All hail the Inter-Library Loan Department!

[rosemary_green]

Yesterday my library's marvelous ILL department presented me with a copy of Shoulder Arms! by George Manville Fenn. I had it with me at the natural foods store after work, which led me to preach a little sermon to the clerk about the wonders of ILL and how books from all over the country can be yours through your public library. I think the poor clerk was a bit surprised by this!
I am very much enjoying the delightfully improbable story, but what has produced the most merriment in our household is the listing of other books at the back. I have now seen lots and lots of descriptions for the L.T. Meade books that daegaer has mentioned, and they seem to contain a disproportionate number of untrained young ladies.
The title that really made us laugh until we cried was, in retrospect, probably not really that funny. It was just the coincidence of having watching the "Dear Sexy Knickers" episode of Are You Being Served this weekend that made this series sound so utterly bizarre:



While I was reading I began an experiment in cooking. I found a recipe for crumpets in our 1975 Joy of Cooking at work, which I have since found to bear little relation to a proper crumpet recipe. At least, what I ended up with was much more in the pancake line than anything else. We somehow interpreted the directions to say that we had to pour the batter into the molds to let it rise the second time. Well, I only had one tuna can "ring", and lots of batter, so what we did was pour it out onto cookie sheets and put 25 glasses over it as molds! Needless to say, this met with very mixed success, the crumpets weren't airy at all, and poor aikifrodogrrl stayed up until 1:30 in the morning trying to get them all to cook through on the griddle!! Naturally, I found lots of recipes this morning that told me everything I did wrong, but if anyone has a good, reliable recipe, do let me know!

Comments

[rringram.livejournal.com]

I made sugar cookies today in the shape of fall leaves. My buttercream frosting was not very buttercreamy.

Tomorrow I'm going to try a white cake.

What's the difference between a crumpet and a scone?

[rosemary-green.livejournal.com]

Well..a scone looks rather like a baking-powder biscuit, while a crumpet is more reminiscent of an English muffin. The bottom is browned like a muffin, but the rest is very porous* and the top is covered with little holes..which do a wonderful job of absorbing butter and jam.

*a word which I have just discovered I cannot spell!

[fearless-jones.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I love celticradio.net! Oh, and good luck with those crumpets. :)