Cooking With Richard

Lunchtime kaiseki from a really excellent restaurant in Hiroshima called An. The first dish was a western-style chilli-prawn:

N-sama had this seafood dish with rich sauce:

Icecream:

Usaji:

Special OKONOMIYAKI from Hiroshima, with soba noodles:

“Please do not feed pigeons, crows, &c.”
The crow is saying plaintively “If you feed me, I can’t live without your help.”

Lady M took us to an Ethiopian restaurant tonight and this was the first time I have enjoyed Ethiopian food. The meal consisted of small lamb and chicken dishes surrounding a sourdough pancake called injera. To be honest the pancake was very sour and somewhat unpleasant.

The lamb and chicken dishes were pleasant enough once we’d ordered some rice to replace the pancake.

Notice my rather excellent ELER / Schneier T-shirt in the above photo.

I laughed out loud at this:

“Bruce Schneier generated his RSA key with the two largest prime numbers.”

Update

A short explanation on the above: There are an infinite number of prime numbers as is taught in any basic number theory course, so there are no “two largest” primes. But the meta-joke is that if Schneier had actually chosen the two largest primes then because the numbers would (presumably?) be close it would be wide open to a Fermat attack.

For the past few weeks N-sama has been wondering about the strange secret project I’ve been engaged in. Well, here it is, revealed to the world for the very first time:

JONESFORTH

The internet in all its glory forgets my first brush with FORTH, which happened in around 1981 or ‘82 with ARTIC’s FORTH. I still have my original cassette and manual.

Ever since then I wondered how it worked …

Only now have I found out and become enlightened.

Please somebody buy me a Jupiter ACE.

£14.99 -> £14.89, a whole TEN PENCE.

I hate supermarkets.

The elderberries were really disappointing this year, but we eventually found a single tree which had a small crop that we could pick:

Last year was much better …

Update

After cleaning them up, here are the totals:

• Elderberries: 2 lbs (about 1 kg)
• Brambles: 1 lb (about 500g)
• Tiny spiders: 4 (1 rescued, 3 will end up in a crumble)

This tiny fellow turned up in the garden today. We think he’s a garden warbler, a plain tiny brown bird who migrates to the UK during Spring and Summer only.

The photos aren’t really good because he uses the cover of the trees and bushes and doesn’t come out.

There were plenty of common birds in the garden today, including this beautiful juvenile blue tit. I can tell this is a juvenile because his (or her?) crown isn’t yet blue, but more of a black colour.

This is one of the blackbirds’ daughters. She seems to like to sit around in the garden in the late afternoon just sunbathing. Crazy …

This deserves about ten blog postings … in the meantime, this is me:

Ahhhhhh …..

Baby bluetit in the tree:

Two baby bluetits eating:

This is probably their mum:

What you looking at?

Greattit mum and baby. Update – I think these are actually Coal tits:

Look at that sky …

Zoomed:

This is a very simple, quick and effective recipe for bean salad. Start with some beans. Here I’ve got about half a lb of each of red kidney beans, french beans and broad beans, the latter cooked for 3 or 4 minutes and then rinsed in cold water:

The dressing is

• 4 tbsp of greek yogurt
• 3 tbsp of olive oil
• 2 tbsp of wine vinegar (I used sherry vinegar for this one)
• 2 tsp of Dijon mustard
• salt and pepper

Just mix the ingredients together to make the dressing:

Crisp up a little bit of streaky bacon in a dry frying pan:

Mix the beans and dressing, and top with the bacon:

Skip to the second part of this video (or watch all of it — it’s quite fun) to see Lee Krasnow demonstrate an amazing puzzle box.

More here

Also these appeal to my mathematical nature:

Shame that they cost $400. Actually with the state of the dollar these days, that’s not really very much money.

Watch out, he’s looking at you.