Jambalaya

Skip Lombardi has issued a plea on his Italian Food Blog for Italian recipes containing cucumber, which he has hardly ever seen in Italian cuisine. It had never occurred to me before that cucumber has made such a minimal impression on the Italian palate. Perhaps it has been eclipsed by its cousin the courgette, or zucchini. One doesn’t see many zucchini sandwiches: unlike cucumber, which is purely a salad vegetable, zucchini generally has to be cooked.

As Skip points out, cucumber is a key ingredient in the famous Tuscan salad, panzanella. And salad it is with the few other cucumber recipes I have come across. Marcella Hazan, in The Essentials of Italian Cooking has recipes for orange and cucumber salad, and roasted aubergine with peppers and cucumber. Elizabeth David, in Italian Food, has an intriguing Insalata di finocchi e cetrioli. I guess these could all be classed as types of insalata mista. Cucumber-only recipes however are rare: the only two I have come across are from Janet Ross’s early 20th century Leaves from our Tuscan Kitchen, more recently re-edited by her great-great-nephew, Michael Waterfield:

Cetriola alla comasco. Cut some strips of peel from a cucumber and slice the cucumber very fine on a mandoline. Arrange on a dish and sprinkle over half an onion (grated or very finely chopped), 1 tbsp tarragon vinegar, and 2 tbsp good olive oil. Allow to ‘pickle’ for 15min before serving.

Cetriolo condito al miele. Cut some strips from a cucumber, cut the cucumber into inch pieces and then into rather thin wedges. Pour over the following dressing: 1 full tsp honey, salt, pepper, pinch chopped marjoram, 2 tbsp wine vinegar, 4tbsp olive oil.

A rather depressing article in E-Health Insider reports on what sounds a bit like a panic measure:

NHS Connecting for Health is urgently looking for experienced NHS clinicians, interested in ensuring that NHS IT systems are fit for purpose, to be flown out and work on assignment with clinical software developers in India or the United States.

It has been my impression for some years that the politicians driving this (not very original) vision have been blindly seduced by BigCo IT into believing that simply rolling legacy systems from across the Pond and imposing them on an unwitting NHS would be a piece of cake. Not so. As any observant student of large IT projects will tell you, a system stands or falls on its usability far more than its underlying sophistication, and you cannot assume that usability in one context translates simply into usability in another. Put more simply, the North American healthcare system and the NHS differ in so many social, cultural, and professional respects that a system designed for one will almost certainly fail in the other without significant redesign. It is no surprise then that the successful contractors are discovering that their prized systems are needing to be rebuilt virtually from scratch.

The real sadness is that if those driving this scheme had thought differently, they could have harnessed the knowledge, expertise and enthusiasm behind the large numbers of successful small scale systems that were already in productive use throughout our NHS. As it is, a large cohort of “early adopters” now feels alienated and frustrated.

The more egotistical brand this as the The world’s biggest IT project. It may well be the largest, centrally-driven, top-down IT project on the Planet—but that is hardly a category with a conspicuous history of success. I suspect that the real contender for the “largest IT project” accolade must be the Internet, which is unquestionably hugely successful. Think for a moment about how the Internet came about: its project director, project manager, project plan, champions, whoever. Then read Tony Hoare’s 1980 Turing Lecture: The Emperor’s Old Clothes (especially his take on the classic Hans Andersen tale at the end, and the following quote).

At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse but I soon realized it was doomed to success. Almost anything in software can be implemented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way—-and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay.

Then go place your bets.

The Consumers Association magazine Which? (online version) has recently reported on the techniques supermarkets deploy to entice us to part with our lolly. They opine that “The suspicion is that these specifications put more emphasis on how the food looks and how long it will last than on what it tastes like”, but go on to say “However, our snapshot taste test of strawberries showed that Tesco’s strawberries were as tasty as those from a farmer’s market. We bought non-organic British strawberries from market leader Tesco, Islington Farmer’s Market, and a market stall in Camden Town. We then ran a blind test, in total rating 234 strawberries for looks and taste. The result? There was no clear winner, with all three of the strawberries being preferred by almost equal numbers.

Have you noticed many farms in Islington, or Strawberry fields in Camden, lately?