The Lair

And there it was, the much anticipated Christmas weekend. Where I could potter around yon olde residence, reduce the reading pile by a book or four, hack away at some stray bits of code I’d been meaning to work on, have the TV humming in the background and of course, perform some culinary experiments.

Yes, experiments. I never really know how the stuff I cook will turn out - but it’s almost always edible. And without experiments, how could I find out that drippy Marmite brew is a wonderful glazing to apply on bacon just before popping into the oven? Yup, the salt in the Marmite makes the outer skin crispy and crunchy. Just the way I like it.

On the subject of Marmite, the wikipedia entry has the following sentence:

In Sri Lanka it is dissolved in boiling water and some lime juice and a fried, sliced onion is added, allegedly an excellent pick-me-up drink for recovering from a hangover

I don’t know about a hangover cure, but I was definitely fed that brew when I was a kid… It was a flu remedy? Or maybe I’ve conveniently blotted out my childhood alcoholic binges. I do remember getting slightly tipsy on cough syrup when I was a kid, maybe that was where my decline into dipsomania started.

There has been a long (well, since the 19th century) tradition of turkey eating for Christmas … but pigeon? That sounds a bit less appetising, eh? Only, Salem the friendly neighbourhood cat decided (on Christmas Eve, no less) that both my landlord and myself really needed to eat pigeon on the morrow and deposited two very dead feathered rats outside our respective doors. Not being able to read cat minds just yet, the theory is that this is Salem’s attempt to share out his hunting bag amongst the residents of the household. Or maybe he just wanted all the turkey for himself and wanted us to make do with pigeon. I’d have been more interested if he figured out a way to bring down the wild (allegedly*) pheasants that lurk in the nearby fields though.

Oh and the smoked gammon turned out extremely well. I should try my hand at it more often.

And in other news, the long awaited Variable Star and Hannibal Rising were both on my reading pile for last weekend. Unfortunately, I was sidetracked by a massive collection of older Heinleins and the Dark Materials trilogy. Maybe this week then.

* allegedly wild because apparently these pheasants belong to the local nobility (aka Lord Deramore)’s estate. I don’t know if the official punishment for poaching his lordship’s game birds is still beheading. Given the number of local laws which haven’t been revised for centuries, it’s probably not safe to find out.