"Lighter than Air", Lee Payne

I've been very much enjoying an ex-library (probably retired years ago as obsolete; the book was written in 1977) history of airships written by an American photographer/journalist, Lee Payne; given that his only other credit is the prosaic "Getting Started in Photojournalism" this seems to have been a passionate hobby project rather than anything to do with his day job (in 1961 he took a ride on the last Navy blimp... He decided to learn more about airships. This book is the result).

The book is fascinating; it's one of those rare cases where an author researches a complex subject with many interweaving strands and manages to present it as a series of coherent stories. ( Read more... )

Spaghetti all'assassina

I had some cheap spaghetti and a jar of passata, so I tried spaghetti all'assassina, which is basically spaghetti cooked like risotto and allowed to stick on the bottom. (I simply tipped the passata into the oil in the hot pan to boil furiously and then kept adding the rinsings out of the bottle, rather than making up a separate 'broth' of tomato puree and water to top it up with; the passata is already pretty concentrated, a lot more so than any sauce I'd normally make.)

It... worked, I suppose. It's a bit messy -- I was wiping spatters of tomato oil off everything everywhere afterwards -- and I didn't see any signs of my spaghetti getting toasted by the hot pan or going 'glossy' where it stuck to the bottom; it was basically just one-pot spaghetti without the requirement to gauge your liquid quantities in advance, and minus the extra vegetable content.