Of quail eggs and Afro-Peruviana...

A quiet summer passes by, and with it come opportunities to broaden the mind. That has meant that it's been a bit quiet here at "Liberal Bureaucracy", but I am intending to return to the blogging, if only because it is a chance to keep people abreast of what I'm up to.

Yesterday, I learned a new skill, peeling hard-boiled quail eggs. we're entertaining today and, as usual, Ros has been busy in the kitchen preparing. There are, however, certain jobs that get referred to me for reasons I don't always understand. Peeling the quail eggs was one of them. Now, I'll be honest, I'm not a huge fan of hard-boiled eggs. The scent of one is enough to put me off, but since Ros asked nicely...

What hadn't been considered, however, was that I don't recall ever peeling an egg. And so, I found myself learning the process from first principles. So, for those of you confronted by such a task in the future without any previous experience, here is what I've learned;

• having fingernails is a help - you can delicately lever off bits of shell
• tap the rounded end in order to start the egg - it's easier than if you start at the pointed end
• quail eggshells are a rather pretty pale blue
• patience is a virtue - you can rush it, but the end product won't look any where near as good as it might

Peeling twelve quail eggs took quite a long time, but I didn't have anything pressing to do otherwise, and, by applying what I learned, it did get quicker as I went along.

So, what about Afro-Peruviana? Well, having stumbled across a band called Inti Illimani Historico, I was looking for them on YouTube when I discovered that they had made a live album with a singer called Eva Ayllón, of whom I knew nothing. She's really rather good, and I am currently hooked on the album, which was recorded at the Café Torres in Santiago.

As a practising bureaucrat, I had a working assumption that I had no sense of rhythm. Or perhaps, as a middle-class mixed race kid from the Zone 4 suburbs, I just hadn't found mine. I'm beginning to wonder if I haven't found it...