The Braineater Gazette & Clarion

I sent this recipe to a relative yesterday and it occurred to me that I could also post it- it's one of those secret family recipes that's basically the one on the side of the box (in this case it's from the Ocean Spray cranberry people)- its seriously delicious, zingy and fresh tasting, good with cooked turkey and AMAZING on turkey sandwiches.

1 unwaxed orange (or if you can't get unwaxed, run orange under hot water and gently scrub to remove wax). If it's a really small orange add a quarter of another one or half a clementine, also de-waxed.
to 1 punnet of fresh cranberries (150-300g, whatever the shop has!), picked over to remove squashy ones
to 150-200g of caster or granulated sugar (start with 150 and add more if it's too tart. For Americans, this is 3/4 to 1 cup.)

With one orange, it makes 1 1/2 - 2 jars of relish, so you need 2 clean jars... You also need a blender or food processor (if you use a processor with a plastic bowl, wash it up quickly after making this as the orange oil can make the plastic brittle).

Leave orange whole, do not peel it! Chop orange into 8-16 pieces. Remove any seeds. Whizz it up (probably in a couple of batches) until it is pretty much a paste and you can only see a few small bits of peel. Put into a biggish bowl, put the sugar on top of it to keep too much of the oil from evaporating.
Whizz the cranberries, definitely in batches. This is boring because they bounce up from the blades so you have to keep stopping and scraping them down. Get them as small as you can, ideally it would be a paste as well but realistically just don't have too many identifiable lumps. Add to the bowl, mix until well blended, taste for amount of sugar. Put it in the jars, leaving some headspace. Put one jar in the fridge and freeze the other (it keeps fine frozen for at least a year).

The next day, the red from the skins will have turned the one in the fridge to a beautiful jewel colour and the flavours will have melded. Keep in fridge and finish within a week or ten days, but this will not be a problem!

(If you run out of turkey it's good with any other meat, sausages, etc, or on pancakes, or with icecream, or pretty much any way you use either chutney or jam.)

Some people add a grated apple as well as the orange but I reject this heresy.

Starting with notes from the two-man Macbeth since I know someone who's actually interested; more shows under the cut. These are slightly-tidied "notes to self".

Macbeth: Tim Fitzhigham and Thom Tuck, with a different guest director every day. Ahh it was so fun! I wish I’d gone a couple of times to see different directors.

In the basement of a cafe, so Fitzhigham’s kid firmly shut the door on the audience until they’d finished converting the room from cafe to venue (someone in the queue behind me said appreciatively “He has a great future in front-of-house”.)

“Two actors and one hour is arguably not enough to do Macbeth”. Tech problems at the start- no sound or light- "we did have a tech, but he refused to work with us"; (I got leaned on as T. looked for a number on the lights).
Directed by Canadian Chris Betts, as a family sitcom. Most characters got a round of applause for coming on, audience provided canned laughter. Messenger was comic postman.
Fitzhigham as Macbeth-as-Fonzie (stealing Banquo's normal leather jacket and looking quite sexy). Ross as, well, Ross from Friends. Banquo (Tuck) as idiot.
Witches distinguished mainly by height, leading to F having to pick T up for quite a long speech. Also quick burst of "I look down on her... "
(One witch was suddenly turned to Texan partway through; F started singing Duelling Banjos. T: isn't that Louisiana? F: they're pretty close together. T: No they aren't! F: I'm a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society!) Lady M falsetto. Got as far as killing the king with only minimal skipping, then went pretty much straight to "my mum had a cesarean", stab.
(They did pause for Macbeth to kill Banquo, which F was very happy to do. T played both Banquo's ghost and Lady M's ghost largely by opening his mouth and bobbing a bit.) The "is this a dagger" speech was done as the leading man's bid to be a film actor, way too intense.
“It's your line” “- it's definitely your line.”
One small character of Tuck’s was given the note of "it's the producer's kid, he can't act". F: "Typecasting"
T hadn't learnt the letter from M to Lady M, making it a bit of a problem when he was plunged into darkness. (F: "Should have learnt it" T: *flips bird*)

https://www.comedy.co.uk/fringe/2019/features/thom_tuck_macbeth_interview/

Copstick review (which Thom disparaged) https://www.scotsman.com/arts-and-culture/edinburgh-festivals/comedy-review-tim-fitzhigham-and-thom-tuck-in-macbeth-heroes-black-medicine-edinburgh-1-4977829

( ACMS, Questing Time, World of Sport, etc )

Notes from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe
Last year one person said they'd have liked to see a post about what I saw, but I'd taken notes in a notebook like a stone age person (who had invented paper, pens and writing) and didn't feel up to transcribing my terrible handwriting; this year I used my phone like Google wants me to, so it's a lot easier. Behind the cut, mostly links to reviews of things I enjoyed.
( Read more... )

First
Let the rockets flash and the cannons thunder,
This child is a marvel, a matchless wonder.
A staggering child, a child astounding,
Dazzling, diaperless, dumfounding,
Stupendous, miraculous, unsurpassed,
A child to stagger and flabbergast.
Bright as a button, sharp as a thorn,
And the only perfect one ever born.

Second
Arrived this evening at half past nine.
Everybody is doing fine.




(If you suspect I'm bored and trolling sigmonster, you're wrong, I'm not bored.)

I went to Barcelona, because I have worked out that if I have a long weekend somewhere with longer days in February it us a good thing all round, and it was brill. Looked at the Med, and went on a tiny boat trip that got all of about a quarter mile outside the harbour; also looked at cathedrals, alleys, ironwork, gardens, hills, markets, Roman walls, etc. Ate lots of tapas and seafood (yum, cuttlefish) and cream catalana (creme brûlée with cinnamon and/or lemon zest in). Was pleased by the many places selling small paper cones of Iberico ham to eat as you stroll.
It tipped it down one day but otherwise there was lots of lovely DAYLIGHT.
And I found out about Eusabi Guell, who was a 19th C multibillionaire (in today's money) who was a bit of a religious nut and also quite into Catalan nationalism. So what he did was fund literary magazines and be a patron for lots of musicians and artists and sculptors and this weird architect who wanted to meld Art Nouveau with traditional Catalonian materials and craftsmanship, and what I'm saying is that if CERTAIN PEOPLE spent a shitload of money on the arts then maybe CERTAIN COUNTRIES would be a lot better off than other forms of nationalism will leave them, because over a hundred years later Catalonia is still doing very nicely thank you from Gaudi tourism. So well done el Sr. Guell.
(Guell's townhouse was Gaudi's first commission, and it is a mixture of rich-people-odd, like the ground floor being designed to drive your carriage right in (the stables are in the basement) or there being five salon rooms of various degrees of intimacy but only three rooms for the ten children and their nurses, arts-patron-odd like the whole house being designed round a 50-foot-high room with perfect acoustics and a gallery for choir and orchestra, and Gaudi-odd like the random wiggly closets in the corners of the master suite. It is very lavish and strange. The family only lived there for a few years as apparently Guell's wife never liked it.)

I stopped at the chippy on my way home and was promptly accosted by the cutest gold-digger ever, who was sitting just outside the door- she was madly in love with me, miaow, I was wonderful, mrrow, {rubs head on my shin}, and she was sure a terrific person like me must have some fish to share with an abandoned, starving, adorable pussycat like her? Miaow? Had I noticed how fluffy her tummy was?
I did try to show her that I only had boring carbs, but she didn't give up until I finished and threw the paper in the bin, when she gave me a betrayed look and dashed off- clearly to a loving home (from her shiny coat and sparkly collar) who probably have no idea what a practised shakedown artist she is!

Am feeling mighty-ish; I have not only worked out how to answer a phone call on my new phone (weirdly non-obvious) but also how to get rid of a "new voicemail!" icon that hung around after listening to the voicemail, and have put a screen cover on without getting bubbles underneath it. Should really go and use the feeling to power necessary chores like gathering up toiletries for travel, but am watching a slime mould devour a lichen instead [1].

Podcast plug! I went and watched a live recording of No Such Thing As A Fish on Friday night, and it was very funny. In a couple of weeks you can hear about what links the Sphinx and a koala's pouch; why the appendix is the Helm's Deep of the body; the foreign dog hairspray scandal; the glass delusion; sea otter archaeologists, and other diverting and edifying tales. (You will sadly miss the live special features like their Top Ten Rejected Facts and Andy Murray's interesting presentation on the Casio watch. He was so gleeful about it! Also seeing them at the end shilling- "We have merch! We'll sign anything! Feed our egos!")

[1] on telly. Though I'm not ruling out there being slime moulds in the coal hole.

Hello folks!
I've had a good break so far, including seeing the Christmas "panto nativity" Alternative Comedy Memorial Society gig ( photos), getting 14 books for Christmas (so far have only read a 1950s cookbook, Step Aside Pops, You're All Just Jealous of My Backpack, and partway through Ancillary Mercy and This Is Improbable Too- must do better), ice-skating (didn't fall over!), going for a pub lunch and a walk by a recently-flooded beck, and having a massage/swim/steam room day. I've just had a bagel with brie, have a pot of tea steeping and some chocolate to eat, and have four more days to do Nothing At All in. Lovely.

Have just started process of changing mobile providers (to giffgaff because cheaper) and also home phone/broadband (to plusnet because Virgin promised certain speeds to their customers… and rather than spend money on putting in the infrastructure to support that, they sold off the customers with crappy cables to talktalk, and if I'd wanted to be with bloody talktalk I would have signed up with the useless bastards in the first place; waited for plusnet to have a decent offer on so will be getting cashback. Mwahaha.)

No tuits left, need to decompress with terrible telly for the rest of the day.

Wednesday books

I'm reading a novella by Melissa Scott from the Astreiant series- too lazy to look up the title, I think it's Point of Knives. Also The Rutland Weekend Television book by Eric Idle.

Just finished Wee Free Men and Mark Thomas's 100 Acts of Minor Dissent.

I may read Deep Secret next, something reminded me of Bristolia this morning on the bus.

Actually it's been such a long time since I did a book log, let's mention some of the new or newish SFF books I've enjoyed over the summer:

Bujold's new novella Penric's Demon. Digital Divide, by K.B.Spangler. Daughter of Mystery by Heather Rose Jones. The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman. Sarah Tolmie's The Stone Boatmen. The Martian. T. Kingfisher's The Seventh Bride. The Silvered by Tanya Huff. The Wizard's Promise by Cassandra Rose Clarke. Nathan Lowell's Quarter Share books. The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo. Am.M. Dellamonica's Child of a Hidden Sea.

(Reread a lot of things too- The Goblin Emperor, Pyramids of London and Bones of the Fair (by Andrea Host), Mindtouch (by M.C.A. Hogarth), Traveller and Wish-Queen by Laura Wise, Martha Wells' Raksura short story collections (new novels being written, hooray!) and also read some classic mysteries n'nonfiction n'stuff.)