The broccoli problem has been solved by blogging and the internet. Last week I signed up for an e-mail feed from the award winning food blog 101 Cookbooks (www.101cookbooks.com) out of San Francisco, and the first message came through yesterday with a recipe for broccoli pesto for when you have much too much broccoli on hand. Bob and I are big fans of pureed broccoli so I am optimistic. Yesterday I referred to the gourmet-foodie wasteland of the Highland Park, New Jersey years. That wasn't completely honest, I did buy a broccoliflower at Foodtown once, and my daughters still joke about the awfulness of that occasion. They also agree that my single stab at 1980s gourmet-foodie trendiness was the most horrible thing I ever tried to make them eat. I don't know if the recipe was actually from the Silver Palate cookbooks, but there were no fancy ingredients in pureed broccoli, just the veg, some, butter, some cream, and a Cuisinart. You can still say "pureed broccoli" to my grown daughters, and they will pretend gag and say "the colour, the awful colour. . ." Thus ended my attempts at trendy cooking. But children do grow up, and they leave home, and one night here in London a few years ago, with some broccoli on hand, I remembered that wonderful pure taste and lovely deep green colour. The butter, cream (now thick and organic from Riverford Farms), and the Cuisinart (well not the same one) were still on hand, and now we often eat our broccoli pureed. Since I am talking rather endlessly about broccoli, I will mention that the trick to cooking it is to way way oversalt the boiling water, then just bring it back to the boil for the shortest time. I learned this by accident of course, probably forgetting the first two times I had put salt in the water, but a few years ago, I was paging through cooking god Thomas Keller's French Laundry cookbook in a bookshop, and found him writing along the lines of: the trick of cooking broccoli is to use more salt than you think possible in the boiling water -- So I don't want to hear any of the faux-health advice from people who regard salt as the enemy of civilisation. (Especially since it is the saviour of civilisation being a sure way to preserve food for the "starving season" of whatever ecoclimate in which one is subsisting.) I don't eat processed food except for obvious junk treats (mmm Doritos and Reeses Peanut Butter Cups, now easily available in England), so I control my salt intake, and I have no qualms about oversalting the things that taste great (to me) when salty: mashed potatoes, French fries, macaroni and cheese.
London is such a cultural cornucopia, we could find an event or two every night of the year. In practice, we attend events in waves. We purchase tickets for a dozen or more events, become exhausted by the cultural input, spend a period of time watching worthless, but entertaining US TV programmes (Bones, Heroes, NCIS, CSI), agree that since we live in London watching this stuff is ridiculous, buy another round of tickets, and let the cycle begin again. August is always a buy-tickets season for us, as the programmes for next season are delivered, and newspapers announce the must-sees. So last night our cultural season opened with a trip to the Globe, the reconstruction of Shakespeare's theatre on the South Bank of the Thames. Now the Globe is not one of my favourite places. Partly this stems from the first production I saw with Megan on holiday, the summer before we moved to London. It was the theatre's first season, and they were attempting to do Shakespeare's whole 5 acts with an interval between each act. We left somewhere in the middle of Act 4, I believe. I'm not sure if they were yet renting cushions for the hard wooden backless benches, but the event was more painful than enjoyable. I hadn't been back for a dramatic performance since then. Bob has developed an interest in Thomas Paine, reading Paine's work and a biography of the man. Paine is a bit of an anomalous figure here. He was a heroic figure in two earth-shaking revolutions, but we are in England after all, and England was on the opposite side of both those revolutions, which makes Paine kind of a terrorist and traitor. I say kind of because the opposition party Whigs were supporters of American independence so they agreed with Paine, even if the government didn't. It was the French Revolution and Edmund Burke that did in Paine's reputation in his native land. Last year, in an interview in The Guardian, Richard Attenborough discussed his decades long quest to make a film on Paine. Over the summer, Bob saw that Attenborough's scriptwriter had turned his script into a play to be performed at the Globe. As we found our way over to the Globe the light rain turned into a slightly heavier rain and as the play began, the slightly heavier rain turned into a raging downpour. Our seats (yes uncomfortable backless benches) were under the roof, but the pit audience, and the actors who performed their parts in the pit, were drenched. When the wind gusted the plastic bag raincoats provided to the pit audience all crinkled at the same time. And of course Shakespeare did not have to contend with the flight path to Heathrow overhead. Cute idea rebuilding a mock-up of the Globe, not sure it's very practical, but the tourists seem to love it, so who am I to be negative. Sadly the play was not very good, lots of running around, lots of extraneous plot points such as the women he bedded, but not a lot of explanation of why he was important. Since much of the audience was probably American, perhaps they knew what Common Sense was and what it meant, but the brief mention of its publication hardly did the work justice. We were trapped for three hours, so there was enough time to offer a little more substance. In London fashion, the three hours of heavy rain ended as the play finished, allowing us a lovely walk across the once-wobbly Millennium Bridge to the Tube and home before midnight.
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