And four, four, four for my headaches
Jan. 24th, 2005 11:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ventaOn Friday, I had one of the nicest meals I've had in ages.
"What a meal to serve someone", Angi said after we'd eaten. "Prunes and liver."
Not together, you understand. The liver was by prior arrangement - we'd been talking some time ago about how wonderful liver is, and how people are foolish not to like it. I'm used to casseroled liver, done in thick gravy with lots of onions. Which is lovely - and a very cheap meal, to boot.
Firday's liver, however, was cut into small strips and flash fried in red wine and peppercorns. The result was wonderfully rich, while the quick cooking meant that the meat was almost the consistency of paté. And creamy mashed potato with lots of mustard, and vegetables. Apparently the liver is a vintage Delia Smith recipe (the chapter of the book which contains it is enticingly titled Offal), but it certainly wouldn't have seemed out of place on the menu of a trendy restaurant.
The prunes arrived by way of a dessert - ice cream, served with a generous helping of prunes in armagnac. Apparently cooking the prunes is a slow and complicated process involving a very large pan and a very large quantity of armagnac. I'm not a big fan of spirits, and often find fruit-in-x to be rather overpoweringly alcoholic. These, however, were great - plump, smiley prunes that were nicely flavoured - and a little tipsy, but no more.
Both of these are recipes I must acquire, either by asking Angi nicely or raiding her kitchen when she's not looking. Either way, Angi gets to be Designated Hero of the Week for providing wonderful food and driving me down and up the country.
Once we'd eaten we were on the road to Canterbury, heading away for a weekend to celebrate a birthday.
As fourth birthday parties go, it was pretty decadent. I don't imagine many fifth years are entered into with quite so much champagne, red wine, and chocolate cake.
However, this weekend Boojum was four. The idea was conceived in late 2000, and in January 2001 we first met up in a church basement in Sheffield. Some of the team members didn't know each other, none of us had danced together before, though we all belonged to other teams. We spent one day frantically pooling knowledge, hammered out a rapper sword dance between us, and went our separate ways. A few months later, having organised a costume by mail and telephone calls, we met again in Sheffield, practiced during the day, and went out on a dancing tour of the pubs in the evening with Snark. (It surprises me that Snark don't have a web page. They're a blokes rapper team formed a number of years ago - when a female team was formed on the same principles, we discovered that several of us had independently mentally named the new team Boojum.)
Since our first outing in 2001, we've developed a hit-and-run attitude to dancing. The seven Boojum dancers are scattered between Canterbury and North Shields (Tyne & Wear), and only meet up four or five times a year. We meet for a weekend at a time: practising all day Saturday, and sometimes Sunday morning, and going on a "tour" on Saturday night. A tour is very similar to a pub crawl in all senses - except you dance in each pub as well. In the spare time between, we drink a prodigious quantity of red wine.
In the four years, we've danced at a bunch of UK folk festivals, and at one big sword event in New York. We're hoping to travel to Boston, Mass., in the Autumn as the guests of Orion Sword (who also don't seem to have a website - grr), and have prospective bookings written in up til 2007. It's not always a relaxing hobby, but it's mine and I love it.
With a view to heading to Boston, we were working on the idea of polishing up some other party pieces - although we have three dances (this is a lot for a rapper team, many have only one) that still doesn't leaves us easily able to fill a 20-25 minute slot. Americans don't seem to have pubs, as such, so we end up out of our natural habitat, and having to put on small stage shows and the like. Two of the other Boojums and our Tommy are very fine clog dancers - I'm lagging some way behind but if I can get the practice in, I'll be able to join in some stuff. They, wearing Boojum's black costume, have plain black clogs, and look very smart. Being a rebel, I have extremely funky bright purple clogs with celtic knotwork across the toes - they're great, they're unique, and they very much aren't going to fit in very well.
Now, it just so happens that the owner of the house in Canterbury where we were staying (and the husband of one of the other Boojums) is one of the very, very few professional clogmakers left in the country. I've known Trefor all my life, and have always worn clogs he's made - he even, when I first got into New Model Army, tolerantly made me a pair of eight-hole black boots with wooden soles.
So, I asked - how was his waiting list, could he knock me up a pair of black clogs before we headed out to Boston ? Yes, he could, once he'd cleared the four month backlog of orders. So, before I left on Sunday, he drew round my feet. Just an outline - put your foot on a piece of A4, and draw round it with a pencil. He took two measurements across each foot, and wrote them down to the nearest eighth of an inch with a note that I have narrow heels. He scrawled across the piece of paper "Liz, for Boston".
And that's enough. Some time before Autumn I will get a pair of black, hand-made, made-to-measure clogs. Trefor might post them. More likely he'll hand them to someone, who's going to see someone else, who'll take them to an Oxford ceilidh, and give them to someone from my other rapper team to pass on, or something like that.
I think Trefor is actually the only clogmaker in the UK who produces 100% handmade clogs (the others use machine-made wooden soles at least). Occasionally, I worry that he'll be the last. If the bottom falls out the IT industry, I wonder if he'd like an apprentice ?
"What a meal to serve someone", Angi said after we'd eaten. "Prunes and liver."
Not together, you understand. The liver was by prior arrangement - we'd been talking some time ago about how wonderful liver is, and how people are foolish not to like it. I'm used to casseroled liver, done in thick gravy with lots of onions. Which is lovely - and a very cheap meal, to boot.
Firday's liver, however, was cut into small strips and flash fried in red wine and peppercorns. The result was wonderfully rich, while the quick cooking meant that the meat was almost the consistency of paté. And creamy mashed potato with lots of mustard, and vegetables. Apparently the liver is a vintage Delia Smith recipe (the chapter of the book which contains it is enticingly titled Offal), but it certainly wouldn't have seemed out of place on the menu of a trendy restaurant.
The prunes arrived by way of a dessert - ice cream, served with a generous helping of prunes in armagnac. Apparently cooking the prunes is a slow and complicated process involving a very large pan and a very large quantity of armagnac. I'm not a big fan of spirits, and often find fruit-in-x to be rather overpoweringly alcoholic. These, however, were great - plump, smiley prunes that were nicely flavoured - and a little tipsy, but no more.
Both of these are recipes I must acquire, either by asking Angi nicely or raiding her kitchen when she's not looking. Either way, Angi gets to be Designated Hero of the Week for providing wonderful food and driving me down and up the country.
Once we'd eaten we were on the road to Canterbury, heading away for a weekend to celebrate a birthday.
As fourth birthday parties go, it was pretty decadent. I don't imagine many fifth years are entered into with quite so much champagne, red wine, and chocolate cake.
However, this weekend Boojum was four. The idea was conceived in late 2000, and in January 2001 we first met up in a church basement in Sheffield. Some of the team members didn't know each other, none of us had danced together before, though we all belonged to other teams. We spent one day frantically pooling knowledge, hammered out a rapper sword dance between us, and went our separate ways. A few months later, having organised a costume by mail and telephone calls, we met again in Sheffield, practiced during the day, and went out on a dancing tour of the pubs in the evening with Snark. (It surprises me that Snark don't have a web page. They're a blokes rapper team formed a number of years ago - when a female team was formed on the same principles, we discovered that several of us had independently mentally named the new team Boojum.)
Since our first outing in 2001, we've developed a hit-and-run attitude to dancing. The seven Boojum dancers are scattered between Canterbury and North Shields (Tyne & Wear), and only meet up four or five times a year. We meet for a weekend at a time: practising all day Saturday, and sometimes Sunday morning, and going on a "tour" on Saturday night. A tour is very similar to a pub crawl in all senses - except you dance in each pub as well. In the spare time between, we drink a prodigious quantity of red wine.
In the four years, we've danced at a bunch of UK folk festivals, and at one big sword event in New York. We're hoping to travel to Boston, Mass., in the Autumn as the guests of Orion Sword (who also don't seem to have a website - grr), and have prospective bookings written in up til 2007. It's not always a relaxing hobby, but it's mine and I love it.
With a view to heading to Boston, we were working on the idea of polishing up some other party pieces - although we have three dances (this is a lot for a rapper team, many have only one) that still doesn't leaves us easily able to fill a 20-25 minute slot. Americans don't seem to have pubs, as such, so we end up out of our natural habitat, and having to put on small stage shows and the like. Two of the other Boojums and our Tommy are very fine clog dancers - I'm lagging some way behind but if I can get the practice in, I'll be able to join in some stuff. They, wearing Boojum's black costume, have plain black clogs, and look very smart. Being a rebel, I have extremely funky bright purple clogs with celtic knotwork across the toes - they're great, they're unique, and they very much aren't going to fit in very well.
Now, it just so happens that the owner of the house in Canterbury where we were staying (and the husband of one of the other Boojums) is one of the very, very few professional clogmakers left in the country. I've known Trefor all my life, and have always worn clogs he's made - he even, when I first got into New Model Army, tolerantly made me a pair of eight-hole black boots with wooden soles.
So, I asked - how was his waiting list, could he knock me up a pair of black clogs before we headed out to Boston ? Yes, he could, once he'd cleared the four month backlog of orders. So, before I left on Sunday, he drew round my feet. Just an outline - put your foot on a piece of A4, and draw round it with a pencil. He took two measurements across each foot, and wrote them down to the nearest eighth of an inch with a note that I have narrow heels. He scrawled across the piece of paper "Liz, for Boston".
And that's enough. Some time before Autumn I will get a pair of black, hand-made, made-to-measure clogs. Trefor might post them. More likely he'll hand them to someone, who's going to see someone else, who'll take them to an Oxford ceilidh, and give them to someone from my other rapper team to pass on, or something like that.
I think Trefor is actually the only clogmaker in the UK who produces 100% handmade clogs (the others use machine-made wooden soles at least). Occasionally, I worry that he'll be the last. If the bottom falls out the IT industry, I wonder if he'd like an apprentice ?
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no subject
Date: 2005-01-24 11:31 pm (UTC)Glad you had a good time- now please encourage
no subject
Date: 2005-01-24 11:37 pm (UTC)The book, incidentally, is no longer in my possession, and hasn't been since before Christmas. You should Have Words with people who don't pass books on when requested.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-24 11:50 pm (UTC)Weird goings on with dancing holds fine appeal- I was a keen Cornish dancer back in the day and know my West Cornwall floral dance better than most! None of that Helston Dance malarky for us!
The fact its in a Pub is a far greater appeal..heck, what d'you think us students do? Work or something? We leave that to the smart bods at Oxbridge! The White Hart is a fave with a crowd of my friends too, but not been in a while since they keep all doing unhelpful things like graduating while I merrily flit between subjects with no intentions of joining the Real World.
Rest of the City- We've a big off Cathedral thing thats kinda popular..some bloke wrote stuff about travelling there..the odd ruined castle, a ver old Abbey, and history and things. Even a *shudder* Rupert Bear & Bagpuss museum..
People Who Do Pass On Books When Requested now has the read and returned book with appreciative note included in safe keeping. Said People also claim Canterbury hasn't a lot going for it. But then, they'd be wrong as
no subject
Date: 2005-01-25 10:46 am (UTC)Blimey - I'm not even sure I've ever seen such a thing. In that case I shall cease worrying about looking like quite so much of a weirdo.
I just thought of the Helston Furry Dance. You know, lots of Furries, pottering about in circles... er, maybe not.
I saw the cathedral from afar, but beyond noting that it looked kind of pretty and spiky didn't form much of an opinion. A Bagpuss museum ? Good grief.
People Who Do Pass On Books When Requested
Oops, I misunderstood. I shall apologise for malignation (is that a word?) and go collect it back at some point.