Gratuitous doggy photo

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France comes to a standstill, cancer research takes a hit and Aberdeenshire can either get some new jobs or a trashed environment. But I’ve got nothing for you. 12 hours straight at the bench; perhaps all for nothing. Here’s a gratuitous P and dog photo from August to cheer myself up. That post about our Californian outing is still waiting on the dog uploading the snaps to Flickr and getting to grips with the keyboard. She’s not too bright, that dog.

i spy

They’re looking to see where my life disappeared to. I think it’s somewhere in the rubbish bin with the thousands of pipette tips and tubes.

Lib Dem spat/row/silliness

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As much as I dislike slander in modern-day politics, sometimes I think reactions to name-calling can get even worse than the original infraction. Take the case of the recent nastiness involving Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne. It was not nice of the Huhne camp to coin the “Calamity” nickname. Perhaps more than not nice; irresponsible, even, to say something like that publicly about your fellow man, let alone your party-mate. Stupid too; it can further split an already disparate party. But the Clegg camp also had a choice to turn a deaf ear. Instead of bringing attention to the silly name-calling, they could have taken the better, unseen, unheard higher ground of ignoring something so petty and childish. By lodging the complaint, they helped it along to newsworthiness, and also helped to bring their own party into disgrace.

I don’t care which of these gentleman become the next Lib Dem leader. I just want the party to hurry up and become that third force of political power they’ve been struggling to live up to these last few years.

Lamb and beans stew for the lazy

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Lamb stew and cranberry basmati

Lamb stew is possibly the only thing we can get away with when we have chunks of lamb in the freezer. Fortunately, it’s one of those easy dishes you can put on while you get on with the weekly chores of hoovering and the damn laundry. And doubly fortunately, it’s a very forgivable dish: you can throw anything you’ve got in the store cupboard in without too much guilt about not spending hours washing, blanching, cutting, prepping. The only prep step involved is remembering to get the lamb out of the freezer the night before. Left in the fridge, it defrosts better than in the microwave, where it tends to get cooked instead.

Brown the cubes of defrosted lamb over a high heat in some olive oil (or whatever oil you like; low sat fat is our preferred frying agent). Throw on a generous pinch of lamb-friendly spices when the lamb is browned all over. The North African/Middle Eastern baharat1 blends are always good for lamb stew (thanks to Phoenicia in Embra’s George Sq for that lesson), but since I’ve used up my home-made NA/ME baharat, I made do with some garam masala, which is almost the same thing except to purists I suspect. At any rate, whatever spice you want to use, it’s usually best to dry-fry it first to give it a slightly charred flavour like you’ve been slaving over a charcoal stove all day, or to release the aromas as most cooks would say. To be honest, I do it because it makes my flat smell good. And makes my neighbours think I’m a genius cook.

This is where the recipe gets a bit complicated. First, open the doors to your cupboard filled with dry goods and canned food that will last a nuclear blast. If it’s empty, resign yourself to fried spiced lamb. If you’re as crazy as I am, there’ll be countless cans and tetrapacks of a variety of tomatoes and beans in there. Depending on how lazy you’re feeling, get out the tin of plum tomatoes and chop them, or just snip open the pack of Parmalat chopped tomatoes, bought just for such occasions. Apply to lamb in oven-proof dish. When that’s done, open your choice of canned pre-cooked beans (haricot in this instance). Chickpeas (USA=garbanzo), haricot (USA=navy), cannellini, flageolet and borlotti are my faves for meat stews. Rinse and apply drained product to lamb.

If you’re all organised, you’ll have turned the oven on when you started browning the lamb. If we’d started this in the late afternoon instead of traipsing miles with the dog to get her monthly $100-worth of food and treats, we’d have stuck the oven on at 150ºC and left the lamb in there for ~3 hours. Being late, the lamb went in for 30 min at 180ºC (350ºF) just the get the whole thing hot and bubbly, and was later turned down to 150ºC (300ºF) for a further hour. Since the chores took longer, the lamb stew sat longer too: ~2 hours, and was probably better for it.

If we had potatoes, I’d have thrown some in for a one-pot meal. But they don’t keep so well here, so we keep rice, noods and pasta as the starchy standbys instead. Basmati rice was chosen to make fake “polo” with dried cranberries. These delightful cranberries were Trader Joe’s version infused with orange, which really helps to achieve that fruity polo effect.

And as you can see, I licked the plate clean:

Licked clean

The Wine2

Dithering about which wine to have, we eventually settled on the 2005 Paso Robles Barbera3 from Eberle. I say “we” because there was a bit of “discussion” as to which of our too-many wines would go well with the stew. It’s easier when you only have one red and one white in the house. At any rate, we were doubtful that the P.Noir (silly name) would live up to the strong lambiness of the stew, a Sangiovese would be too soon after its outing earlier this week, and the Zinfandels we had would be too spicy. A mildly-spicy Barbera would be able to hold its own against the tomato and lamb. Ah, there we were wrong,. The Barbera out-competed the lamb stew. It was, perhaps, too young, high in alcohol and left a very strong sensation of pepper in the mouth. We’d spiced the stew quite delicately and chosen an overly-spicy wine. Ah well. No matter. The Barbera was saved for after dinner, where it paired brilliantly with a square of Chocolate Negro con Avellana (61% cacao) by Valrhona. The cherriness of the wine was brought out much better after the cocoa fats took some room up on the tongue. Nice one.


1 As far as I can tell, bahar=spice. So it’s a bit of a tautology to say baharat spice.
2 I think it’s about time I start writing down which wines work with what food. Over the years, we’ve had fantastic wines that could have been great with food other than what we drank it with. And the converse. Problem is: we’re forgetful. It has to be stonkingly brilliant, like a Margaux with roast duck, to make it memorable.
3 55% Steinbek Vineyard, 45% Christian-Lazo Vineyard. Isn’t it cute how they put down which vineyard the grapes came from. I almost feel like I should have a mini-pilgrimage to each vineyard from which wines I have loved were birthed…

Beowulf

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It’s been almost ten years in the making, but at long last, the wait is over and the Gaiman–Avary “treatment” of Beowulf has hit the theatres.

In a desperate attempt to see it without anyone spoiling it for me1, we dragged ourselves out on a work night to see it. In 3D, on an IMAX screen2. While I knew not to expect regular “live” action, it was still a little disconcerting to see [such-and-such actor in movie] in avatar form. But my brain quickly adjusted, and the way the rendering was done made the environment believable3. A certain realism pervaded the atmosphere, which grounded the re-telling of one of the oldest myths. The story of the hero: flawed, human, brave and yet vulnerable.

The setting also made the monsters believable; realistic even. I’m glad we saw the film before we’d seen any images of Grendel or any trailers. I’d hate to have missed out on the many “Oh my goodness, they did WHAT to Beowulf?!” moments I had. I’d hate to give the game away here and fill this with spoilers. But let’s just say I was amazed with how they depicted Grendel: physically and as a figure in the story. I love Neil Gaiman’s take on stories. He always finds a different perspective from which to view things. His published treatment of the Grendel character in the Scottish Shadow short story within Fragile Things foreshadowed this version for me4. I don’t know if the foreshadowing of so many things in the film version were just good set-ups within the film, or leakage from my own reading of the Beowulf poem or Beowulf-inspired stories I’ve read over the years. Ooh, it’s so difficult to write of the absolutely fantastic story-telling without giving the whole thing away. I so, so loved how two linked revelatory moments were built-up subtly. One appreciates it all the more when a well-loved old tale is in the hand of masterful storytellers6 and sympathetically brought to life by an extremely talented team of film-makers.

And as Andrew discovered, the script indeed takes liberties with the written poem. But I must say, while the facts have been changed, the story is better. So many things in this movie, I could not, in my wildest imagination, have teased out from the bare bones of the epic poem. My own vivid imagination could never have “seen” the seedy interpretation of the story. Grendel’s mother. What a piece of work (and not just in the clichéd sense). The Hoard. The dragon. Oh, the dragon. Where do I begin with the implications? This wasn’t just a re-telling of the Beowulf story alone. It was a complete reworking of all the myths we draw from, all the stories ever told.

Without the story, the angle, the movie would not have worked. But with that, and fantastic cinematography and other movie-making dazzly effects5 to immerse us in a believable world, Beowulf – The Movie was an extraordinary experience.


1 I’m still annoyed about the way trailers give away the “clever bits” of a movie. For example, the trailer for the latest Will Smith one-man-show I Am Legend would have been perfect if they’d just stopped before they gave the whole game away. It was tantalising until they spoilt it for me. That’s $20 I won’t be spending then.
2 Though not as large and all-encompassing as the Science Centre IMAX screen of my childhood. Incidentally, the 3D goggles for IMAX are not very comfortable for a nearly 2 hour movie: they were a bit tight and definitely didn’t sit well on top of my work-day spectacles.
3 For a given amount of belief. There were clunky moments, but not enough to jar you back to reality.
4 In publication order at any rate. If he wrote the script to Beowulf in 1998, it could well have preceded his Scottish Shadow short story.
5 I use this generic term because a crap load of different things make a movie. I am a simple biologist; pardon the ignorance.
6 I should mention here that the script was the fault of both Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary. But since Gaiman has written more books that I’ve read, I’ve been a little biased in my blethering praise. If you want to know more about the script’s history, a good place to start would be searching the Gaiman archives or the Avary blog that I’ve not learnt how to navigate.

Bottled Californian sunshine

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Having accumulated several bottles of wine over the summer, I hosted a mini tasting session of a mere fraction of the full cupboard of Californian sunshine. Here are some piccies taken pre-drinking.

Mini wine tasting

The cheese and fruit spread was intended to 1. line the stomach and 2. provide gentle reminders of the often-fruitiness of wine. OK, maybe the cheese was merely my lazy way of providing some food without much effort on my part other than choosing a wide enough range to suit most palates. I personally prefer mature, sharp cheeses, but sometimes like the sweetness to be found within a Gouda. The Whole Foods in Westwood stocks two pretty decent varieties: the Rembrandt and the Vincent. I don’t know who makes these, but some prize must be given to the person/agency that named the cheeses. After all, when asked, most people would probably name these two big guns as examples of Dutch painters. And the marketing genius behind the names even took into account the relative status of Rembrandt van Rijn and Vincent van Gogh, marking the more mature Gouda as the earlier, Baroque Dutch master. If asked in a taste-test which painter I would have likened the mature Gouda to, it would have to be Vermeer: brightly coloured, domestic scenes with a certain maturity in content and theme come to mind, with a slightly mysterious provenance like most of his work. The younger of the two Goudas did not make as much of an impact on me, but I appreciated its slight tartness, which worked well with the 2006 Pinot Grigio from Castoro Cellars I started the evening with. Admittedly, once the cheese entered my mouth, that was the last of the delicately flavoured Pinot Grigio I tasted. If we were to get this wine again, I’d be more careful and serve it with something less sharp, more sweet and slightly fatty. The vineyard suggests scallops in cream sauce. Mmm… I miss our Edinburgh Farmers’ Market scallops from Loch Fyne… After the Pinot Grigio was done with, we just gave up and had the rest of the wines with the cheese and fruit willy-nilly. So much for paired tastings, eh.

Hard to soft

The other cheeses on the hard->soft board were Mimolette, Cheddar and Brie. I have a soft spot for the Mimolette. It sounds a bit silly, but it reminds me of a mature hard cheese that’s sat in a cool dry place for a little too long, and has a concentrated saltiness to it. Slivers of Mimolette on the tongue almost melt away as the salts dissolve, leaving you gasping for rehydration of your salt-dried tongue. A mature cheddar, on the other hand, marries its slight saltiness with a slight tang and some softer chewiness. This Borough Market label is a very good example of a good cheddar, best eaten in thin-ish slices. It’s no substitute for my favourite cheddar in the world though. The cheddar they make on the Isle of Mull is to-die-for-although-not-literally. And thinking of that make me miss the Iain Mellis stores in Edinburgh, of which a trip to our local Stockbridge branch was our fortnightly treat to ourselves. Perusing their list of cheeses makes me almost cry for the inaccessibility to us of Cuddy’s Cave, a cheese we used to fight over, the Ardrahen, Gubbeen, and the blue that made me like blues again: Cashel Blue. Cue sighs all round the dinner table. And don’t start me on the lady who sold the nutty Dunlops and creamy Bonnets at the twice-monthly Farmers’ Market. We miss her. And her cheeses more so. The last cheese on the board was a creamy Brie. OK. Not much to write home about. If not for the recent heatwave, I’d be tempted to leave this out at room temperature to allow it to breathe and mature some more. Nothing more insipid than a Brie that’s too young. Our other local hangout, Herbie, used to (probably still does) have a round wooden board on the counter-top, on which would rest a really stinky Brie. It’d usually be oozing when I’d walk in, smile at the VERY cute men behind the counter, indicate how many inches I desired, smile even more when they turned their backs to cut me a slab, leave happy with oozing cheese and never ever tell P that’s why I ALWAYS looked in through their window.1

The stinkers

Is that enough cheese reminiscing? Probably shouldn’t have started. Food gets me homesick for Edinburgh. And sometimes I get homesick for Singaporean food. Speaking of which, the Stilton on the board always reminds me of Singapore, where an English friend of my father liked to recount the time when he thought the house he’d recently moved into had blocked drains. Apparently, it had started all of a sudden. The whole place stank, just stank, of damp, dank sewage every now and again. Peeeuuu… It turns out it was durian season, and the neighbours’ fruity feast was wafting over and offending his senses. Said English friend is a huge fan of Stilton, as is my dad. Huge fans. Every Christmas, we’d have to get one of those damn Stiltons in a pot. I though the royal blue of the pot was pretty, especially with the goldish Mason jar-style lightning closure wires. But come time to open the pot, I’d flee from the kitchen. Those darn Stiltons stank like blocked drains to me, the world’s biggest eater of durians. For the longest time, I could not stand Stiltons. I would eat any and every other blue cheese, including Roqueforts and Gorgonzolas, but not Stiltons. Until one day, on impulse, I bought a slab of Stilton from Valvona and Crolla for P as a Christmas present, in keeping with my own yearly tradition of buying my dad a Stilton even though I would not touch the stuff with a barge pole. Suffice to say, P had to fight to have any of that present over Christmas. Mmmm… Ngom ngom ngom… Stilton on an oatcake, Stilton on a water biscuit, Stilton on a chunk of bread, Stilton licked straight off my finger. Drains no more.

Of the other two cheeses on the Stinker board, only the Pyrennes was mildly offensive. But they were there with the Stilton on the basis that they were made from raw milk and hence not entirely safe for pregnant women and sprogs. Come to think of it, the Brie and Cheddar were probably not entirely safe either. As you can plainly tell, I’m not used to having to cater for pregnant women and sprogs, but I’m learning… I was surrounded by pregnant women and sprogs through my PhD years, but had a reprieve through the early post-doc years. Suddenly, I’m surrounded again. Sprogs everywhere! They come in spurts, don’t they? Even if you have a decent range of ages for friends, births tend to cluster. Never just one. Always 3 or 4 at the same time. Never just one baby growsuit to buy, always several. At least we can cheat and give the same ones to the different parents. Ah. Back to the cheese. Cheese I know a little about. Babies are a complete mystery to me. The last cheese was a Morbier, which I have a certain fondness for, despite the bitterness. It’s partly the way it’s made that’s appealing, and partly its creamy smoothness. And something about that middle layer of ash again reminds me of my grandmother’s habit of burning prayer slips into hot water for me. Ashy prayer slips in how water does not quite live up to a kid’s expectation of a treat.

Soft fruits

The second wine of the evening (yes, we’re still banging on about wine. sorry about the cheesy interlude) was the 2005 Paso Robles Sangiovese from Eberle, the vineyard with a huge boar statue outside its tasting room (photo to be uploaded sometime in the next decade). I love Italian wines, thanks to an education by Valvona and Crolla’s back room and tasting sessions. And the relatively inexpensive prices don’t hurt them either. In California, the Paso Robles lot really know how to make Italian-style reds. They say it’s the climate, I think it’s the attitude2. At any rate, this my-grandmother-was-from-Tuscany grape makes a damn fine wine in their hands. It’s juicy, fruity, and yet, fresh. Like the process of plucking raspberries off their canes and catching a whiff of the organic compounds released upon damage to the fruit and parent plant.

Big Red and chocolates

The third wine of the night was originally, in the grand scheme of things, meant to be the fourth. But P took one look at the already sozzled guests and made an executive decision to skip the Mouvérdre and hop right in to the Big Red from Hop Kiln. We’d made an impromptu stop at Hop Kiln after our canoe trip down the Russian River with Kirin, ostensibly to taste the wine but more to use their loos after a few hours on the river. Feeling somewhat self-conscious, we tried some of their wines and came away pleased with their blended reds. With the Big Red, you can tell they were aiming for a fruity, spicy wine. And it goes pretty well with chocolate. Something about the slightly bitter fattiness of high-cocoa chocolate marries well with what the bottle label tells us was 52% Zinfandel, 18% Cabernet Sauvignon, 16% Syrah, 14% Carignane. Talk about a multinational wine. It’s a good one for just sitting, sipping and scoffing the chocolate with.

While the Hop Kiln Big Red was meant to be the finisher, we ended up having the Bonny Doon 2004 Mouvèrdre3 anyway. And while it was out of sequence, and obviously so, we enjoyed it too, for we are great big lushies.


1 To check their Brie was oozing, of course. What else?
2 Or altitude even.
3 I love Bonny Doon labels. The Ca’ del Solo labels by Chuck House were, along with the enthusiastic recommendation of the West End OddBins folk, were huge deciders in my loyalty to the brand. The gorgeous graphics sucked me in, but the adventurous wine-making and unique tastes of their many experiments made me stay. Stumbling across the tasting room near Santa Cruz was the most fantastic find of our trip down the central coast of California. The refreshingly “young” and experimental nature of the place chimes very well with how we view wine: something to play around with and enjoy. In the case of this Mouvérdre, the awesomely ferocious komodo dragon was designed by Tavis Coburn. Strangely, I don’t think of this wine as a Rrrargh sort of creature; it’s fruity in a raspberry-fresh-tart sort of way. It’s more like a wimpy iguana… But to each his own interpretation.

Hello world of WordPress!

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Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!

Why, thank you. I think I will…

I’ve dithered about combining the various aspects of my online diary-keeping. Blogger has been perfectly fine for my purposes, and would probably have continued to be so. But I’m in a somewhat impulsive mood and feel my disparate personalities should manifest themselves in one resting place. So here we are again. Trying something new.

Eye of round causes tears of joy

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Sometimes, I crave me a steak. A juicy beef steak.

That’s not an easy thing to find in LA. I have yet to stumble across a butcher. There are carnicerias, but they don’t seem to sell beef steaks. There are supermarkets, but they don’t hang their meat. So we don’t often have steak, unless it’s buffalo1.

So I was somewhat surprised when P came home with some eye of round in steak form, marinated in something and crusted with coarsely ground pepper. Meat from the hind tends to be roasted or braised or some-such. It can be stringy if not well-marinated and slowly cooked. At least in my limited experience. And so we usually stick with the safe tenderloins and sirloins. Or the British frying steak.

The eye of round steaks were under an inch in thickness, and a mere 2-3 minutes per side left them closer to medium-well done than our preferred nearly-medium juiciness. And it could have done with being hung for a fortnight or so. Still, it was steak. And it was juicy. So juicy we were reluctant to give the dog a bite. Served with crisp asparagus spears2 and steamed thin-skinned red potatoes (variety unknown), it was just what I needed.

A glass of Geyser Peak Meritage 2003 on the side made it a small meal of perfection.

1 Speaking of buffalo, I miss ostrich meat and venison.
2 How can tender asparagus still be found at this time of year? I suspect P has broken the “local-veg wherever possible” guideline. But I’m not complaining. Much.