That was the week, that was

On Monday I had another chin-wag with Donald.  This time, we met in The Elephant House on George IV Bridge.

The Elephant House

The Elephant House is a gourmet tea & coffee house, located near the National Museum of Scotland, and famous for being the place where J.K. Rowling sat whilst writing much of her early novels.

J.K. Rowling sat here

The back room

The back room is super, with a very light, open feeling, and views to the castle.  As usual, Donald was in good form.  The day before he’d walked up Stob Binnein, on the top of which there is still a lot of snow.

Tuesday, I did some more tidying of the garden, and ran round Newhailes House, on the way to which are some “footballer’s houses” beside a private golf course.

View from outside the grounds of Newhailes House

On Wednesday, the weather was grim!  Too cold and snowy for more than a two-mile run, so it was time for clearing out email, etc, and seeking solutions to the cold draughts in this old house we live in.

Thursday was a busy day.  I went to the Queen’s Gallery, at the Palace of Holyroodhouse, and spent more than two hours looking round The Heart of the Great Alone: Scott, Shackleton and Antarctic Photography.  Fascinating photographs, made all the more so by the fact that you are handed headphones, with a commentary, which has the effect of blocking out any distractions.  Of course, you want to know what the toilets are like at the Palace:

Toilets at the Palace

The cafe

Then on to some decidedly cold tapas at La Tasca.

Barely warm tapas

And finally, a book event at Waterstones, in George Street.  The book in question was “Still on the Sound: A seasonal look at island life“, written by Michael Faulkner.  The talk and slideshow was very well attended and appreciated.  Here is the author’s website, where there are some pictures.

Michael Faulkner (on right)

Made a start on painting the first of the 19 internal doors, on Friday, and on Saturday we had an excellent meal with Ro, Dave, Les and Cathy at Tapa: Barra y Restaurante in Leith.  The food was hot, and much superior to La Tasca earlier in the week.

Lindsey & Ro

Dave & Les

Guitarist enjoys a joke with Dave

Late on, Simon arrived

And, to finish the week, a four mile run along Milton Road, on a very windy Sunday.

Potjiekos winner

A potjiekos is a stew cooked in a three-legged, cast iron pot called a potjie.  Popular in South Africa, it is traditionally prepared outside, normally on a wood fire.  The cast-iron cooking pot actually originated in Europe, during the wars of the seventeenth century, when food was scarce and communal meals containing just about anything edible were slowly stewed.  The potjie was brought by early immigrants to the Cape, where it became an essential part of the Trekboers‘ kit.

Potjie

Potjie

I bought my potjie in a hardware store in Gaborone a long time ago, but have only used it once because I found it impossible to remove all of the lead-based paint used to protect it’s inner surface from corrosion, even after extensive sanding.  So, for the meal described below, I used a Le Creuset pot, and, as it’s snowing, I didn’t cook outside on a wood fire, but rather put the pot in a slow oven.

You can cook any meat and veg in a potjie, but the following incorporates Dutch-Malay spices and apricots.

Brown several chicken thighs, add onions, crushed garlic and some ginger.  Cook for a while and add garam masala, ground coriander and tumeric.  Add chopped sweet potato and 500 ml ginger ale.  Add cardamom, a little cinnamon, some lemon juice and some dried apricots.  Cook slowly for 1.5 hours.

Add a little flour to some natural yoghurt and stir into the pot.  Simmer for a while and serve.

In Le Creuset

Chicken potjiekos with dried apricots and sweet potato

Very tasty with a lovely texture, but the sweet potato was overcooked and very soft, so try adding it later in the process.  I think it could also have benefited from some Kenyan beans.

Top click-throughs from this blog over the past month.

Here’s a list of the top 20 lick-through links (links to sites which visitors clicked on) from this blog over the past 30 days.

entireweb.com	27
pdfmyurl.com	24
convergemag.com/edtech/6-emerging-tec…	20
topsite.com	15
dlib.org/dlib/january10/01contents.ht…	15
trendsmap.com	13
ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/438/1/JISC-S…	13
janeknight.typepad.com/pick/2010/02/2…	11
roddymacleod.files.wordpress.com/2010…	11
explainthis.org	10
hw.ac.uk/library	10
picfog.com	9
abebooks.com	8
mywire.com	8
library.mmu.ac.uk/rwbb	7
abebooks.com/blog	7
data.london.gov.uk	7
flickr.com/photos/23204710@N06/434450…	7
etechlib.wordpress.com	7
jungfrauwinter.ch	6

10 interesting websites #3, as selected by Roddy MacLeod

This is the third 10 interesting websites post.  As usual, it’s a mix of various kinds of sites that I’ve come across recently, with at least a few which should appeal especially to information professionals.

1. OpenCourseWare Consortium – Find course materials by browsing individual OpenCourseWare sites or by searching across all courses

2. Potholes – I have issues about the state of the roads, especially those in and around Edinburgh.  They seem to dig them up every ten minutes. Karen Blakeman wrote a review of this site.  She also wrote a review of the FixMyStreet website.

3. Emerging Technologies Librarian is a blog by PF Anderson, the Emerging Technologies Librarian for the University of Michigan Health Sciences Libraries.

4. Reading Copy Book Blog is a book blog from the staff at AbeBooks

5. Libraries of the future project – Let’s hope for some really good output from this project.  It’s very much needed.

6. TopSite attempts to find you the top websites on any subject.

7. ORCID: Open Researcher & Contributor ID. The ORCID Initiative represents a community effort to establish an open, independent registry that is adopted and embraced as the industry’s de facto standard.  It’s quite amazing that something as basic as researcher identity has not yet been resolved.  Here is a blog post from JournalTOCsAPI that discusses ORCID and related projects.

8. 25 places to find instructional videos – from Jane’s Learning Pick of the Day

9. Discovery versus Disintermediation is a Powerpoint presentation by Jane Burke, from ProQuest that points out that library websites are often impenetrable and unusable with their massed databases and indexes, jargon, and high learning curve for users.  And teaching students how to use such sites is NOT the answer.  Here’s another similar opinion, from Sarah Taylor: “… there are instances where access to electronic material is nothing short of tortuous.”  So true!  Libraries could also take this further by implementing what I suggested in this post: If I was a student today, this is what I’d want from my university library

10. annotatr is an interesting proof of concept facility by Bosco Ho which lets you to make comments on papers found via a search of CiteULike.  CiteULike is a free service for managing and discovering scholarly references.  The development of annotatr is described here.  It should be noted that this is not so much a service, as a proof of concept facility, and there would apppear to be some problems with the site at the time of writing.

Garden clean-up

It was definitely time to tidy up the back garden.  It’s only a small garden, but seems to get very overgrown.  There’s still quite a lot of things to do, and next month, some planting.

Before

After

Before

After

I also tidied up the window boxes.

One of the front window boxes

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

Part of the Bond movie “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service“, the one that starred George Lazenby, was filmed on the summit of Schilthorn.  It was minus 25 Centigrade when Lindsey and I arrived at the summit, via the cablecar from Birg.

Outside the revolving restaurant on the top of Schilthorn

In the background, the Eiger

The view to the west

In the foreground, Birg

When the move was being planned, the summit station on Schilthorn was still unfinished.  Costing 20 million Swiss francs, it had only been possible to construct the shell and exterior.  The Eon Production company behind the movie helped pay for the rest of the development, including the revolving restaurant, which has since been redeveloped.

Drink at the Sunstar

This was the only drink I didn’t really enjoy.

Rugen brau

A cocktail for Lindsey

You can’t do this in the UK any more, but in some Swiss cantons there are bars which have separate smoking areas.  In one bar, I was told, so that the barpeople don’t need to go into the smoking area, orders are taken and delivered by toy train.

In the separate smokers bar

Food again

Here are some final photos of food at the Sunstar Hotel, Grindelwald.

A big cheese

One part of the salad buffet

Sweet buffet

More sweets!

Meals in the Sunstar

We enjoyed a week of excellent food at the Sunstar Hotel, Grindelwald.  Here are some examples.

Starter, from the buffet

Perfectly cooked venison

Too many choices from the terrines and sauce Cumberland buffet for this starter

"Sautéd fillet of trout with smoked salmon sauce and vegetable linguine"

"Bisquit of almonds stuffed with apricots coated with white chocolate"

Well, you burn a lot of calories on the slopes!

Oops! Overdid the starter buffet again

Veal

From the carvery

Delicious sweet

I can't remember what this was, but it tasted great

Sunstar weekly programme

A surprisingly interesting part of our recent holiday in Grindelwald was the Sunstar weekly programme, organised by the hotel.  What possibly comes to mind when thinking about a weekly programme run by an hotel is bingo, a quiz, etc, but the activities run by the Sunstar Hotel Grindelwald were fascinating.

The first activity was a ‘Backstage Tour’ of the hotel, hosted by Yves Timonin.  It involved a tour of various backroom parts of the hotel.

Kitchen

Preparing the sweets

Another part of the kitchen

We toured the kitchens, and saw the evening meal for about 100 guests being prepared, in what seemed to be a very organised and unhurried manner.

Wine cellar

Wine cellar

Some of the availablle wines

We visited the hotel’s wine cellar, where Yves gave us a sample, and we also saw the laundry (the Sunstar does all it’s own laundry). and the spa.

Some of the other activities which we missed included crossbow shooting and a torchlight fondue night, but on the Thursday we enjoyed a private flambé course.

Mixing the flambé ingredients

The flames didn't show up, in the photos

Then we ate the result, with ice-cream

According to the cook, here are some preparation tips for a goood flambé.

1. Put butter in flambé dish, stir until melted.  Add sugar.  Put lemon rind on fork, stir sugar and butter until combined.

2. Stir sugar and butter until golden brown; watch carefully, mixture can burn at this stage.

3. Add lemon juice and orange juice.  With the addition of this cold liquid, sugar in pan will turn to toffee, keep stirring until toffee dissolves.  Bring to boil, boil until reduced by half.

4. Add vodka annd Grand Marnier; heat gently 1 minute, do not stir.  Set aflame, stir until flames die down.  Boil 1 minute.

5. Add the fuits.  Stir until just heated through.

Lindsey attended a ‘Mix your own cocktail’ session, but didn’t take any photos, and the final activity we went to was the Kitchen Walkabout, with Head Chef Michael Lorenz.  This was fascinating, and Michael was an excellent guide to what happens in a busy top-quality kitchen.  Michael also runs an occasional cookery days holiday.

Michael Lorenz talks about the kitchen

Preparing the food

Michael Lorenz at the breakfast station

In another post, I’ll show you the mouthwatering results from this kitchen.