With autumn comes cooler weather, and Sting...

I'm not sure why, but the arrival of cooler weather seems to make me want to listen to my Sting albums. And that's fortunate, because I don't think he's made an album I don't like.

Last year's "If On A Winter's Night..." is one of the most perfectly-named albums I've ever listened to. I am saving this one for the proper cold weather, but I bought it last year and found it to be the most aptly-titled album I own. It was marketed as a Christmas album but is anything but. It's a frigid winter album -- a low-key record that has an ambience to match the cold, windy, and desolate winter outside your window.

I wrote a review on Amazon when I first bought it, so I'll leave it at that.

Non-gluey leek and potato soup

I made leek & potato soup today, following a recipe from Anne Sheasby’s “The New Book of Soups”, and it was very good. This book is becoming a favourite!

Afterwards, I went to look for other recipes to see how they compared. I was surprised to see a number of recipes telling you to use a blender or food processor to puree the soup once the ingredients have been sweated and softened. Sheasby’s book explicitly says that, if you do use a blender or food processor in this manner, the soup will take on a gluey texture.

It’s no surprise, then, that I also found discussion threads online where people were asking why their leek and potato soup had gone gluey. The answer, apparently, is to do with the starch molecules in the potatoes being liquified and possibly overworked.

So, what does Sheasby’s book suggest for pureeing the soup? It suggests pushing it through a sieve or using a food mill. I started with a sieve and ended up getting the food mill out, with the most coarse cutting disc – I could quickly tell it was going to be too much of an ordeal to push so much flesh through a sieve. I’m surprised it even suggested the sieve at all and wonder if it was a matter of “well, a food mill is required but if what if you haven’t got one?”.

The food mill was a lot of work, though, so I can see why the blender is tempting. Still, the result was good so it was worth it in the end.

This is what food mills look like. You can use them for quite a few things. I’ve used it for apple sauce, and you can also use it for things like very creamy mashed potatoes:

 

Royksopp's "Forsaken Cowboy"

What a great track from Royksopp's new "Senior" album! I have been very impressed with the entire album.

Pumpkin soup

Now that all but one of my pumpkins have been harvested, I turned two of them into pumpkin soup:

It's not the most eloquent presentation, but you get the point :)

The recipe was a good one, and I got it from Anne Sheasby's "The New Book of Soups", which is probably the best soup book I own. I originally borrowed this book from the library but there were so many recipes I wanted to make note of that I thought I should buy it.

I doubled the recipe given in the book and ended up with a stock pot full of soup, which left me with about 6-7 servings for the freezer!

So that leaves 3 pumpkins left.

Quality crime investigation by Toronto Star investigative reporters: "The Bandido Massacre" and "Bad Seeds"

Regardless of what you think about the Toronto Star (and I think quite a lot of bad things about it), you can't ignore the fact that they're one of the few Canadian newspapers doing some consistently decent investigative journalism.

Over the past year or so, I've read two investigative books written by Toronto Star crime reporters that I thought were very good.

The first and better of the two is "The Bandido Massacre: A True Story of Bikers, Brotherhood and Betrayal" by Peter Edwards. It is a substantial and thorough account of the formation and downfall of a pitiful, amateurish offshoot of the worldwide Bandidos motorcycle gang, including a lot of necessary background information that would have been omitted by a lesser author.

The second is "Bad Seeds: The True Story of Toronto's Galloway Boys Street Gang" by Betsy Powell. It is a decent account of the circumstances surrounding the formation of Toronto's first urban street gangs in Scarborough's Malvern/Galloway neighbourhoods, the principals involved, and the details and outcome of the investigation and trial surrounding the raids that brought them down in 2004-2005. It offers an interesting look at how the presence of a handful of people in a community can make life perilous for the vast majority.

Pumpkin identity parade

Here's the latest pumpkin lineup. There are two more nearly ready to be picked and another still quite green but starting to turn orange.

These are pie pumpkins. The round ones weigh about 1.5kg each and the taller one is 1.8kg.

As you can see, the leaves are also falling.

Letters To Juliet: worst movie of the decade, but probably an accurate portrayal of single urban womanhood

The decade is still young, but I'm pretty confident I've just seen its worst movie.

And it's called "Letters To Juliet".

Is there anything this movie didn't trivialize?

Here's the summary, as I saw it: girl from New York accompanies entrepreneurial boyfriend to an unnecessarily airbrushed and colourized fairytale version of Italy as he shops around to prepare to open his new restaurant; girl does not find food or her boyfriend's restaurant interesting but discovers affinity for Post-It notes stuck on brick wall; girl finds very old Post-It note behind loose brick in wall; girl replies to Post-It note on which old woman had aspired to reconnect with old man; girl meets airbrushed Matt Damon lookalike with pokey English accent who happens to be grandson of old lady; Matt (the viewer, not Damon) falls asleep; girl returns to New York with boyfriend after Matt Damon loses the courage to ask her to stay with him; girl dumps boyfriend because he is too focused on opening his restaurant and not on Post-It notes; girl goes back to Italy for wedding of old man and old woman, providing a capstone to their 2-week relationship, and decides to stay with Matt Damon lookalike because he's got no apparent job and nothing better to do with his life than look at her adoringly in perpetuity.

The only thing it didn't trivialize is contemporary single urban womanhood, as reduction would be tricky.