'ONE OF THE VERY NICEST THINGS ABOUT LIFE IS THE WAY WE MUST REGULARLY STOP WHATEVER IT IS WE ARE DOING AND DEVOTE OUR ATTENTION TO EATING'

Luciano Pavarotti




READING:

Bombay - or Mumbai as we are now supposed to call it - is a huge city with a vast population nearly half of whom live in slums. The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar is set in Bombay and the two women who are the central characters epitomise the contradictions to be found there.

Sera Dubash is a Parsi widow who lives in a spacious, modern appartment. Bhima is her servant, for over 20 years she has worked for Sera and her family, cleaning their home, shopping at the market, preparing food, and although neither of them would ever acknowledge it, a bond of trust and a sort of friendship has grown between them.

Despite her comfortable life, Sera has had a difficult married life with an unpredictably violent husband and the mother-in-law from hell. Since her husband's death her adored daughter and charming son-in-law have moved in with her and she is beginning to enjoy life.

Bhima on the other hand lives a life that is almost unimaginable for anyone living in the west. She has a room nearby which she shares with her teenaged granddaughter Maya, for whom she would sacrifice everything she has. Maya is attending college and Bhima hopes that her education will enable them to escape the slums, where they have little privacy, no running water, and have to share the most primitive of communal latrines. But something happens to Maya which puts a strain on Bhima, and eventually it reaches a crisis point which fractures the relationship between herself and Sera.

The lives of the two women are told in flashback and the reader slowly becomes aware of the events that have formed their lives into what they are today, what divides them and what brings them together. Sera and Bhima are both strong in their different ways, but it seems that even in modern India the accidents of birth, class and cultural traditions still shape a woman's life more than anything else.

A really interesting and absorbing book which was both informative about contemporary Indian life and a moving story of two individuals.

Rated 5*



RANTING:

I thought we were supposed to be in the middle of the worst economic recession known to man; banks are collapsing, house sales are stagnant, the unemployment rate is rising rapidly and the news media are lambasting us with doom and gloom, local councils are warning us that rates will have to rise and services will have to be cut.

And in the midst of all this, how does Leicestershire County Council decide to spend £6000 of rate payers' money?
Fitting sophisticated Satellite Navigation Systems to 14 of the council's lawnmowers.

I'll just repeat that.
They have spent six thousand pounds fitting Sat Navs to fourteen lawnmowers.

I know, I know, you couldn't make it up.

Apparently the council employees who use the lawnmowers to keep the parks, fields, road verges and other public open spaces trim and tidy have been complaining that they might get lost in the long grass.
Have they been cutting the grass or smoking it?

I have steam coming out of my ears....I think I should go and lie down until I have become calm again.




RECIPE:

The Scotch Egg has got a reputation for being one of the worst examples of take-away fast food which is such a shame as a proper Scotch Egg is perfect for picnics, padkos, and packed lunches. There is no comparison between a home made Scotch Egg and the horrible, orange-crumbed travesties that are produced commercially and which can be found in the chiller cabinets of supermarkets, motorway service shops, not to mention cafés and pubs up and down the land.

Nobody seems to know where the name comes from, but Fortnum & Mason's,
the Queen's grocers in Piccadilly claim to have invented them in 1851. Maybe they did, but I suspect that the recipe had been around for quite a while, probably in Scotland, and so F&M called them Scottish Eggs. Anyway, whatever their history, they are a doddle to make and apart from vegetarians everyone seems to like them, particularly children.

You can add any number of things to the sausage meat to change the flavours. I've had SEs with crumbled Stilton or finely diced black pudding added to the mix, not to mention chili and herbs. The one thing you MUST have is good ingredients; top-quality sausage meat (or buy the best available sausages and slip the skins off), fresh free-range eggs, and proper toasted breadcrumbs are all essential. Although they are usually made with hen's eggs, you can also make dinky little ones for canapes if you use quail eggs. Serve them hot with homemade tomato sauce and mashed potato, or cold with chutney and salad

SCOTCH EGGS
Makes 4 large ones

5 large free-range eggs (4 for the SEs and one for coating)
450g good quality sausage meat
3 spring onions
1 tablespoon finely chopped parsley
1 heaped teaspoon finely chopped herb of your choice ( chives, thyme or sage)
A good pinch of ground mace
3 tablespoons plain flour
Salt and pepper
Dry breadcrumbs for coating
Sunflower oil for frying

Put four of the eggs into a saucepan, cover with cold water and bring to the boil, then simmer for exactly 9 minutes. Remove the eggs and plunge into cold water.

Finely chop the spring onions, and add them to the sausage meat together with the chopped herbs, mace and some salt and pepper. Use your hands to mix everything together really well then divide the mixture into four and make into patties.
Put the flour onto a plate and season with salt and pepper.
Break the remaining egg onto a plate and beat lightly with a fork.
Tip a good quantity of breadcrumbs onto a plate and spread out.

Shell the eggs and roll each one in the seasoned flour then wrap a patty of sausage meat round it, stretching it and pinching any gaps together so that the egg is evenly covered. Then roll it in the beaten egg and finally roll it in the breadcrumbs pressing them on gently so that it is completely covered.

Put about 5 cms of the oil in a deep casserole or saucepan and heat until a small piece of bread goes brown within a minute of being dropped in it. Carefully add the SEs and fry in the hot oil for about 6-7 minutes, turning them often until they are evenly brown.
Remove from the oil and drain on kitchen paper towel.

SORRY, SORRY, SORRY - the last few weeks have been hectic to say the least, what with moving house and a full-on calendar of other commitments, I'm afraid the blog has been sadly
neglected, apologies all round.

In a couple of days time I'm off to China for a fortnight, but hope to blog from there as I am taking my latest toy, a small but perfectly formed notebook made by Dell.



READING:

Ruth Rendell is one of Britain’s most prolific and popular authors, in the four decades since I read her first book she has published a further 57 titles, 45 under her own name (21 of which feature her detective creation Wexford and the fictious town of Kingsmarkham), and 13 under her pseudonym Barbara Vine. (to learn more about Ruth Rendell, click here.)

I hadn’t read anything by her for a year or two and decided it was more than time to pick up one of her recent books. In 2006 she published The Water’s Lovely as Ruth Rendell, When she writes as Vine the novels are often multilayered, darker and explore the impact that chance or coincidence has on her characters.

Ismay and Heather are sisters who share a flat in what was once the family house; their elderly mother Beatrice, who has dementia, lives in the flat above them cared for by her sister Patricia. Thirteen years previously, when Ismay and Heather were in their early teens, their stepfather Guy was found drowned in his bath.

Ismay has always thought that Heather drowned him in order to protect her from Guy’s sexual attentions, and has worried whether she should have been complict with her mother in covering her sister’s crime.

Now both young women are working and in serious relationships, but the past continues to cast a long shadow, and threatens their lives.

As always Ruth Rendell has created some memorable characters, and in this book are three of the most compellingly selfish people you could imagine. Andrew, Ismay’s boyfriend, is a truly nasty piece of work. He treats Ismay with contempt and reduces her to abject misery. Heather’s fiancée Edmund has a mother, Irene, who is the most hysterical hypochondriac, using her imagined illnesses to try and control Edmund. Marion Melville, one of Irene’s friends, is a character worthy of Dickens. A manipulator par excellence, she visits several elderly people for entirely selfish reasons and it is through her unwittingly amoral behaviour that Guy’s death comes back to haunt the sisters.

Rendell excels at the psychological crime novel and this is no exception, though I did think it was much more in the style of Barbara Vine, and I am surprised she published it under that name.

Rated 4*

RANTING:

There are times when I begin to wonder what country I am living in, and now is one of those times….am I living in Britain, or East Germany before the collapse of the Berlin Wall ? We are being turned slowly but surely in to a nation that spies on one another, reports one another (sometimes anonymously) to the “authorities” for perceived minor infractions of civil or criminal law.

You may wonder why I am getting all hot under the collar about this today, read on and you may become hot under the collar too.

Lincoln City Council has decided that all council employed plumbers and electricians are to be given training in spotting child abuse, so that when they are in someone’s home to fix a wonky pipe or re-wire an electrical circuit they can spy on the family and report back to Social Services if they think that children may have been abused.

Child abuse is a horrible thing, it harms children and their families. The term is wide ranging, and includes neglect, emotional, physical and sexual abuse. It is by its very nature hidden, and difficult to spot even for experts. Just having an accusation of child abuse made, rightly or wrongly, can tear a family apart and do lasting damage which may echo down the generations.
I say this as one who, after 20+ years in the Family Courts, dealt with more cases of child abuse than I care to remember.

To expect handymen (or women) to be able to diagnose children as abused or in danger of abuse after a week or two’s training, when they are busy working on the job of plumbing or wiring is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard of.

No it’s worse than that, it is very dangerous and just plain wrong. What on earth do Lincoln Council think they are doing?

The chance of false allegations will be very high; and if a plumber unblocks a sink in Family A’s kitchen and doesn’t report anything, does that mean that all is ticketty-boo and the kids are fine? Does it hell, it means absolutely nothing.

There used to be a good old English phrase “Mind your own business” and the business of plumbers is plumbing, not spying for social services.

I hope that the people of Lincoln rise up and stop this outrageous plan.

RECIPE:

Adjusting to a new kitchen takes time - in the first place you have to remember where you have put everything as you unpacked box after box, and then the regular way you move between sink, stove/oven, fridge etc seems awkward and unfamiliar.
Waiting for the plumber to come and sort out the boiler a few days ago, meant a working lunch had to be re-scheduled from a restaurant to being here in the new house, and the menu was dependent on what I had available. -Some frozen Canadian scallops (which are a really useful thing to have in the freezer, they should not be defrosted before cooking and taste delicious), a packet of Puy lentils, and a small Savoy cabbage provided the basis for a really tasty main course which I will be making again.
Puy lentils are the only lentils which have an A.O.C. (Appellation d'Origine Controlée ), they are small, grey-brown in colour and do not require pre-soaking.

SCALLOPS WITH LENTILS & CABBAGE

Serves 4

400g frozen Canadian scallops
250g Puy lentils
1 onion, finely chopped
200g bacon lardons
2 teaspoons lemon juice
Salt and pepper
1 small Savoy cabbage, finely shredded
1 heaped tablespoon finely chopped flat leaf parsley
Olive oil
2 teaspoons soy sauce

Place the lentils in a saucepan and cover with about ½ litre of boiling water, cook for about 20 minutes until the lentils are soft. Drain and set aside.

In a frying pan sauté the lardons until beginning to brown slightly then add the chopped onion and continue cooking, stirring regularly, until the onion is translucent, add the drained lentils and mix together; add the lemon juice and season to taste. Set aside.

The lentils can be prepared to this stage well in advance, even the day before, and then re-heated in a pan or microwave prior to serving.

Heat a splash of olive oil in a shallow pan, and when very hot add the shredded cabbage, stir-fry for a few moments before adding enough water to moisten it, keep cooking for a minute or two until the cabbage is softened but still has a little bite to it. Stir in the soy sauce and the chopped parsley. Set aside but keep warm.

Heat a frying pan until very hot, add a splash of olive oil and then the frozen scallops. Cook for 6-7 minutes each side until soft, cooked through and golden brown.
Place a ring of the cooked cabbage on each plate, and heap some of the lentils in the centre. Carefully place about 5-6 scallops on top of the lentils and serve immediately with crusty bread.

A SO-CALLED FRIEND SENT ME THIS LINK THE OTHER DAY, I need help, I think I've become addicted, I've wasted so much time, its worse than Sudoku. And, no, I haven't got a clue why its called coldtomatoes.

READING:

Set in Nigeria during the 1960s Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has a much darker and more serious story to tell than ‘Purple Hibiscus’ her first book which I and many other readers thoroughly enjoyed. At first I found it hard to get into the book, but little by little, as I got to know the main characters, I was drawn in and became totally absorbed.

The background to the story is the complex political situation in newly independent Nigeria which gave rise to a civil war that the west called the Biafran War, following the attempt by a part of the country to secede and form an independent state.

Adichie has skilfully pointed up the various ethnic divisions between the Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa tribal groups within Nigeria, divisions which come to have a bloody significance as coup and counter-coup lead to all-out war, a war in which starvation was deliberately used as a weapon. The war is very much seen from the point-of-view of the Igbo people – the author being an Igbo whose parents survived the war.

The story is told from the perspectives of three characters; Uwugu, a young country lad who comes to be houseboy to Odenigbo, a famous Nigerian academic - a maths lecturer in a university town in the part of Nigeria which attempts to become the independent state of Biafra; Olanna, the UK educated daughter of a wealthy nouveau riche Nigerian couple who is in love with Odenigbo and goes to live with him; and Richard, a young Englishman who is in love with Kainene the non-identical twin sister of Olanna, and who is writing a history of the war. Around these three individuals are a larger cast of characters who impact on them in various ways.

My knowledge of the peoples of Nigeria and the political history of the country was extremely limited, so apart from anything else this book provided me with a rough and ready lesson. This book is about civil war from the perspective of a handful of individuals who are caught up in it. Above all, however, this is a book about love, loyalty, betrayal, family relationships and friendships, how these are changed by war and how ordinary people manage to cope during really dangerous and frightening times. Numerous books have been set against the backdrop of the two world wars in Europe and the Far East, but very few as this one set against a modern war, a war in Africa, waged by Africans.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is still a young woman, she is not yet 30, and she has already written two absolutely brilliant books set in her home country; I think she will become considered one of the great African authors of the 21^st Century. This book has been long-listed for the 2007 Orange Prize, and seriously deserves to win.

Rated: 4*

RANTING:

Sometimes I could scream – this country is being strangled with thousands of rules and regulations, and petty officialdom loves nothing better than implementing them, even when their interpretation of the regulations is manifestly nonsense.

During the winter months the coast of England is often battered with gales and recently Arthur Bulmen who lives by the sea front in the Lancashire coastal town of Fylde found that nearly seven tonnes of sand had been blown off the beach and into his front garden. It had also blown all over the roads and pavements. The local borough council were busy trying to get the sand removed from the highways and back to where it belonged. Mr Bulmen, being a decent sort of chap (79 years old, retired bank manager) got busy filling his wheelbarrow with the sand from in front of his house, wheeling it across the road and dumping it back on the beach. So what do the cretins who constitute Fylde Council do? they threaten to prosecute him for fly-tipping.

Now YOU know what fly-tipping is, I know what fly-tipping is, and I don’t think that returning sand to a beach fits into that category. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
A Fylde Council spokesperson said:
"The sand is actually part of the Queen's Crown estate,
which owns most of the foreshore around our coasts.
This year has seen an exceptional problem with wind-blown sand.
We have been cleaning up since Christmas.
But the council has no responsibility to clear sand
or any other debris from private land.
The owner must do this."
They also said that anything removed from a garden and dumped on the beach constitutes fly-tipping which is a criminal offence and must be prosecuted. Even when it is the same beach sand that they themselves are scraping off the road in front of Mr Bulmer’s house and putting back on the beach. He should employ a specialist waste disposal firm who will put it in a designated waste tip (which would cost him approximately £500).

What truly ridiculous state of affairs – what has happened to common sense?

RECIPE:
Tonight I am going to a Hen Party, a Hen Party which is being held in a beauty salon! The bride-to-be is a delightful young woman from Ecuador, and next weekend she is marrying a lad who comes from White River in Mpumalanga. I have been asked to provide something South African for everyone to try, and I thought that there could be nothing better, nor more typical, than the ubiquitous alcoholic milkshake that appears on menus up and down South Africa. So I have packed up my blender, a pack each of coloured drinking straws and plastic tumblers, ice cream and Kahlua in a coolie bag, and a packet of cocktail umbrellas for suitably gaudy decoration and I'm off to enjoy myself sipping a Dom Pedro whilst having either a facial or a manicure What a great plan for an all female pre-wedding bash.

DOM PEDRO
Serves 2

4 scoops (300ml) good quality vanilla ice cream
4 shots liquor of your choice (I use Kahlua but you can use Tia Maria, Amarula or whiskey - in fact you could probably use just about alcohol of your choice)
4 tablespoons double cream.

Whiz all ingredients together in a blender until just mixed (don’t over blend). Pour into two tall glasses and serve with straws for sipping.

WARNING: Do NOT drive after drinking one of these!