Runny Thoughts

Spoilt brat.

I am reading a book.

Why thank you. I’m proud of myself too.

Not any old book though - a murder-mystery-detective-type-thing. It’s very good.

As is normal in these situations, there is a blurb on the back, which, effectively, gives you three Crucial Pieces of Information:

CPI 1: there is a murder. So far, so normal.

CPI 2: there is another murder. Again, only to be expected.

CPI 3: one of the main characters disappears. Aha! An interesting twist. Wonder where it will lead?

There is also the usual bit of guff about the main detective. Fair enough - they have to tell you something.

There is, however, a problem.

The problem is not CPI 1 - the book starts with the first murder, and, let’s face it, it wouldn’t be much of a m-m-d-t-t without one of those.

CPI 2, coming as it did at page 100 (of a 320-page book), was only to be expected - we had, after all, spent about ten pages inside the murderer’s head (MWAHAHAHA!!) as he planned it, so it would have been a little bit of a let-down if he had decided to stay in and watch reruns of Quincy instead. Plus, to be honest, if the body count stops at one in a book of this type, you feel a little short-changed.

I keep reading. And I keep reading. And keep reading. It’s all terrific stuff, but I can’t help thinking: “when do we get to the bit where this character, the one I’m reading about right now, the one whose internal machinations I am currently privy and in thrall to, the one who is quite clearly a pivoty central-type-person in the plot, because it says on the back cover that she disappears, when do we get to the bit where she actually, you know, disappears? You know, THE BIT YOU’VE ALREADY TOLD ME ABOUT”.

Page 200, that’s when.

Page 200. That’s about two thirds of the way through the book.

WT, as the saying goes, F?

It’s as if I was watching a film, and as the opening credits roll, someone stands up and announces to the assembled throngette: “you see him? He gets killed eighty minutes in, he does.” (In fact, don’t get me started on cinema trailers).

Charlie Brown would have known what to say.

Aaaaauuuuggggghhhhh!!!!

Who does these things? What blithering, lobotomised, candy-floss-brained son of a mongoose thinks: “I know, as it’s a murder mystery, let’s unravel the writer’s carefully-crafted, finely-wrought, clever-twisty-plot-type-stuff by telling the reader what’s going to happen in the book before they’ve even started reading it”?

And I thought spoilers were the things on the back of naff cars.

Gah.

That’s all.

Gah.

The Ten Stages of Writing

Disclaimer: There are, like, 48 gajillion articles and blogs out there entitled either So You Wanna Be A Writer?, Writing The Easy Way or How To Write A Book. The author is aware of them, and has even read the first few lines of some of them, but feels that some of the most important details have been left out, so is moved to offer:

The 10 Stages of Writing

1. Write something. This is harder than you think, but nonetheless the comparatively easy bit. Not as easy, though as:

2. Show it to your mum. She will know what to do. Her opinion, although possibly accurate, doesn’t actually count. But it will make you feel better.

3. Emboldened, show it to some friends. Some of them will like it. Some of them may even read it as well. They will make enthusiastic noises. IMPORTANT: Under no circumstances should you trust their opinion. It is worthless.

4. Buoyed by the positive (or lack of negative) reaction from friends and family, start preparing Booker Prize acceptance speech.

5. Realise you have to finish writing book first. Booker Prizes are generally not given to promising opening chapters.

6. Fail to realise how bloomin’ hard it is to write a book. Continue writing book. Finish writing book.

7. Pat yourself on back and pour large drink.

8. While under influence of large drink, reread book. Ignore fact that book is really not very good and contains long sections of incoherent gibberish while congratulating yourself on limpid prose, stunning metaphor, sweeping narrative arc etc. Decide to send it off to publishers the next morning.

9. Having sent book off to several publishers (all 110,000 words, obviously - they’d be annoyed to have to stop reading after three chapters), feel rather aggrieved when they fail to contact you by return offering lucrative five-book deal.Console yourself with thought that at least a dozen publishers turned down J.*.R*wl*ng (NB it is thought that repeated exposure to this name can cause severe damage to the nervous system of aspiring writers, so it has been thought necessary to replace some of the ones most likely to disturb the sensitive.)

10. Days turn into weeks turn into months, with still no word from bastard publishers. Become increasingly bitter about cruel unfeeling world’s inexplicable failure to recognise your true genius. Vow to put things to rights in coruscating exposé of publishing world. Return to Stage 1.

Recipe Shmecipe

You know what I want? What I really really want?

A cookbook that tells it like it is.

The marvellous writer Julian Barnes has written very entertainingly on the subject of recipes, the frustrations inherent in trying to follow them, and how they fail to meet the expectations of one who wants to be told exactly what to do. If you don’t have this book, I thoroughly recommend it.

My beef is a bit different.

I have yet to read a cookbook that accurately represents the experiences of the normal cook.

I would love, just once, to read a recipe like this (with apologies to The River Cafe, from whose blue book this is first extracted, then distorted):

Penne with Tomato and Balsamic Vinegar

Serves between 3 and 6.

If 3 you will have far too much and will pick at the leftovers for the rest of the afternoon, finally succumbing and finishing it off because let’s face it there wasn’t enough left for a whole portion by that stage.

If 6 you will realise when it comes to serving time that there isn’t enough and will try to salvage it with a tub of double cream or some bread on the side.

You will need:

2 tablespoons olive oil. Bugger, none left. Butter then (scrape the jam off first. Actually, leave it on - it adds a pleasant sweetness.)

2 garlic cloves, peeled and cut into slivers. Sounds so simple, doesn’t it? Allow at least ten minutes for this bit, mostly for getting the papery bits off the second clove. There will still be a little bit attached and you’ll have garlic under your fingernails.

A sharper knife.

A handful of fresh basil. But only if the pathetic little plant you bought from Sainsbury’s hasn’t died. Otherwise forget it.

1 x 800g tin peeled plum tomatoes. Or 2 x 400g tins. That’s the normal size in a normal kitchen. We’re not all the bloody River Cafe you know, our larders groaning with catering size packets of everything, and our scouts constantly on the lookout for the most authentic, used-by-actual-Ligurian-peasants-you-know-but-actually-grown-on-the-Contessa-di-Vecchio-Prosciutto’s-fifty-thousand-acre-estate, unbelievably expensive and exclusive olive oil.

Some sticking plaster handy for when you cut yourself opening the tins.

Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper. No sea salt? What kind of foodie are you? Sod it, Saxa will do.

250g penne rigate. Or fusilli. Or farfalle. Or, come to think of it, a mixture of all three because that’s all you have left. And 250g, by the way, serves 2, not 6. Chuck the whole lot in.

75g butter, cut into pieces. Yeah right. Make that an indeterminate-sized lump of butter plus a little bit more. Oh go on then, another little bit.

4 tablespoons balsamic vinegar. Now where was it? Somewhere in this cupboard. Oh here’s some white wine vinegar. Will that do? Hmm. Looks a bit manky at the bottom. Sell by...oh. Ah. Never mind, in it goes anyway. How much? 4 tablespoons. Oh look, just slosh in a good glug.

Oops.

120g Pecorino cheese, freshly grated. Ok so nobody has pecorino. Use parmesan. Yes you have. Have another look. It’s in the scrunched up foil package at the back. There you go. A bit dried up, but it will do.

More sticking plaster for when you grate your fingers trying to eke out the parmesan dog end.

Heat the olive oil/butter/whatever oil you managed to lay your hands on in a pan that is either far too big or just too small. Answer the phone and come back to find that the oil/butter/whatever oil you managed to lay your hands on has burned.

Clean the pan and start again, this time with a more suitably-sized pan.

Fry the garlic slivers until light brown. Leave them for half a picosecond too long. Burn them.

Swear lightly. This is authentic and entirely in keeping with the provenance of the dish.
Add a few of the basil leaves. Throw some of the others on the floor by mistake. Leave them there to steep with the garlic slivers that fell off the chopping board when you were ‘slicing’ (hacking) them ‘thinly’ (misshapenly).

The basil leaves appear to have disappeared. Plunder the plant again. The stalks contain more nutrients apparently.

Add the tomatoes. Stir and cook gently for 30-40 minutes.

Yes, 30-40 minutes. Should have read it before you started, shouldn’t you?

It’s cooking too fast. Turn it down.

Too low now. Up a bit.

Make some toast while you’re waiting.

Put some water on to boil. No not that pan. Nor that one. Bigger. Bigger. Is that the biggest one you’ve got?

When the water is boiling remember that you should have salted it. Salt it. Throw the pasta in.

The pan boils over. That’s why you need a larger pan.

Relight the gas. Mop up the water.

Cook the pasta. Realise that the fusilli need nine minutes and the penne thirteen. Never mind. Just boil them all until they’re lightly dead.

When the pasta is cooked, realise that you need a colander.

Walk from cooker to sink with saucepan full of boiling water and pasta in one hand, colander in the other.

Vitamin E is good for burns.

Drain the pasta in the colander. Rescue those pieces of pasta from the sink.

Realise you should have rinsed the sink first.

Return the pasta to the saucepan with the butter.

Add a bit more. Can’t do any harm.

Add the vinegar and coat the pasta thoroughly.

Now add the tomato sauce. Realise that you should have stirred it while it was cooking. Scrape the burned bits off the bottom of the pan and mix them in thoroughly with the rest of the sauce so that nobody notices.

Now is the time to throw in the double cream.

Serve.

Realise that the reason they specify balsamic vinegar is because it tastes horrible using anything else.

Grate a lot more cheese over it in a doomed effort to cover up the acid taste of stale vinegar that pervades the dish.

Next week: overcooked roast lamb with undercooked roast potatoes.

eBooks & iBooks & Real Books To Boot

Just to prove that I don’t only think about food (see all previous posts):
I’ve recently succumbed to a bit of an eBook frenzy. I discovered dozens of freebies on the iPhone, so downloaded them like a python eating a goat. Austen, Dickens, Bronte, Dumas, Fitzgerald, you name it. If it’s famous and I haven’t read it yet you can bet I have now downloaded it and will not be reading it in the foreseeable future.

Actually that’s unfair. The first thing I read on the iPhone was the first chapter of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species.

Fascinating stuff. Can’t wait to find out who did it.

I then engaged in some comfort reading. Books that I have no need to read again because I memorised them when I was fifteen. But I just wanted to check that they’re still as funny in a different format. Take a bow PG Wodehouse and Saki.

Now here’s the thing.

I’ve always been of the ‘there’s something special about a book that can’t be replicated on a computer screen’ persuasion.

I used to like vinyl, too. (Readers under the age of 35, click here.)

And now the 200+ LPs that I have collected over the course of 30 years or so lie unwanted in a pile in the cellar. I’ve transferred some of them to my hard drive, (a process I still inexplicably call ‘taping’) but to be honest the whole thing is rather fiddly and time-consuming, and I always get the levels wrong, and even though I’m by no means a picky audiophile of the kind that can never actually enjoy listening to anything because they’re so obsessed with ‘that buzz, can’t you hear it? You must be able to hear it! I don’t know how you can listen to this with that racket going on’, there are some tracks that even i can’t hack listening to, so fuzzy, clicky and generally all arsed up is the sound.

That last sentence does make sense - you just have to read it again.

The point is, it’s the CONTENT that matters, not the medium. And eBooks, I discover, are no eXception.

I’m reading The Count of Monte Cristo at the moment. A real page-turner, especially when the size of the screen means you turn a page every few seconds. And the eReader very kindly tells you how far into the book you are. 1.6%, since you ask.

But I’ve still got Alan Bennett in my bag, so to speak, for battery emergencies.

Chicken

I avoided the temptation to give the chicken the usual treatment today. Normally I’d shove a lemon up its bum, and a load of garlic, and maybe a sprig of something rhyming with...well...rhyme, and probably slosh a bit of white wine in the pot and drink the rest of the bottle, then semi-wet-roast it until at least partially dead.

This time, though, I turned poacher. It was a reasonably small bird, so into the big oval Le Creuset with it. Onion. Cardamom pods. Water. Boil. Simmer. Drain. Set aside. Boil the stock for a while, and while it’s reducing, quarter (or more) the chicken. Pine nuts in dish, chicken on pine nuts. Add rice (I could have done more) to stock. Simmer. Rice on top of chicken when cooked but still a bit wet. Into oven for a few minutes to bring up to temperature. Hey presto.

Got that?

The delicious thing about this way of cooking a bird is the simplicity of it. Chicken, rice, water, and whatever seasoning you might want. There is no throwing away, except, of course, the onion, but once that has imparted its flavour to the stock, it is beyond saving. The bones go back into whatever liquid is left, and there’s your soup for the next day. Or into the freezer with it for a risotto on another occasion. The chicken is unencumbered by other intrusive or overpowering flavours, and rice cooked in chicken stock...well, pardon me if I fall to my knees sobbing with the sheer pants-wetting fantabuliciousness of it all.

I would say that the pine nuts are the icing on the cake, but they’re better than that...they’re the pine nuts in the dish of poached chicken. Reading about it you might say “well what about the crispy skin? Don’t you miss that?” Well, you’d’ve thought so, wouldn’t you? But no, not a bit of it.

Accompaniment, from Claudia Roden’s Jewish Food: lightly pickled vegetables (cauliflower, carrot and cucumber on this occasion).

They were cut into chunks, poor things, and then had copious quantities of salt sprinkled on them. After an hour or so vinegar was added (balsamic today, but white wine was called for by the recipe). They were steeped for another hour, then drained, the salt conveniently disappearing with the vinegar, although of course both left their indelible impression. Now if you did all of that to a person, or even a hamster, you’d be carted off to the nick, but it’s a very much more humane way of treating a vegetable than boiling or steaming. The flavour of the veg is not dissipated into the atmosphere (as when steaming) or the water (as when boiling). It stays in the veg, firmly enhanced by the tender care of the pickling materials. The crunchiness of the raw vegetables contrasts nicely with the comforting wetness of the chicken and rice, too.

Thoroughly satisfying.

Earlier, it was food on the hoof. Altogether more prosaic, and if you have read any previous entries you’ll know that the Pret Choc Bar was heavily involved in proceedings. Precede it with the Pret ‘salmon nicoise’, which, although delicious, threatened to contravene the Trade Descriptions Act, and you have a perfectly functional way of feeding yourself on a Southern (or any other) train. Altogether more sociable than a Whopper and fries, too.

Maybe not quite as delicious, though.

A Brief Paean To Nige

Where would I be without Nigel?

Today my thoughts turned to the celeriac that has been lurking for the last few days. I shan't say where - it's just been lurking.

I've been dipping in and out of Nigel Slater's latest magnificent octopus: Tender (btw please don’t buy it from Amazon. Go to your local independent bookshop and order it. It will cost a bit more, but they will appreciate you, and if you don’t appreciate them, they will close down. Here ends the lecture.)

This book has a concept so stunningly obvious that I'm amazed it hasn't been done before. Well, it probably has, but I doubt if it has been done as well as this.

It's about growing, cooking and eating vegetables (at least part one is - part two will be about fruit hurrah). It is written in his usual style, every syllable lovingly imbued with the care of the professional food writer, but the whole equally saturated with the enthusiasm of the amateur.

Above all, I get the feeling that Nigel is fundamentally 'just like us' when it comes to food. I just know that he has hardening dog ends of Parmesan (beginning, frankly, to smell a bit like vomit) and a mouldy jar of capers at the back of his fridge, just like me; that, just like me, he ignores the pile of bananas from his organic delivery box in favour of more glamorous fruit like mangoes or pineapples, and they sit in the bowl, steadily browning, until well beyond the point of no return; and that sometimes, just sometimes, he says 'fuck it' and makes himself a meal comprising six chipolatas, a packet of Kettle chips, three-quarters of a bottle of red wine and a mars bar.

Just like me.

But he is also the master of 'giving you permission to make things up'. Hence tonight's meal. Sausages, grilled and sliced; celeriac, sliced and boiled; a simple dressing of mustard, lemon juice, oils, parsley. Mix together in a bowl. Eat. Wipe juice from chin. Watch quite-good-ish film about John Lennon.

Safe.

Jerusalem Artichokes

Grape Nuts with a banana, as usual. Must do something else for breakfast one of these days.

Lunch took me by surprise. Which is a bit silly really because it tends to come round at pretty much the same time most days. But you know how it is.

So it was goat’s cheese and pitta breads and some hastily-grated cabbage carrot and apple, just like the other day. Except it’s never quite as good the second time round.

Goddam healthy though.

And I sort of did the same thing in the evening, too. But I realised just in time (working to a deadline as I had to go out) and grabbed my oldest cook book. Not oldest per se (that’s probably Connie Spry - one of those books that you feel you should have if you’re interested in food, but rarely use. But when you do use it you realise how good it is.) But the one I’ve had the longest.

My mum gave it to me on December 23rd 1987. It was intended as a Christmas present for a young man who was just about beginning to show signs of interest in cooking (I was 22). Wrapping presents wasn’t really high on her agenda as my dad was in hospital after the second of three heart attacks. The third one killed him the next morning.

I’ve cooked most of the recipes in the book in the intervening twenty-two-and-a-very-little-bit years, (it’s Eating In by Fay Maschler, incidentally), some of them dozens of times. It has in it a recipe for one of the most illogically-named dishes I can think of.

It’s Palestine Soup.

Now stay with me.

It is called Palestine Soup because its principal ingredient is the Jerusalem artichoke.

We’re already in political hot water, aren’t we?

The plot thickens (unlike the soup, which is silky in texture). Perversely, the Jerusalem artichoke has absolutely no connection with Jerusalem. The name is supposedly a derivation of girasole, the Italian for sunflower, which the plant resembles. If you must, here is the Wikipedia article about it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem_artichoke.

Further, it’s not even a bloomin’ artichoke.

So we have a vegetable whose name has nothing to do with its actual derivation; and the name of the soup, at the very least, tells only part of the story. Perhaps it should, for the time being and to soothe feelings on all sides, be called The Soup of the Holy Land.
It’s actually rather delicious. I didn’t do it as described by Fay Maschler. I didn’t have any celery, cream or hazelnuts, and I peeled the chokes raw, chopped them roughly and bunged them into some melted goose fat (the Christmas gift that just keeps on giving), soon after the onions; she recommends blanching them whole, letting them cool and then peeling them.

Whichever, the combination is simple and goes for loads of similar soups: onions softened in fat, main ingredients chopped and added shortly thereafter, stock defrosted (in this case) and added to simmer for fifteen minutes or so, blender deployed, bread toasted, toast buttered, bowl filled. If you have lots of vegetables and not much stock, it’s a thick soup (and you can always add water if it clogs your blender); if the other way round, a thinner, silkier one. You can add cream, or milk, or even Greek yoghourt (although that tends to display the more English quality of disintegration on exposure to heat). This particular soup does very well with some chopped hazelnuts sprinkled on top, but survives perfectly nicely without it. I fried a couple of rashers of bacon and sliced them into the bottom of the bowl before adding the soup. If I hadn’t known about them already, they would have been a nice surprise. Unless you were a vegetarian.

I don’t know whether Fay Maschler’s book is a great one or not. I’m sure there are some dodgy recipes in there, but it will always be very high on the list of my favourite cook books.

Thanks mum.