A Doctor Of Many Things (original) (raw)

This is the BSFA Award and World Fantasy Award shortlisted management textbook you never knew you wanted, but now you know you have to have it. The hardback has a scary academic price tag, but the paperback has a nice friendly RRP of £20/$30 or equivalent.

If you want to order direct from your local bookshop or other provider, the ISBN is 978 1 83910 528 9.

Not sure if you want to buy it or not? Here’s a sample chapter to whet your appetite and a quiz to show you which Westerosi leader you are.

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Not that sort of appetite.

Last month, I did a poll to determine which recipe from the Star Trek Official Cookbook I should do next, and the winner, by a short head, was Marina Sirtis’ Eggplant Casserole (sic– pretty sure Marina Sirtis herself, being British, would call them aubergines, at least in private).

The ingredients are nice and simple (though… 1 CUP of olive oil?! Really?!):

2 pounds small, skinny eggplants, sliced (you can also use Japanese eggplant)

1 28-ounce can crushed tomatoes

1 medium-sized onion, finely chopped

1 cup light olive oil

2 tablespoons chopped parsley or 1 tablespoon dried parsley

salt and pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 375 degrees [FM NOTE: 220 C]. Slice eggplant crosswise into half-inch slices. Heat olive oil in a heavy skillet until it just bubbles but doesn’t smoke. Fry eggplant in hot oil until nicely browned on both sides. As the oil is absorbed, keep adding more, taking care not to splatter. As each batch of eggplant slices is fried, place them on a plate with paper towels so they can drain.

When the eggplant is done and is draining, fry the onion in the remaining oil, or add more, over medium heat until the onion is golden brown. Then very slowly (so that it doesn’t splatter) add the tomatoes, parsley, salt, and pepper. Simmer for about 5 minutes. Put the eggplant into a casserole dish (13 by 9 inches) in layers. Add the tomato sauce mixture, cover with aluminum foil, and oven bake at 375 degrees for 45 minutes.

Serve with either a crusty white bread or a dark olive loaf to mop up the delicious sauce. This should be accompanied with a light Greek salad with olives and a hint of feta cheese.

This dish goes very well with either a Soave or Frascati or even a fruity Valpolicella. Serves four to six.

The first thing I learned was that yes, it does require a full cup of olive oil to fry two aubergines and have a little left over for the tomato sauce. Still, slicing and cooking them was straightforward!

Since I happen to have two large skillets, I also opted to save time by cooking the tomato sauce at the same time as the aubergines, since there’s really nothing to be gained from doing it sequentially, bar perhaps having one less dish to wash.

The dish going in….

And the dish coming out! The end result was simple but tasty, with the aubergines soft enough after a double cooking to eat with a spoon.

Following the recipe, I made a small Greek salad with feta and olives. I like feta so I added more than a hint of it. I was eating on my own for this one (FYI, I got about three portions out of the recipe, so maybe the aubergines in the USA are bigger), and my local supermarket does olive bread in bun size, so it seemed rude not to. I have also included the wine bottle in the photo to show that I did indeed drink a Valpolicella with the dish– don’t know if it added anything special, but it was very nice.

Overall, a good simple meal and a nice one for a summer day when it’s not too hot to cook.

If you’ve tried this recipe and have opinions, or have thoughts on what I should try next (as you can see, I listen!) comment below or flag me down on social media.

Taken near the Hotel Lafitte, five minutes’ walk from Bourbon Street, in June 2016. The deluge was starting, but we hadn’t quite realised it yet.

I have a longer story about New Orleans, about Brexit and delirium and the most accidentally expensive holiday I ever had, but I just like the photo, so I’ll leave the story for next month.

Kai and Xev take a Moth to Texas, the Moth is attracted to the flame on an oil refinery, the two of them are separated in the resulting crash and before you can say “what’s the other cult series made in Nova Scotia that everyone’s heard of?” Xev is in a trailer park. She acquires a harem of rednecks, but one of them turns out to be the jealous type.

Meanwhile, it turns out that Isambard Prince, head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, is indeed Prince from the previous season, with all his memories but seemingly without his powers of regeneration.

This season is definitely about the running gags. We have once again the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms secretly controlling the US government (which, given recent news that the BATF have been dragooned into participating in ICE’s immigration raids programme, seems less satire and more prescience); the idea that discovering the Higgs Boson will shrink the Earth to the size of a pea; and NASA astronauts have a shocking mortality rate that no one seems concerned about. In a non-running but definitely topical gag that is probably lost on most viewers of the 2020s, the LEXX blows up Pluto.

One unexpected consequence of the move to Earth is production-related. Since its inception LEXX has been mostly shot on greenscreen, and generally very successfully so, but this season the greenscreen looks really obvious. I expect it’s easier to get away with greenscreen on alien rather than Texan landscapes.

Nigel Bennett has gained weight and acquired a crew cut and keeps reminding me irresistably of Doug Ford, Premier of Ontario. I wonder if that’s where Ford got his look.

Update to last week’s You Choose What I Cook So I Don’t Have To: the response was a) overwhelmingly off the blog, and b). marginally in favour of eggplant stew. So, I’ve taken note for future polls, and next month’s recipe will be the eggplant. Don’t worry, I’ll do the penne pasta later!

Next month, I’m going to do another Star Trek Cookbook recipe, and I’d like to try one of the “celebrity” dishes (contributed by cast and crew). But I can’t decide between Marina Sirtis’ eggplant stew (a Greek dish with eggplants and tomatoes) and Robert Picardo’s penne (pasta with walnuts and asparagus).

So, over to you guys! I’ll post the results at the end of the week.

I’ll make the non-winning recipe eventually at some point too, don’t worry.

A night out with the boys from the Dwarf is necessarily going to include a chicken vindaloo, Lister’s favourite curry, so of course The Abso-Smegging-Lutely Unofficial Red Dwarf Cookbook has an easy-to-make recipe for it.

In Britain vindaloo has the reputation of being the hottest of curries and so eating them has become something of a trial of machismo (or at least it was among the people I hung out with at university), but, whisper it, it doesn’t have to be: you can vary the amount of chillies if you’d rather enjoy the subtleties of the flavour of the spices. Oh, who am I kidding, we’re going for maximum heat here. This version is (more or less) guaranteed not to turn into a nightmare vindaloo monster, but it may ruin your stomach lining.

Chicken in the marinade

Recipe:

1 lb/450g chicken, cut into small chunks

2 onions, chopped

1 tomato, chopped

1/4 cup tomato purée

1 Tbsp oil

Marinade:

1 tsp oil

8 cloves garlic

½ inch ginger

3 tšp red chili powder

½ Tbsp mustard seeds (1 tbsp mustard powder)

½ Tbsp black peppercorns (1 tbsp ground)

1 tsp cumin seeds

2 green chilies, chopped

1 Tbsp tamarind paste

½ tsp ground coriander

1Tbsp coriander seeds (or 1 heaping tbsp ground)

½ tsp fenugreek seeds

3 cloves (1 tsp ground)

1 tsp cinnamon

4 Tbsp vinegar

½ tsp turmeric powder

1 tsp unrefined sugar

½ tsp salt

Tomatoes, onions and chillies cooking

To make the marinade: Heat 1 teaspoon of oil in skillet and add garlic & ginger. Sauté onions until beginning to brown. Then add next eight ingredients of the marinade and roast over low heat
for about four minutes until fragrant. Remove from heat and allow to cool. Once cool, put in blender with last four ingredients and blend into a smooth paste, adding water if needed. Marinate the chicken for 2- 24 hours.
Heat 1 Tbsp oil and add green chilies and onions. Once the onions are golden brown, add the
tomato and cook until mushy, then add tomato purée. Cook 2-3 minutes, then add marinated chicken and remaining marinade. Mix well and cook about 10 minutes, adding water if it gets too dry. Serve with rice.

Chicken cooking

The dish was quite easy to put together and cook. At the risk of offending the spirit of my culinary patron Madhur Jaffrey, I went the easy route and made my marinade with pre-ground spices. Which is perfectly acceptable for me as my palate is not that subtle (too many vindaloos at university I expect), but I also opted for a longer marinating time to compensate. I also didn’t have fresh chillies so I used jalepenos, on the grounds that a little extra vinegar would be fine. And I didn’t stop at 2!

Finished dish with rice and naans, not turning into a horrible vindaloo monster

My test audience (one a curry aficionado, the other a curry novice, both Red Dwarf fans) were quite appreciative, saying that it really tasted like a proper vindaloo and that it would certainly pass the Dave Lister test. It was an easy, tasty and spicy meal, so I would definitely make it again, though only for people who really like their dishes hot.

If you’ve tried this dish (or have a different vindaloo recipe to recommend) or would like to suggest another for me to try, let me know here or on social media.

Amazon Prime has finally got around to including LEXX season 4. I’ve no idea why they didn’t before, I assume there’s some rights issue that makes it different. Anyway, even though my memory is that this is by far the worst season, I’m a completist, so buckle up, TV fans.

The LEXX arrives at Earth, where the American public have just eschewed reasonably normal presidential candidates to elect an idiot with no political experience, and before you can say “wait, wasn’t this show made 25 years ago?” the Americans have detected the LEXX in orbit and sent up a serial killer to try and murder its crew, giving us a nice case of narrative whiplash less than 30 minutes into the new season. That second plot at least provides some good horror/humour moments before Kai deploys his assassin skills and finishes it off.

Already this is rather uneven, with the election plot not really jibing with the “Earth versus the flying saucer(s)” plot, and the big problem in evidence is that common sense dictates the LEXX should just eat the Earth and move on, so the scriptwriters are going to have to keep finding reasons for this not to happen. Although “Xev is horny and wants to shag the population first” works perfectly well as an excuse in LEXX terms, and there’s already humour potential in the fact that the LEXX crew not only don’t think like Earth people, they don’t think like Earth people believe aliens think.

Earth is implied to be hell, not least because Prince from the Fire Planet has reincarnated there and is in charge of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. This kicks off what I remember as one of the recurring jokes of this season, namely that the BATF actually run the American government, which is maybe not implausible.

If we had Fire and Water last season, then this implies that Earth should have a twin planet named Air. Sadly no one else seems to have thought of this.

Shoutout to Tony Anholt doing a cameo as a newsreader (it must have been one of his very last roles), and Rolf Kanies (General Krebs in Downfall) as the President.

Saddle up, space cowboys, we’re on the home stretch. For the last two weeks, we’ve been working our way through the three Plomeek Soup recipes in the official Star Trek cookbook, with generally positive results. Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations, I guess. This week we’re doing the final recipe, which is not a Neelix recipe and is, ostensibly, the version which Spock threw at Nurse Chapel in “Amok Time”.

Recipe

1 cup finely chopped onion
5 cups chopped celery
4 cups peeled and chopped carrots
1 cup (2 sticks) butter
4 cups chicken broth
1/2 cup heavy cream (optional) (FM NOTES: no, it’s really not)
1 teaspoon ground pepper
salt to taste

In a heavy 8 quart soup pot, sauté the chopped onions very slowly in ½ cup butter. When onions are transparent, add the remaining s cup butter and the carrots. Let carrots brown on low heat for
approximately 30 minutes. Once carrots have browned, add all of the celery and continue cooking on low for approxi mately 10 minutes to allow celery to soften. Next add the broth, pepper, and salt, and then stir through. Cover and let soup simmer for approximately 1 hour.

When ready, you can either add cream or serve as is. If you decide to serve the soup with cream, you can either add the ½ cup cream to the pot, stir, and let heat for another five minutes, or you can let your guests spoon the cream into their bowls individually. Serves eight.

veggies cooking in butter

Reading it through, it does seem like a very 1960s recipe, reminding me suspiciously of Campbell’s Cream of Vegetable Soup. Unlike the other two, it isn’t nutritionally complete, and, horror of horrors, has a meat broth base! Vulcans are supposed to be vegetarian, damnit. No wonder Spock got angry. Needless to say, I substituted in a vegetable broth instead.

End stage: really well cooked veggies

First of all, this thing has a hell of a lot of butter in it. I guess that’s where the protein is? Except that’s mostly fat. It also takes a hell of a lot of cooking, about 1 hour and 40 minutes, but I was going to do it for SCIENCE.

1/2 cup of butter. Seriously, Spock?

Cooking it for 1 hour and 40 minutes also made the veggies really soft, which is on theme with the other two recipes. Also, even with more broth than the recipe suggested, it wound up getting really dry, which is why I said you really do need to add the cream or you’ll just get a bowlful of boiled carrots.

I served it with grilled cheese on toast, so as to add some actual vegetarian protein to the thing.

Soup in a 1960s modernist bowl just to stay on theme.

So, how would I rank the three recipes? Neelix’s second recipe was definitely my favourite; I’d add more liquids and a bit of parmesan, but as a nice thick pumpkin and courgette soup, it did the business. Neelix’s first recipe was my second favourite, though I’d add a lot less nutmeg and, just for preference, wouldn’t cook it quite as long so the veggies aren’t as soft. Spock’s recipe wound up in last place. It was OK but, as I said above, was a bit too much like Campbell’s Cream of Vegetable Soup than anything alien and exotic, and the lack of squash was a problem for me.

And that’s finally it for Plomeek Soup Month! If you’ve somehow found a fourth recipe, or have tried this one, or have other suggestions for recipes for me to try, comment below or flag me down on social media. Live long and prosper!

And here’s the second Plomeek soup recipe from The Star Trek Cookbook. This is also a Neelix recipe, and comes as a paragraph at the end of the first recipe:

You can also make a much simpler and sweeter version of plomeek soup in your electric food processor by blending a 16-ounce can of unsweetened whole pumpkin with a small cooked zucchini squash and a cooked sweet potato until you have a paste. Add whole milk and butter, salt and pepper, to taste, and heat it in a medium-sized saucepan until the flavors blend, Just before serving, add a half cup of light cream and stir through. You can also add cinnamon. Serves four to six.

Ingredients in their natural state.

As you can see, there’s a lot of cooking leeway in this description. For people who want a little more guidance, I’ll say that I cooked the zucchini (courgette) and sweet potato in a 200 degree oven for 45 minutes (since I assume from the first recipe, and the blender element, that they should be really soft). I left the skins on when blending. I added about 1/2 cup skim milk, 1/4 cup butter, and 1 cup double cream (heavy cream for North Americans). I added 1 teaspoon each of salt, pepper and cinnamon.

Canned pumpkin is available in pretty much any North American supermarket, but for Brits and/or Europeans trying this recipe, I’d advise you to check the “American” imports section in your local supermarket. It’s can be hard to find in October (Canadian Thanksgiving) and November (American Thanksgiving), but I like a good pumpkin pie so I tend to stock up.

Ingredients being blended.

I don’t have a blender, but I do have a Magimix food processor, which does the job nicely. I added some of the liquid during the blending process, which helped get a smoother end result.

The paste cooking into soup.

The finished dish wound up thicker than a soup really should be, so perhaps more liquid would make it better. However, a thick paste did give it a sort of what-aliens-eat-on-spaceships feel, so why not. As with the earlier recipe, it’s nutritionally complete but a bit carb-light, so I added homemade bread and butter. And actual Romulan Ale (no vodka this time though).

Drinking Romulan ale is a really subversive thing for Vulcans.

I liked the taste better than I did the first version; it’s less bitter, but the pumpkin does really dominate. So if you like savoury pumpkin/squash dishes, you’ll probably like this. I don’t know if putting a few shavings of parmesan on top would offend Vulcans, but if it wouldn’t, it might add to the flavour.

If you’ve tried this recipe or have suggestions for recipes I should try, comment below or flag me down on social media!

Plomeek soup! The dish Spock threw at Nurse Chapel in “Amok Time”! That Neelix keeps never getting quite to Tuvok’s taste in Voyager! In a franchise as full of food as Star Trek, from Troi’s comfort-eating chocolate to Sisko’s family’s Cajun restaurant, Plomeek soup stands out. So of course The Star Trek Cookbook will have a recipe.

Guess what! It’s got three!

I hereby declare this Plomeek Soup Month on this blog. For the next three weeks, I’m going to try all of the Plomeek soup recipes in the book and report on all of them. This is the first one, and is supposedly Neelix’s special, the one he makes for Tuvok.

Recipe

1 cup of dried white beans

6½ cups water

1 large onion, chopped

1 bay leaf

1 kabocha squash, cut and peeled

½ pound green beans, cut in half

1 small zucchini squash, cut into pieces

½ pound cooked spinach

2 tablespoons minced garlic or 2 cloves chopped

1 tablespoon curry powder

1 teaspoon nutmeg

The ingredients, pre-cooking.

Put beans into a large pot and allow to soak for approximately 8 hours in order to soften
them. Next, drain the beans and in a large saucepan, boil the beans in five cups
water with onion and bay leaf for approximately 1 hour or until they are very
Soft.

Now, add 1½ cups water to bean mixture and add the kabocha squash, green beans, squash, garlic, curry powder, and nutmeg. Cook for at least 30 minutes as the soup becomes a nice healthy orange and the squash becomes tender. Add the spinach and cook for another 15 minutes. This soup is a meal in itself. Serves two to four hearty eaters.

Soup on the hob!

For the sake of convenience, I used pre-cooked, tinned white beans, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t get a terribly different result than if I’d cooked them myself, so that’s an option. This was otherwise a pretty easy dish to make. The 45-minute cooking time made me squint, since I don’t normally like my vegetables really soft, but I did it anyway.

Never not going to show off my Quark’s Bar merch.

The end result was a little bitter for my taste; I think it was the nutmeg. I didn’t mind the soft texture of the vegetables as much as I’d thought, though, and I certainly didn’t dislike it. Although it could technically be a meal in itself, it’s a bit light on carbs, so I added some homemade bread as a side, and that worked nicely.

If you’ve tried this recipe or have suggestions for what I should do after Plomeek Soup Month finishes, comment below or flag me down on social media!