The alchemy of simple recipes

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The more I cook, the more I’m thrilled by simple recipes. Much of Italian cookery is made of just a few ingredients; making the best of them. I love the recipes in the two River Cafe Cookbook Easy volumes. They’re true alchemy.

This evening, Sam and I have been blown away by a fantastic recipe in Simon Hopkinson’s The Good Cook, the book that accompanied his recent TV series. Breast of Lamb Baked with Onions has just eight lines of ingredients:

1kg boned, rolled and tied breast of lamb (my butcher didn’t have any breast, so I used neck of lamb)
salt and freshly ground black pepper
a little dripping or oil (I used rapeseed oil)
1kg onions, thinly sliced
2 bay leaves
1 tbsp vinegar (I used sherry vinegar)
2-3 tbsp anchovy sauce
2 tbsp chopped parsley

The lamb, onions and bay leaves are cooked slowly in the oven in a casserole dish with a cartouche for a couple of hours or so until the the lamb is deliciously tender. The lamb and bay leaves are removed and the vinegar and anchovy sauce added to the onions and pan liquid.

The liquid is then reduced, to get a smooth, thick soupy onion gloop.

I put the gloop in the bottom of a bowl and placed the neck of lamb on top scattered with the parsley to serve, and accompanied it with plain cooked carrots and smashed new potatoes with butter and chopped mint. Hopkinson suggests mash, but I liked the idea of mint as a traditional accompaniment for both lamb and new potatoes.

The depth of flavour in the onions and the melting lamb have to be experienced to be believed.

I’ve been a bit quick with the method description here, partly because the recipe is so simple, and partly because I urge you to go out and buy The Good Cook. It’s a cookbook that should be on your bookshelf.

I’m going to cook the recipe again very soon using the right cut of lamb. Maybe it’ll be even better, if that’s possible.

RIP Paul Motian. I’ll miss you so much

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Since drummer Paul Motian died in New York earlier this week, there has been an enormous outpouring of tributes, emotion, grief and anecdotes all over the Internet.

Copyright Bernard Ley http://www.jsb.ch/gallery.htm

Personally, he’s a musician I’ve seen live many times. I’m a fan; Motian is my favourite drummer and one of my favourite composers. A completely unique artist, who had a completely personal approach to time.

I’m not qualified to say much about the great man, so I’ll let you choose from the writings of those who are.

Ornette Coleman, plus some photographs of the South Bank

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Sunday saw me going up to London to see Ornette Coleman at the Royal Festival Hall. The last night of the London Jazz Festival, it was an amazing climax to the 10 days. At least, I can’t really think that anything hit greater heights than the 80-odd year-old’s quartet.

My thoughts about the gig are at AudioChews, and my photographs of around the Royal Festival Hall are on Flickr.

OS X Lion wi-fi problems solved

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I suppose I should say right from the start that this story probably isn’t the standard 10.7 connection problem you’ll read about all over the net. This solution may help some people, though. This post also acts as a kind of addendum to this one, about general technology malaise at Rosam Towers.

When I upgraded my late 2010 MacBook Air to OS X 10.7 Lion just a few days after it launched, everything was fine. So fine that I upgraded my iMac, too.

Somewhere along the line, the Air started having problems with connecting to my wi-fi, and occasionally the iMac, as well. I upgraded Lion immediately updates became available, but the problems continued, so that I needed to reboot the Air, and increasingly the Apple AirPort Extreme.

Then I started getting an error message – just now and then – that there was already a device on the IP address that had been assigned to the Air as it reconnected. The penny dropped. Over a year ago, when we upgraded to 50Mbit/sec broadband, Virgin had installed a new wireless router in place of the cable modem we had previously.

Loathe to substitute a ‘free’ ISP wireless router for my AirPort Extreme, and to spend time reconfiguring the network, I first tried plugging the Extreme into the Virgin router. I ‘knew’ this wouldn’t work because I’d then have two DHCP servers on the network, but I could switch one off, couldn’t I?

The thing was, the network worked immediately, without any further messing, and continued to work with no problems at all until Lion turned up.

Once I’d remembered I had two DHCP servers in the network, I decided that the simplest way to get it all working was to remove the Extreme and reconfigure the Virgin router with the same network name and password as the Extreme.

That was more than two weeks ago, and there has not been a single network problem from any device on the network. Lion doesn’t like having two DHCP servers on the network, unlike Leopard, Snow Leopard, iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch or Apple TV.

Colour or Monochrome?

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I’ve been taking photographs since I was a child. Most of the photos I’ve taken since I was a student have been in black & white.

Indeed, I’ve been soldiering on with my Canon SLR film cameras, shooting black & white film for all of my serious photography until just a couple of weeks ago, when I bought a Canon PowerShot G12 digital camera.

At last I’m able to shoot in RAW.

I’m still loving monochrome, and I’ve ended up with two sets of images from my first real day out with the camera, at Brighton Breeze. The monochrome and colour images are now on Flickr.

I think the monochrome images win hands-down. What about you?

The People’s Republic of Worthing Telegraph has changed

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The sorting out of my Internet properties goes on.

My Posterous blog at www.peoplesrepublicofworthing.co.uk started off as a place to post anything I found interesting on the Net. I now realise that it has evolved naturally into my photoblog.

That means The PRW Telegraph now contains my Instagram photography from my iPhone and images from my Canon G12 on their way to my flickr account.

Why would my local takeaway want my card security code?

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I’m going to give my local Chinese takeaway the benefit of the doubt by not naming them, but the events this evening were a bit strange.

When I telephoned to order a delivery, I was asked for the three-digit security code on my card when I tried to pay. I don’t know about you, but I don’t let that info go over the phone.

The voice at the other end of the phone insisted that she needed it, even when I insisted that I’d never been asked for it before. That’s OK, I was told, you can pay with cash.

I was starting to get a bit fed up by then, and said I’d cancel my order as I didn’t have the cash and wasn’t going to give them the security code. I hung up.

While looking for another menu, the takeaway called back and said they could take my order without the code. I could sign the slip at the door. Strangely enough, this is precisely what they’d asked me to do previously.

So what was all that insisting that I gave them my security code about? I hope nothing fraudulent was afoot.