Greatly Honoured and Intellectual Dumplings

GREATLY HONOURED. GREATLY LOVED. GREATLY TIRED ... Greatly semi-inspired ...

Ruth has nominated me for a Thinking Blogger Award!

I can't display my medal yet because I've yet to find the html for that ...

But it's a kind of tag, and I'm to pass it on to another five so my list is coming up tomorrow.

It's another stew day. Lamb stew today! My sacreligious margarine dumplings are hubbling as I speak. (Sacreligious because if you're any kind of dumpling afficionado you will know that, to purists, beef suet is the only way to go for dumplings.) Mine, however, come out like extra-special stew bread. Remarkably soft, kind of dry in the middle (but not floury) and ... well ... like ... well, bread.

My new stew is very light on potatoes and they're quail-eggs size baby potatoes, unpeeled but sliced. They hold their shape beautifully throughout the two-to-three hour cooking process. Okra (better known to some as gumbo) I add loads of. Topped and tailed and sliced. One onion this time instead of two. One courgette. Celery salt (approx one teaspoon) in place of ordinary salt. Loads of paprike (about two teaspoons). No added chili: Jamaican curry powder instead (about one teaspoon). I add the spices to the oil that I use to brown the lamb this time, along with a little sliced garlic (no need to crush, especially if you're stewing). A can of chopped tomatoes always forms the stew base. Onto this I throw a good heaped teaspoon full of herbes de provence. Forgot Maggi liquid seasoning this time (I'm so OCD-ish about my cooking. Everything has to be a precise repeat performance of last time unless I specially break free. Then I feel so funky and groovy and liberated like I cannot explain. (That, my friends, is the sadness of OCD ...) My extra-fluffy dumplings basically form the carbs section in place of vast numbers of potatoes. I lurrve my dumplings. They go like bread and absorb all surplus water without the need to cook with the lid off on an already broiling day ...

OK: I feel an unclosed bracket - but what would be new ..?

Tomorrow I've an evil drugs management appointment where I will be grilled. Last time the doctor got all clever and probing I snapped at him "well I haven't committed suicide, have I!?" and the atmosphere of the session plunged from there from sparring into deadly serious. It annoys me that for over a year I felt that way and yet because I simply avoided saying anything it was assumed that I - a picture at the time of the walking dead - must somehow have been okay. What planet do some of these people live on? I demand to know.

Well we'll never find that one out ...

The air is greying into light blue. That coasting into late evening colour. The other day I awoke to experience intense grey rubbing against my window. Fog! I thought. No. It was merely clouds. I'd slept positioned elsewhere to my mind-map's impression of where I was, what I could see. So I was assuming I was facing the houses opposite. Actually I was looking up at a mizzling London sky. We don't get pea-souper fogs like they used to in the 1950s, when they used to burn real house coal. The smoke from this, combined with London's natural damp and fogginess produced a megatastic smog so intense on some days that the blind had to lead the sighted from tube stations across roads to the trolley-bus stands ... those were the days ...!

On that rambling note I shall have to go. Take care everyone! See yous all tomorrow ...

>pop!<

(gone)

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Tonight's blog recommendation: The Animal Advocate - doggie diaries, puppy tales ...