An Exercise in Irrelevance

In the shop today, I noticed that they had some frozen soy beans. So, I thought I would give them a go. I’ve always been a fan of edamame that you get in Japanese food shops, so I decided to try and replicate it. Sort of. The beans were not in pods and I don’t have a steamer.

In the end, I boiled them with some fresh garlic that I had, strained, the water of, tossed them with chilli olive oil and soy sauce (heat and salt), strained the excess and eat them. Nice actually. Needed a bit more than the 4 minutes simmer the packet said, so I ended up giving them a quick microwave.

Not bad, although not exactly refined. I need to work on this one.

The rest of the mean was dry, curried tofu and chickpeas, a spinach curry and rice. Done this many times before. I need to do it more often, not least as I appear to have 3 kilos of spinach in my freezer.

Originally published on my old blog site.

I just listened to the archive hour on radio 4. It’s an odd programme: sometimes it’s dreadful ("in 1950 there was some obscure entertainer on the radio who was dull then and is worse now"); sometimes it’s excellent.

Today it was about the Falklands invasion with recordings of the Island radio. The Falklands conflict was as enormous political event of my childhood, and I have many conflicting feelings about it. But the invasion itself involves a civilian population, with a few soldiers, at the end of military invasion they could not hope to stop. The archive hour described the events in a simple and straightforward manner, leaving the drama of the recordings to tell the story. The broadcaster showed extraordinary bravery, speaking to his children, then hoping for a return of the Islands to their peaceful state.

Originally published on my old blog site.