February 10, 2007
Vegetarianism
Yesterday I spent a very interesting evening with a lovely vegetarian Argentinian girl who was introduced to me a few weeks ago by a mutual friend. She popped into the office bar to meet a few people as she's curious to learn about PR (despite working in public relations in its broadest sense, I'm afraid I know little about media relations, public affairs, marketing communications or many of the other disciplines within the industry, so it was better for her to speak to some of my colleagues). Judging from the reaction of some of my colleagues, I work in a particularly carnivorous environment.
Anyway, much explaining and several beers later (me, that is, as my South American guest is teetotal...) we trotted off to grab a bite to eat. There was a queue at the first place we tried, so as a fall back we asked if Dong San had vegetarian dishes.
Dong San can hardly be called a vegetarian establishment: the last time I was there, I thoroughly enjoyed raw 'beef salad with Korean pears' followed by sashimi - highly enjoyable, but not quite what we were after last night.
My Latin friend ordered 'vermicelli noodles with vegetables', so I did the same. "That's not a good idea," said the friendly, waiter "it's better if you have something different so you can share." He went on to recommend a 'beef and vegetable pancake' and a 'beef and vegetable rice hotpot', assuring us that it was absolutely no problem to make everything without the meat.
It was really, really tasty. Cheap, too, but I guess that's one advantage of not eating meat or drinking alcohol (there had to be one).
Now, I know that some of you might be worrying about the lack of protein in my diet. Well, don't. I just fried up some of the off-cuts from my butchery class and had them for breakfast. I'm taking the shoulder of lamb that I boned round to Sven and Marie-Hélène's for a late lunch/early supper after today's rugby matches. Tomorrow, I'll make a lamb curry with the fillet and I'm currently braising the rest of the meat that I brought home from the Ginger Pig.
Vegetarianism. Maybe not.
EDIT:Well, the lamb shoulder was delicious. I undid the string and stuffed it with a mixture of anchovies, garlic, capers and parsley, as described in Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's River Cottage MEAT book. Then I re-tied it while Sven prepared potatoes in goose fat and sugarsnap peas. We accompanied it all with a splendid bottle of 2000 Pomerol.
As I said, maybe vegetarianism isn't for me./EDIT
February 6, 2007
Well, I might not make a butcher...
... apart from anything else, it's hard work!
Tonight was the course that I signed up for in early December.
We watched our teachers Carl and Chris, both Kiwis who work at the Ginger Pig, 'break a lamb' before we were all chucked (literally) a shoulder to bone and truss.
Well, I didn't make too much of a hatchet job, but my shoulder was nowhere near as attractive as the ones the experts were demonstrating on. I left rather too much meat on the bones, too.
The six students worked pretty hard until it was time to taste some of the Swaledale lamb that we had been practising on - cooked at a low temperature for about 4 1/2 hours on a bed of vegetables and enjoyed over a glass of wine.
There was lots of advice about knives, whetstones and cutting styles (I found a few of the latter tricky) and lots more about cuts of lamb and ways in which to prepare them.
All told, it was four hours of fun and I have about four kilos of lamb in my fridge to boot!
It's a pig next month.
February 4, 2007
What a difference a few months makes
What a difference a few months makes, what a difference, more pertinently, a name on a team-sheet makes.
To be fair, Jonny Wilkinson wasn't the only reason for England's timely victory over Scotland's rugby team yesterday; having Brian Ashton as head coach was at least as important and the team he selected played like a unit, which just wasn't the case under his predecessor Robinson.
Anyway, the locals in the Rob Roy were pretty friendly considering they had to put up with two England shirts amongst the sea of blue (Simon and I got there early, so we had the best seats in the house) although the landlord did turn off the sound during the national anthem. After the match, he came over to have a chat and he explained that if it were a soccer match, he would have asked us to leave - for our own safety!
42 : 20, eh? Well, I'm not the only one who's glad that Jonny is back.