Irina de France

It has been warm, and I have been sowing seeds and giving my tomatoes holidays outside. It has also been very cold at night, with a white frost, and I had to put the extra blanket back on top of my bed! To my relief the rocket and lettuce seedlings survived the cold all right, and everything else was still safe beneath the soil...

( Poppies )

Some of the strawberry plants are showing signs of life (though at least one appears to have had its new growth eaten off, and is trying again to put out a fresh set of leaves). Some of them look as if they may have died over the winter.

I soaked a dozen or so dwarf peas and they are now in a newspaper jar, but have shown no signs of sprouting just yet. I also sowed a tray with the last of the assorted purple flower seed, though so far as I remember it didn't come up terribly purple and didn't appear to contain any of the listed species other than cornflowers! Certainly most of the seed remaining in the packet looks like cornflower tufts, though they may simply be the biggest...

( Gypsophila elegans, Gypsophila vaccaria, Swan River daisy and pink Linaria )

we shall see how the 1990s book introduces the subject when it arrives in that course.

Well, in my next lesson in *that* book I now have to memorise the declension of eleven pronouns† across six cases :-p
Fortunately I actually have more or less subliminally absorbed/remembered those already, to the degree that I can simply ask myself 'what sounds right' when I can't remember the answer and mostly come up with the correct result. Mostly.

† First person singular and plural, second person singular and plural, third person masculine, feminine, neuter and plural, 'who', 'what', and 'itself' (also masculine, feminine, neuter and plural, so I suppose it's fourteen rather than eleven...)

I had a strange experience this morning after listening to another chapter of "The Three Musketeers" in Russian (last night I was already too sleepy to even attempt it). YouTube subsequently showed me a video of a Polish priest conversing in the Vatican with an American via the medium of Latin, and I genuinely could not work out whether I was hearing Russian or not :-p( Read more... )

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I found an envelope of spring onion seeds which I evidently harvested last year from the spring onion that flowered, so have tried sowing those, since the two surviving stubs of the old ones are looking pretty sick. It didn't help that something came along and ate the tops off them -- and also ate the flowers off the calendulas, quite deliberately, half a head at a time, coming back every night to finish the job and then moving on to the next plant -- I would be more annoyed about that if they hadn't been flowering all winter so that I was rather bored with them!

The tulips are all blooming heartily, with the exception of the bulb at the end, in between where the two garlics were put in, which is only just showing a bud. Presumably due to competition from the neighbouring bulbs, even though the garlic cloves were much smaller....

I have spent what feels like a week (certainly multiple days) in trying to memorise the Russian verbs of motion, going so far as to write them out and carry them around with me to study in spare moments, and when I finally ventured on the exercises at the end of the chapter I still managed to get almost 50% of them wrong -- just as often via simply mistaking the (irregular) verb form as via picking the wrong version of the verb! I seem to remember that I never really mastered verbs of motion the first time round ( Read more... )

So far I have made it to Chapter 15 -- 4:26 hours out of 9:30 -- in my Smekhov-narrated "Three Musketeers" audiobook, although admittedly I tend to predictably fall asleep within the first ten minutes or so every night (or at least realise that I have mentally 'tuned out' and haven't understood a word of what has just been said, and get up to turn it off). "Brave New World" to the contrary, having mellifluous Russian administered to my sleeping ear doesn't seem to result in any subconscious acquisition of knowledge :-p
(And to be fair, some of the recent chapters do appear to have been very much shorter than the others!)

I went to the supermarket to buy another month's worth of groceries (red and green lentils, evaporated milk, lard, brown rice, etc.) and came away with a pound of very heavily discounted minced lamb that was being reduced because it was (a) date expiring that evening and (b) "20% fat" (evil!evil!evil!)
So I had a quick change of cooking plans and used half of it to make a 'dry curry' from a successful recipe in my scrapbook: https://101things.wordpress.com/2006/06/17/kheema-matar-minced-lamb-curry-with-peas/
(it's very handy to have a non-tomato-based curry, though I don't have lamb mince available very often :-)

( Read more... )

( Piquant Beef )

(I froze the rest of the minced lamb; I can use it in meatballs, or I believe I do have some Caucasian recipes in the Russian cookbook that call for fat lamb... or possibly 'fat-tailed lamb', which is not necessarily the same thing!)

To quote March 3rd last year, it has been warmer, and I sowed a batch of chilli, towel-tomato and Roma tomato seeds.
Although stupidly I deliberately elected to sow the 'bad' towel-tomato seeds, being the ones that I managed to glean early on in the season from the few fruits that had seeds in, rather than the known 'good' ones that came from later fruit bursting with seed, on the grounds that I didn't want to risk my best seed on a too-early sowing. But of course if these do germinate than I shall end up with adult plants from possibly-defective genetic stock (although to be honest all the plants behaved the same way, and they are probably seeds from the very same stock, just picked later in the year).

I also planted out some more of the mixed salad/lettuce seed from last year, as it was pretty successful. I don't know how well it will have lasted, so I sowed it quite thickly.