Surprisingly pleasant

Among her many excellent qualities, my friend Rebecca makes a particularly good cup of hot chocolate. I think I only ever got to experience this once, and I didn’t pay very much attention to how she did it as there were already too many people in the mutual friend’s kitchen where she made it. She returned to the USA not all that long afterwards (notwithstanding about 6 months of Covid lockdown in between) so I never (yet) got a second chance to see the process, but I gather it was an old family recipe and I know that it eschewed pre-mixed drinking chocolate formulations. In fact, I’m fairly certain that it involved melting real chocolate in hot milk, though she may have used cocoa powder.

In addition to the obvious key ingredients of chocolate and milk, Rebecca’s hot chocolate involved a number of spices. These definitely included chilli, which was quite surprising but very effective, and probably also included cinnamon. Sadly I can’t remember any of the others, though I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a dash of salt in there (excellent for bringing out other flavours, if used in moderation), and quite possibly a bit of ginger.

Since encountering Rebecca’s wonderful hot chocolate, I’ve occasionally added a few dashes of spice (usually including cinammon and also often a bit of chilli powder) to my own hot chocolate, though I must confess that I’m lazy enough to use drinking chocolate powder rather than melting the real deal.

Tonight I got a bit more than I bargained for as I made myself a cup of spiced hot chocolate. I had already zapped the milk in the microwave and stirred in the chocolate powder and a generous amount of cinnamon. I was reaching into my spice cupboard, just above the sideboard where the cup was sitting, to get out the chilli powder when my sleeve accidentally caught a jar of oregano and knocked it out of the cupboard.

I was quite impressed with the alacrity with which I caught the jar in mid-air, thus preventing it from smashing on the floor. However, the lid turned out not to be very firmly fixed on and most of the contents ended up all over the work top, with quite a lot in my hot chocolate.

Being as I’m (a) not averse to a bit of culinary experimentation and (b) far too tight-fisted to throw away a potentially perfectly good cup of hot chocolate, I gave it a go. It turned out to actually be quite a pleasant taste, albeit probably not a flavour combination I’d go out of my way to recreate. To my mind, oregano is definitely better atop a pizza.

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by Magnus on 2024/03/20  •  Permalink
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Posted by Magnus on 2024/03/20

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On the rocks

A friend of mine recently posted to Facebook a photo he’d taken of a seabird, which he’d entitled “Shag on the Rocks” (fair enough, as it was that particular relative of the cormorant and it was indeed perched on some rocks). He commented that it sounded like the name of a new cocktail.

That idea stuck in my mind for a while, so I decided to have a go at creating a cocktail to fit the name.

The shag is a mostly black bird with a small patch of yellow just below its eye (which I think is actually part of its beak rather than its plumage). So I wanted to go for a more or less black, or at least dark, drink with a bit of yellow.

After thinking about several options I came up with the idea of using black sambuca (an aniseed/liquorice flavoured drink, and one I’ve been meaning to try for a while as I’ve previously enjoyed white sambuca, which tastes quite similar but looks completely different – it’s clear, rather than actually white, but for that matter black sambuca’s actually more of a deep purple than actually black), coffee liqueur (I happened to have some Kahlua to hand but it would work with others, possibly with a bit of rebalancing), chocolate bitters and lemon juice (initially for the yellow, but I realised it would also help to tame the sweetness of the other ingedients).

A good rule of thumb for making cocktails is that if they only contain clear ingredients (i.e. generally alcoholic ones) they are best stirred and if they contain other things such as milk or citrus juice they are better shaken as the extra aeration helps to generate a pleasant texture. The lemon juice in my recipe suggested that shaking would be the way forward. Incidentally, I think this may be the first time I’ve actually got my cocktail shaker out since I moved house 18 months ago!

I wasn’t at all sure about the proportions to use, but decided to start with 1 part lemon juice, 2 parts Kahlua and 4 parts black sambuca, using a 10ml base unit. Actually the 1 part lemon juice was approximate as I don’t have a 10ml jigger – I think it was probably nearer to 12ml in the end. The others were more or less accurate. I also added a couple of generous dashes of Angostura chocolate bitters and then shook up the whole lot with ice for about 20 seconds – essentially until the shaking tin got painfully cold to hold in my hands.

I then double-strained the mixture onto a large ice cube in a rocks glass and garnished it with a slice of lemon. The end result looked something like this:

Visually, that’s more or less the effect I wanted – more or less black with a bit of yellow (though perhaps a half slice of lemon would be better in this case).

Arguably, though, the taste is the most important aspect of a cocktail even if, as in this case, my inspiration came from a more visual direction. I’m pleased to say that this particular combination, in the proportions I initially tried, worked quite well (at least to my tastebuds, YMMV). I don’t think it’s one I’d want to drink all that often, but it was very pleasant and would be good as an occasional treat.

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by Magnus on 2024/02/18  •  Permalink
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Posted by Magnus on 2024/02/18

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War leeks and whale roads

Once again I realise it’s almost a year since my last blog post. I’m consistent, if nothing else 🙂

Recently I’ve been dipping my toes once again into the waters of Old Norse language and literature – not a subject I’ve ever explored to any great depth but one that’s always had a certain fascination for me, perhaps in part due to my name.

One feature of Old Norse that I was already familiar with is one which it shares with Old English (another language which I’ve dabbled in from time to time over many years without ever attaining much proficiency – the same, to be fair, could be said of probably at least two dozen other languages): the kenning.

As far as I know, kennings are more or less exclusive to ON and OE. They are figures of speech in which a concrete, single-word noun is replaced by a figurative compound of two or more words. I gather that in OE, kennings are pretty much always two-word compounds, while ON ones can get a lot more complex. My favourite OE example is one I’ve known for a long time: hronrade, which literally means “whale road” and is used to refer to the sea. There are several other kennings for the sea which, like that one, appear in Beowulf (e.g. seġl-rād “sail-road”, swan-rād “swan-road” and hwæl-weġ “whale-way”) but hronrade’s the one I know best as it appears within the first few lines, which is more or less as far as I’ve ever got in my attempts to read Beowulf in the original language (I think it’s generally considered that OE is sufficiently distinct from, and not mutually intelligible with, Modern English to count as a separate language).

I already knew that kennings were also a feature of ON but I didn’t know any specific examples until I was skimming the Wikipedia article on kennings during my lunch break today and stumbled across a delightful one: ímun-laukr (lit. “war leek”).

Can you guess what it means?

I must admit that I couldn’t, but as soon as I saw the answer it made a strange kind of sense. A war leek is a sword, presumably (as pointed out by Wikipedia) based on a resemblance in shape. I’m almost tempted to take up fencing again just so that I can wield my war leek!

This reminds me of a quote that I thought I’d previously blogged about but can’t find any trace of in my blog archives. I can’t actually remember the exact wording and don’t have the source to hand but it was from a book about self-sufficiency by John Seymour (probably The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency but it may have been another as he wrote quite a bit on that topic), in which he was extolling the virtues of the leek as the national symbol for Wales (my adopted home nation) as being a much more sensible choice than an inedible rose, thistle or shamrock. As far as I know, the Welsh never actually used leeks as swords in battle, though.

I’m not sure how long my current active interest in ON will last (judging by past form, I expect it will go onto the back burner again quite soon), but if nothing else I hope to remember this wonderful turn of phrase for a long time to come (and who knows, perhaps I’ll coin a few modern day kennings of my own).

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by Magnus on 2024/02/08  •  Permalink
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Posted by Magnus on 2024/02/08

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… or too hard?

Yesterday I mentioned that I’d started trying to use songs as part of my latest attempt to improve my French.

Although I haven’t quite finished learning Grand Jacques (to the extent of being able to perform the song without the lyrics in front of me), I decided to press on and start learning a second song anyway. The one I settled on is a song I’ve known for even longer than that one: Fernande by Georges Brassens.

When I was still having French lessons at school my teacher, Mme Hughes, lent me a handful of tapes from francophone singers. Presumably this was because she thought I’d enjoy them and they would help me to improve my French. As I said, the idea of learning languages through songs is not new to me, even though I’ve not really applied myself to the method until now.

The singers in question were Félix Leclerc (French-Canadian), Guy Béart (father of the famous French actress Emmanuelle Béart) and Georges Brassens (as with Jacques Brel, probably one of the most famous French singers; unlike Brel, actually from France). At the time I was unaware of any of that, but still I enjoyed listening to these French blokes singing.

One of my favourite tracks, on account of its jolly tune, was Fernande, from the Brassens tape. I didn’t worry too much about trying to understand the lyrics, although I was vaguely aware that it was about a bunch of women as the chorus mentioned the names Félicie, Léonore and Lulu as well as the eponymous Fernande. Come to think of it, I’m not sure I realised that Fernande was a girl’s name at the time, though the others were more obvious. (Also, come to think of it, this is my second post in a row where I’ve managed to slip in the word “eponymous”.)

Anyway, suffice it to say that Mme Hughes didn’t explain to me what this particular song was actually about. I discovered that for myself several years ago and quite at random (I can’t actually remember how). The chorus runs “Quand je pense à Fernande, je bande…”, with the same verb (bander) being used to describe the singer’s reaction when contemplating next two ladies and his lack of said reaction when it comes to Lulu (“là, je ne bande plus!”).

Readers of a sensitive disposition may wish to skip the next couple of paragraphs, in which I reveal what the lyrics are actually referring to. Suffice it, perhaps, to observe that this would be an ideal situation in which to deploy that quintessentially French phrase, Oh la la! (quite possibly with several extra la‘s tacked on to the end). And I should probably apologise to anyone of a sensitive disposition who speaks French well enough to understand the lyrics without requiring a translation. Anyway, enough prevarication…

It turns out that bander means to get an erection, though as it’s a slang term it would probably be better to translate as getting a stiffy or a hard-on or something like that. The word bandaison towards the end of the chorus (“La bandaison papa ne se commande pas”) is the associated noun (so that line could be rendered as “Daddy’s wood can’t be controlled”).

So much for the chorus, whose meaning I pretty much figured out a few years back. It’s only recently that I’ve actually looked up the lyrics to the verses and discovered that these refer to a series of lonely men (e.g. lighthouse keeper, seminary student, soldier) who are prone to think about the women they are missing and may experience certain physiological effects as a result. Apparently it was common among soldiers writing home from the trenches of World War I to start their letters by saying “It is hard when I think of you”. I’m not sure whether this song brings a whole new meaning to that phrase or just explains an intended subtext that was already present.

Although being a song very much from a male perspective, I came across a video of a performance by Carla Bruni (the wife of the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy). She introduced the song by stating that fact that it is banned from French radio, before saying with a cheeky grin that she was going to sing it anyway.

I’m not sure which French song I will tackle next, but I’ll probably aim to make it one that I would be more able to sing in polite company without running the risk that my audience would be able to understand the lyrics.

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by Magnus on 2023/02/18  •  Permalink
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Posted by Magnus on 2023/02/18

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Too easy…

I’ve realised with no great surprise that it’s almost a year since my last post!

Recently I’ve been getting back into studying French. This was the first foreign language I began to learn, when I started secondary school (more years ago than I care to remember). Subsequently (as in, about 23 years ago) I started to learn Welsh and I now use it on a more or less daily basis as one of the two main languages – along with English – of my local community, so this has long been my most fluent non-native language. Still, French remains a relatively close second, despite me having spent probably somewhat more effort on studying Spanish in recent years and having had more opportunities to practice that language with friends and by travelling in places where it is spoken.

I’m not entirely sure what prompted my desire to get stuck back into French, though quite possibly having a French model in our life drawing class may have been a source of inspiration (although Anna’s English is excellent and far better than my French is ever likely to get, so I certainly don’t need it in order to communicate with her).

In any case, as well as switching back to French as the main language I’m studying through Duolingo (where I’m currently up to a 1250 day, i.e. almost 3 and a half year, streak with only a handful of one-day streak freezes having been deployed), I’ve started watching several French language YouTube channels, including several that are devoted to teaching the language through the medium of itself (i.e. videos in French about French). In one of them, I think it was probably Français avec Nelly, there was a video about tips for language learning which suggested several useful ideas including writing a regular journal and learning through songs.

Neither of these ideas are entirely new to me, though I’ve not really seriously employed either of them in my own previous language studies. I decided to give them both a try now as I seek to improve my grasp of French.

The journal is just a little thing I’ve set up as my own private Google doc with the aim of trying to write a few sentences in French every day, or at least most days. It’s not particularly important what I write about, as the idea is just to get writing. It occurred to me that if I set the document language as being French I get immediate feedback on spelling and grammar, though it’s certainly not enough to ensure that my finished result is polished French. Pas de problème, as nobody else is going to be reading it anyway.

The song thing is definitely an idea I can take to, as music has long been my principal creative outlet. In fact, although I never particularly set out to learn Welsh through song, I have come to realise that a lot of the more obscure vocabulary I know (such as the word morwyndod (maidenhood)) was picked up from various folksongs I’ve learned over the years.

I decided to begin by trying to properly learn a few French songs that I’ve been acquainted with and enjoyed listening to for many years. The first one that came to mind is Grand Jacques. Originally by Jacques Brel, possibly one of the most famous French singers (though he was actually Belgian), I actually first got to know it through the singing of Laïs, a Belgian a cappella female vocal trio (though often working with a band of instrumentalists and, I gather, now down to two members). The song was on their eponymous debut album, which remains my favourite. It is probably my second or third favourite song on the album; my absolute favourite is Barbagal, but that’s in Piedmontese (an Italian dialect) and therefore not all that useful for helping me to learn French!

I can’t remember when I first discovered Laïs, but it’s at least as far back as 2008 when I started scrobbling to last.fm and in fact this album remains my second most scrobbled one of all time (with 355 total scrobbles – which equates to a lot more scrobbles per track than the most scrobbled album, which is actually an Uncle Dave Macon omnibus with around 100 tracks to share the 502 scrobbles that’s had). It was sometime later that I discovered it was actually a Jacques Brel song.

Still, while I’d subconsciously picked up a few of the words, mostly the start of the verses (“C’est trop facile” = “It’s too easy”) and the start of the choruses (“Tais-toi donc, Grand Jacques” = “So shut up, Big John”), I hadn’t really paid a lot of attention to what the song was actually about. I’m still not sure I entirely understand the underlying meaning of the song even though I can now grasp at least the surface meaning of the lyrics. It’s certainly quite a sad song and strikes me as being about somebody who is too quick to criticise others (curates, soldiers, lovers…) without recognising their own imperfections, though probably open to a few different interpretations.

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by Magnus on 2023/02/17  •  Permalink
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Posted by Magnus on 2023/02/17

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A sweet kiss

Last autumn I began to get quite interested in cocktails, exploring beyond the limited confines of the ones such as Martinis and occasional Manhattans that I had previously constructed in the glass without particular thought about measuring proportions or employing any of the techniques that professional bartenders use to get consistently good results. I found a number of cocktail-related YouTube channels (my two favourites being Cara Devine’s and Anders Erickson’s, though there are plenty of other good ones out there too) to provide inspiration and tips (or “sips, tips and recipes” as Anders refers to the content of his own channel), and invested in a set of basic bartending gear (cocktail shaker and strainer, bar spoon, etc.) and a few extra bottles of booze, and set about my cocktail voyage of discovery (to borrow a catchphrase from Ciara O Doherty, another cocktail vlogger whose channel I’ve enjoyed, though she now seems to be shifting focus onto the adventure of buying a house – so I should probably stay tuned to that one, but that’s a subject for another post 🙂

Both my wallet and my liver are probably quite glad that my initial burst of enthusiasm has waned a bit, but I’m still putting my new-found skills and equipment to good, if not quite such frequent, use and keeping an eye out for new cocktail recipes.

With my latest online grocery order I got a small pot of cream in order to make a handful of cream-based cocktails I’ve previously enjoyed (such as a Grasshopper and a White Russian, though I ended up having to tweak both those recipes a bit this time round as I realised I was missing other vital ingredients). On a whim, I also decided to have a look for cocktails involving rum and cream.

A quick bit of googling turned up a recipe for a cocktail with the enticing name of a Bee’s Kiss, which I found on a blog post for National Rum Day. I’m fairly sure that the nation in question is the USA, since the bloggers themselves are apparently based in Nebraska and certainly use ounces as their basic measure whereas most of the rest of the world use metric measures. I wasn’t aware that there was such a thing as National Rum Day but I’m not very surprised as the Americans seem to have a national day for just about everything there isn’t already a international day for. Some of them are, I think, worth celebrating more widely. For instance they have a National Pie Day (23rd January), which I forgot to celebrate this year and which shouldn’t be confused with International Pi Day (14th March), which I fully intend to celebrate (probably more by eating some homophonic pie than by doing any calculations involving the mathematical constant that’s actually being celebrated).

Actually, when I googled just now to find out the date of National Rum Day (which didn’t seem to be mentioned in the blog post linked above) I discovered references both to National Rum Day and to International or World Rum Day. Either way, it seems to be celebrated on 16th August, which would be a good time of year to enjoy nice refreshing daiquiris or mojitos. I’ve now added it to my calendar and realised that it’s the same day as a friend’s daughter’s birthday, but since she’s going to be turning 13 or so this year I don’t think she’ll be celebrating with rum just yet!

To return to the Bee’s Kiss, I tried it for the first time tonight and I like it. Given the name, it’s probably no surprise that along with the rum and cream the other ingredient is honey. To me it tastes a bit like a liquid version of a rum gateau – a cake I’m very fond of (though I haven’t had one for several years); again, that’s perhaps not surprising, given the ingredients.

I made a few minor tweaks compared to the recipe linked above.

Firstly, it calls for aged rum but I didn’t have any so I used a 50:50 split of dark (Captain Morgan) and white (Kingston 62), 30ml (approx. 1oz) of each. I’m sure it would work just as well with only dark rum, and probably fine with just white rum though you wouldn’t get such a nice golden colour in the finished drink. Still, for a future occasion this could be a good excuse to get a bottle of aged rum.

Secondly, I didn’t make quite enough honey syrup so there ended up being about 20 to 25ml of that, instead of 30 (it’s meant to be 2:1 rum to honey). Also, I didn’t measure the honey and water very carefully so it probably wasn’t quite the 4:3 ratio they specified in the recipe. I just mixed a desert spoon full of honey with a scant desert spoon of boiling water and left the mixture to cool. A full tablespoon of honey would probably be about enough for one drink’s worth, or you could make a bigger batch and save what you don’t use. I expect it should last at least as well as regular sugar syrup, which is good for at least a week or so if kept refrigerated.

Finally, I used single cream, which is probably a bit lighter than the heavy cream specified in the recipe. Terms for different types of cream seem to vary quite widely from one country to the next, even within the anglophone world, and often they don’t seem to be exact matches, but I think heavy cream in the US is closer to what we call double cream over here. As I was using lighter cream I pushed the amount up slightly, from 3/4oz to 1oz (or rather 30ml).

The recipe didn’t specify whether to chill your glassware, but I decided to do so (by the simple method of leaving a few ice cubes and some cold water in it while mixing the drink), nor whether to garnish the drink (I didn’t, and it didn’t seem to need one) or to fine strain it (I did, as I generally do when shaking drinks, especially ones with cream where the thick, smooth texture would probably be spoiled by the little bits of ice that would get through the coarse strainer alone).

Just in case the link above should break in future, and to provide a handy recap in metric units, here’s a recipe for the Bee’s Kiss as I would make it next time (essentially as above, but with the full amount of honey syrup and maybe a different choice of rum):

Ingredients: 60ml aged rum (or dark, or light; or 30ml each of dark and light); 30ml honey syrup (see below); 30ml single cream.

Method: Combine the ingredients in a cocktail shaker and shake well with ice for approx. 20 – 30s. (Fine) strain into a chilled cocktail glass (no garnish required).

Honey syrup: combine approx. 4 parts honey with 3 parts boiling water, stir and leave to cool. (1tbsp honey should provide about 30ml of syrup but a larger batch can be made and stored in the refrigerator for upwards of a week).

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by Magnus on 2022/02/20  •  Permalink
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Posted by Magnus on 2022/02/20

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No butter… no problem

What do you do if you run out of butter and it’s not convenient to nip out to the shops to get some more?

I suppose there are probably many answers to that question, probably depending largely on why you want the butter in the first place (with apologies to anyone who is now thinking of Last Tango in Paris – if you don’t already know, I suggest you don’t google it!).

In my case, I wanted it to go on some bread-type products – more specifically in pitta bread and on crumpets, all in a savoury context.

As I was contemplating what to do in light of my rapidly diminishing butter reserve and the remaining pitta breads and crumpets I was hoping to finish over the weekend, before my next grocery delivery (including a couple of blocks of butter) arrives on Monday night, I remembered enjoying bread with olive oil on my visits to Catalonia a few years ago.

In fact, they have a regional delicacy called pa amb tomàquet, which consists of bread with tomato (and, as I recall, usually also garlic) rubbed in, then salt and olive oil sprinkled on top. This is very delicious. However, I’m fairly sure that bread with just salt and olive oil (or even just bread and olive oil with no salt) is also a thing in those parts, and even if not it’s certainly something I’ve enjoyed from time to time, preferably with nice fresh, still slightly warm bread.

I figured that this ought to work with pitta bread since that’s also a mediterranean thing (albeit from further east than Catalonia), and my guess turned out to be correct, so I decided to save my remaining butter for the crumpets I had lined up for tea tonight and instead enjoy my pitta breads (or pitta(s)?; pita breads or pita(s) for any visitors from the USA; I’ve no idea how the rest of the anglophone world spells them but according to a brief survey of Wikipedia in different languages, most seem to favour a single ‘t’) with oil and a little salt.

As it happened, I didn’t have quite enough butter for my crumpets in any case. I considered having the last couple with honey instead, but curiosity got the better of me and I decided to see what they would be like with oil and salt. The answer is, to my palette at least, “surprisingly nice”.

I think I’ll probably stick to butter (with a bit of salt and pepper – an idea I picked up from the classic Grammar of Cookery by Philip Harben, widely recognised as the first celebrity TV chef, though I’m not sure his name would be all that well-known these days) for my crumpets when I have it available, but it’s good to know that olive oil works as a fine alternative. And I’ll definitely be aiming to have pitta breads with oil from time to time in the future.

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by Magnus on 2022/02/13  •  Permalink
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Posted by Magnus on 2022/02/13

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