Archive for February, 2016

Songwriting: Step by Step is a 2012 book by Aaron Cheney. It is short. It comes in at about 100 pages and I bashed through the book in about an hour. I paid £2.29 for the Kindle edition, which seems fair.

It does take you through step-by-step, but the steps are not covered in that much detail. I think I picked up more from the casual references to terms and techniques than I did from the main focus of the material. A lot of the text covers writing the lyrics. This is not something I am too concerned about. I have a lot of learn here, but I have written lyrics for many years, it was always adding the tune that I struggled with. This section was covered in far less detail.

I also spotted a grammar mistake. “Everyone” instead of “every one”. In a perverse way it made me feel good that I am not the only person putting books out there with imperfect grammar.

Would I recommend it? Probably not. If you are buying a book on songwriting, my guess is that you probably want to dedicate some time to it. If so, you will want a book that goes into more detail than this does.

The Wayward Bus is a 1947 novel by John Steinbeck. Many of Steinbeck’s novels are long-ranging affairs, some taking place over several generations. In contrast, The Wayward Bus takes place over a single day.

What is the novel about? Well, it’s about a bus that gets stuck in the mud. This only happens towards the end of the novel. The rest is build up to the bus getting stuck in the mud. Looking back now, I am not sure entirely sure how Steinbeck spun out an entire novel based on that. He did though, and it was interesting.

One thing I have always enjoyed about Steinbeck’s work is his ability to create emotion within me. With The Gapes of Wrath I felt a small sampling of the frustration felt by the farmers who were victims of the financial system. With The Wayward Bus I experienced if only for a moment, the frustration of being trapped in a small town with dreams of getting out.

What do you do with leftover pancakes and leftover sausages? Add some cheese and turn them into a breakfast wrap of course!

The original River Cottage Cookbook as it proudly exclaims on the cover has now sold over half-a-million copies, apparently. It comes as a hardback with an embossed cover and a ribbon marker.

It calls itself a cookbook, but that is perhaps misleading. It is not a cookbook as you might expect. It is more of a handbook for River Cottage. It is broken down into sections: herbs, vegetables, fish, poultry, etc. Each one contains a lengthy guide to the subject followed by a few recipes.

In a way it follows the River Cottage TV show. It goes into more detail on each topic but not into the same detail as something like John Seymour’s Self-Sufficiency. This makes for interesting reading if you want to make your own River Cottage adventure. There is some information of city-dwellers too, though not as much.

I found the recipes a little boring. I think I have used maybe two of them. This is due to a combination of having tried basically the same recipes in other River Cottage cookbooks, or often because the recipe is something I have already tried, but with an ingredient I cannot get. Therefore, if you are looking for a good cookbook, this is not it. However, if you like River Cottage and want to read more, with a few recipes, this might be worth a glance.

Last month Sarann organised a food drive. It was great to see the various Humanist groups around Leeds including West Yorkshire Humanists and Sunday Assembly Leeds all coming together to help the homeless. As ever, Sarann did an excellent job organising everything!

Roses are red
Like the blood spilled by Xena
Last year we wed
Because I love Elina

I have already written some stuff about January being fish month. See raw fish, turbot and shellfish. What was it all in aid of you wonder? I have been working my way through the River Cottage Fish Book. Co-written by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and his aptly-named friend Nick Fisher.

It is a comprehensive book. Hugh talks a lot about conversation before moving on to fish skills. Things like how to prepare fish, skin them, clean them, dress shellfish, etc. There is then a large selection of recipes broken down by cooking method. Finally, the book finishes with an in-detail description of the fish you can find around Britain.

I have gone into detail about some of the recipes below.

Chinese fish parcels. You make a bed of vegetables, then layer up fish fillets and soy sauce. Wrap it neatly in kitchen foil and roast the whole thing. It is difficult to get out of the parcel gracefully, but great for eating outdoors when you can eat it straight from the parcel.

This was a great chance to try out the cutting blades on my food processor. They are pretty brutal.

Slow-cooked squid. While it does produce a rather tender squid, I was not a big fan of this dish. Even when I tried it’s close-cousin the stuffed squid.

I also tried the slow-cooked mackerel with similar results. It does have some bold flavours, but it was not quite to my taste.

The squid rings proved more to my taste. Even the homemade garlic mayo was acceptable. This was a good chance to attack my fear of deep-frying. I have always been dubious about doing it at home. At McDonald’s, I knew I had a ring to pull that would coat the entire kitchen in foam if things went wrong. Without that safety net the prospect of heating a large pain oil to 180 degrees Celsius has always been a frightening one. But I did it and the results were good.

Overall the book is excellent for those who love fish and want to do interesting things with them. Will the recipes make it into my regular rotation? Maybe. Though River Cottage Every Day still provides my every day basic fish recipes. It was also an interesting read though, one that you could do without even looking at the recipes.

January was fish month, which really meant seafood month. As a result, we ate our way through a lot of shellfish too. Unfortunately, I’m not hipster enough to take a photo of every single dish I eat, but here are some thoughts.

We made the mistake of trying lobster again. It is disappointing every time. The taste is fine. But it is so expensive. For what is essentially a giant prawn that you have to smash your way into yourself.

Dressed crab. Boil your crab, scoop the meat out and use the shell as a miniature serving platter. I used velvet crabs. I wouldn’t recommend them. The flavour was okay but there was almost no brown meat on them. They were both about the same size, but one yielded much more meat than the other: the is a big difference between freshly malted vs old shells (you want the latter).

My kilogram of mussels turned out to be 10% stone.

It has been two and a half years since we launched the Leeds Restaurant Guide. It originally came out as an eBook. This is a natural format for it. You can search it, index it and update it. It works great as an eBook.

However, there is something magical about a physical book. Something that you cannot replicate with an electronic copy. I always wanted to do a print edition alongside it but the logistics of it were sizeable.

One of the great things about the eBook edition is the speed we can put out updates. In its basic form, the guide is not a book: it’s a database. In fact, that is how we store all the information. I wrote a custom content management system to handle it all. This takes all the reviews in and spits out an eBook in a matter of minutes. If we wanted to publish a new edition, we could do within an hour.

The print route is more difficult. Print books do not have the fluid content support that eBooks do. You have to design for a fixed layout, fudge pages and spend a huge amount of time getting it all right. Then if you want to make any changes, you have to re-done everything. Possibly the entire book. That would cause a huge time-lag and that just did not cut it for me. The guide evolves and the print edition needed to be able to evolve with it.

Thankfully, after several failed attempts at getting the system correct, we finally have it in place. It is not quite as fast as the eBook, but gives us the ability to publish a new edition within 24 hours. This means that the print edition will not be a second-class citizen in comparison to the eBook.

Initially, the book is available on Amazon. In the future: who knows where else!

My Toastmasters speech for Speaking to Inform project #5 “The Abstract Concept”. In this talk I discuss how morality and altruism can work within the context of natural selection.