I went to the dump this morning, and got petrol for the lawn tractor, which ran out of fuel and ground to a halt by the bonfire heap the other day. There was a cloud of black smoke arising from behind Clacton as I returned, and I hoped it was from a controlled fire, and not somebody's field of barley going up. I wouldn't have chosen today for a burn myself: it was already hot by half past ten, with a strong breeze, for one day only, a hot wind from the south.
By afternoon it was too hot to work outside, and I retreated to the kitchen. The strawberries and milk left unused in the wake of Tuesday's power cut had not gone off, and strawberry gelato beckoned. The second half of the mixture is still churning, but the teaspoonful I ate from the first half as I put it in the freezer was very nice. It is made with custard instead of cream, using whole milk and eight egg yolks, which is a lot, unless you happen to have twice as many laying hens as people in your household, and a surplus of eggs. You make a rather sweet custard using yolks only, mix it with strawberries squished up in a blender, freeze it, and voila. Strawberry ice cream.
That leaves the question of what to do with eight egg whites, other than flush them down the sink, which seems a waste. Checking through my books and recipe file, most biscuit and meringue recipes using egg whites required two, so I put them two at a time into four separate bowls when I broke the eggs. So far two are on their way to being meringues (whisk the egg whites until stiff, add two ounces of sugar per white a spoonful at a time, dry out in a very cool oven and voila again. The meringues of my childhood had fragments of rice paper stuck to the bottom, but nowadays I have discovered baking parchment. I don't even know if you can still buy rice paper). Two more went into some macaroons, Nigella's recipe, mix 150 grammes of ground almond with 200 grammes of caster sugar, stir in the egg whites, stir in a scant tablespoon of plain flour and some almond essence, dollop out in teaspoonfuls on a tray and cook in a cool oven. She says 160 degrees, but the Aga doesn't do temperatures between just below boiling and about 180, so the macaroons get cooked like the meringues, for a long time in a cool oven.
The other two bowls of egg whites are still in the fridge. Nigella suggests freezing them, but my suspicion is that in nine out of ten cases that is just a delaying tactic which ends in flushing them down the sink at a later date. I was thinking of coconut buns (Good Housekeeper circa 1979) and a Sophie Grigson recipe for meringue-derived biscuits with hazelnuts in that I cut out of the Evening Standard a long time ago. They'll have to wait until tomorrow, though, as I've run out of space in the oven. The only snag is that we will never eat all this sweet stuff, which will contain in aggregate over a pound of sugar, but I'm sure my colleagues and nephew and nieces will help out.
Taking sole possession of the kitchen for the afternoon gave me another chance to work through some of the new things on my iPod that the Systems Administrator is not so keen on. Africa to Appalachia was sitting on my Amazon wish list for a long time before a cheap second hand copy popped up. I don't even know what it was doing on the wish list. Well, obviously I put it there, but I no longer remember what radio programme I was listening to when I did, or if I read a review. Jayme Stone (he is a him and no, I never heard of him either) is a Canadian banjo player, who has made an album with a Malian musician called Mansa Sissoko on kora and vocals, sponsored by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.
That is probably enough to send you wailing for the exit, but the banjo is a fine instrument, greatly under-rated and the butt of cruel jokes (What do you call a banjo in a skip? A start). I grew up listening (sometimes) to the music of Hedy West on vinyl (now re-released by Topic as a CD, I must get it) and have always liked the banjo. I like what I've heard of Malian music, mainly Ali Farka Toure. I am inherently suspicious of fusion music, but thought I must have put Africa to Appalachia on the list for some reason. It is great, a really good album. Africa and Appalachia meet very naturally, and seem to get on like a house on fire, Africa to the fore on most tracks.
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