So yesterday was the day of the big ‘vegetable stock preparation’ and I think that all has gone well but I won’t know until the final taste comes when I prepare some soup in the next day or so. I started off with a good array of freshly scrubbed, but not peeled, vegetables (onions, peppers, carrots, celery, leek, garlic and sweet potato) to which I added some thyme (from a herb jar) and some freshly cut basil. but no salt. After a good drizzle of olive and just a splash of boiling water, this collection was cooked for about 20 minutes with a constant stirring so that it did not stick. Then this was blitzed with a hand held mixture until I ended up with a kind of gooey paste (which did accord with the video I had watched previously) I had purchased from the internet some extra large plastic ice cube containers and these I filled with a spoon (and put the plastic lid over them) before they were popped into the freezer. A little job for the next day or so is to pop out these cubes and perhaps wrap them in little foils of silver paper so that they resemble the bought product. So far, so good except I do not know what the eventual taste will be but stuffed full of good ingredients I would surprised if they do not taste good. So now instead of reaching for the onion gravy jar, I shall deploy my own product and I have 16 of them so I imagine I will use them up at the rate of about 4 per week. The night before, I watched again the film that BBC had made of the life of Florence Foster Jenkins with Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant, both of whom were incomparablly good in their respective roles. I must say that the scenes at the very end when Florence was on her death bed and her husband expressed his deep love for his (admittedly eccentric) wife, I was actually moved to tears (as it reminded me of Meg’s death) I wondered how true to life the film managed to be and discovered that apart from a little dramatic licence, it was a pretty accurate portrayal. The 2016 biographical film Florence Foster Jenkins is remarkably faithful to the outline of the real-life New York socialite, though it took some dramatic license with audience reactions and her final moments. The film accurately portrayed the singing and costumes: Florence (played by Meryl Streep) genuinely had no sense of pitch or rhythm, wore eccentric self-made costumes, and threw roses into the crowd during her shows, just as depicted. St. Clair Bayfield, Hugh Grant’s character, was her real-life partner and manager of over 30 years. He truly did shield her from harsh criticism by managing her invitation-only club and keeping negative reviews away from her. In the Carnegie Hall debut, she really did sell out Carnegie Hall in 1944 at age 76, and gave away hundreds of tickets to war veterans. The record that she made even became a best-seller for the recording label. The part of her pianist accompanist (Cosm\u00e9 Macmoon) was also excellently portrayed and after the death of Foster Jenkins in 1944, his own career took some strange career twists as after Florence Foster Jenkins died in 1944, he did not pursue a lasting career in music, instead turning his focus toward bodybuilding, master-level chess, and mathematics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the late morning, my daughter-in-law and I set off for Sutton Cheney which is a village halfway through Bromsgrove and Leicestershire where we had arranged to have a lunch date with a very old Leicestershire friend and her daughter. We settled upon a gastropub with a very good reputation and each enjoyed a delicious meal of a very high standard. We had arranged to meet at 1.00pm and my daughter-in-law and I arrived 15 minutes before the appointed time with no traffic holdups en-route and our friends were not subject to any delays either. We had a lot to catch up on because my friend has moved house a few months ago and I took along with me the card signed by all of the members of the international linguist conference that Meg used to attend as part of the Erasmus programme. I also had located an iconic photograph that showed Meg’s swan-song i.e. dancing on the table of a Greek taverna in the city of Thessaloniki the previous year. After a delightful lunch, we had an uneventful journey home but we could not fail to notice the dramatic developments and infrastructure that has just been put into position as part of the HS2 approach to Birmingham. Upon my return home, my daughter-in-law stayed for an obligatory cup of tea and a chat. Before she left me, I released two of the cubes of vegetable stock prepared yesterday and frozen into an ice cube container so that she could try them out at home. The acid test for me will come shortly when prepare the look and potato soup which is the latest on my schedule. I noticed that it was the England-Croatia football match and the first half was 44 minutes old (i.e. with one minute of the half to go) and I witnessed the scoring of a fourth goal as England, playing superbly well, had put four goals past Croatia in the course of the half. I still need to sort out some TV viewing for myself this evening but I can always entertain myself with a thorough reading of ‘The Times’ and a Sudoku puzzle. There is more football televised this evening (Scotland vs. North Macedonia) but this does not sound the most riveting of contests. We know that ‘gas’ i.e. petrol and diesel prices are at an all time high in the United States and this is causing all kinds of reasons for voters to turn on Trump at the time of the mid-term elections. The G7 group of rich nations have agreed to release 10 million barrels of oil from strategic stockpiles to help to alleviate the current shortages. The immediate causes for the shortage are two global conflicts raging at the moment, namely the US conflict in Iran and the blocking of the Straits of Hornuz and the Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil supplies. In part, the G7 must be gambling that with only about a month to go before the mid-term elections, that the Iranian conflict might be mitigated before too long and this will help to put downward pressure of prices. Here in the UK, we have seen diesel prices teach \u00a32.00 a litre and filling an average 55-litre family car with diesel now costs roughly \u00a3110.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So yesterday was the day of the big ‘vegetable stock preparation’ and I think that all has gone well but I won’t know until the final taste comes when I prepare some soup in the next day or so. I started off with a good array of freshly scrubbed, but not peeled, vegetables (onions, peppers, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8617"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8617\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8618,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8617\/revisions\/8618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}