Do you have a Griddle? A tasty fry-up on a rainy day

Today is a bank holiday, and true to form it rained and drizzled and was pretty cold, considering it is almost summer.  I woke up with a cold nose and in a foul mood, and remained so for most of the day.  Lately my favourite breakfast restaurant has been toying with me – eggs undercooked, bacon overcooked, and no free newspapers.  So I thought, being foul-mooded, let them victimise some other fool!  I am staying at home and do something useful for a change.  I figured, given the election results, the newspapers would be dire reading, and not up-to-date anyway, so staying in with the radio seemed a good option in that that respect, too.

While in the kitchen conducting the Great British Fry-up I decided to clear it out a little – there is always too much stuff in the kitchen.  It is true that I have had several clear outs already, but I had my eyes on a particularly large milk pail and a cast iron frying pan that always has food stuck to the centre.  This latter is particularly annoying, because it is practically brand new (for a cast iron pan) – a mere 25 years ago I bought it new in a shop.  Since then I acquired several one-hundred-year-old ones, which are much better.  With iron skillets older is usually better, I find.

I had already gotten rid of a little one – what the heck, you can use a medium one just as easily – and a crepe maker – crepes can be done on my griddle! – and only had four frying pans and the griddle left.  Now that the sub-standard pan has been discarded, there are just the old medium pan, the old large pan, the new grill pan, and the griddle left.

Griddle after usage

If you are like most of my friends, you don’t have a griddle, and barely even know what it is.  Just look at the photos and you’ll see.  A griddle is basically a large slab of iron, the width of the stove, covering two burners.  Usually one side is smooth, the other for grilling.  Today I tried the grill side.  I put my egg into the little smooth round area that is on one side of the griddle, thinking it was the logical place for it, but it was a large size egg and it overflowed its allotted space.  So I won’t be doing that again!

The grilling side of the griddle

The escaping egg ....

After you turn the food over it has grilling stripes!

Griddles are great in that you have a large area to work with, bigger than two pans, so everything you need for breakfast is right there sizzling.  Hash browns are difficult to buy in these parts, so I used potato slices.  Because griddles don’t have sides, like skillets, food fries rather than cooks – the water can escape and evaporate more quickly from a griddle.

The smooth side of the griddle - lunch works, too!

I have always liked cooking with cast iron, ever since I discovered it in Oregon.  I started with a basic set of untreated iron, three pots and a skillet.  Nowadays I only use unglazed iron for frying, for pots I use the ceramic glazed variety (Le Creuset).  Unglazed iron is great if you have an iron deficiency, but the downside is that (a) everything tastes irony, which isn’t to everyone’s taste, and (b) everything looks irony – boiled potatoes, for example, take on a bluish hue …..  And keeping food in them for re-heating is a big No-No!  I still remember a lentil stew which ended up looking like car grease when it was re-heated the following day, and that was 25 years ago!

Anyway, the great thing about frying in cast iron is that cleaning is pretty minimal.  Once your pan is properly ‘seasoned’ (has acquired a glaze of fat) nothing sticks.  After usage I just brush off left over bits of food.  It is crucial to only fry, and not cook, in cast iron pans, because the cooking removes the glaze and the food start to stick to your pan again.  If after frying you do feel the need to clean it, just add a bit of salt into it and scrub with newspaper or kitchen towelling, brush the salt and dirty bits out of your pan, and it is ready to use again.  Personally, I mainly leave the griddle on the stove and use it as and when, without ever removing the grease.  With the pans I tend to remove the excess oil with a kitchen towel, because they hang over the sink and the oil drips out of them and into my sink if I don’t.

Cleaning a pan with salt

Nice and smooth after the salt clean

Using my griddle on a rainy day always brings out the Oregonian in me – Oregon is notoriously rainy, and cast iron griddles are very pioneerish and early American, and I totally bought into that aspect of American mythology.  Would you believe it, I even used to make Salt-rising Bread?  It doesn’t taste all that great, so I stopped doing it – nostalgia for someone else’s past has its limits!  I still make Watermelon-Pickle, though. 

Anyway, there I was tending my griddle and thinking pioneerish thoughts, when I remembered that I used to have a Bacon Press!  The trouble with bacon is that it goes all curly and doesn’t keep quiet in the skilled, and doesn’t fry evenly all over.  A bacon press is a heavy slab of iron which you put onto the bacon – it holds it down and also makes it cook faster.  No one uses them anymore, not in this city anyway.  What had I been thinking all those years since I left Oregon, struggling with substandard curly rashers?  Why hadn’t I bought a Bacon Press?

Don’t you just love Ebay?  Bacon presses are dirt cheap, for ten dollars or so you can buy a nice one.  It’s the postage that kills me – but never mind, one made in Washington – which is next to Oregon so not to be sneezed at – is winging its way to my humble abode soonishly.  Life is good.

By the way, bacon presses are also good for making paninis, for weighing down Hamburgers, frying thin slices of ham and steaks, and for making toasted sandwiches.  I shall try out all those things when my bacon press has arrived, especially the Woven Bacon Sandwich – I saw a photo, looks supercool! 

In case you are wondering about my breakfast literature, Ajahn Brahm is my favourite Buddhist monk.  I listen to his talks on You Tube when I feel a bit fragile …  The story ‘Who ordered this truckload of dung’ is about the man who gets a load of dung delivered to his house.  He hasn’t ordered the stuff and can’t get the deliverers to take it back, so he makes use of it by digging it into his garden, which improves dramatically afterwards.  The idea being, we all get a lot of crap dumped on us which we never ordered and don’t want, but since complaining about it isn’t going to get us anywhere we might as well use the stuff to our advantage and put in some personal growth.

A great guy, Ajahn Brahm.  I especially like his saying, don’t bother trying to get even with people who have wronged you, Karma will get the bastards anyway!  I put a link below to one of his talks, if you are interested - but if you put Ajahn Brahm You Tube into Google you'll find him easily.

My next post should be a cheerful one, I am going to Leeds Castle!!!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj98u8peZOU

Another missed exhibition – But it is nicer outside, anyway!

Last weekend I was in Paris, determined to see the exhibition of the Orient Express at the Institute of the Arab World.  Outside there were wagons to inspect, inside a collection of artefacts to view.  But my determination flew to the four corners of the world when I saw the crowds queuing at the entrance!  I hate queuing!!!

So I took a few shots of the locomotive and skedaddled.  What the hell, I’ll see it next time.  By the way, the exhibition is the opening gambit by SNCF, who plan to re-instate the Orient Express later this year.  Not sure whether they’ll get to Baghdad, but even just to Istanbul would be pretty cool.

Enjoying the sunshine next to the Seine!

Anyway, I took myself off and down the river, passing Notre Dame along the way.  And luck was with me, because while I was busy taking photos of stolen gargoyles a band struck up a merry tune, a large side door opened, and a procession of well dressed people carrying banners emerged and marched down the street.  Apparently some Grand Legume (bigshot) was visiting the cathedral, a bishop or whatnot.  It was very interesting, anyway, and all the tourists were watching transfixed, while I darted in between them taking pictures of gargoyles.

I think that counts as one of My Gay and Glamorous Life episodes!

Mutilated gargoyle of Notre Dame

Ditto

And again

Side door opens ...

Hotel Dieu is a hospital

Lost in translation

Translation is a tricky business, especially since words in different languages that denote the same thing have different emotional flavours.  Good examples are the English words Pork and Hearse – in German the words Schweinefleisch (pig-flesh) and Leichenwagen (corpse-wagon) refer to the same things, but the connotation of these words is very different.  In English the words stand on their own, they must be learned in isolation.  In German they can be derived – if you know what a pig is and what flesh is you know what pig-flesh is, and the same goes for corpse-wagon.  But unless you already know French (where Porc means pig) the word Pork means nothing to you.  Arguably the spirit behind these different choices for words is that one culture is more direct, and more comfortable with certain aspects of existence.  Using the word Pork makes it easier to think that one isn’t really eating a dead animal than using the word pig-flesh.  Actually, before the Norman take-over of England the English used the word pigmeat rather than pork. 

Even trickier than translating from one language to another is translating experiences into words.  How do I translate what my eyes see into words which I can use to share this experience with some one else?  We do this all the time, of course, but deep down we know very well that our words are a very poor reflection of reality.  No matter how carefully the words are chosen, reading a menu is only a pale reflection of eating what is on the menu.  Even if we enlist the aid of pictures, or evocative scents, or appropriate music, we cannot re-create an experience adequately.  As Wittgenstein said, all we can do is guide someone else along a certain path, so s/he can have the same experience that we have had.

But even that is unsatisfactory.  Even if you see the same sunset that I see, your sensory experience, and your emotional response to it, might be very different from mine.  I will never forget the story of the tourist who admired a group of rugged pine trees that stood on an inaccessible mountain ridge high above the Yellow River, and remarked to an ancient local man how much he envied him this beautiful view.  Beautiful? replied the local man.  That isn’t beautiful at all!  It is impossible to get at!  Beautiful to the local man meant useful, and since he couldn’t get at the trees and cut them down and use them for firewood he thought them ugly and useless.  The tourist and the local looked at those picturesque trees from different perspectives, and even though they saw the same thing they interpreted it completely differently.

So is it ever possible to truly share an experience with someone else?  Indeed, is it even possible to share an experience with oneself?  Often when we re-visit a past experience it seems very different to us than it was the previous time.  We see / eat / smell / touch the same thing but our emotional response is completely different.  Or so it seems to us, because in fact we don’t really know.  We are comparing a memory with a reality, and never know how accurately the memory corresponds to the experience which occasioned it.  So I don’t think it is possible to compare experiences in any meaningful way, not with oneself and certainly not with others.  Is my toothache today worse than my stomachache from last week, or my headache last year?  Is my toothache worse than your toothache? 

And why try to compare these things anyway, why does it matter whose toothache is worst, and whether your enjoyment of a sunset is similar to my enjoyment of a sunset?  I think it matters because it helps to dispel our existential loneliness.  As long as we think that other people see / taste / hear / feel / emotionally respond in the same way to the same experiences, we can maintain the illusion that we are not alone, not just isolated creatures haunting the vast memory caverns of our own skulls, surrounded by others who are ‘we know not what or who’.

Out & About in Oxford - A Gloriously Riotous Mess

I had a great morning mooching around Oxford!  The afternoon will be dedicated to gardening - yet again! but the weather is good and I had an enjoyable morning, so am ready for some heavy duty slashing & burning.  I dropped by college and picked up my post, which included my newly purchased gardening gloves.  Not the wimpish sort available in gardening centres, which are of no use whatsoever against the inch long thorns of pyracanthas, but the sort used by people who have to pick up needles and glass shards. Usually they cost £150 (yikes!) but Ebay obliged with a pair for £15 including postage, so I look forward to gardening without shredded hands for once.

Around the corner from my house is a patch of land dedicated to weeds, and it never fails to cheer me up when I pass it on my way to work or my breakfast Cafe.  A few weeks ago the dandelions dominated, this week it is buttercups.

Walking down St Clements I stop at the local grocery store for The (Manchester) Guardian and a chat with the knowledgeable grocer, then turn into the High Street, and dip into Valerie's for my currently favourate breakfast - poached eggs and smoked salmon.  You have to go early, after ten the tourists and sleepy locals arrive and the place gets crowded.

View from the window of Valerie's

After an hour or so I donate my newspaper to the next customer and slither down Cornmarket, ending up at the heart of town, St Mary Magdalen's Church.  It is surrounded by a beautiful churchyard, full of rakishly angled gravestones and flowering weeds.

The church was quite busy this morning, because the bishop is coming to visit tomorrow and everything was being prepared for his visit, so I did not stay long.

Following my nose, I meandered down St Giles and decided to pay a visit to Jericho, near where I used to live as a student, thinking I might buy some wool in a wool shop in Walton Street.  I discovered, alas, that the shop had closed down - oh well, there is always Ebay.  I did discover that St Sepulchre Cemetery was open!  I used to go there all the time, twenty years ago, and remembered it as being a glorious riot of untidy gravestones and waist-high weeds.  Well, it still is!  Buildings have sprung up all around it, but the cemetery remains as messy and disheveled as always.  Long may it remain so!

Queen Anne's Lace and Bluebells - Glories of an English Spring!

Show down at St Sepulchre!