Timepeace

Anyone who thinks, and makes others think,
that time is money is wearing the wrong watch
-whatever the time on it is when they look
they will be paying for it all their lives.

The watch that gives the best sense of time
engages with time via tasks, where however long
a task takes to complete, doing it well
means not having to do it again.  

How To Make Potato Bread

Presently the calendar is between St Bridget's day - 2nd of Feb - and St Patrick's day -  17th March. As the date of Lent approaches, when people are meant to eat less/eat simpler what home made food could be simpler and more Irish than potato bread? In the spirit of such simplicity I present a version of the recipe I learned from a close relative thirty years ago. Recipes are food memes, for them to live and change they have to be passed on. Job done? Maybe.... 

1-Scrub clean but leave on the skins on two medium-large sized potatoes.

2-Boil the potatoes halved in salt water until they are cooked, but are definitely firm.

 

3-When the potatoes are cool, grate them, skins included, with a coarse grater into the bowl.

 

4-To the grated potato add flour. How much flour? This is the guesswork: Add two handfuls at time, or a small pile, on top of the potato. When you have kneaded the flour into the potatoes evenly enough that the result is a half-firm ball of dough with the mix that is how you know you have used the right amount of flour. The ball of dough might fall apart a bit, but overall if it only just holds together that is about right.

 

5-On a large surface, put a spread of wholemeal flour and or/sunflower seeds.

6-Divide your dough in two and put one half on the flour/sunflower seed surface.

7-Roll the dough out, putting some flour or sunflower seeds on the top side between the rolling pin and dough to reduce sticking.

8-Roll it out very thin, not much thinner than the shop-sold commercial potato bread you might see.

 

9-Cut to shape, either palm sized squares or half circles, using the lid of a small pan as a cutter/shape and bisecting the rolled out dough.

 

10-Put each piece you have cut to one side (hence the large surface).

11-In a skillet or large pan put a 50/50 mix of olive oil and sunflower oil, just enough to cover the whole surface thinly.

 

12-Heat your pan to medium to high heat and put in your shapes of potato bread using all the space in the pan.

13-Watch them so that they seal and brown slightly in the heat.

14-Place 'done' pieces on a side plate.

The two medium-large size potatoes make six to ten pieces of potato bread using the pan lid cutter technique. From the potatoes being left to cool after boiled, the whole operation has taken me forty mins. 

I usually put the pan/skillet on the heat at the same time as starting the first cutting out, and 'multi-task' by rolling thin the dough and cutting more pieces out whilst watching those on the pan or skillet and having the plate ready for the finished pieces. As I take fried pieces out of the pan/I put them on the plate/put more pieces into the pan/cut more pieces out/watch the frying/put the next finished piece of potato bread onto it's plate/cut out more shapes/put more potato bread in the pan/maybe adding a bit more oil/and back to rolling out more dough and cutting out more shapes, all in a rather circular movement ideal in a galley kitchen where free space is premium. My buddy, Anthony still likes potato bread. He likes to tidy the mis-shapes that get made in the process well before we sit down to have them warm with-what else? Our own homemade blackberry jam.     

How To Teach Children

Who Charles Darwin was and why his ideas matter.

First make the class size in the school about thirty
each class to diminish their sense of individuality,
the better to stop them thinking for themselves.

Then make these people between the age of seven
and eleven subject to rules for how to compete
with each other where for being competitive
they cannot work out the basis of the rules.

Without defining fairness tell the pupils
that the teachers are always right; the rules are fair.
Then get the teacher to be as selectively unfair
as they can be without being seen to be; the pupils
that teacher wants to observe and reward are those
who recognise soonest the distance the teacher keeps,
from the rules they are meant to apply, such pupils 
then know much better how to be safely break that rule,
and be unfair or worse, particularly when their motive
is to best slower pupils who have not worked out
why the teacher has not stopped them being bullied.

Where the subject of mentoring or coaching appears
teachers should explain that where it is offered
it is offered so that those helped will win prizes
on behalf of the school in inter-schools competitions.

The teacher must deny any link the pupils might make
between improving their performance with input
from the teacher; teachers are there to examine
for failure, and crowd control more than to teach. 

This is why when the pupils play football
even a dead dog from the street would know why
why some are bad at sport; they lacked the mentoring,
which would make them better at what they are bad at.

What the pupils want to avoid, but have to meet,
is what comes next; secondary education,
secondary in the sense of what is primary,
what matters most, is that when a child lacks
the innate smartness to convince the world
how smart they are, then their world will insist
that they be barred from improving, the more
to use them for what they lack, support
for their intelligence and application.

Divine Terroir

The scene; a baptism. 'Jacinta knew that Treadway did not look at the Croydon Harbour Eagle the way she did. He saw other things in it, things that had to with his travels over the land, things that he and other men of the cove, and many of the women, recognised as their own spirit, made of the energy that came off the land. There was an energy in the English eagle and another energy altogether in the Labrador eagle. They were so different that everyone knew-Treadway knew and Jacinta knew in a different way-that the pine eagle did not belong in church at all. But it was there and so were the spruce-wood pews, and the plain windows, and the wooden nave, and the ordinary house carpet, and the glass jugs of flowers picked from patches of ground descended from the tender but incongruous gardens planted by Moravian missionaries along this coast in the early nineteen hundreds. There were pansies poppies and English daisies, flowers that the cliffs and seas and raging skies dwarfed but the hearts of the first German and Scottish women settlers had needed to not break upon Labrador stones. This whole religion Jacinta thought-and Treadway knew without thought-depended on people more than people depended on it. You didn't need it unless you died not have the land in your heart; the land was it's own God.

A paragraph from 'Annabel' by Kathleen Winter, published in 2011 and shortlisted for the Orange prize for Fiction in that year.         

George Bernard Shaw On English Entitlement

 'At every one of these concerts in England
you will find rows full of weary people
who are there not because they really like classical music
but because they think they ought to like it.

There is the same thing in Heaven,
a number of people sit there in glory
not because they are happy
but because they think they owe it
to their position to be in Heaven.
They are almost all English.'.

from his play 'Man and Superman'. 

My Contribution To 'Gay History Month'

Sir Roger Casement was a diplomat, social activist,
Irish hero and 'gay diarist' when such diaries
when homosexuality was an activity,
rather than an aspect of character,
and his homosexuality was a small part
of who he was with his intelligence and charisma.
With his death at the hands of the British state 
and his character slandered, still he 'outed'
the idea of an Ireland free of the British Empire,
much to the chagrin of Unionists today,
when at the time homosexuality,
remained mostly unknown outside
the Bloomsbury group of writers.      

 

Picture Set Of The Month - February - The Paintings of Captain Beefheart

Though he ceased to be Captain Beefheart
when he stopped both making music and painting 
and chose the one talent - painting - full time.
His agent for selling his paintings said 'one career only.'.   

His friends said of him that from the second half
of the 1970's onward he showed early signs of
having the multiple sclerosis that made him use
a wheel chair in the 1990s and eventually
ended his life. It was affirmative pragmatism
for him to choose painting over performing music;
painting paid him more, gave him much more time
 to lead a creative self contained life
whilst allowing him to manage his health better.

Please left click here to see all the paintings 
by Don Van Vliet a/k/a Captain Beefheart
from 1962 to 2010, on the artist's website.