Spelt bread
Earlier in the week, I attempted to make some spelt buns with yeast. The yeast failed me utterly and they turned out like little dough cannonballs which, while edible when warm (especially when treated as a scone and eaten with butter and jam), weren’t really the thing. I suspect this was down to shamefully out-of-date yeast rather than anything else. During the week I procured some fresh yeast and had another bash.
I used this recipe from Doves Farm:
500g spelt flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp quick yeast
1 tsp sugar
300ml warm water
1 tbsp oil
Mix dry ingredients together, add the wet and combine; knead for ten minutes and leave to prove for an hour. Knead for a for other five minutes and turn into an oiled 2lb loaf tin; leave to rise for another half-hour. Bake for 40 minutes at gas 7.
What other unusual flours have you tried baking with, and what are their results? I’m curious to try out others now.
The Consolations of Philosophy
Before heading to London last weekend, I was killing some time in Hodges Figgis. I happened across Alain de Botton’s Consolations of Philosophy and was intrigued by the first two or three pages but, having no money whatever, I deferred purchasing it. However, I didn’t forget about it and the next day when I was taking my constitutional walk round Foyles I sought it out. Not being able to find it myself in the philosophy section, I went to the desk to ask if they had it in stock. I gave the man the author and title; as he typed it in, he scoffed, “Ah yes. Stolen from Boethius.” I then trotted after him as he directed me to the “Popular Philosophy” bookcase, directly beside the bog-standard “Philosophy” bookcase in which I’d been looking for the book; this bookcase contained other writers who are living, and spines that were brightly-coloured. The overall effect was to make me feel as if I were sitting at the kiddies’ table of the philosophy department’s all-ages spread. The curious thing is, though, that it is exactly this vaguely off-putting and elitist attitude surrounding philosophy that de Botton is combatting in the book. De Botton’s aim is to make philosophy accessible and relevant to the widest possible readership but without slipping into being simplistic or reductivist (it is decidedly not “Philosophy for Dummies”). It is a short book at just 240 pages, and many of those pages are given over to somewhat whimsical illustrations, so of course it is not as dense as some of the 800-page tomes I passed over on the regular Philosophy bookcase, but he does succeed in giving the general reader a précis of the thinking of six big names from history (Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche).
It’s been a while since I read anything that has made me so keen to go away and read a million other things and all at the same time, particularly in the cases of Epicurus and Montaigne . In addition, de Botton cleared things up for me greatly with Epicurus — it seems I’ve always carried about a caricatured picture of what “Epicurean” means, whereas once his actual philosophy was outlined to me it seems to make perfect and attractive sense. De Botton manages, too, to make such names far less intimidating — I finally know something about Nietzsche and what I know makes me want to find out more. He also strikes a really nicely-observed balance in his tone, managing to put across new ideas in a very clear style that never patronises, and he does a great job of geeing you up and compelling you to turn the next page. On this showing I will definitely be trying out de Botton’s other work , as well as giving Montaigne’s essays more of a go (though happily Montaigne is on a course this term, and so I’ll have to do that anyway). It is, if nothing else, proof that we should never turn our noses up at the “popular” bookcase in any bookshop department — we can’t all be experts in every field, but that shouldn’t stop us from being curious about dipping into many fields. For that matter, authors (and scoffing bookshop employees) should not be averse to catering to such an audience who, while being non-expert, might still have a brain in their heads and be curious to know more about the world.
The Make Lounge Shop
In addition to my other activities during my weekend in London — the Hitchcock gig on Saturday, making Irish stew (the English BF had pointed out that I’d never made it before), baking brownies and waiting for the plumber on Sunday morning — I took the opportunity while I was in there to finally get myself to see the Make Lounge’s shop, which opened in August. I went with a determinedly open mind but I still didn’t think I’d end up loving it. Though I’ve never been to one of the Make Lounge’s workshops, I feel they’re not at all for me. While I love to learn from a person than from a book whenever I can, I think the prices charged for many of their workshops is frankly cheeky (FORTY-SEVEN of your English POUNDS for an evening of CAKE DECORATING?!), and I was prepared to have a similarly ambivalent attitude to the shop — while it’s lovely to see crafts flourishing, I was sure they’d probably be taking the piss to some extent too. I left feeling that I wanted to live there.
It’s a very small space but it’s extremely well-curated, and manages to cover a wide number of craft materials without feeling bittily done — which is why I usually prefer to go to an all-out knitting shop or dedicated fabric shop than a one stop shop which caters properly to nothing at all. The materials available in the shop mirror the crafts and skills that are taught in the workshops, so there is the focus is on sewing, crochet, cupcake decoration and embroidery materials, with a very attractive selection of books on these topics. Easily the most impressive thing for me was the wall of craft fabrics, which may be the best I’ve ever seen in person (though it has to be said, John Lewis’ selection is improving, with the addition of Heather Bailey materials the last day I was in there), with a heavy emphasis on Michael Miller craft fabrics — and all of them were a very reasonable £9.50/metre. They also had what seemed to be the full range of Sublime Stitching patterns at £4.50 each (with the embroidery floss to go with them), as well as many other unexpected touches — such as envelopes containing 6 Present and Correct gift tags adorned with vintage stamps. I spent fifteen minutes dithering over fabrics before deciding that I shouldn’t buy anything on this occasion — I’m currently poor as a church mouse whose wife has run off with all the cheese, and as I could only have scraped together enough for one metre of one fabric, when I really wanted absolutely everything in sight, I felt that I should just leave it. But mark my words: I’ll be back.
I spent part of last week lapping up Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, until I realised that within 48 hours of starting it, I’d had some kind of disagreement with the important men in my life (father, brother and the BF). While I was greatly stimulated by Wolf’s arguments, it was also very unsettling and almost anxious reading at times. However, before I return it (not completely read) to the library, I wanted to excerpt a little of her argument about women’s magazines here. I was especially interested in this section because I felt that she articulated arguments about this medium that I’ve had myself in a more articulate and sophisticated manner than I’ve ever managed.
… though the magazines are trivialised, they represent something very important: women’s mass culture. A woman’s magazine is not just a magazine. The relationship between the woman reader and her magazine is so different from that between a man and his that they aren’t in the same category: a man reading Popular Mechanics or Newsweek is browsing through just one perspective among countless others of general male-oriented culture, which is everywhere. A woman reading Glamour is holding women-oriented mass culture between her two hands.
Women are deeply affected by what their magazines tell them (or what they believe they tell them) because they are all most women have as a window on their own mass sensibility. … Newspapers relegate women’s issues to the “women’s page”; TV new programming consigns “women’s stories” to the daytime. In contrast, women’s magazines are the only products of popular culture that (unlike romances) change with women’s reality, are mostly written by women for women about women’s issues, and take women’s concerns seriously.
– Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth (London: Vintage, 1991), p. 70-71
In the course of reading her chapter on women’s magazines, I found myself asking many questions, mostly about what Wolf makes of the world twenty years after the book’s publication and especially the difference the internet has made (or not) to women’s mass media. I also questioned why, at least for now, I’m putting off reading any more — am I happier in ignorance, or am I just wisely choosing to pick my fights rather than fire on all cylinders and get burnt out in no time at all?
Brownies
If you’re looking for healthy and yummy-looking brownies, I suggest you head to Shayne’s blog, because by weird great-minds-think-alike serendipity, she made some brownies this weekend too. If, however, you want decidedly unhealthy but definitely FANTASTIC-tasting brownies, like these bad boys –
– stay put. I used Nigella Lawson’s recipe for flourless chocolate brownies, not because of any new-found gluten intolerance but simply because it was the first one to pop up when I searched for brownies on the site (though I’m always interested in trying out different methods of baking to my very traditional grounding in baking that heavily relies on dairy butter/processed sugar/processed flour).
I highly recommend this recipe not just for how well the finished product turned out but for the ease of making them (quite a small ingredient list) and, for baking, almost no washing-up required. You’ll need to wash up the saucepan in which you melt the chocolate and butter and which also serves as the vessel for mixing everthing else and, if you make up your baking tin out of foil as I did (we had no tin of the right size), you won’t even have to do the tin. Score!
I never feel I capture the purpleness of melted chocolate mixtures and I definitely didn’t in these grainy photos, but I wasn’t helped by poor overhead lighting and my own impatience to get the photos taken. Suffice it to say, the mixture was intense-looking.
I gave my brownies about five or ten minutes longer in the oven than the recipe calls for, as I knew I wanted to transport at least one of them the next day and didn’t want it to be too squidgey and crumbly to be able to eat on the go. I then made up a very simple sauce, not quite the one Lawson gives in that link, of double cream and the rest of the dark chocolate melted and well mixed together, and poured directly over a couple of brownies (you only live once, people) for our dessert.
The only thing I’d do differently would be to use walnuts as the recipe states. I used chopped mixed nuts because they were in the house and needed to be used up, but I can imagine that walnuts, maybe only halved rather than finely chopped, would really add to the texture. But I can’t believe how well this recipe went on my first try at it — really well balanced between dark chocolatey flavour and sweetness, great texture, filling without being sickly.
As the brownies were baking, the BF stuck on the Turtles’ song “Food” because, as I discovered, in the middle there’s a recipe for brownies set to music, which he thought apposite at that moment. However, while listening to it I thought I detected the word “pot” in the midst of the recipe and asked him about it; on further Google investigation, it turns out that the Turtles’ recipe is for hash brownies (he’d never realised this before). This was a song released in 1968!
Robyn Hitchcock’s Maritime Evening
Courtesy of and © Marc Broussely of www.loudpixels.net
On Saturday I took myself to the Queen Elizabeth Hall for another Hitchcock-led evening of themed music (the last was part of the Pestival programme), where he was joined by the likes of Graham Coxon, KT Tunstall and Kathryn Williams. The inspiration behind the gig was the journey organised by Cape Farewell on which Hitchcock and the others travelled to the Arctic to take in the effects of climate change. This resulted in an evening where there was a very coherent central message but one which could be somewhat repetitive, both musically and lyrically — a problem which beset the Rogues’ Gallery gig for similar reasons – and could be very grim indeed at times, such as Hitchcock’s “There Goes the Ice”, the title of which tells you everything you need to know.
However, this is not to say that the evening was a complete bummer. I was delighted by Kathryn Williams‘ contributions to proceedings, both as lead and harmony vocalist, and will be checking out more of her work soon. She was really quite pregnant at Saturday’s show, and I was surprised by how surprised I was (if you see what I mean) at seeing such a pregnant lady really belting out her line on songs such as “The Grey Funnel Line”; it was pretty invigorating. While I dug all her own compositions in the first half of the show, I found her performance of standard “Shallow Brown” absolutely captivating.
I can’t be quite so unreserved in talking about the others in this show. I was studiously avoiding any expectations of KT Tunstall, having never been too interested in her singles but knowing nothing to her definite detriment, and I didn’t know what to make of her by the end of the show. There’s no doubt that she can play and sing — her a cappella performance of “The Jar of Saltwater” (possibly not its correct title, but close enough) was thrilling — but the way she came across otherwise onstage is less than prepossessing, at least to me. When she came on, Hitchcock had some difficulty with an amp, which she succeeded in fixing. Her reaction to this was to pump the air and shout, “And I’m a girl!” Fuck off.
Similarly, Graham Coxon continues to put me off. His input was minimal on this occasion, with just two songs. The first, “Brave the Storm”, knocked me sideways: the tune, the beautiful finger-picking style of guitar-playing, the lush harmonies provided by backing singers Lucy and Jen (or Gem, not sure) — everything worked beautifully and I thought I’d have to revise my opinion on him. And then he played the mess that is “Caspian Sea” and I realised that I didn’t.
I like these evenings of Hitchcock’s, where he often acts as MC, corralling other interesting artists around him, and in such endeavours it’s churlish to be much too choosy about the likes of Coxon when you also get introduced to a Williams. I also think he manages to stamp his own personality on it throughout (far from having a bitty and piecemeal feeling, the gig was cohesive and satisfying as a whole), and his is a persona well-matched to this ringmaster role — genial, generous and rambling. And he knows both that the audience should hear certain sentiments, and so performs the bleak “There Goes the Ice”, but that they should go out of a Saturday night gig on a high, and so delivers a STONKING tutti performance of “Underwater Moonlight” to send us home on (though I actually felt it was Lucy, Jen and Kathryn Williams who sold that particular one with their unbeatable backing harmonies). An enjoyable but strange night.
See comments for setlist.
The sound of one jaw dropping
That was the sound that accompanied my clicking on the link to this card by Rifle Paper Co., found via Oh Joy!.
Reading around the Origin of Species …
I finished On the Origin of Species today for a class, and feel like I deserve a medal. I read every page of that sucker. It’s been a difficult read, despite the fact that Darwin isn’t nearly so dry as you might expect, but at each stage illustrates his propositions with examples from his notebooks. Some of these (particularly the fossil ones) are completely uninteresting to me, at least in his hands, but others, such as the mad instincts of ants, really make it fly along — but such patches are, it has to be said, in short supply. I have a feeling it has something to do with the euphoria I was feeling on getting to the final page, but Darwin’s final paragraph was actually my favourite passage of the book; I found it a very satisfying tying-up of the threads he’d created in the rest of the book, but it still has something even out of context.
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to ref;ect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance, which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability, form the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed laws of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
– Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 360
I also felt the introduction to my edition by Gillian Beer was helpful, highlighting the “variety of ideological potentialities” that Darwin’s work has thrown up, being picked over by “individualists, Fascists, Marxists, imperialists [and] anarchists — [and], indeed, quietists” (viii). Marx, it seems, read Darwin’s theory as a naturalisation of contemporary British economic philosophy of “Survival of the Fittest”. Beer concludes thus:
It would be false and sentimental to suggest that Darwin denied the power of competition for resources in evolutionary change. He viewed extinctions as inevitable in evolutionary process. But he emphasised also that survival depends upon variability, and that diversity is essential to the island of the world.
– Gillian Beer, Introduction to On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. xxv
Lying low
Essays are due on Friday and I have a HEAP of stuff to read for a new class then too (Nicomachean Ethics and Origin of Species much?). And my sewing machine has now taken to eating all the fabric it goes near. So I’ll see you when I see you.
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