Observations from a Hill

OK - as promised, Chicken Handi, or chicken in a pot, although this pot is French and oval, but there you go: it's a good pot, and very Hand[i]y, too. I pretty much followed the recipe/receipt/modus operandi on the spice mix packet, just to see if I could learn anything [new] about cooking South-Asian-style food: you're never too old to learn new tricks; something I firmly believe of dogs, too.  Anyhow, the experiment of actually following instructions in cooking anything- as you'll no doubt know is an unusual state of affairs for me - has actually borne some good fruit in this case. A fine sauce with an authentic consistency, and as I'd surmised, with the natural sweetness of the onion base to the fore and balancing the acidity of the tomatoes to boot; this was as close to my Holy Grail of South Asian sauce-making as I've got in forty-odd years of cooking. I will add that the spice-mix that came in the packet with the recipe is tailored to a spice-loving palate, so

  The astute, and more importantly, observant among you will note, quite rightly, that the above picture is - indeed emphatically - not a pot of Chicken Handi. I floated this micro-project a couple of days ago and I have, in fact cooked the thing, but as we'd been over to The Bull in Biwmaris [Beaumaris] for our usual light lunch, neither of us felt like tucking into a rich curry for supper this evening. So the thing will sit and improve overnight for consumption tomorrow. Pictured is my repast this evening: an open toastie of good ham topped with grilled, melted cheddar, on thick, sliced white bread - which I consider to be the ideal base for such a sandwich, where the meat and cheese are the centrepiece, not the bread. I'll post a pic of the curry and tasting notes tomorrow...

Well, there we are then: another good one down. Herbie Flowers: bassist, tuba-player and creator of some of the most iconic bass-lines ever to grace the airwaves; most memorable for many of my generation being the ineffable backbone to Lou Reed's 'Walk on the Wild Side', which needs no explanation, elucidation or explication, musical triumph that it was. Flowers played on so many studio sessions and supplied the groove to so many bands in his time, but to me the Wild Side bass-line was the apotheosis of cool, treading the fine line of simultaneously being both firmly in, and subtly slightly out of the pocket of the groove; a genius interplay between the double-tracked string and electric bass parts which Flowers himself penned and which elevated a good Lou Reed tune to the truly great piece of work that was released in 1972, from Reed's album of that year, 'Transformer'; produced by David Bowie, with whom Flowers also collaborated on numerous occasions. As a ses

Pictured, the pressure cooker we picked up from a charity shop some time ago - new and unused, by the look of it - and which has languished, unused since purchase, in various locations about Fairview Heights since. Which is just plain weird, as back in our early days here in the parish of Llanllechid, we were avid users of this splendid cooking aid: we used to own a splendid French device that resembled a pressure vessel from some kind of submarine, crafted from aluminium so thick it could have been a deep-sea submersible in its own right. Wonderful piece of kit, which I suspect is currently buried in the Twilight Zone that is our erstwhile garage, down the hill. Must try and rescue and refurbish it some day. Anyway, we made first use of the more modern version shown the other day, to make a chilli. We'd forgotten how easy these things make doing this kind of nosh: you can even - as we used to back in our food-co-op days of the early eighties - cook dried pulses such as chickpeas a

  After last night's brief reflection on inspiration, or the lack of it, I got the idea for tonight's little scribble from messing around with something in the studio earlier today, involving Meccano. I was just mocking up a mechanism to better visualise whether it would suit my purpose - which it didn't, and I should have known better - with some old Meccano parts that I've got lying around the place. These bits came from the clearance of Aunt Lou's place [blog posts passim] and almost certainly belonged to her late son, David, who died in his forties. Now, this led me to reflect on my Meccano set, which Dad gave to me in around 1959 or 60, when I was around five or six years old. I'd got it into my head over the years that the set I had was a number five, but seeing some images of old catalogues online, I realised that it must have been at the very least a number eight set, as, in the illustration above, from a Meccano magazine of the time. The tower crane fea

'It is a most remarkable thing. I sat down with the intention of writing something clever and original; but for the life of me I can't think of anything clever and original - at least, not at this moment.' Not my words, obviously, but those of the great Jerome K. Jerome; he of 'Three Men in a Boat' fame, in his first observational open epistle in a splendid little book entitled 'The Idle Thoughts of An Idle Fellow: A Book For An Idle Holiday', published in 1890. Now the sentiment of blank page syndrome he expresses so eloquently applies to me most afternoons/evenings as I wonder what the beejesus to scribble for the day's post. Sometimes I've already cooked up a notion for a post in advance, or on rare occasions will have written most or all of it the day before - the ideal situation - but for the most part there's much head-scratching to be done before an idea comes to me. I guess the idle fellow in this case would be me, and tonight the idler