6.66, is one hundredth, of the number, of the beast.

Let's play "what on earth is she going on about?"

Post drinks with the lovely D.H. I headed home and put together a recipe that I recently unearthed in the process of culling the many sheets of newspaper torn out of various newspapers and magazines and crammed into my bookshelf. It was called 'Salmon in a light, fragrant broth' and that pretty much summed it up. The broth was composed of lemongrass, oyster mushrooms, chilli, shallots, stock and sugar. While it bubbled away the salmon fillet (rubbed down with fish-sauce and salt and pepper) hit the grill for a good searing. Then I wilted baby spinach in the broth, took it out and put it at the bottom of a bowl, topped it with the salmon and poured the broth over both. Season with lime juice and a little more fish sauce and eat with unladylike relish. Citrusy, fishy, the musty taste of shrooms and fresh green from the spinach.

I've been worrying that my descriptions of tastes and scents are kind of repetitive. There was an article in the March 10th issue of the New Yorker this year about the difficulties of describing smells. John Lanchester comments that you can either go for the heavily symbolic: "it smells/tastes like a late night in china town in the winter" or the scientific: a system (in theory so far) that attributes identifying codes to specific odorant molecules. The latter is a way off - a lot of things about smells are still mysterious. See the slightly fuzzy backwards picture as an example. The top one smells like spearmint and the bottom one smells like caraway. Reverse the pictures if you want to use them for anything - at the moment they're actually caraway and spearmint.