Using a windfall

This week I have been eating... a lot of apples.
I picked up a bag of windfalls after the heavy winds brought down a lot of fruit from the ornamental trees in the park; they're not particularly nice to eat raw, but they're fine as ingredients. Of course they needed chopping up and cleaning out the assorted wildlife and bruises on a fairly urgent basis.

I made "Quick Bramley (they weren't) Apple Bread" and "Spiced Apple Buns" from my collection of old newspaper cuttings (interestingly, I discovered that the second recipe actually appears *twice* in my clippings book, from two different sources!). ( Read more... )

The most successful use of the sour apples was in a recipe from the Egg Marketing Board which specifically requires "sharp dessert apples" rather than cookers. To make 'homestead eggs' (an American recipe?) you fry up chopped sausages with sliced onion and chopped unpeeled apples, seasoning and a teaspoon of sugar -- and anything else you fancy; I added the stub of some celery plus chopped cabbage stalks. When the vegetables are soft and the sausages cooked, you poach eggs on top of the mixture.
According to the recipe, anyway -- I just scrambled them in and made a sort of frittata out of it, because I wanted a dish I could reheat from cold for the next day :-p

The Worth of the Maker

I'm amused to see that the final section of Dorothy L.Sayers' "The Mind of the Maker" has apparently been described by reviewers both as condemning capitalism and as an exposé of socialism, thus indicating that the reader is apt to see in it precisely what he puts there himself...

The religious aspect, I'm afraid, leaves me stone cold( Read more... )

Shorn of its religious trappings, however, the argument of the final chapters is essentially that of William Morris, Tom Rolt, et al. -- that the human being is by nature an artist who needs to express himself in his work, whatever that may be, and that by turning a world of craftsmen into a world of mindless machine-servants we have created widespread alienation and dissatisfaction.( Read more... )

Sayers' argument is that the activity of creation in some form or another is a primary human need; that a worker should take pride in what he produces and do it with integrity, whether that be a well-run household or a political negotiation or a setting for a gemstone or a piece of computer software. "Yet the integrity of the work—the stipulation that it shall be both worth doing and well done— rarely figures in any scheme for an ordered society".

Which is of course neither a leftwing nor a rightwing attitude, but an artistic one.