Tag Archives: bookshop management

Haste Ye Back

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 Jack’s weekly guest post –

This has been quite the week – – – –

My niece Vicki and her daughter Elle flew off back to Scotland on Tuesday, while meanwhile Wendy headed off to Oregon on Sunday for a week. Vicki and Elle’s trip was incident free and they were home in Aberdeenshire by Wednesday morning, but Wendy got caught by the storms in Texas and ended up overnighting in LA before finally getting to Portland almost a day late. Of course the wonders of that interwebby thing meant I could share in the delights of the trouble-free journey as well as the horrors of the other one.

Meanwhile our ‘cafe couple’ Kelley and Sam took the low road and drove to Charlotte NC for a concert by ‘Night Wish’, the avant garde Finnish group, with tickets and a back-stage pass courtesy of my old singing buddy Barbara Dickson (one of the members of NightWish is Troy Donockley, Barbara’s musical arranger and band leader).

But what of me?

I have gone from living in a busy, bustling home full of relatives and friends to a solitary existence with only dogs and cats for companionship (and the foster-kitten population went from seven to three over the same period). Yesterday and today the cafe has been closed due to Kelley’s absence and mid-week is the bookstore’s quieter time. As the time moves towards noon and all the cats, dogs and kittens settle down to their siestas, I wait to see if I have to explain diplomatically to cafe customers as I did yesterday that Kelley deserves the occasional break (and who NightWish is!).

I often say that you can’t appreciate good health and lack of pain until you’ve experienced the opposite, and I think for a gregarious person like me, the same applies to companionship.

Haste ye back y’all!

Cooking the Books

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Jack’s weekly guest post continues the Indian theme and re-visits the problem of which books he puts in the store –

 

Regular readers probably know, by now, that I’m a devotee of Indian food – curries, papadums, somosas and badjhies (we don’t need no stinking badjhies, as Bogart’s Mexican adversary famously said in ‘Treasure of the Sierra Madre’).

 

So when Wendy produced my five Indian cookbooks yesterday and asked me innocently if it was time for them to go into the shop I was momentarily flummoxed. Should they? They have been my pride and joy for years!

 

But had I ever actually used them in a practical way? Had I propped them open and followed their every word?

 

Well, actually, no! What I had done is gathered a lot of experience over many years and ended up making two or three regular things.

 

1) Fry finely chopped onions in vegetable oil until just browned; push them aside and fry three tablespoons of Mike Ward’s famous curry powder mix in the same oil; dump in a jar of plain tomato pasta sauce and all the vegetables (peppers, golden raisins and mushrooms, usually); add a similar amount of plain yoghurt bit by bit; simmer for a few hours.

 

2) Exactly the same as 1) except miss out Mike’s FCP and add three tablespoons of Patak’s hot curry paste at the end.

 

I also sometimes do a prawn/shrimp or chicken tikka. Make up a mix of onion, yoghurt and tandoori spice mix and marinade the shrimp or chicken overnight in the fridge. Next day remove the shrimp or chicken and clean most of the marinade off. Grill until crisp, then serve with the heated marinade on the side.

 

I shouldn’t forget Wendy’s home-made chutney made from our own fruit and vegetables – but that’s her closely guarded personal recipe!

 

I’m delighted to say that our local supermarket now carries a very good selection of Indian spices, sauces, papadums and naan breads, so it’s now easier to come up with the goods.

 

The five books? You’ll find them in the cook-books section, proudly displayed together.

 

(But I did enjoy reading them and imagining all the dishes – every one of them!).