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Nov. 30th, 2012 10:52 pm
Bubbly-cock and Fingal's son
Today is the Feast of St Andrew, Patron of Scotland, which we ended up commemorating in small serendipitous ways. For one, the Old Man made a kind of shepherd's pie for dinner by topping the turkey stew off with the mash; to give a bit of a foundation, he lined the pan with some stuffing that he'd lightened a bit with leftover eggwhites--all in all, a clever bit of Thanksgiving recycling.
For dessert, I broke into the "Scottish Butter Tablet" our friends had brought us back from their trip to Scotland this summer. Essentially, this is fudge made by people who don't know what they're doing: sweetened condensed milk cooked down with loads of sugar until grainy, and only butter for flavouring. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
monshu could hardly bear to eat any. The only way I managed to get a substantial amount down was by hacking it up and mixing it into some Breyer's vanilla, Coldstone Creamery-style.
Yes, you understood that correctly: I mixed it with commercial ice cream to make it less cloyingly sweet.
The other bit of serendipity was finally hitting the section of Werther where Ossian turns up. I've been plugging away at the novel, a few more pages with every ride on the shuttle, and recently passed the two-thirds mark. (It's an epistolary novel and, as chance would have it, I'm up to the letter dated 30. November.) Our moody teenager gushes for a couple of paragraphs about how his soul is like one of the blasted heaths in Macpherson's work and then the editor spends two pages in eyestrainy eight-point font putting this into the context of early Romanticism. (I can't work out whether the copious footnotes are slowing me down or helping me along by reminding me of the importance of what I'm reading and giving me a natural break from the narrator's juvenile excesses.)
It reminded me that I've never actually read any Ossian, so I followed some links to an online text and gave it a try. Not happening, at least not tonight. I mean, my concentration is shot from sinus problems and poor sleep, but even without that it's hard to think of the mood I'd have to be in to read long sequences of lines like, "Daughter of heaven, fair art thou! the silence of thy face is pleasant! Thou comest forth in loveliness. The stars attend thy blue course in the east. The clouds rejoice in thy presence, O moon!" without my eyes immediately glazing over.
For dessert, I broke into the "Scottish Butter Tablet" our friends had brought us back from their trip to Scotland this summer. Essentially, this is fudge made by people who don't know what they're doing: sweetened condensed milk cooked down with loads of sugar until grainy, and only butter for flavouring. monshu could hardly bear to eat any. The only way I managed to get a substantial amount down was by hacking it up and mixing it into some Breyer's vanilla, Coldstone Creamery-style.Yes, you understood that correctly: I mixed it with commercial ice cream to make it less cloyingly sweet.
The other bit of serendipity was finally hitting the section of Werther where Ossian turns up. I've been plugging away at the novel, a few more pages with every ride on the shuttle, and recently passed the two-thirds mark. (It's an epistolary novel and, as chance would have it, I'm up to the letter dated 30. November.) Our moody teenager gushes for a couple of paragraphs about how his soul is like one of the blasted heaths in Macpherson's work and then the editor spends two pages in eyestrainy eight-point font putting this into the context of early Romanticism. (I can't work out whether the copious footnotes are slowing me down or helping me along by reminding me of the importance of what I'm reading and giving me a natural break from the narrator's juvenile excesses.)
It reminded me that I've never actually read any Ossian, so I followed some links to an online text and gave it a try. Not happening, at least not tonight. I mean, my concentration is shot from sinus problems and poor sleep, but even without that it's hard to think of the mood I'd have to be in to read long sequences of lines like, "Daughter of heaven, fair art thou! the silence of thy face is pleasant! Thou comest forth in loveliness. The stars attend thy blue course in the east. The clouds rejoice in thy presence, O moon!" without my eyes immediately glazing over.