Celebrating International I Love Broccoli Day!!!!

Broccoli and Three Cheese Souffle

This year's celebratory dish for International I Love Broccoli Day is Broccoli and Three Cheese Souffle.  I made a test version last Sunday, to make sure that it will turn out right on Saturday, when I will celebrate properly.  Tomorrow I am unfortunately first at work and then having dinner with a friend, so can't celebrate in style and on the right date.  Of course we shall toast Brocoli Le Grand in the course of the evening tomorrow - between the starter and main course, probably.

I never made souffle before, so this was a bit of a culinary adventure for me.  I used a Delia Smith recipe, a quick google will lead you to her website and recipe.  I followed instructions carefully, except that I used cream instead of milk for a richer taste.

As you can see, it turned out very well!  My souffle dish was a little large, so the souffle didn't rise above the rim of the dish, but frankly I don't mind - I'd hate for it to overspill and make a mess of my oven.  I buttered the dish and dusted it with grated cheese, which is a new one for me - usually I use flour or breadcrumbs.

I ate the souffle with a mixed salad, and, I hate to admit this, the salad was better than the souffle!  The souffle tasted boring. Insipid.  I don't think I will make it again, but seeing as I bought this souffle dish for the occasion (£0.48 at the Animal Sanctuary Shop) I might use it to make a different type of souffle - perhaps a chocolate one?  Apparently broccoli and chocolate go well together, provided it is dark chocolate ....

So I think for Saturday's celebratory feast I shall prepare a few other broccoli-ish dishes, including some plain boiled spears with olive oil and a bit of grated nutmeg - still my favourite preparation!

Happy International I love Broccoli Day!!!!

Ingredients

Buttered dish dusted with grated Parmesan cheese

The broccoli mess inside its dish

Risen to the top!

Nice fluffy texture

Served with mixed salad

The corals, by Carl Ewald - Reve de Corail, by Annie Faivre

One of my favourite scarves is Reve de Corail by Annie Faivre.  Partly because of the gorgeous combination of red and white, but mainly because it reminds me of one of my favourite childhood stories by Carl Ewald.  I don't know whether Annie Faivre was inspired by this story, but if she wasn't she jolly well should have been!

Carl Ewald was a Danish writer who was very popular in Germany as well.  He specialised in writing stories for children which explained scientific matters in a simple way.  My favourite is The Corals.

It isn't well known in the English speaking realm, certainly I have never met anyone who knew either Carl Ewald or his stories. This is a short retelling of the story.

A long time ago and far far away there lived a little coral with its family.  But it was discontented, and wanted more than live the boring life of its large extended family - to wit, it wanted to build an island!  An island with coconut palms and a sandy beach, large enough for people to live on.  Although this idea was widely poo-pooed by all and sundry, our coral stuck to its dream, and one day took leave of the entire clan and swam away in search of a good spot on which to build an island.

When it found a likely spot, it firmly attached itself to a rock on the bottom of the ocean, and started to build up a layer of calcium carbonate.  But it soon realised that building an island was a big job for one tiny coral!  But did it give up its dream?  Not this coral!  Instead it asked whatever sea creature it could press into its service to spread the word that it was building a new island and needed other corals to come and help.

And such was the power of its dream, and its eloquent persuasiveness, that soon lots of other tiny corals settled nearby and joined its island-making activities.  After a while, alas, the founder coral died.  But its dream lived on!  One generation of corals after the other worked on building that island, and whenever one was close to death it handed the dream and island-building task on to the next generation.  One generation after the other they quietly worked away, and whenever one of them was flagging they reminded each other of the dream of the first coral, which had started the whole enterprise.

And the coral reef grew ever closer to the surface of the ocean ....

Finally one day the reef was high enough to surface from the water, and everyone was terribly excited - they had build a new island!  When the island was big enough, the corals asked the waves to throw whatever plant debris floated in the water onto the island, so that it would decompose there and create soil.  The waves, being congenial fellows, happily obliged.  And soon the island began to build up some soil, and little plants began to grow, and eventually even a coconut arrived in the current, and grew into a large tree, just as the founder coral had dreamed.  And the corals continued to work on the island, making it bigger and stronger, and hoping for the arrival of some people, to complete the dream of the coral.

And one day, many many generations of corals later, a small boat landed on the island, with a woman and a man and a small child.  They looked the island over, found it to their liking, and build a little hut on it, and lived there happily ever after.

Just imagine, if a creature as tiny as a coral can build an island, what might you and I accomplish?

Can you see the little monkey on top of the teapot?

Oxford Bus Museum - motoring into Britain's past

Today I went with my old friend J to the Oxford Bus Museum, which is actually in Hanborough, a ten minute train drive away from Oxford.  J goes there four times a year, whenever he makes the long journey from the south coast of England where he lives.  He was a bus driver himself in the 1950s and later, so is full of amazing anecdotes about life on the buses.  I couldn't have asked for a better guide to the museum!

Unfortunately for my readers, I didn't take any notes, and anyway am way too exhausted after my adventurous weekend to write detailed blogposts, so you are just going to ahve to go yourself and do the best you can on your own.  I did take lots of photos, and have cut and pasted a link to the museum website, so I really do hope you will go one day.

http://www.oxfordbusmuseum.org.uk/

The museum has buses from the earliest days of bushood to the 1980s.  I even found a bus I used to commute daily to London while I was working in the City in the 1990s!  I got quite nostalgic, though in those days there was no air conditioning and the journey was seriously miserable in summer.

Also part of the museum is the Morris Motors Museum, which illustrates the work of the great car manufacturer and philanthropist William Morris.  William Morris was a truly amazing man - for example, when he heard in 1938 a plea on the radio for an iron lung he offered a part of his car factory to produce them; in total he donated 5,000 iron lungs!

http://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/collections/2013/03/07/the-man-behind-the-motor-william-morris-and-the-iron-lung/

The museum also runs tours in old buses on certain days, and we were lucky!  After having spend some time looking over the museum, and having a cup of tea and toasted teacakes at the cafeteria, which looks rather like the ones that were used by bus drivers in the olden days - they even have black toilet seats, haven't seen one of those in ages! - we took a little jaunt around Oxfordshire in a bus from the 1950s.  It did rather rattle us about, but was most enjoyable.

All in all it was rather a wonderful trip into the past, and I liked it much better than, gasp! large museums like the Louvre or British Museum.  It is small and manageable, staffed by volunteers who are very knowledgeable and clearly love being there, and charmingly old-fashioned.  There is none of the slickness of the large museums, and certainly not the hordes of visitors one encounters elsewhere.  It is just an extremely interesting, well managed, lovely little time capsule.

The fate of all too many old buses

Old bus seat

Oxford Gloucester Green central bus station

Bus from 1013

Gas lamp

Oil lamp

Bus I used to take

I always sat behind the driver, in case they got lost or needed my advice!

Oh how I remember those seats!

New additions to the museum are refurbished by volunteers

That's what the bus looked like we took a tor in

Notice the handle to the right?  That was used to change the banner that showed where the bus was going

Very unusual Morris Band Bus - the back of the bus has a second story, for musical instruments

Inside the Morris Motors Museum

Morris made lots of different vehicles - here is a fire engine

The Iron Lung project

And here the cycle museum - some very old examples!

Children's cycles from the 1910s

Morris cars....

J's father had one of those

Complete with window wiper

This is a pick-up truck!

Gas tank in front of car ....