Middlebrau

Catching up on the Newspapers

I sympathise very much with some of the ideas expressed by economist, author  and Observer columnist Will Hutton in his recent article, "Words won't change capitalism. So be daring and do something".

From the time the economic meltdown started, I've really been wondering, "Where, exactly, do we start again?"  What can be done to lift our economy out of the morass and downward spiral.  The concept of cuts in government spending is good in principle, but it needs to be met with powerful drivers to get the private sector growing again, and so far that effort has been lacklustre, putting it kindly.  If you're only cutting, there's no chance for a moribund private sector to make up for that loss of economic activity and you're stuck in recession.

My sympathy with Hutton's ideas is in part informed by our early efforts to raise a modest sum to purchase the brewery freehold back in 2009.  At that time the banks just wouldn't lend.  One banker told us to come back in 18 months!  That's a bank telling a business it's not a good time to invest for the business's future, even though the business case for the investment was all about long-term certainty and lower operating costs.  It's now been nearly three years and the banks still don't lend and the economy is still stuck in the doldrums.  At least we finally managed the freehold. 

Hutton recognises this problem.  He takes politicians to task for being too late to even awaken to the problems afoot.  He encourages active but positive government intervention to get markets working again.  He makes some useful points:

• to deal with 'unknowable risk', capitalism and government need to forge closer links; to share that risk
• banks aren't helping because they are hoarding cash to help shore up their balance sheets and repair the damage done to them by rampant over-lending in the years leading up to 2008
• the current government is talking the talk, but 'absurdly' not backing it up with policy actions

I like the sound of his proposals to prime the economic pump:

• replace a monetary policy guided by a 'redundant' inflation target with targets to boost GDP in cash terms by 7% per year for the next 5 years
• use 'every instrument of policy' - QE, (low) interest rates, government borrowing and government loan guarantees of up to one third of loans to SMEs  (he forgot targetted tax cuts and extended capital allowances)
• oblige the Treasury to issue infrastructure bonds, and the BofE to buy them, to force more and more money into the economy

This latter point has always struck me as a good idea - something that will pay benefits in the long run and perhaps even instil a bit of pride in the landscape instead of letting things run down.  Even building HS2 strikes me as good for the country, though it has had a long gestation, pissed a lot of people off and will probably not be delivered on time or to its generous £37.2bn budget cost.  Still, more of this, please.  And more support for renewable energy... it will pay dividends in the long term and stoke the economy now.

I presume this infrastructure QE could be inflationary, but that doesn't seem to be a worry - if other inflationary pressures are minimal, then even accepting 4-5% inflation in the economy seems okay to Hutton.  The key is to get things moving again.  Seems he is in favour of inflating away the debt overhang: "As money GDP starts to rise, so the public deficit and real burden of private debt will fall."  If there is some real growth and we inflate away the debt burden, win/win? 

I suppose inflation needs to be borne in mind to some extent by the BofE.  Just pumping 7% more cash into the economy could be inflationary, eroding purchasing power that won't keep pace with 'growth' in the near term; leaving savers and pensioners with less and less unless they are indexed.

Something also needs to be done to goad the banks back to their day job, to get that money doing productive good.  Hutton makes the point that bankers should be rewarded with bonuses for doing what banks do - supporting capitalist growth through lending.  In effect, their bonuses should reflect the success of the economic recovery that their lending facilitates.    This seems sensible.  Perhaps if bankers get the economy moving again people will be less concerned with the size of their bonus envelopes.  Hence Hutton's call for politicians to be daring and act to make this happen.

Blood, Bones & Butter

I've just finished reading Blood, Bones & Butter: The inadvertent education of a reluctant chef, by Gabrielle Hamilton. Wow, what a journey!  People like Hamilton have sucked the marrow out of life, and I loved the transition from what seemed like a lost, misspent adolescence to success on her own terms in Manhattan.  I would have said the whole thing was a true tour de force, but I found the long last section on parenting, Italian summer holidays and searching for an open restaurant in New York to be a little overcooked, unfunny and self-absorbed (for which I don't think Hamilton would necessarily apologise - the last section is a drift into making sure she gets out of her life what she needs).  It seemed like padding out a shorter work to book length.  A disappointing dessert after a great meal, but still a meal you'd talk about.

I had read a few brief excerpts in The New Yorker over the past couple of years.  Her teenage years and experiences were astonishing - left on her own for a summer as a young teen; an empty relationship with her mother who was clearly a massive early influence on the course of her life and her way of thinking about food.  I kind of like that she's writing as memoir of the hazy past days that aren't that far distant in time from my own childhood, which shows something of how the US has changed over the past 40 years.  Maybe we're just getting old.  I like that she's writing a memoir while she's still out there in the thick of things.

A bonus for me was her sojourn in Ann Arbor, where she suddenly realises she's had a mentor.  She tells this story separately here.  This brought back some memories for me of walking around campus, though I don't think I've been back to Ann Arbor since around 1992. 

In all, a worthy read for its gripping story of a journey through the ranks to opening her own restaurant.  I wouldn't even have minded more fly-on-the-wall details of this phase of her life, but maybe they're a bit current and sensitive.  So, my fourth book this month.  I've got a couple more under way at present, so hopefully can maintain the momentum.  Read on!

Chou farci

We've had a profusion of cabbages in our weekly garden box scheme this winter and were looking for something new to do with them.  By chance, the latest issue of The Art of Eating came last week and had two recipes for cabbage - one, for red cabbage, is pretty much our default for using red cabbage - a slow braise with apples, onions, spices and a bit of vinegar.  The other, chou farci (stuffed cabbage), was new to me, and made for a fantastic Sunday meal that used up two of the accumulating crucifers.

The gist of this recipe is that you're taking apart a cabbage and then re-assembling it with sausage stuffing inside it.  What I liked about the AofE recipe is that it has you take about half the cabbage (the inside bits) and chop them up and make them part of the stuffing. 

These bits, after blanching, are mixed up with sausage and packed into a ball the size of a small grapefruit.  You take the rest of the stuffing and mould it to the inside of the larger cabbage leaves (which also have been blanched), then press these around the ball of sausage and cabbage to reshape the cabbage.

This then bakes over a base of chicken stock (in our case).  Following the recipe, I put some bacon on top, but the outer leaf still blackened.  It needs to basted regularly to keep it from drying out.

This is what it looked like going into the oven.  After baking low for the better part of an hour, you slice it and it's like a sausage meatloaf with layers and shards of cabbage in it, which make it mighty tasty and reasonably light.  I took the remaining chicken stock, which by now had thickened and soaked up some of the cooking juices, tipped in a tin of chopped tomatoes and reduced it by about half to make a sauce to serve the dish with.

When I first started parsing the recipe, it seemed overly fiddly, but it was definitely worth the effort.  The kids loved it, it solved our cabbage problem and used up some of my homemade sausage as well.  Very thrifty!

 

Quick Spotify FIP Playlists

Courtesy of LifeHacker, a headline that made my afternoon:  Build Spotify Playlists from any Wikipedia Song List.  Because I realised that someone finally had provided the functionality to automatically generate playlists from a list of songs, artist and title, on Spotify.

I had a look at doing this when I first signed up for Spotify over a year ago, but it was too complicated for my ancient programming skills.  And now someone has done the necessary and there is Spot My Songs, which makes it possible to take a playlist off my favourite on-line radio station, France Inter Paris (FIP), and turn it into a Spotify playlist.  Here's what I do:

• Go onto the FIP website, archives, and select a whole day's worth of tracks.
• Copy the list and paste it into Excel.  Remove the times by using "Text to Columns" with a fixed width. Delete the first column.
• Copy the reduced list and take it to Notepad.  Do a "Replace Text", replacing three consecutive spaces with a marker character.  I used the tilde (~).
• Close Excel and re-open it (I had to do this to clear the "text-to-columns" from working).  Paste the list back into Excel and do "Text to Columns" using the tilde as a delimiter.  This splits the list into columns of Artist and Song. 
• Clean this up.  Sort on Column B to remove anything that doesn't have Artist|Song.  Here you are removing the news.  Also remove artist F.E.R. - FIP Loop, and anything else that doesn't look like Artist|Song.
• Save this list as a "tab-delimited text" file.
• Upload that text file to Spot My Songs, and drag the playlist it generates (it takes a few minutes) into Spotify as a new playlist. Et voilà! A day's worth of FIP on Spotify, minus any tracks it couldn't find. 

I did a trial on yesterday's playlist and it found 71% of all the tracks - something like 145 out of 204 tracks. One thing it won't do well is to find the classical music - it tends to be listed in French on the FIP site, rather than the English titles it usually has on the GraceNote database.

Three minutes to a 10-hour FIP playlist.  Can't be bad.  Loving this already!

Reading

I sat last night trying to decide whether to read or to write a blog post, and reading won out.  I've been on a bit of a reading kick since New Year (or really, since Christmas).  Hoping to get through a few more titles than the 13 I knocked off last year.  That seems pretty meagre, but I only managed ten in 2010 and 12 in 2009.  Something about having a job and a business and a family (and subscribing to the New Yorker!) that tends to distract.  Anyway.

So, I've made it through three titles already this year:  The Tiger's Wife, by Téa Obreht, which I was reading at New Year.  Magic realist fable set in the Balkans.  Snowdrops, by A.D. Miller - expatriate take on life in modern Moscow, complete with unfolding nastiness.  And The Sorceror's Apprentices: A Season at elBulli, by Lisa Abend - fly-on-the-wall season with the stagiares at elBulli.  A useful read that serves to stifle any desire to work in a posh kitchen.  Not a bad start.

I'm still working on my three "devotionals" - the saints, the Deakin and the Sunday Miscellany book - those will all finish together at the end of April (hurrah!), and my current main read is The Great Sea, by David Abulafia, which is a human history of the Mediterranean from the beginning of history.  I find it really fascinating - I am now just up to around the time of Christ and it has really served to put classical history in perspective.  Something about being able to breeze through Alexander and Caesar and Hannibal and put their times and accomplishments in outline against the greater sweep of human history.  I like how Abulafia points to traces of the ancient world that still exist today.  You get a sense how the work to build a harbour, for example, changes both the geography and the economy of the modern world.  Or how these trading cities were established around the rim of the Med (the book aims to stick to the coasts, skipping over some of the history of the big empires because it is not particularly coastal). 

And I've still got the New Yorker and the Economist to deal with.  I'm doing better with the Economist these days, thanks to the iPod app...

Would I care to set any targets?  Maybe 24 books this year is possible?  I've got a shelf full of unread books, and a wishlist full, and I'm kind of thinking to let the library fill in many of these titles to avoid buying more when our shelves here are so full and in need of a proper cull.