My Ultimate Chile (so far)

I have saved this recipe. This is the last one I cooked, in the fresh local chilli season, but I think I will not be changing it again.  

45ml groundnut oil (or lard for authenticity)

700g beef skirt, cut into large cubes

One large red onion diced

3 sticks of celery diced

One large carrot diced

Several cloves of garlic chopped

2 Dorset Naga chillies deseeded and chopped. From Peppers by Post www.peppersbypost.biz  . These are supposed to be the worlds hottest so use a strict no-touch technique, wear your marigolds, use a knife and fork, scrub your hands afterwards and still feel how it smarts when you scratch a sensitive area.

2 teaspoons of cumin seeds, roasted in a dry pan until aromatic then ground.

One small tin of tomato purée

Half a bottle of beer, preferably a palish ale. I used Wye Valley Brewery’s HPA

2 sprigs of thyme

200g black beans (turtle beans), soaked overnight and cooked in boiling water until softish. (I cook them separately as I always burn the pan anyway. It may be something to do with the beer.)

Get the fat hot in a pan and fry the cubed skirt until browned. Best to do part at a time to avoid stewing them. Set aside. Sweat the onions in the fat followed by the other vegetables and the cumin. Add the tomato purée, a little water, the thyme and the beer. Start to drink the rest of the bottle as you sweat over the hot stove. Stir in the beans. Add pepper and salt to taste. As you taste marvel at the incredible heat generated by the chillies and give you brow a good mopping. Open another bottle of beer.

Put pan in a coolish oven and leave for an hour or so. Garnish with coriander leave and serve with rice.

Beside the Ocean of Time

I bought this for £2 from George Kelsall's bookshop in Littleborough. It is a fine example of the best things in life being (nearly) free. The luminously poetic prose generates a warm, satisfied feeling and a desire to savour each word. I had a similar feeling reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road but eventually that book's bleakness made me frightened to turn the page and I had to put it down, hopefully not for ever. Beside the Ocean of Time recounts the history of an Orkney Island told through the dreams of a crofter's son growing up before the Second World War. He is described as "idle and useless" by his school teacher. The small community has accumulated oral history and fable related in pub, smithy and schoolroom. This is suddenly lost when the island is turned into an airstrip to protect Scapa Flow. The poet-narrator leaves for the war and a Bavarian prison camp but returns to the deserted island to live in the beachcomer's hut and to repair an old abandoned fishing boat and toil at his unattainable poem. A ray of hope shines through the haar described in the final pages. The island is not completely deserted.

The Cloudspotter's Guide by Gavin Pretor-Pinney

Suffering from a severe (is there any other?) form of Man Flu, I picked this up and devoured it in two days. If I had wanted to write such a book I would have constructed it in the same way as Mr Pretor-Pinney using a mixture of science, religion, history, philosophy and art, well-written in a lively fashion and glued together with liberal dashes of humour. Starting with Chapter One, cumulus, my febrile brain was buffeted from children's drawings to John Constable to René Descartes to Hindu and Buddhist beliefs about elephants, learning in the process that a cumulus cloud weighs the same as eighty elephants, to lava lamps and then on and on. I felt rather like what poor Lt.-Col. William Rankin must have felt, that is the exhilaration and not the pain, when he was obliged to bail out at 47,000 ft above a cumulonimbus in Chapter Two. Even the ostensibly boring stratus and the often frankly depressing nimbostratus managed to shine in these pages before I surged to the upper troposphere, with a detour to Billingsgate Market for the mackerel sky version of cirrocumulus, and beyond. A veritable tour de force.

Wheatsheaf Inn, Raby

We went to the Wirrall to find another pub which we had visited several years ago. We only remembered that it was on the Dee Estuary. This proved elusive. But we had a short walk along the shore where the in-house editor recited the poem about Mary who had to go to call the cattle home across the sands of Dee in bad weather and came to a soggy, sticky end. There were no sands on view today however. Perhaps further out across the bog. Best not to risk it.

Then following the recommendation of my Welsh class the previous evening, we went inland to Raby to this picturesque thatched pub which was surprisingly busy with diners for a Tuesday lunchtime. There are whitewashed walls, black beams, flagged floors, eight draught ales and open fires inside. According to the Good Beer Guide it is celebrating 400 years since being rebuilt following a fire. (It reminded me of my first house in Devon, which we had to leave following a fire in its thatched roof when I was two.) I had a good braised veal shin washed down with Brimstage Trappers Hat and the IHE her usual paté and glass of pink.