There was a touch of frost this morning. The cows don’t seem to mind. It just shows that you (one) don’t need very long fur to keep warm.
This was the view in the other direction, towards the horse farm across the lake:
You can’t see much. Here’s a blow up:
A Bad Guide 
Ooh we don’t want frost just yet. We’re still cropping tomatoes, basil, sweetcorn, potatoes, runner beans, corriander, nasturtiums, rocket, tarragon, sorrel, lemon thyme, oregano, summer savoury, lovage, lemon balm, lemon verbena, sage, peppers and radish seedheads. One decent frost would leave us with just apples, Jerusalem artichokes, leeks, horseradish and rosemary.
the other day i’ve listened to cicadas, in October!
omatoes, basil, sweetcorn, potatoes, runner beans, coriander, …
You apparently don’t have any borrage, so I’m not as impressed as I might have been. But if you say you’re going to use the horseradish in Prime Rib with Roasted Garlic and Horseradish Crust, or Beef Tenderloin in Cherry Sauce, or even just devilled eggs, I might stoop to envy.
We used to have tons of borrage, Grumbly. Gradually it was eroded when I planted other things and now it’s all gone. I love it, though. I don’t know where to get any more.
I’m very impressed, Dearie.
Our rosemary doesn’t overwinter.
I remember a few years ago being stopped in traffic on the way from Kennedy to Manhattan and seeing fireflies in the bushes.
In the 70s, I once planted various herb seeds in construction sand at the back of the house where I lived that was being renovated. The back was right next to woods going up a hill in Bonn, so I mixed big handfuls of rotten leaves into the sand. I had read that most herbs grow best, and develop more intensive odors, when grown in poor soil.
The borrage grew about 20 times bigger and faster than everything else I had such as thyme, sage etc. Apart from being tasty in salads, in the late summer it put out tons of neon purple flowers (which can be candied, I think). I used to sit in the failing light of the evening with a joint, meditating on that purple.
Oh I must try that next spring. Our borage was more of an ultramarine. We used to put the flowers in the salad sometimes.
The borage didn’t like being transplanted.
I have few words for colors. What you call ultramarine is perhaps what I called purple. I’m sure I could tell the differences if two color samples were directly next to each other, but otherwise …
I hate buying shirts and ties. The last few times I bought shirts, I took all my ties with me to the store. When I bought ties, I took all my shirts along.
Ah, you’re right, borage has only one “r”. I was thinking of <i<Borretsch (which can also be spelled with one “r”, according to Duden, but I’ve never seen that spelling).
I’m a useless speller, I only noticed because a red line appeared under it. In Norwegian it’s borrago and I think that has two Rs.
Ultramarine is definitely blue, but now I think about it ours had a purplish tint too.
My daughter, who was just in Berlin on a class trip, bought me a beautiful blue shirt there. (She used up all her money on that and a cashmere sweater for her mother.) She says I look like a newsreader in it.
A newsreader?? One of those people who relate horrible things in a neutral manner?
You can’t fault their shirts.
Yes, that just occurred to me, in the credits: “Crown clothed by St. Laurent”. She means you’re glamorous!
She longs for me to wear suits and ties, as I did when she was too young to remember. Nowadays most of my clothes have holes in, but at least I have one good shirt now. I may have to read the news in an emergency.
Here’s a brief article in German about a just-published UN report saying that Norwegians have the best living standard in the world. Perhaps you should get a suit, so as not to let down the side. Does the Norwegian government subsidize glamor?
We do have a couple of borage – I’d forgotten them because we’ve not had a Pimm’s summer since ’06. And I don’t count hazelnuts because the squirrels eat them all. Though I must say that last winter they left us a lot of walnuts in exchange.
And our damsons have gone the way of all pickle.
“borage, Borretsch”
la bourrache in French.
In den Staaten, deren Entwicklungsstandard im Mittelfeld liegt, kann ein Fünftel der Bevölkerung nicht lesen.
That’s terrible.
Yes, they were sure to let everybody here know they have the highest standard of living, although I had thought that measured by per capita income we were in second place behind Luxembourg. Except for showing national levels of poverty these things are fairly meaningless, though. Sure, there are no really poor people in Norway, and everyone can read and write and get free medical treatment … but what if you don’t like snow?
I don’t know what borage tastes like, but I know how to spell the word because I used to read it every day.
Many years ago, in the waning days of my first marriage, my wife had a dish towel or tea towel hanging up as a bit of kitchen decor. The towel was covered with the names of various herbs. Two that happened to be written in rather large print were unknown to me except for reading them on the towel. When a friend of ours, companionably hanging around with us one day, saw it and said something nice about the taste of borage, I said “It looks like a recipe for marriage: equal part of lovage and borage.” A bittersweet moment — sardonic laughter all around.
No, my bad jokes were not the reason she left me.
I think that’s a very good joke. And then Wally Shawn titled a play ‘Lettuce & Lovage’.
But who got custody of the tea-towel?
I don’t know. I haven’t seen it in a long time.
Let’s make up a variant of that story of the wisdom of Solomon: The poor couple couldn’t agree even on that. He pulled, she pulled, and before they knew what was happening the towel had become two ragged scraps. Upon which they were both struck with such force by the absurdity of the idea of trying to separate the borage of it all from the lovage of it all that they resolved then and there to save the marriage.
I expect they all go together like a horse and carriage.
Isn’t “borage” pronounced as if spelled “borrage”, rather than as in “boring”?
Borage is nice to look at, but picking it is hard on the hands.
Yes, borage rhymes with porridge when I say it. I can’t see why it’s hard to pick, though.
As I remember, only young borage leaves are suitable candidates for eating, at any rate in salads. I don’t know what else borage is good for. The young leaves are easy to pinch off the stems. The older the leaves are, the tougher – and the fine hairs on the leaves become more like bristles. Picking these leaves would be hard on the hands, but then who wants to pick them!
Similarly, tsn’t it the case that only young nettle leaves are suitable for consumption, say in a nettle soup?
Nettles apparently have nutritional and medicinal tradeoffs. It says here, about picking nettles for soup, that you should “use the first three to four whorls of leaves only from each nettle stem, and pick only in spring, while their laxative properties have not developed (!)”.
The recipe ends with “Serve the soup garnished with the herbs and a dollop of smetana”. The German Schmand is said by Grimm to be apparently derived from smetana, but in what way exactly is not clear. Originally Schmand meant just thick cream. Nowadays it means sour cream. It’s sold in supermarkets here as Schmand, but I didn’t find this in Duden. Only by entry-search in Grimm did I find the lemma Schmant, which is after all in Duden. In the Wikipedia article on borsht , I found this:
In East Prussia sour cream (Schmand) and beef is served with the Beetenbartsch (lit. beetroot-borscht).
I wonder if smetana also has changed meaning in that way, from “fresh” to “sour(ed”. Since I don’t know what nettle soup tastes like, I have no idea whether fresh cream or sour cream would suit it, or maybe either one, depending on what else goes into the soup. I found a recipe for a Jewish psychedelic borsht. It contains only two hints as to what “psychedelic” means to the author: “rest, joy and spiritually” and “filling and heart warming”. I can only assume that the author has never dropped LSD.
I’d no idea that a dollop of smetana might refer to a dairy product. The word SMETANA (and maybe Schmand, but definitely smetana, according to Wikipedia) might have helped when my wife wanted to make rømmegrøt in Germany. We assumed very high-fat sour cream didn’t exist outside Norway.
One of my neighbours has most probably taken acid, as well as having made enormous quantities of nettle soup last year; so I can ask him/her/them if it had psychedelic effects or if, in fact, that came from the sour cream. I’ll ask about the laxative bit too.
When I have bought Schmand in the past, I think it had 20% fat. That fat content is the legal minimum for something sold as Schmand. The German Wikipedia says Schmand is also sold as sour cream, but what I’ve seen and bought as sauere Sahne in Cologne had less fat content, something like 12% or 15%.
Schmand wird unter diesem Namen, aber auch als saure Sahne (Sauerrahm) mit mindestens 20 % Fett angeboten, in russischen Supermärkten oft mit einem Fettgehalt von 20 %, 30 % und 42 %.
Schmand has more body and oomph than crême fraîche, Which reminds me, did you catch the News Quiz on Radio 4 last night? That’s where I heard about drag queens floor thugs in Swansea. Check out the video soon, because some organization is pulling them from the internet, or suppressing the sound track. This video is in German, unfortunately.
The neat bit is, it wasn’t drag queens at all who the yobs attacked, but two Welsh “cage-fighters” on a stag night. Here is an amusing interview with them (speaking Welsh English, as I suppose it is).
But that will teach them not to pick a fight with drag queens (is that the German name?). I didn’t know about cage fighting, it looks like a combination of boxing and wrestling.
Regular Norwegian sour cream has a 30-something percent fat content. By the way, I’ve found a Norwegian shibboleth to be the knowledge that the fat content of Norwegian homogenised milk is 3,9%. Every Norwegian knows this, for some reason.
Wiki:
That’s quite interesting. The German Wiki has this under Schmetterling (the English Wiki has nothing about the name origin, someone — not me — ought to translate this):
The German word Schmetterling (butterfly), whose first recorded use was in 1501, derives from the Eastern Middle German word Schmetten (thick cream), which often attracts several varieties of butterfly. There was even a superstitious belief that butterflies were witches in disguise wanting to get at the cream. Certain regional names for butterflies such as Milchdieb (milk thief) and Molkenstehler (whey stealer) seem to be associated with this belief. The English word butterfly suggest a similar derivation, and corresponds to the Buttervogel (butter bird) encountered in certain regional dialects of German, so-called since these butterflies were attracted to where butter was being churned. In certains areas there were various additional names such as Schmandlecker (cream licker, “cream smacker”) in Westphalian German, Müllermaler (“millermaller”, because of the whitish dust on its wings like flour, small cabbage white. In Swabian and Bavarian German, children would chant “Müller Müller Mahler” when they saw one), Lattichvogel (lettuce bird, Lactuca) in Hessian German, Sommervogel (summer bird) in Schlesian, Siebenbürgen (Transylvania) and Swiss German – just as the Danish sommerfugl.
The word Schmetterling became predominant in all areas only in the second half of the 18th century. According to Rösel von Rosenhof in 1749, this order of insects was still called Tagvogel (day bird, butterfly, in contemporary German Tagfalter) or Nachtvogel (night bird, see Noctuidae and moth, in contemporary German Nachtfalter). The component …falter does not mean falten (fold), as if referring to the folding of the wings. It comes instead from flattern (flatter), in Old High German fifaltra and Old English fifealde, the reduplication intending to express the rapid motion of the wings. Italians call this creature farfalla, which goes back to the Latin papilio, from which the French papillon is derived. The ancient Greek word for butterfly was ψυχή psyche, meaning “spirit, breath, soul”.
This schmand sounds like it would clog your arteries. I once ate this sort of thing at a Polish restaurant with some thick pancake things. They were delicious, but I was sluggish for the rest of the day.
Ah, thank you Grumbly. I wasn’t hinting, I meant that it ought to be included in the English Wiki article on butterflies.
Nijma, I don’t know whether you’re serious in suggesting that the ingestion of food fat causes “clogged arteries”, or only partially serious. The sluggishness may have come from eating too much of it, i.e. “eat everything on your plate or you won’t get any dessert”.
In any case, that idea is a mummified bit of (at the latest) 18th century speculation about how the body processes food, based on primitive analogies with (al)chemical apparatus (alembics and tubes) and the then-new idea of “machines”. The notion is on a par with things in the traditional German medical imagination such as Blutreinigungstee (blood-cleansing tea), which some people actually still buy. And yet there are still so-called nutritionists and physiologists who seem to think that way.
“Fat-clogged arteries” is a primitive analogy with clogged drainpipes. But the body cannot be usefully compared with a kitchen sink. No statistics have ever demonstrated that mortality rates from arterial dysfunction are much different from one country to another, or when they are that there was a primary cause and that primary cause was the ingestion of large amounts of fat. Popular beliefs to the contrary have tended to come from the USA, have originated with the so-called nutritionists, and then been whipped into tsunami fear waves by the media.
As far as I have been able to make out from occasionally looking at studies in the serious medical literature, eating-related diseases in America, and conditions such as non-genetic obesity, are due principally to pigging out – eating too much of everything, whatever it is, and then hanging out, i.e. leading a sedentary life, which includes sitting in cars while driving everywhere. The brother of a friend of mine in the 60s was a health-food addict who seriously traumatized his intestines through eating almost nothing but muesli. Germans, up till the last 10-15 years when kids have been eating more and more American-type processed food, are a healthy, scrumptious people. Americans are superstitious, pasty fatsos by comparison.
I remember the American hysteria about “blood cholesterol levels” from the 60s onwards, when for almost twenty years people shunned butter. In the late 80s, there was some red-faced backtracking by the people who had originally stirred up the fear, but mostly the subject was just quietly dropped, and people started buying butter again. No statistical correlation between butter consumption and clogged arteries had been demonstrable. But it was so “obvious”, right? Same story with “white death”. Americans are the most unhealthy people in the world, and their food hysteria is the most dramatic. I can’t remember who remarked that Americans also have the most expensive piss worldwide – because it contains all those vitamins and compounds which they consume in great quantities, but the body can’t process.
After being confronted with all kinds of scares over the last 45-50 years, my first reaction to any kind of scare report in the media nowadays is to dismiss it. The only claims I will consider for even a moment are not claims, but studies in scientific journals that do not make their way onto page 1. Once a study in reported under a screaming headline in a newspaper, I immediately push it aside.
Grumbly, you sound like those dairy industry public relations types they have up in Wisconsin. For starters, you might google the medication “Lipitor,” or check out what the not-for-profit American Heart Association says about cholesterol and cardiac diets:
http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=1516
Those studies are a dime a dozen up in Wisconsin. I’d rather see a report that advised me to eat unlimited chocolate.
SCIENTIST DISCOVERS CHOCOLATE IS GOOD FOR YOU!!
In an astonishing breakthrough on the health front, Dr. Gene Claptrap has found that eating lots of chocolate makes your nails lustrous and stong, causes warts to atrophy and keeps your T-cells purring. It also suppresses your appetite, so you don’t want to eat anything else.
strong
Cocoa has many health benefits, it’s the sugar and fats added that can cause problems. Try buying chocolate with more cocoa in it, increasing the cocoa content gradually, and that will decrease the sugar and fat content. If a chocolate bar is not very sweet you will eat less of it. Some French and Swiss brands have several kinds with different cocoa content, up to 84%, which is quite different in taste and texture from even the darkest Hershey’s chocolate which has much less cocoa.
I like the Edelbitter (premium bitter) kind with 80% or 82%. It’s true, if chocolate is not sweet you don’t eat as much. From the Frankfurt train station recently, I rode off into the sunset on a shingle of almost unsweetened chocolate with jalapeño …!!!
I’m temporarily calling it a “shingle” because it’s rectangular and flat. An American site selling Lindt calls it a “bar”, but that can’t be right, because it sounds like a Milky Way. Anyway, they’re quite vulgar – you won’t find them in the store of a Belgian chocolatier. Does anyone know what the right word is? I can only think of things like (metal) plate, or small (cat) flap. The German is Schokaladentafel, different kinds of which can be like a small hash brick, thicker or thinner.
Wiki says
In France, chocolate is traditionally sold in those thin flat rectangular bricks, called tablettes, which are not meant to be eaten all at once like a bar but according to those predetermined little rectangles, which can be broken off individually or as bars as you choose. Nowadays you find them everywhere in Canada. In health food stores you can get other brands too, all with a relatively high cocoa content.
The venerable Hershey’s bar, vulgar but not as vulgar as a Milky Way, has the shape that we are speaking of — flat rectangle with predetermined subrectangles — doesn’t it?
If a chocolate bar is not very sweet you will eat less of it.
Adding gravel and soap helps too. I hate that 70 or 80% cocoa chocolate. However, in London there used to be a lovely kind of Belgian cooking-chocolate wrapped in yellow paper. It displayed those medals, things like First Runner-Up 1910 World Exposition of Cooking-Chocolate, Lake Como.
Having an allergic child, I’ve noticed that in Britain all the sweet pastry in bakeries contains hazel nuts. I don’t understand why.
I love those Lindt bars with the Raspberry filling, but they’re so expensive. The ma and pa grocery down the street also sells a Polish variety with and without crushed hazelnuts. I’m developing an addiction for them. I should check the fat content though. The type of chocolate with a white peppermint filling seems to have hardly any fat content. Chocolate is also supposed to help with menopausal symptoms, since it is supposed to contain some precursor for serotonin, but it also contains some caffeine, so I’m not sure how that would work out.
My favourite chocolate ever is Ice Cubes. They sell them in New York, but I don’t know where else. They are ice-cube size and probably have hazel nuts in. Anyone who has Ice Cubes available has a duty to eat them.
The Hershey bar, ah yes, that’s the only one that’s right for making s’mores. When you have finished toasting your marshmallow, you break off a square or maybe a few squares from the chocolate bar, and put them on one of your graham cracker squares before squeezing the melted marshmallow between them.
Years ago I remember adding paraffin to chocolate to make some kind of sweet. It didn’t melt as easily as I recall.
adding paraffin to chocolate
Two remarks:
1) That sounds bad, too much like Crown’s Adding gravel and soap for me. Are you sure you weren’t trying to make a scented candle?
2) In Britain the word “paraffin” has a different meaning. Let’s be careful.
Yes; I think of paraffin as another name for jet fuel, soI was a bit worried for a minute, but a quick look at the Wikipedia entry for paraffin shows
Oh yes, it’s not the same as what we call kerosene, a liquid burned in those lamps that Sig likes with the glass chimneys. It’s a solid waxy stuff and is used to pour melted over the tops of jam and jelly. Every summer we processed fruit this way, it kept for years.
Here is another baking link:
http://www.baking911.com/chocolate/melt_temper.htm#TO%20MELT%20BAKING
We used a double boiler to melt everything. The taste wasn’t all that great. It did taste kind of chocolaty, but the whole point was to make it shiny and decorative.
I think it was for dipping the outside of some sort of candy balls, so you want it to hold its shape and not get fingers sticky. Did I actually wear white gloves in those days? Yes, I suppose you could pick one up while wearing white gloves after church. Funny, I don’t remember what we did with the white gloves at the coffee downstairs after the service.
The Belgian cooking chocolate: I’m sure you mean Côte d’Or. If you click on vue détaillée, you get a bigger picture: http://www.chockies.net/epages/62049378.sf/fr_FR/?ObjectPath=/Shops/62049378/Products/cot003
There used to be one of their factories right outside Brussels South train station, so there was this lovely smell wafting over the whole area.
As to Ice Cubes chocolate, is this what you mean?
http://www.thechocolatestore.com/pd-17-4-chocolate-ice-cubes-moritz-4-7.aspx
They say they’re from Germany, but I can’t say I particularly remember them, although from the description, they sound just like my kind of thing.
http://saveuvugirl.blogspot.com/
http://www.mongolduu.com/
I’m very sorry to disturb you all, please, click through the links. If it is possible, would you donate what you can?
Thank you very much for your kindness.
i’m sorry again, i hope it will help her cause even if just a tiny bit
read, who is she? Do you know her? Leukemia is very serious.
The second link has some good music, but I can’t read it. Is this Mongolian music?
Yes, leukemia is very serious and i know only what the first page says about her too, Urangoo Baatartsogt, the second page also has links to her donation fund, i feel so sorry about her, to come to study to the US thinking her whole life is before her and get diagnosed with such a serious disease, but there is some hope, there is cure and if only there is enough money
when i recall my mom 10 years ago dying from the progressive form of MS and i was so hopeless, i want to help her what i can
my cousine died two years ago from the breast cancer in Seattle, so i feel her pain as mine
the page has a lot of mp3s, it’s Mongolian music, some are good, some are so-so
if you are interested i can point you the songs i like
and thank you very much, Nijma, for asking, so far i got only your response
Urangoo Baatarkhuyag, i’ve mistaken her name
Everyone is sleeping. You are on the West Coast? California is two hours earlier than Chicago.
It is so sad when someone young dies, although all death is sad. My husband was 39. My mother has also fought breast cancer and survived, so when I found something, I knew I had to go to the doctor very quickly even though I was a student and I didn’t have insurance. I paid the doctor later, little by little.
I would love to know what music you listen to. Can I download the mp3s?
That’s horribly sad, read. They need $350,000 and so far they’ve collected $13,000. It’s too bad they can’t treat her someplace cheaper, but I’m sure ‘they’ (her family?) have investigated that possibility. She needs a big infusion of money from somewhere; isn’t there a Leukemia foundation or another big charity that might help? At least you’re helping.
Bruessel, I’m pretty sure you’re right; I think it was Côte d’Or, although the packaging seems to have changed during the past thirty years. That’s amazing you found Ice Cubes. Now I have to worry about whether I should buy some and get even fatter.
Aha! Diligent research on the web (much more fun than real work) has shown me that I indeed knew and liked something in my childhood that was a different version of Ice Cubes: http://www.germandeli.com/eiskonfekt.html
I actually never used to eat them cold but liked it when they turned into a gooey mess.
By the way, you don’t look fat on any of the pictures on your blog, so I can only assume you’re fishing for compliments.
That’s right, they should melt in the hand as well as the mouth. I’m not fat, but I used to be thinner.
i’ve posted on the wrong thread, sorry
thank you all for encouraging me, i hope i could raise at least a thousand, counting my friends i’ve sent emails and my sisters, and hopefully some people at LH and U and other sites clicked through and donated
if you click on the link ‘burtgegdsen bukh duu’, there are 6000 mp3s you can listen to, about downloading i’m not sure , if you listen it downloads automatically via real player iirc, i’ll tell you what artists i like later in the evening when i have more time
cheers
if you click on the link ‘burtgegdsen bukh duu’, there are 6000 mp3s you can listen to
I see it. It’s in the main menu on the left, the fifth one from the bottom. It’s in Cyrillic though:
Бvртгэгдсэн бvх дуу
The sound quality is not that good, but I don’t see how to get it to open in realplayer.
i’ve posted by mistake to LH, so beginning from 209-212 Adarsuren, love his songs
213 Agiimaa i like her videoclip, i’ll post later when i find it
beginning from 729 Badruugan i love his songs too, 859 Bayasgalan Botgon duu is a nice song
1125 Bolormaa – Namrun ongo orloo eejee is my favourite
i hope you ‘ll enjoy listening them
213 Agiimaa i like her videoclip, i’ll post later when i find it
There are a couple versions of one in a virtual aquarium on YouTube, though their audio compression pretty much kills the techno beats, which I bet are meant to be a big part of it.
the best i like of it is the lyrics, it’s nothing desperate or whiny, i recall i’ve dreamed once i was flying in the outer space after reading Blavatskaya :) , it was a really beautiful dream
so i recall that feeling listening to the song
I’ve been enjoying the songs, thank you. I even wrote a post about it with more links:
http://camelsnose.wordpress.com/2009/10/14/donate-to-save-urangoo-baatarkhuyag-and-listen-to-mongolian-music/
At the very end is a good YouTube of Bayasgalan Botgon.
Botgon duu means a baby camel’s song, Bayasgalan is the singer’s name
thank you so much again
read: Blavatskaya Would this be the woman known in the West as Helena Blavatsky or just Madame Blavatsky?
Lovely photos sa always, thanks for sharing! I wondered whether the frost you shot was unseasonably early because the weekend you posted the photo we had a vicious and unseasonably late snowstorm that stranded hundreds of motorists and killed hundreds of lambs.
m-l, yes, why?
Stuart, we had an unseasonable cold snap; down the road it was -4c.. Poor lambs. Apparently cows can stay out the whole winter; the only limitation is whether they can find grass to eat, which of course they can’t if there’s snow on the ground, but they don’t seem to mind a bit of frost.
read, I was just curious. It could have been a different person. that I didn’t know.