Fresh food

I have just been down to the Dun Laoghaire farmers market. I have returned with: three vast aubergines (eggplants - why are they called eggplants?), tomatoes, onions, courgettes, red chillis, button mushrooms, pleurotus mushroom(s)¹, brazil nuts, hazelnuts coated in yoghurt, dried cranberries, and artichoke hearts.

Culinary success can only follow a lineup like that. I keep opening my bag to look at the selection inside.

¹ I have never heard of these before, but they had them - they're clumps of things like oyster mushrooms, all growing from one stem thing. They appear to be related to the oysters, but cost only about half as much.

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Hm. Both Metcheck and The Weather Outlook are giving a possibility of snow and gales in the northern UK over the weekend.

Wonder if we'll get anything like that?

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From a comment I left on another journal, which I figure is worth reposting:

The texture and heft of the pages in old books makes for an entirely different reading experience. It's kind of the opposite of reading through old letters, written on paper so thin it's almost like tissue. And then there's the scent, which modern books just don't have in the same way.

I stayed in a house out in the West of Ireland, many years ago, with a friend's family and several other families they knew. It was a very English house, very back-from-the-Colonies, with an elephant's foot umbrella stand, tiger skins on the walls, and on so, and it had bookshelves which were covered in books, which I figure must have bought by the yard, because they were all colour co-ordinated, and in nine out of ten of them, the pages were uncut.

I was fascinated, but didn't want to cut them, so I read them vertically, pushing the pages out into tubes and peering in to read the inside for the "inner" pages.