Quotidianity on a Rainy Wednesday

This afternoon I decided to cook chicken broth for a separate recipe, and since Ge. bought the few ingredients and Mama had bought three bundles of asparagus yesterday, it all went into a meal.

First I fried the soup chicken in a little oil since it is supposed to improve the flavour, and threw in the celeriac while I was at it. Then I took them out of the pot and put salted water to a boil, and chopped up the remaining 'soup greens' (Suppengrün: e.g. three carrots, a small leek, a willowy parsnip and curly parsley as well as a celeriac fragment), and then threw them into the water gradually after the chicken had already found a home in it. Then it boiled and boiled, I skimmed off a little of the protein? which flocked to the rim, and I added a quartered tomato since one was sitting around and the weather does not conduce to palatable longevity.

Part of the broth then went into a beaker for the sake of the recipe for which it is intended, and I added asparagus stock to the rest on Mama's recommendation. After that came the fun bit of sprinkling in salt for flavour, and then hoisting out the chicken and reducing it to bite-size little pieces of boiled meat with the assistance of a fork and our most enormous carving knife. Which also took a while.

It was a cloudy and mildly tempestuous day today; oak leaves being blasted in the wind and showing their greyish undersides, tropically large drops of rain, etc. Uncle Pu was there for a visit, so in the evening we ended up playing the customary three Haydn trios again. Lately I've been playing mostly Beethoven's late sonatas and bits of Chopin, though not so much today, when I turned to the cembalo and tried out Baroque pieces.

It may be silly or obvious or venom to the soul of a true connoisseur, but one of the best ideas to approach a Baroque piece seems to me to be to consider it carefully and assign a particular method to playing the different values of notes. Sometimes I play all of the eighth notes staccato, sometimes the quarter notes; sometimes I play them detached or play them legato, and often I do something different in the left hand. It sounds quite good once one strikes the right balance, and I think Glenn Gould did something similar. And, frankly, I think it just sounds bad in my case if I don't do it.