A lost opportunity for the Carry On series

At a mahvelous party last night, I remarked that 'Get your sausage while it's hot' (which in context was a perfectly innocuous thing to say) could perfectly well constitute a companion piece to Bessie Smith's culinary blues 'No-one in town can bake a sweet jelly roll like mine':

I then realised I had not alerted my invisible friends in the plastic box to Crosby's Molasses series of suggestive old ladies ads, recently drawn to my attention.

Which evoked the thought 'How is it that they never made Carry On Cooking?' Hattie Jacques suggesting Kenneth Williams tries a crumpet or two; Barbara Windsor presenting Sid James with a couple of baps... it pretty much writes itself.

Deviations into sense

Robert McCrum is surprisingly non-poncey in Fifty things I've learned about the literary life.

I particularly like:

20. Literary fiction is like sci-fi. It's a genre.*
15. You don't have to read every book you buy, and you certainly don't have to finish the book you've started.
34. Lists are the curse of the age.
38. Ebooks are not the end of the world.
42. No one is obliged to like Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities.**

*I think this should be no 1
** That is a relief, as I have a paperback I bought in 197x languishing somewhere in the great book morass, still unread.

[W]e ask whether the internet is actually changing the way our minds work and Aleks Krotoski comes up with some surprisingly non-panicky or gosh-wow reactions:

'[T]here's no definitive answer and a whole lot of contradictory evidence
....
Many of the claims are a synthesis of hunches, agendas, anecdotal evidence and a response to the general paranoia that dogs us when faced with something unknown
....
[N]ew technologies – whether the printing press, the telegraph, the railway or the web – produce exactly the same concerns about our cognitive capabilities. How quickly we forget.

There has not been enough time to address whether the web is actually rewiring our brains; it will be a few years before any longitudinal studies can offer evidence one way or another
....
[T]he web is not doing anything to us; that it merely presents us with a mirror that challenges us to face ourselves.

Culinary

Saturday breakfast rolls: the basic soft rolls recipe, with white and wholemeal spelt flour (3:2) and toasted pinenuts.

Beside putting together the Famous Aubergine Dip during the week (because it improves with keeping a few days) I made a foccacia (the Blake/Collister Bread Book recipe) to take to a party (*waves at everyone I saw there*).

Today's lunch: dab fillets brushed with milk and dipped in cornmeal seasoned with zatar mix, panfried in butter and served with cut limes, with asparagus healthy-grilled in walnut oil and sprinkled with balsamic vinegar and samphire stirfried with garlic and star anise.

This week's bread: Greenstein's Psomi Loaf, with Waitrose Toasted Seed Mixture.