FIRST OF ALL

Is it really necessary to put an electronic tag on a £3 block of mild cheddar?



Second of all; would anyone microwave 700g of cheese in the packet?

Soup 'en' Jazz

Once when we went to Amsterdam, we had soup from a special soup shop. It was still daytime, it was still warm, it was very delicious. Later we would sit by a canal, of course, and watch the city pass for hours and the sun set early, paralysed by fear unless the loitering ducks got ‘too flappy’ when we walked past. But for now everything was fine.

At that soup shop I bought a very interesting cookbook entitled ‘Soup en Jazz’, which has their keynote recipes for 10 soups, but which is also accompanied by a CD which has a designated track for each soup, which you must play when you are eating.

3 years passed. The ‘Soup en Jazz’ project looked like it might go the same way as Bolivian Monopoly and Rain Chime. But a serendipitous glut of beetroot came along last week, and we made borscht. You can visit Sebastian Gampert at his myspace, but his Borscht track is not available. I have asked him to put it up. A fitting track I thought, as it fits nicely into the part of the day occupied by sitting down to have a steaming bowl of soup. But it is in no way Eastern-European, which would have been disappointingly obvious anyway. I have not listened to the other tracks as I am saving them for future soup.

Transient Form, Marmite

Very recently Linz dropped a jar of Marmite on the kitchen floor. The glassy sound was absorbed by the goop within, of course, but its decisive crack was chilling, like a skull, dulled in flesh, against the lowest concrete step. We knew what had happened (the worst), when we heard that sound. Absolutely FASCINATINGLY, however, the jar, which was shattered into a million pieces, did not lose its form as it was glued together by its cannonball of sap. So we could lift it up, whole and put it in a bowl, and watch it collapse slowly over a period of half an hour. 

I wish I had had the foresight to take this picture earlier.

 

Sometimes, I wish I still smoked...

Like this time, in Istanbul.

I was sitting around on the waterfront in this ancient city, letting the air and the heat digest a good meal on my behalf. One of these golden cigarettes would have helped a lot.