread chunks - in fact anything you would normally leave out for the birds !

Please don't bother to look up 'wild garlic recipes'. Googling that phrase produced 22,300 pages. Wild garlic pesto sounded promising though.

You are quite right that Seneca invented laxatives, everybody knows that. Don't worry about google page-rankings. If you have the tool switched on while you are googling, there is a small white letter-box icon with a movable green bar from the left. The amount of green indicates how reliable a site is. You don't need it.

AnonymousRob ...... Glad your caravanning was so good. And I'm glad about your employment situation even though, as you say, it sounds complicated. You will enjoy a 'sabbatical' - you will be able to come WoW-ing or similar !

Kipling was indeed a weird man. As we used to say in the Triangle days, - "Weirder than weird Jock McWeird and he was pretty weird". Although of the 'right' he remained a staunch defender of 'the common man' and much of his poetry is memorable because he put his finger on essential truths. And, unlike more obscure but more highly regarded poets, his work is 'readable'. Probably better 'read' than listened to because of a tendency to sound mawkish and sentimental. A definite hint of the 'parson'. So much quoted though. Who doesn't know chunks of 'If' for instance? (That must be the smallest link ever) This is the poem recited - make your own minds up.

Jill ..... Although this isn't a response to a comment, it is about Picasa. When you have the programme open go up to the top of the page and click 'Help'. From the drop-down menu select the top one 'Help contents and Index'. This will open a treasure trove of useful info and answer many questions.

No quotation tonight. Too tatered. Catch you tomorrow.


ooooooooooooooOooooooooooooooo

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your ‘painted sweetlips' were worth a google..
Family: Haemulidae (Grunts) picture (Dipic_u4.jpg) by Randall, J.E. AquaMaps | Point map |
Order: Perciformes (perch-likes)
Class: Actinopterygii (ray-finned fishes)
FishBase name: Painted sweetlips
Max. size: 100.0 cm FL (male/unsexed; Ref. 3678); max. published weight: 6,300 g
Also known as Seilvin-rubberlip, Khannai, Khanny, Painted Thicklip, Pointed Sweet Lip, Sailfin Rubberlip.
They differ from Plectorhinchus by having a much longer and narrower caudal peduncle and fewer dorsal fin spines.
They are reportedly ciguatoxic in some areas; reports of ciguatera poisoning.
Good, in’it?

I wonder if Christina Rosetti also came up with ‘closing the stable door after the horse has bolted’?

You fail to give us the source of your free range, corn fed, chicken from Yorkshire. Presumably you didn’t actually have to go to Yorkshire?
Please do tell.

I must to Wellow Woods immediately to pick some wild garlic (illicitly as it is a site of special scientific interest, I discovered yesterday).

Time for an old joke:
“Do you like Kipling”.
“I don’t know; I’ve never Kipled”.
‘If’is by no means my favourite poem but hearing Denis Hopper read itmakes it obvious why it is so popular. Sandra was once dismissed from English class to walk the perimeter of the playground for misquoting:
“If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
It’s probably because you’ve had a few.”

In Picasa, when I click help I only get a little panel in the top LH corner which leads nowhere (no sign of a treasure trove!).

Rob:
Yes, Man U deserved to win the match and the league. But Chelsea did well, all things considered, to get so close. A pity they are no longer the most attractive team to watch. And good for Giggs; although he always looks such a troubled, miserable man he has been a brilliant servant to the club.
Sorry Jack, your son, has gone missing. Would ‘kippling’ help find him?

Anonymous said...

I'm really, really surprised that there has been no mention of Kipling's abilities as a baker of cakes. This poetry business is all very well but surely his real legacy to the nation, and our culture, is a tart?

To kipple (v): to defend the Common Man; to put your finger on Essential Truths; to bake cakes; to send your underage son off to be killed in a (pointless) war.

Which reminds me of an ex-EPS member who once asked me how Madonna managed to record all those hit records and play for Argentina. I said it must be something to do with being touched by the hand of God.

Agreed Chelsea did well and, but for injuries, may have done even better. But that's football, it's a man's game, a game of two halves, sick parrots and being over the moon. A beautiful game. I wonder why Giggsy doesn't smile very often? Maybe he doesn't like football.

Painted Sweetlips sounds like the name of a gangster's moll. As does Legs Akimbo. I found an Australian government website with information about Painted Sweetlips; it included pictures. I wouldn't fancy kissing one.

I have signed my new employment contract today and, as of 26 May, will no longer be a public servant. Life will be tough in the private sector; my new job starts with 2 days off for a bank holiday. After that, if you regard yourself as a person with a disability, I will be out and about trying to find you sustainable employment. Pick up your incapacity benefit book and walk. I've just realised, though, that my new employer is a registered charity and I shall still be paid out of the public purse. Keep paying your taxes, folks.

Rob

Anonymous said...

Is the dish kebab made from just the lips - what happened o the rest of the fish? I had Talipa (which I have seen on sale here).orange ruffey, butterfly fish nd mai-mai while on the cruise. I did find out that the last is actually a sort of porpoise, wouldn't have eaten it if I had known that.

One of first memories is of my grandfather reading me The Just-So stories, Kipling was much admired by him. I loved them.

Yesterday we had A Grand Day Out- a trip on the London Duck. This used to be a DUKW used in WW2 in the Normandy landings, among other places. Now painted yellow and fitted with seats - we had about an hour and a half trip around central London, seeing the sights, and then straight down a slipway into the Thames, bounced around, then chugged along for about 40 minutes. It felt quite James Bondish! And it was a lovely sunny day, not too hot. Great fun.