An open thread, where at your weekend leisure, you can discuss anything you like.
49 Responses to “Saturday Salon”
Leave a Reply
Please read the comments policy. If you would like an icon beside your comment, please register a Gravatar.
There is a Comments Preview function below the typing box which activates when you start typing.
Why does this article remind me of the old Yellow Pages ad about the Robotian Nation Anthem ?
http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,23749386-5005361,00.html
And here is the above ad.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyMvm9OSCys
I defended my thesis today, and it went well.
I am drinking nice Scotch now.
Frank,
Whoever those consultants were, I think there will be trouble. I was watching and it was just plain embarrasing for everyone. There are a few things you should have done before putting on such a game:
Ball? Check.
Pitch? Check.
Nets? Check.
Anthem? … Anthem?
Well done THR, perhaps you should defend it here!
Looking for ideas for ill considered world environment day comedy performance, AND offering fantastic FREE Brian Burke ringtone.
http://theworstofperth.com/2008/05/24/weekend-worstoff-7/
Eurovision last night didn’t disappoint. I do love the way there is always a Death Metal band from somewhere in Scandinavia who dress like Warhammer figurines!
This time they had a wind machine (to blow back the waist-length blonde hair), a timpanist who looked like Hagrid, and firebombs. Which could have been interesting given the wind machine. The whole night was full of potential disasters e.g. Russia: a guy in socks singing with a very strange looking guy on skates dancing around him. Ice skates, that is.
Bosnia-Herzogovina: as the announcer said, I don’t know what they’re on, but I want some. Weird dude with four brides in veils and a clothesline with nappies.
Fantastic stuff.
At present I’m cooking up some vegetable/lamb/beef stock/Worcester sauce soup. The point of all this, is, that now its winter I’m buying those soup-packs of vegetables from Bi-Lo/Coles/Woolies again. And over the past few years they’ve dropped the two celery sticks, putting in more carrots, and the little packet of Worcester sauce, but the price remains the same.
You reckon this is worth a complaint to the grocery price enquiry?
How’s about the full recipe Paul. I love soups but have trouble getting the same results as others.
Listening to Yeasayer…& Akron Family. Typing.
Mulling over whether we should have barley & curried vegetable soup w/ homemade bread rolls…or vege lasagne.
Lovely cool day w/ blue sky in Sth East QLD. No snow…just shorts.
Excellent work this week Kim. Some insightful & stimulating offerings & topics.
That sounds spectacular. I think that there should be a permanent soup thread.
BilB @ 10,
Burnsey’s Winter soup recipe:
Either buy a vegetable soup pack or, preferably:
Take one reasonably large pot.
Put in bottom of pot, becaquse it works better in the bottem than on top of the vegetables either/or:
2 lamb shanks or 1 reasonably sized packet of chicken breast and wings or 1 reasonably sized packet of diced beef.
Cut top ends/leaf off the following:
Peel and chop up to 5 reasonably sized carrots (bite size)
Chop up 4 small celery sticks (bite size)
Peel and chop up 1 swede.(bite size)
Peel and chop up 1-2 parsnips.(bite size)
Wash peel and chop up 2-3 washed potatoes. (bite size).
Add to pot.
Then add 1 peeled and diced brown onion.
A large handful of chopped mushrooms (ordinary kind.)
2 tomatoes cut into quarters.
2 crumbled stock cubes, chicken for chicken, otherwise beef.(One will do, but I find 2 give a better flavour)
A sprinkle of salt -not too much, because the stock will provide the salt.
A good dash of Worcestershire sauce.
All in pot.
Fill pot to brim with water, bring to boil and let boil till meat/vegetables are cooked.Simmer on lowest possible heat for c. half an hour.
Serve hot with thickly buttered bread or toast to dip in soup. If you like.
Will feed one person for about two days.
Paul,
Thankyou. I have a fairly comprehensive kitchen at my small factory. Your soup will be next week’s primary productive exercise. BilB
I am at this very moment in the throes of making Green Minestrone, myself. It’s serious soup weather.
Have, btw, just watched Pandaemonium on DVD. I would have enjoyed it a great deal more if I didn’t know much about the Wordsworths, Coleridge and Southey. But as I do, enjoyable as the film was (except for the dreadful end credits and some very weird opium dream sequences that showed a modernday structure and some shots of vapour trails in rhe sky, all parts of Coleridge’s opium hallucinations - yeah, I know he was stoned. Still …)Got a bit lost in that swntence. Enjoyable as the film was, it was highly inaccurate and a terrible slur on both William and Dorothy Wordsworth, who were both very humane. So there.
Cabbage, sweet potato and chickpea soup happened this afternoon at this end of town.
Thesis is due in 6 days. Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiit.
“Excellent work this week Kim. Some insightful & stimulating offerings & topics.”
Can only agree.
LP is certainly humming these days. Congratulations to all contributors. Always leading the intellectual pack and by a considerable margin as well.
BTW, this is a non-paid endorsement. Just sayin’.
Last night’s NSW edition of Stateline featured a story on the launch of the “Forgotten” King Fox Album, which featured as a member a young Billy Field, of Bad Habits fame.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59JUT0PaMcg
Pumpkin soup today for lunch and grandson’s first taste of mashed pumpkin. He seemed pertubed, unsure, but ate a little.
Magic!
At least he didn’t puke it up…good for him…unlike when I first ate Brussels…now I luvs ‘em. Ambigulous…good for you. How I envy you having a grandchild…:) Lucky thing.
Still, as my dear friend, longtime companion & wife just reminded me…we have the cats…& the birds in the garden…& 2 nephews. Just wish the cats could play SCRABBLE & cards. And help in the garden instead of just sh*tiing in it.
sam - i hear you!! mine’s due on thursday… can’t count though so who knows how many days that is… actually more to the point i don’t want to know
that’s why i’m perusing lp, of course
“Eurovision last night didn’t disappoint.”
Or, tonight, Helen @7.
Another triumph.
Georgia(14) is in with “Peace Will Come”. Take that, Lennon.
Latvia did ‘pirates’, as you would.
It is another exciting contest!
also. what is that pale purple box that seems to be at the top of (some?) posts? is it just decoration…? it confuses me
hang on, it seems to be some flash thingamigummy that my computer doesn’t like. never mind.
Anyone considering going down the Foxtel IQ2 path?
“Anyone considering going down the Foxtel IQ2 path?”
sigh
sam - i hear you!! mine’s due on thursday… can’t count though so who knows how many days that is… actually more to the point i don’t want to know
that’s why i’m perusing lp, of course
That’s not proper procrastination. You should really be cleaning behind the fridge.
Deborah,
Cleaning behind the fridge is a girl thing. Taking the fridge apart and putting it back together, or finally fixing the broken freezer door flap is proper boy procrastination. I wonder what they do on the ISS to be human?
That brings up an interesting thought. The Space Station must be really frustrating for female astronauts. It is not like there is much scope for reorganising it, as it is all pre thought out to a insane degree.
David Marr v Piers Akerman on Insiders this morning was good value if not utterly depressing that people such as Akerman exist.
the implicit racism of his comments was alarming, if unsurprising.
Speaking of theses and soups, a friend of mine had just had roast tomato and garlic soup and double pea soup couriered to my place (via her partner) to sustain me in my thesis writings!
And lemon slice.
Mark,
Of its as wintry in Brisbane as it is in Armidale, that soup would be really something to enjoy.
Well you,ve got no excuse for putting out a passe paper, it will no doubt be a good one. And then the review of the soup will appreciated as well.
No probs, will review the soup! The recipes are from the Veganomicon:
http://www.theppk.com/nomicon.html
Paul, actually it’s typically lovely warm days in Brisbane for this time of year - maximums around 24. Gets a touch chilly at night. But you can see why our tourist authorities are planning a campaign to get people to come here during winter - it’s just gorgeous. I had some friends visiting from Melbs a few years ago who couldn’t believe how lovely the clear blue skies and the warm days in June were. Mind you, after about 4pm the temperature has a tendency to drop very quickly.
Thick pea soup with bread & butter, chicken, corn & noodle soup (make the stock with chicken carcases and lots of delicious herbs), lamb shank and barley soup, thick with vegetables and plenty of bread and proper butter, scrumptious lentil soups. Yum! The best thing about winter!
Delicious osso bucco and stews a close second.
No wonder the waistline increases exponentially in winter.
Edward Current is an anti-creationist satirist who has made many excellent youtube videos. This one, God’s Cool Designs, is his best yet.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lcrq5OOkQdk
I have two lots of food on the go: sitting here in my study enjoying the smells wafting in from the kitchen.
first, a boiler slowly turning in chicken brodo. Good handful of herbs from garden, plus a few cloves and peppercorns
Second apple butter. Really, make a batch of this, oh so good. With 20 min waterbath processing will last for a year. Unsweetened is oh so good on pork chops/roast. Oh yeah. Kassler chops fried in applebutter mmmmmmm! Sweetened good over icecream, on toast, in layer cakes etc. Applebutter unlike lemon butter has no dairy in it. I urge you to give it a go!
Apple butter recipe
These fruit butters unlike ‘lemon butter’ contain no dairy products. Just concentrated fruit and, in some, some sugar, cooked until the fruit has the consistency of soft butter
A slowcooker is the ideal way to cook the fruit. These would hold about 3Kg of fruit.
So for apple butter a bit over 3Kg of cooking apples: Granny Smith, Jonathan, Braeburn. Use only one type, mixing types means some are cooked right down while the other type is still firm. Wash and core the apples then cut into segments. We do not peel the apples as there is lots of lovely pectin just under the skin.
Put the segments in the slow cooker and pour over about 1L of apple juice. To make the butter more appealing spices can be added: cinnamon sticks, whole cloves and/or cardamon pods, some mace bark or small piece of nutmeg. A cracked alspice, star anise if you like anise flavor etc. The jar I brought to the May meeting (of the beer & wine club) had two cinnamon sticks, 6 cloves and 1/4tsp of mace–definitely had some spice but the general comments were “not enough spice.”
Once all this is in the slowcooker switch it onto Low and place the lid on, leaving a gap for the steam to escape. After 24 hours remove the apple mass from the slow cooker and press it through a sieve or mouli (mouli is much easier) to remove the peel and spices and return to the slowcooker. Taste and add a small amount of sugar–fruit butters use way less sugar than jams do, partly because the fruit sugars become concentrated. Test for doneness by taking out a teaspoonful–it should mound on the spoon. For the more pedantic, place the teaspoon of fruitbutter on a ceramic saucer–there should be no ring of moisture around the butter.
Fill into hot clean jars, seal then waterbath process for 20 minutes. Use within 12 months and refrigerate once opened. The fruit acids mean you have a couple of months to finish the butter once the jar is opeened.
Sweetened fruitbutter is great on toast, over icecream or yoghurt, in a cake etc. Unsweetened applebutter is oh so good on pork chops or roasts–you could even fry the porkchops in apple butter.
Other fruit can be used: peach butter, spiced with great restraint and hardly sweetened is heavenly, but strawberries, apricots, plum, nectarine, quince (quince & apple butter great with cheese BTW,) pears etc. Hopefully winter 08 will be wet and summer 09 mild and I will make a big batch of apricot and ginger butter.
The origin of the fruit butters is the Dutch & German etc migrants to the US. The US still consumes heaps of fruit butter but they have forgotten about it in Europe! A lady at the Farmers Market has an old Australian cookbook that mentions fruit butters, but it never took off here. I would like to reverse that!
Mmm, that sounds delicious, T. As do many of the soup ideas on this thread.
Over here it’s a holiday (long) weekend, but circumstances have conspired to keep me localized, no holiday adventures alas. Must stick close to the Schloss and do a bunch of things that need to be done, not onerous, but they’re things that’re demanding I do ‘em. Still, it’s sort of a lazy process, with time lags in between tasks.
Spent a fair bit of today curled up in a big chocolate-brown leather easy chair reading (of all things) Kerouac’s “The Dharma Bums,” would you believe it, and kind of digging it. Never was too keen on the Beats, but someone whose taste I respect recommended it, so in I dove despite the irritating title. Worth the read. Sort of a bit like John Muir as translated by Su Tung-p’o. In fact, the whole thing strikes me more like a good, long prose-poem than like a novel, and seems more than a little like variations on the theme of Su’s two great prose poems on the “Visit to Red Cliff”. It helps if you know Gary Snyder’s work too, as he is one of the main characters. It brought back old memories of my days hiking the beautiful (but hilariously named) Topa Topa Mountains in the Ojai region north of Los Angeles: gorgeous, gorgeous mountains, lovely freezing-cold streams, incredible sunsets, and two of my favorite country bars, up in a region where a bar really is a “roadhouse” and it’s not an affectation.
Also reminded me of long hikes in the wilderness north of San Francisco with two of the loveliest, kindest, most cultivated people I’ve ever had the privilege to know. One of them a gifted photographer, so I still happily have some records of those days (this was long before digital, and I’m terrible about keeping photos, so, lucky!).
The soup theme here today is delightful. Maybe if I feel wordy later on, I’ll attempt to post my famous old recipe for “Gazpacho for an Angry Mob,” which I used to often make but seldom for fewer than fifteen people. Haven’t done that in years, hmm, it inspires one to go and find a few armfuls of actual good tomatoes and start making phone calls. But then there’s the matter of the other dishes: the warm sliced roast chicken with warm mayonnaise and golden raisins, the salad, the rice, the chilled potatoes, the octopus… it gets complicated.
Well, back to work. I wonder if my iced coffee is cold yet.
hehehe j_p_z
After reading about the roasted tomato soup, a tray of tomatoes are roasting in the oven! Will incorporate into the chicken soup.
Will admit that when summer is fading away I wish it would fade a bit bloody faster, thinking about the soups, roasts & pizzas (home made) etc to come in winter.
Pizza is even better made with dry roasted tomatoes!
Also, chard & basil makes a wicked pizza topping, don’t forget to grate some nutmeg on
deborah - good point! wow, i must be less desperate to avoid study than i though i was. maybe i like this thesis after all (??!)
Double pea soup was delicious! Unfortunately my soup reviewing skills are lacking…
So to compensate here are some soup recipes from post-punk kitchen:
http://theppk.com/recipes/dbrecipes/recipe.php?CourseID=39
And, all unsuspecting, I made split-pea soup for tea tonight… It’s lovely to see so many people who can actually cook here.
Cheers nasking!
grandson is almost 6 moths old, smiles, loves playing “peek-a-boo”; to his credit he brought up the “farex” av week ago, but kept the mashed pumpkin down. First grandchild for both ets of grandparents. Enjoy your nephews!
I have a feeling the birds probably do help in your garden, e.g. eating insects; but as to mowing or digging, or pruning, nah. We net our fruit trees and tomatos to avoid “sharing” with the birds, and some of the pesky little chaps STILL find ways to share.
- does that make them thieves, or socialists?
The Federal Libs and Nats have done a backflip under the influence of Clive Palmer’s cash and decided to back the creation of the Queensland Pineapple Party.
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/queensland/feds-give-clearance-for-lib-vote-on-merger/2008/05/26/1211653888414.html
This follows the redistribution of state electorates on Friday which Antony Green in comments at Poll Bludger says will give Labor 63 nominal seats in the next parliament. Lib/Nat 22 and Ind 4
http://www.pollbludger.com/861?cp=1#comment-156071
nasking at 10 and wpd at 18 - thanks!
Ms Fits retires her blog.
All lefties can cook, daiskmeliadorn. I mean, who ever heard of a RWDB cook-cum-blogger…?
link