Half-cooked flower

A fine dinner followed. I have been planning a recipe blip for a while now, hope I'll be able to do it soon. For now there are certain constraints. Constraints that won't allow me to switch on my music and take my own sweet time at the end of the day to cook. I am assuming I shall have the chance next week.

Now for some extracts from something I have been re-reading. Not for the discovery/realization at the end but for how loopholes in all possible alternatives were discovered.

"We have learned how to spot the good ones on a map, for example. If the line wiggles, that?s good. That means hills. If it appears to be the main route from a town to a city, that?s bad. The best ones always connect nowhere with nowhere and have an alternate that gets you there quicker. If you are going north-east from a large town you never go straight out of town for any long distance. You go out and then start jogging north, then east, then north again, and soon you are on a secondary route that only the local people use."

"What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua...that?s the only name I can think of for it...like the traveling tent-show Chautauquas that used to move across America, this America, the one that we are now in, an old-time series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer. The Chautauquas were pushed aside by faster-paced radio, movies and TV, and it seems to me the change was not entirely an improvement. Perhaps because of these changes the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep. The old channels cannot contain it and in its search for new ones there seems to be growing havoc and destruction along its banks. In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated. "What?s new?" is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question "What is best?," a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream. There are eras of human history in which the channels of thought have been too deeply cut and no change was possible, and nothing new ever happened, and "best" was a matter of dogma, but that is not the situation now. Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for."

Ring any bells?