heliopausa

It's been a busy weekend - opera, culinary triumph, further adventures with Victor Hugo...

The opera was on Saturday night - though I think I misspeak by calling it opera; the production very much put the focus on the dancing as well as voice, and there was spoken voice as well as singing. It was María de Buenos Aires, and I liked it very much more than I thought I would - liked the production.
I didn't think I'd enjoy the dancing at all (I thought I knew the company, and hadn't thought terrifically highly of their work in the past) but I did, and the small orchestra took a little while to warm up, but then were great - very involved and involving. Of the singers/speaker, the men were very good; the woman who sang Maria had, I think, been chosen because physically she resembled the woman who danced Maria; she was good, but not as good. Anyway, I was glad we'd gone. :)
But on to domestic arts! I'd decided (inspired by adaese :) ) to make a vegetarian kedgeree.
I scrabbled around the internet, looking at various recipes, and not liking anything very much to fill in for the flaked smoked fish (tofu? tempeh?), and then thought - mushrooms! Specifically, local dried forest-grown shiitake mushrooms (nấm hừơng rừng), soaked in smoky-flavoured stock. And it was a brilliant success, and I've tried to load a picture on DW, and if it doesn't work, I'll try again. :) (also - we usually make curries with curry paste, so i had to shonky up a curry powder from what seeds and spices I had to hand, and it was not bad at all. :) )
The photo insertion didn't work, but wonderful

edenfalling has saved the day, by putting the photo in her reply , below. Thanks,

edenfalling !

Victor Hugo! He does some great scenes!

The whole Waterloo section was simultaneously sublime and very amusing. (How many ways could he find to say that Napoleon really should have won, that Wellington had an unfair advantage, because it rained! and nobody told Napoleon about the sunken road in the path of the cavalry charge! and God was putting a spoke in the wheel! and anyway, Napoleon was much more dashing than tedious old Wellington...)
He reminds me a lot of Walter Scott - though Scott is way less blinkered, patriotically, and better at character, and puts his more discursive side-notes in as appendices - whereas Hugo just slaps them down in the main text. I like them a lot, though! as for example, Waterloo, above. His whole piece on enclosed orders was really interesting, too, to see what this mind was thinking in the middle of the nineteenth century - he's very blunt about the erotic aspect, for example.
He's not much for subtlety in character, nor for very convincing plotting, and can be for me a bit too detailed in scene-setting. (I never read all those bits in Agatha Christie, either, where she explains exactly how far it is by the back stairs from the Colonel's bedroom to the corner of the smoking room etc etc etc.) But he is in patches genuinely sublime, and has some wonderful hold-your-breath set-pieces, and is genuinely, interestingly, the real deal Romantic. I've only just finished the second volume, though, so much more to come.

and I have made progress on my NFE, of a sort - I've shifted the end-post closer, by simply cutting out some of the story. So I can feel that much closer to finishing. :) Anxiety still gnaws, though.