Post Thanksgiving assessment:
The shepherd's pie was successful. I made the mistake of telling my wife what was going to be in it and she was fussy. I had to be uncharacteristically brusque with her. I've been feeding her for almost 30 years; I know what I'm doing. She is going to eat it and like it, and she did.
The filling was easy ground lamb and spinach and a big spoonful of beans for texture and some separation. Then I threw in a bunch of savory things: some lemon juice, garlic, carmelized onion, herbs, tumeric salt. The crust was easy. I just pressure cooked four potatoes and then whisked them with raw leeks. In a way I erred with them. I made them rather dry so that they would brown up better in the oven. But dry potato mash is difficult to spread. So it wasn't so smooth. Let's just assume it was an affect I was chasing and let's call it rustic.
The butternut squash cooks itself...after you cut it into a moiety and put it in the oven. So I just cooked that thing, scraped out the meat and added the usual suspects of butter, cinnamon, salt, black strap molasses.
That was my holiday feast and it was fine. This morning I had a shock going to the market for provisions and a bundle of leeks was going for almost eight dollars. I had to opt for a red onion. And I bought some yukon potatoes which I haven't done in a long while and now I remember why! When I took them out of the potato bag, they were round. They are going to be difficult to peel. Now I remember why I gravitate away from them.
I've been playing around with the E alt scale. I was focusing on the A# on the 10th and 13th frets. A# was probably on my mind because of a recent thread about enharmonic notes. It is A# because It is in E and E is on the sharp side of the circle of fifths so that all its accidental notes are sharps.
However, underneath the melodizing I am playing a 2-5-1 in F using the same tones. In that case the A# is not an A# but a Bb because we're in F which is on the flat side of the circle of fifths.
If I were going to publish the sheet music of what I'm doing, I would have to make some executive decisions. On one hand, grammar is grammar so that A# is A# in E and Bb when in F. However the goal of sheet music is communication. As a writer you have to evaluate would breaking grammar makes things more clear. Would calling the tone Bb throughout the composition makes things easier for musicians or would someone say I'm finger picking in E and you write Bb? WTH?