Recipes for interesting times

.Jeremy Corbyn has won the Labour Party leadership election ... again. Now the fun begins. Will he be able to wipe the slate clean as he has supposedly promised to do? Not that I doubt his willingness; it's just that the party does have form at the moment. Will they be able to break the cycle of nasty niggling that they have got into?

Friends who have joined, or in some cases rejoined, the Labour Party in the last year are expressing their delight all over Facebook. I am maintaining a discreet distance from it all, although I actually believe he should be given a chance. It's time a realistic opposition was working in this country. I wait with bated breath!

Another country, Iceland, seems to be considering suing Iceland, the frozen foods company, over the use of the name. It's not that Iceland, the country, wants Iceland, the company, to change its name. They are quite happy for the name to remain. What they don't want is for Iceland, the company, to have sole rights to the use of the name. Should some company in Iceland, the country, want to use that name to promote its goods in Europe, then Iceland, the country, doesn't want Iceland, the company, to stand in their way and have legality of their side. Fair enough!

I like to collect recipes from the weekend papers. There is quite often something worth considering, which I cut out and put on one side, only to revisit it later and decide whether I am ever likely to make that dish. In that case, I stick it in my recipe scrapbook. It's just one of those things! Nothing nerdy about it at all. In fact my granddaughters quite enjoy looking through it.

This morning the Guardian gave us a whole supplement of recipes by Yotam Ottolenghi. The pictures of his dishes always look enticing. And yet, I approach them with trepidation. Why? Because they
often have wild ingredients that I know I have no chance of locating without travelling all the way across Manchester or even further afield.

Today's interesting-looking recipe called for edamame. I was not even sure how to pronounce it. So I looked it up and found that it is a "preparation of immature soybeans in the pod". It features in Chinese, Japanese and Korean cuisine. And presumably in the cuisine of trendy folk who can find such stuff close to home.

Here's a quote from Wikipedia: "Outside East Asia, the dish is most often found in Japanese restaurants, some Chinese restaurants, and health food restaurants. In the United States it is sold packaged in frozen sections of grocery stores, in cans, or fresh in the produce sections of health food stores."

No chance of finding that in our local Tesco then!