I love this dish, the smell fills the house when it’s in the oven. It’s also easy to prepare, although it does take a long time to cook.
We have two versions in this house, I do a slow-cooked version with cannellini beans (recipe here), Mrs S uses a pressure cooker and her recipe features oxtail soup (must be Heinz).
Both are delicious, with different textures and many common ingredients. Beef, onions, garlic, carrots for starters. I put potatoes in the stew, Mrs S does them separately. But the most important component of the stew is the dumplings.
Uncooked dumplings. You don’t need to be very rigorous getting spherical dumplings, rougher dumplings will fluff up just the same.
Dumplings are easy enough to make, as long as you use suet and self-raising flour you can’t really go wrong. A generous helping of dried herbs and chilli add some flavour. We give them 20 minutes steaming over the stew. This allows the dumplings time to swell and acquire the required soft texture and some of the flavour of the stew. It also means that some moisture from the stew is lost so the stew thickens a bit.
Dumplings done, stew ready to serve.
I’ve just noticed that there’s a very angry-looking dumpling in the middle of the picture. Just as well we ate it before anyone noticed.
There are two ‘first computers’ for me. The first one I used was when I was at Thurso High School. This was the school’s 8K Commodore PET that was available to book for lunchtime use. I was at the school from ‘81 to ‘82 before we moved to England. I don’t know that I learned very much; some programming in BASIC but no guidance, played a text adventure game and perhaps gained an awareness that computers were a thing that would feature in my future.
The second was a BBC B that was a Christmas present to the family in 1983. Transferring data and uploading was a challenge using cassette tape recorder. It could take half an hour to load games, along with the clanking racket of data transfer and you’d come back from your tea to find the load had failed. Jealous of a neighbour (an engineer) who had a floppy disc drive and he could load a game in under a minute! He’d also expanded the BBC B’s 32K RAM to an unbelievable 128K.
The power!
Having a BBC C at home was handy, because this was the machine I used for ‘O’ level computer studies. In theory I could have transferred work between school and home, but data transfer wasn’t really viable and we only did a small amount of programming during the course.
Inevitably games were played on the BBC at home, once we hooked it up to a spare telly. Elite was my favourite, a space adventure game with trading commodities and the occasional space battle. I also have fond memories of my dad playing ‘Estra’, a collect-the-pieces game that took ages to load. But while it loaded, it played ‘Entry of the Gladiators’1, which was fun.
You can play Estra here, and listen in awe to the theme music.
After O levels, I didn’t use computers much for a number of years. I first heard about email in 1990, when I was at uni in Loughborough. One of my tutors told us that he could send a message from his computer2 to a friend at Portsmouth and get a reply later that day. Much faster than letters and less intrusive than a phone call.
Mrs S and I didn’t own a computer at home until about 2000, after we had bought our first flat. The mainly so that I could work at home on my PhD. I had to run an extension line right across the flat to get dial-up internet and it was honestly easier and quicker (and possibly cheaper given the cost of phone calls back then) to take a bus up to the university (from central Bath) and get journal articles from the library than it was to try and download them at home. But I did write my thesis on it, so it served its primary objective.
I can’t remember the specs, but I do know it was quite an expensive bit of kit for us at the time. Given its cost, we shipped it over to Australia in 2003 and back again in 2005. We still have it in the loft, gathering dust and awaiting possible resurrection so I can play Quake III Arena again.
Write about a few of your favorite family traditions.
Most families have in jokes, like most friendship groups. This is why your brother is the funniest person you know, though your sister is a successful stand-up comedian. Well, maybe not your brother, but it’s a tale I’ve heard comedians tell.
Growing up, we had a few stock phrases in my family, it was usually my dad who used these. Every time someone went to the barbers:
What’s the difference between a good haircut and a bad haircut? Two weeks.
Every. Time.
I do miss him.
One he borrowed from a work colleague:
I want to see it on a concrete piece of paper.
As a family, we find it difficult to say goodbye on phone calls. Mrs S laughs when I talk to my mum, we will say goodbye and it will be another ten minutes before we hang up. When we visit, mum always stands at the door waving until we’re out of sight.
Now we have a family of our own, we have a few traditions and stock phrases. The most important one is letting people know when you’re finished in the bathroom. Lifted directly from “The Young Ones” episode Nasty.
Rik letting Neil know that he’d finished in the bathroom. Very socially responsible of him.
Bathroom’s free!
Unlike the country under the Thatcherite junta!
Over the years, the adjective for the junta has changed. It’s currently Starmerite, it has been Sunkakian, Trussite (very briefly), Johnsonian, Mayite, Carmeronion, Brownian and Blairite in its time. But the important thing is that we know the bathroom is free.
The first of March is St David’s day! Triple celebrations for us, since Mrs S is 3/4 Welsh, my first name is David and it is our oldest’s birthday.
This recipe follows the hand-written recipe Mrs S got from her gran (Mrs K) in 2007.
Mrs S did the camerawork, thanks to her for helping!
Ingredients
200 g self-raising flour
100 g margarine (“baking spread” or similar)
75 g caster sugar
75 g currants
1 or 2 tbsp milk
one egg, beaten
1/2 tsp mixed spice
Video link
Mixed spice
For the mixed spice I combined one teaspoon each of ground mace, cinnamon and allspice with half a teaspoon each of ground cloves, ginger and coriander (I couldn’t find ready-made spice mix in the shop). Nutmeg can also be added to the mix, but we only had whole nutmeg and I couldn’t be bothered to grind any. There are recipes Welsh cakes that say to use only mace, I may try that some time.
Spices used to make the spice mix for the Welsh cakes. This is not an endorsement of Sainsbury’s spices, by the way.
Method
Combine the flour and margarine in a bowl and rub together to make crumbs. This is the same procedure for making crumble for puddings, so it’s a proper life skill.
Then add the flour, caster sugar, currants and spice. Mrs K’s recipe calls for half a teaspoon, though she said it could be left out.
Mix well, then add the beaten egg and milk. Combine all these until you have a smooth dough. If the mix is too wet (as mine was), add flour until you get a good dough. Add milk if the mix is too dry.
We left the dough to settle for an hour, so the flour could absorb all the wet ingredients.
On a floured surface, roll out some of the dough mix to be about 5 mm (¼ inch) thick. Use a gauged rolling pin if you have one (I don’t). Cut out circles (a cutter is best for this), then the cakes are ready for frying.
A rolling pin with thickness gauges. If you need to roll out dough to a particular thickness, this is an excellent tool.
Frying the cakes
Traditionally a griddle would be used for frying. You can get flat griddles for induction hobs, but you may as well use a frying pan, as we did. Unless of course your oven has a built-in griddle, in which case I’m very jealous.
Like with any pan-fried cakes (eg pancakes) the pan needs some fat in it to help cook the food and also to provide extra non-stick. We used a 1:1 mix of vegetable oil and butter. If you want to be traditional about it, use lard. Don’t use a lot otherwise you could end up with a very fatty tasting cake.
In a hot pan (or on a hot griddle) fry the cakes for about a minute on each side. You will need to use judgment here, you want the cakes to be a dark brown but not burned. The cakes will swell as they cook, so make sure they cook long enough on each side for this to happen.
Frying Welsh cakes. The cakes swell during cooking, this is the self-raising flour doing its thing. The swelling means that the outside of the cakes will be crisp but there is a soft centre.
This swelling – due to the self-raising flour – combined with frying a thick piece of dough gives the cakes their double texture. The outside will be crisp and there is a lovely soft and chewy interior. A bit like an armadillo.
When they are cooked put them on a plate with a piece of kitchen towel on to absorb excess fat. Cook the whole batch; we got 12 cakes from this mix, the size of your cutter will determine how many you get.
Serving
Sprinkle with granulated sugar as a finishing touch. They are good enough to eat warm or cold. Just eat them as they are, but if you like you can put jam, honey or Nutella on them, spread some butter or thick cream on them. As a savoury alternative, pop a chunk of cheese (Caerphilly might be appropriate) on it, if you’re one of those people who likes cheese with fruit cake.
Finished Welsh cakes. We ate them with just the sprinkling of sugar. You eat them however you want, you made them after all.
Changes
Having eaten my share and discussed with Mrs S and the rest of the family, I think we will add a full teaspoon of spice to the next batch. Mrs K wasn’t one for spicy food, so her taste buds were likely more sensitive than ours.
It may well be possible to air-fry these. We don’t have an air-fryer, but if you do let me know if it’s doable.
I frequently struggle with cryptic crosswords. I don’t always (or often) finish them, but I don’t struggle enough to completely abandon all hope. The private Eye crossword is supposed to be one of the easier cryptics. The Times is the standard in difficult crosswords – they even have a Latin crossword sometimes.
The recent edition had this clue as 9 down, which was one of the rare ones I got almost immediately. The black-out is where I wrote the answer. I usually do this before I fill in a clue so that I can check that other solutions match letters.
How to solve this logically? As with all cryptics, there are two parts to the clue. One is a straight clue, the other is a riddle to get to that straight clue. Part of the fun (yes, fun) is working out which bit is the straight clue. This is usually either the first or last part of the clue, but you don’t know which and you also don’t know where the straight clue finishes and the cryptic starts.
In this case, the straight clue could be ‘Foreign’, ‘foreign minister’ or perhaps ‘is on right’. But ‘is on right’ politically, driving on the right or on the right hand?
Knowing how cryptics work after many years, the last part flags that there will be some word-building needed. The phrase ‘that is’ signals that the letters ‘ie’ will be used. ‘On the right’ means, for a down clue, that the other letters will be on top of ‘r’. So the word ends ‘ier’, and the ‘foreign minister’ is the straight clue.
The ‘scurrilous comic’ is the first part of the cryptic. Comic can mean a couple of things, it could be the name of a comedian or a paper comic. From the title of this post, you might have guessed that the word ‘viz’ is in the answer.
I first read Viz back in 1988 when I was at 6th form. Even then, it wasn’t as funny as it used to be. After a few years I stopped getting it very frequently, though my parents bought me a Viz annual in the 90’s. They had no idea what was inside until my dad and my uncle (who were both about 60 at the time) read the annual and were both shocked and very amused by Buster Gonad1.
From Viz 48 (July 1991). I did my first degree at Loughborough and I thought this was hilarious.
So the assembled cryptic is ‘viz..ie..r’, or ‘vizier’, the name for a dignitary from Persia and the surrounding region. I’m pretty sure the first time I heard of a vizier was in a pantomime – probably Aladdin – where the baddie was the vizier. Indeed, Jafar was the vizier in the 1992 Disney film of Aladdin.
After two weeks I haven’t finished this one, and will need to wait for the next edition to find the answer to 15 down: You might claim booze is from Iceland – I’m dubious (9). I think it’s an anagram of ‘Iceland Im’ (the word ‘dubious’ indicates an anagram), but other than that, I don’t know.
The other day I reached a Duolingo rating of 80. This means that, after about five years of concentrating on German, I’ve finished the course.
From now on there’s a series of daily refresher lessons so I don’t get rusty. And I’m still talking in German with our younger daughter as she completes her A level. And after all that learning I still cannot remember which ‘the’ to use or when I should use ‘ihn’ and ‘euch’. Clearly, a different type of tuition is needed if I am to go further.
What next? I could revisit Danish, but no I no longer work for an Anglo-Danish company I don’t know if I want to. Or French would make sense since we go to France quite often. Or maybe Scots Gaelic – I grew up hearing this on telly occasionally1, though Thurso wasn’t in the Gàidhealtachd and I have nobody to practice with. I’ll decide soon.
Grampian (north Scotland independent telly) would have a few hours of gaelic programming including the children’s programme ‘Cuir Car’ which showed life in the Islands and songs by Runrig. ↩︎
French is supposedly the language of love. Certainly to the ears of someone who grew up only hearing English and the occasional Scots Gaelic, the words “Je t’aime” sound more pleasing than “Ich liebe dich”. But to German ears, what does “I love you” sound like? Do they prefer “Te Amo” or would the Dutch “Ik houd van je” sound exotic?
Background text for the design. Fourteen languages, mainly European because I couldn’t work out how to get other alphabets.
This design was done in Canva. I only made it a week ago and I have forgotten which languages I used. I think there’s German, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Swahili and Polish. Oh, and English (thanks to Mrs S for reminding me about that one!).
To make the final design I repeated the background text at random angles and set the opacity down. Then a nice pink gradient as background and it was ready for the main image.
The main text was done in TC Milo, black with a light pink outline. The massive kiss is one of the graphics that Canva supplies.
Summary of fonts used for this design.
This design looked better on some items than on others. I only did one item of clothing, the black sleeved t-shirt. And the apron, if that counts as clothing. Buttons below link to the products.
The “je t’aime” design on tote bag, t shirt, clock and apron.
Also known as ‘chips’ in the US and Australia1, crisps are my go to snack.
Will Self is a fan. In his typical sesquipedalian style he has written about the ‘plangent crepitation’ experienced while consuming these ‘fried and friable foderols’. Basically, it’s the crunchiness that gets you. There’s little more disappointing in this world than a non-crunchy crisp.
What flavour? I’d rank the standard flavours as salt & vinegar > ready salted > cheese and onion.
Favourite S&V is Piper’s, a different flavour of vinegar. They claim it’s cider vinegar but whatever it actually is, there’s something a bit more mellow about these than the standard sodium acetate in some crisps.
Pipers cider vinegar and salt crisps. Emphasising the vinegar first suggests that the vinegar is at the forefront of the flavour, and they are right.
Ready salted is the vanilla ice cream of the crisp world. Maybe not very exciting, but a crisp manufacturer has to be able to do this right. The crunch, the salt and the fat are a delightful combination that can also be experienced in good pork crackling, but without having to prep a pork roast first.
So while I’d normally put cheese and onion as third after ready salted, the exception is Fiddler’s Lancashire Cheese and Onion. These are currently my favourite crisps, though they are difficult to get hold of. Mrs S surprised me last Father’s Day with a whole box of them, much to our mutual delight. Hers in finally finding something I want2, mine in having 24 bags of these fantastic crisps all to myself.
Current favourite crisps, Fiddler’s Lancashire cheese and onion. Distinct flavour compared with other cheese and onion, Lancashire rather than ‘cheese’ makes all the difference.
Many other flavours are available from Piper’s, Fiddlers, Kettle Chips and others. Mrs S is a fan of Fiddler’s black pudding and mustard. Black pepper is a great addition to any crisp. Pigs in blankets and chorizo get shout outs from some manufacturers. But for me, the ‘big three’ flavours from my childhood will likely never be supplanted.
Where what we call chips are known as ‘hot chips’. The colonials are so disappointing ↩︎
Whenever a scientist retires, resigns, is made redundant in their mid-50s, or leaves science for any reason there is a great deal of knowledge, know-how and wisdom lost.
I’m proposing an institute where these people are paid to come in a few days a month and thrash out their old theories for the benefit of younger scientists and engineers. There will be access to equipment, testing rigs and all sorts of analytical equipment, with free tea, coffee and biscuits. The full-time junior staff will be specially selected for their intelligence and patience.
One of my theories about innovation is that there are many half-notions in the world, but connecting your half to someone else’s half and making that bridge the gap between problem and solution can be a hit-and-miss affair. If you’ve ever heard something at random that sparks a memory and makes you go “Ah!” then you’ve bridged that gap.
Comedy writers are excellent at this, a joke is two ideas put together in an unexpected way.
The SIMOF solution is to have people who spent a lifetime bridging gaps create sparks in ways that nobody – least of all themselves – could anticipate.
It needs funding, and a site that has good access for public transport. Other than that, the idea’s good to go.
Describe an item you were incredibly attached to as a youth. What became of it?
When I was very young I had a teddy bear. Not unique, I know. Mine was a hard-bodied bear that I called ‘Bungle’, after the bear in Rainbow. I have no idea where he came from or who gave him to me.
Bungle could growl. Hidden inside the body was a device that gave out a ‘Ba-aaa’ sound when you turned him upside down. He wasn’t very cuddly, I may have had other toys to cuddle, but Bungle is the one I remember.
My memory of him is that he lost an eye at some point and also at least two limbs. He got threadbare and likely very grumpy towards the end. I have no idea what happened to him, he probably got thrown out when we moved from Thurso when I was twelve.
In the living room of that house there was a big toy box that also served as a window seat. From there we could glimpse the island of Hoy, one of the Orkney Islands. In the box was everything you could wish for to play with. A couple of dozen cars and car tracks, loads of Lego, soft toys, Bungle, some Fisher Technik, wooden building blocks and a tired old red plastic ride-on train.
I think the box itself was thrown out with the move, but some of the toys are still around. The Lego, my wooden blocks – a present from my ‘new little sister’ in 1973 – and the train are still at my mum’s house and are enjoyed by her grandchildren and great grandchildren.
Bungle is long gone. Other toys have been lost over the years, but I do love that generations of our family have enjoyed toys we outgrew, but our parents kept hold of, just in case.
