Runny Thoughts

Cock-up (leekie)

The leek is a marvellous thing. And I’m not even Welsh.

There were two of them in the fridge. I lopped off the tops, rinsed said tops cursorily in running water, and bunged them into the stockpot with a chicken carcass (it’s a fairly pointless exercise without one of these or equivalent, to be honest), a carrot, salt, and water to cover. I could have put in a bay leaf and some parsley and all the other usual gubbins, but what can I say? I’m a rebel. I live on the edge.

The rest of the leeks, the main attraction so to speak, were sliced into ticker-tape thin ribbons, rinsed rather more thoroughly and thrown into a lidded pan - I’d removed the lid temporarily to avoid littering the floor with ticker-tape thin ribbons of leek - with some butter, the water that clung to the rinsed leeks, some more butter, a lick of salt, and, what the hell, just a smidge more butter.

Set phasers to low, captain. Mr. Spock gets antsy if there’s any chance of his leeks sticking.

That is not a euphemism.

Leeks go wonderfully with eggs, I find. On this occasion I asked the Flame-Haired Temptress, as she came in from work, “what shall I do with the eggs? Scrambled? Poached? Omelette?”

I was treated to the weary look of one who simply doesn’t care, but who is wondering why the hell the food isn’t on her plate NOW.

I answered my own question.

“Poached then.” You know that thing that happens when you want to have water boiling at what the professionals call a ‘quiver’, so you boil up some water in a pan and it’s boiling at what the professionals call a ‘rolling boil’, so you turn it down and then it goes off the boil when you put the things in that are supposed to be being boiled, so you turn it up a bit and put the lid on and then it goes up to a rolling boil again and water spits out of the sides and goes everywhere, putting out the gas, so you have to relight it and by that time the water’s unrolling again and you coax it back to a quiver but then it somehow starts rolling again even though you thought you had it just right and your eggs end up being what the professionals call inedible kack?

Well, that.

The leeks were nice though.

Do Yourself A Flavour

Back in the day, when I knew no better, I had a cookbook addiction. My shelves groaned under the weight of glossy food porn, each new fad lovingly and self-consciously represented at great and ostentatious expense. I was especially fond of cheffy books: the Roux brothers, Anton Mosimann, Alastair Little, Shaun Hill, Jean-Christophe Novelli, Marco Pierre White, Pierre Koffman, and so on and so fifth. (This was before the revolutionary days of the River Cafe and their authentic, yet somehow staggeringly expensive take on Italian peasant cooking). I pored over them, taking in their wisdom, fondly imagining that one day I would actually cook sumptuous dishes like “lapereau farci au foie gras, aux artichauts et truffe” instead of the more mundane concoctions that actually represented my daily fare, for example the searingly honest and earthy “tranche de toast avec beurre salé, coulis de marmelade d’orange Coopers”.

Funny how everything sounds more glamorous in French.

Hardly a month went by without the latest celebrity chef launching their own book, each more glamorous and expensive than the last, and each, truth be told, reproducing very similar cooking with subtle variations to trap the susceptible (that’ll be me). Then, sometime in the 1990s, there was a revolution. It was a mild revolution, a bit like the decision one occasionally makes to keep one’s socks in the left-hand drawer instead of the middle one, but it was a revolution nonetheless.

Until then, most of the chef cookbooks that I had seen had clearly been written from the point of view of someone who did all their cooking in a professional kitchen. To this day, when I see the words ‘preparation time: fifteen minutes’ followed by a list as long as your arm of ingredients that need peeling, chopping, whipping, shelling, slicing, dicing, or sometimes chasing around the kitchen with a net and a cleaver, alarm bells ring in my head like the triangle part in the last movement of Dvorak’s Cello Concerto. Fifteen minutes. Yeah, right. It takes me that long to peel a clove of garlic.

These books were also beautifully illustrated, the perfection of the presentation merely underlining the impossibility of the task before you. It was as if the chefs were taunting your inadequacy. “See that?” went the subtext, “you’ll never be able to do that, you won’t. That’ll be thirty-five pounds, please.”

But in the 90s there emerged a refreshing strain of books, written by accomplished, and sometimes prominent chefs who had actually spent a fair proportion of their time in domestic kitchens, and who encompassed in their writing an innate understanding of everything that that entailed. Ovens with dodgy thermostats; imprecise measurements; unavailability of key ingredients; tendency to slosh in just that little bit more wine/oil/cream than the recipe prescribes. These impediments, and many more, are familiar to the domestic cook, and these new writers, while bringing to the table, as it were, their immense professional knowledge and experience, also understood that most people don’t actually want to reproduce restaurant food in our own homes. That, after all, is why we go to restaurants.

In addition, these chefs-turned-writers could actually write. The leader of this pack, for me, was (and is) Simon Hopkinson. He was chef-proprietor of Bibendum in South Kensington in its absolute heyday, before turning his hand to full-time food writing. I still miss his magnificent column in The Independent. What Hoppers did in his first book, the incomparable Roast Chicken & Other Stories, was very simple. He chose some of his favourite main ingredients, and he wrote about them, taking care to include, for each one, several contrasting recipes, all carefully designed to show off the featured ingredient to fabulous advantage. He didn’t show off, he didn’t blind you with science, and, touchingly, he included fanfares to other cooks and writers by whom he had been particularly influenced. The book exudes love of cooking, eating and the written word in equal measure, and remains very near the top of my Desert Island Cookbook collection some fifteen years later.

Others, of course, have joined it, including several by The Country’s Favourite Nigel, whose latest offering, Tender, Volume Two, I was lucky enough to be given for Christmas.

Now, I yield to nobody in my admiration for Mr. Slater. In the Runny household, his word is law. If Nige says there is good to be found in swede, I put forty-five years of bitter and contradictory experience to the back of my mind, and give it a try. When he extols the virtues of kale, I swallow manfully and do his bidding. Dammit, the man’s a legend - his books are stuffed full of common sense and knowledge, and he writes like an angel. Furthermore, and possibly most importantly, you get the overwhelming impression that about once a month he thinks ‘bollocks to it’ and makes himself a fish finger sandwich with ketchup and mayo on Kingsmill medium white sliced, followed by a family-sized Galaxy. This is how I want my food heroes - underneath it all, just as slutty and greedy as the rest of us.

But, much as I love Nigel, and look forward to discovering the joys of his latest offering, my heart this Christmas was stolen by an outsider, something quite unexpected and original. It is called The Flavour Thesaurus, it is written by someone I had never heard of, and I think you should buy it.

Niki Segnit is, as far as I can tell, neither professional chef nor food writer. But she clearly loves, and knows a lot about, food. And she has found a way of writing a book about food that is refreshingly original, and does something not, as far as I know, attempted before.

Which, of course, is what original means, so do me a favour and ignore the last part of the previous sentence. I can’t be bothered to delete it.

The Flavour Thesaurus does what it says on the tin. Using as her basis an alluring flavour wheel (like a colour wheel, but, well, with flavours instead of colours), Segnit explores the possibilities presented by the pairings of 99 ingredients, which come under a broader umbrella of 16 categories: ‘roasted’, for example, or ‘green & grassy’. She does this in what I would call a selectively exhaustive manner, eschewing some of the more outlandish combinations that would arise from an absolutely rigorous adherence to the principle, but offering a mini-essay on every pairing deemed worthy of inclusion. Blackcurrant and mushroom, for example, doesn’t make the cut, but cauliflower and chocolate does, with a brief description of Heston Blumenthal’s (who else?) cauliflower and chocolate risotto.

By avoiding the ‘everything has to be presented in recipe form’ option, she has liberated both herself and her reader. Entries include historical detail, pithy comment, a snippet or two of fascinating information, outspoken personal opinion, and plenty of dry wit. Cuisines from all over the world are referenced, as are, gratifyingly, many films and TV shows, as well as other writers, from Homer (the Greek one, not the Simpson) to Jamie Oliver, via the OED.

Sometimes, when the fancy takes her, she includes a compressed recipe; more often, she doesn’t. The brevity of the entries encourages the reader to dip in and out of the book, although I’ve found it so interesting that I’ve been reading it from cover to cover, and every page is an encouragement to explore, to experiment, to cast aside the foul tyranny of recipe culture that has held us in its thrall for so many years and trust the instinct of one’s own taste buds.

The result is an absolute joy. Her writing is pithy (have I said that already? How unpithy of me), drily informative without being tedious or lecturing, and possessed of an economical wit. Here she is, for example, on a horseradish and bacon sandwich: “Sink your teeth in and feel your eyeballs begin to turn upwards. Note how the horseradish gets behind the bacon and gives it a nip on the backside.” And on the combination of walnut and parsnip: “Like gnawing on Pinocchio’s leg.”

There is more in this 400-page book than you will find in dozens of other, more heavily promoted, tomes.

Even better, there isn’t a single photo in it. I feel adequate again.

Hallo Pumpkin

Ah, Halloween. Traditional in England since...er...a few years ago.

I may be in the minority, but we didn't 'do' Halloween when I were a lad. Maybe it was the proximity to Guy Fawkes, with its soggy catherine wheels, short-lived sparklers and half-baked potatoes; maybe we hadn’t yet recovered from the breathless excitement of Harvest Festival; maybe it was simply not in our consciousness except as an annual episode in Peanuts cartoons.

That is how I knew about it. If it hadn’t been for Linus van Pelt and his attempts to lure the Great Pumpkin to his achingly (nay, eye-wateringly) sincere pumpkin patch, I would have grown up not knowing about Halloween at all.

Poor Linus. The thought of his forlorn annual vigil still gives me a hollow feeling in the stomach. Never mind Charlie Brown’s regular attempts to kick the football or to steer the latest in an endless series of kites away from the clutches of the rapacious kite-eating tree. Sad though they were, those failures epitomised Charlie Brown’s lot in life. You could almost say they validated his existence. What use, after all, is a failure who cannot fail?

Linus, though, was erudite, well-read, refined. He could look at a cloud formation and see a map of British Honduras or the profile of the sculptor Thomas Eakins, where Charlie Brown merely saw a ducky and a horsey; he was prone to quoting the Gospels, and saying things like “there is no heavier burden than great potential”; for ‘show and tell’ he hand-drew facsimiles of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Ok, so maybe he was a bit pompous, but this tiny failing was offset by his attachment to his security blanket, and especially by his touching belief in the Great Pumpkin. The annual pumpkin patch episode became part of the Peanuts canon, as indispensable as Beethoven's birthday, Joe Cool, or Lucy's psychiatrist's booth. One year, Linus was the runaway leader in the polls for Class President, only to blow it in his final speech, which opened with the words "let me tell you all about the Great Pumpkin".

If the romance of the Great Pumpkin made Halloween a more attractive prospect to this eight-year-old, trick or treating left me stone cold. Don’t get me wrong. The greed I displayed at Christmas (to take a small representative sample) would have qualified me for a career as a merchant banker or Premiership footballer, but at least there was the pretence of reward for good behaviour.

Trick or treating, on the other hand, seemed to me extortion, plain and simple.

Now I’m all grown up and everything, and at least partially responsible for the ethical moulding of a little person who is cast disturbingly in my own image, I’ve started examining these festivals, as far as is possible, from the child’s point of view. So I started thinking “what exactly is the message we send the younger generation on our annual holidays and festivals, especially now so many of them have lost touch with their religious or secular origins?”

The results are quite revealing:

New Year: celebrate new beginnings and reassess your drab, worthless life. Preferably do this when hungover. Join a gym for a month.

Valentine’s Day: if you are not in a relationship, you are sad and lonely, quite beyond redemption. If you are in a relationship, and do not allow yourself to be ripped off to the tune of forty quid for a bunch of roses, and eighty for a substandard ‘romantic meal for two including bottle of wine and mid-meal serenading by an out-of-work gipsy violinist’, followed by another seventy for a pair of tickets to a Valentine’s Day concert ‘including a rose for every lady in the audience’, you are an abject apology for a human being.

Mother’s Day: assuage your guilt with a phone call and a bunch of daffs.

Easter: commemorate the death and miraculous rebirth of the one who is the embodiment of goodness and universal love, the Easter Bunny. Consume a quantity of chocolate the size of Basingstoke.

Father’s Day: boys - watching sport on the telly all day and not lifting a finger to help with the housework is fine for limited periods. See if you can make such periods last all year.

May and August Bank Holidays: random days off are fine when, for no known reason, officially sanctioned.

Harvest Festival: give out-of-date tinned peaches to old people.

Halloween: form gangs and roam the streets extorting goodies from innocent householders with scarcely-veiled threats of unnamed violence.

Guy Fawkes night: down with terrorism, especially when it’s incompetent.

Christmas: generosity, forgiveness, peace on Earth, goodwill to all men. Never mind all that touchy-feely rubbish: spend money you don’t have on stuff that will be jettisoned by the recipient within a week; buy industrial quantities of food and drink that you wouldn’t consider consuming during the rest of the year; eat until you resemble a barrage balloon that’s won a ‘best Mr. Creosote impersonation’ competition; pretend that staggering to the corner shop to buy a pint of milk is ‘walking it off’.

Well, there it is. Annual holidays holding a mirror up to modern society. Inspiring, isn’t it?

Short and Wurlys

I regard myself as a pretty open kind of guy, prepared to see the best in people, as I hope they would in me.

But over the last ten days I’ve found myself increasingly involved in furtive behaviour.

It’s my own fault. Who would have thought that a simple blog post on confectionery would spark off a national debate, local uprising, bit of a chat on Twitter and a dozen or so comments here on this blog?

Deary me, the outrage I caused. Well not so much outrage as cheerful disagreement, to be honest. But thanks to everyone for sharing. It seems that chocolate is a much more unifying subject than, say, religion or politics, for the simple reason that more people are interested in it. Makes you think, doesn’t it? Never mind the Tea Party, how about the Chocolate Party?

(Sidebar 1 re Tea Party and the deliciously awful Christine O’Donnell: this is the story of the week, hands, as it were, down)

Back to my shifty behaviour.

Buoyed by people’s interest, and always open to new and exciting experiences, I’ve taken a fresh look at the confectionery counter in the last few days. And this is where the furtiveness comes in.

Overwhelmed by choice, I’ve spent so long examining the wares on display in a variety of local emporia that I wouldn’t be surprised if shopkeepers replaced their “no more than four scool chilrden (sic) at a time” notices with “no more than one minute looking at the sweetes”.

(Sidebar 2: my all-time favourite newsagent sign is “the magazines are not for reading”. You know what they mean, but...)

It shouldn’t be that difficult, should it, to make a decision on which chocolate bar to buy? Usually it’s straight in there for a Toffee Crisp or a Twix, maybe sometimes a Crunchie if I’m feeling particularly ill-disposed to my teeth. Occasionally, when they’re in season, a Creme Egg. But all this counter-talk of Drifters, Twirls, Penguins and Topics has led me to, well, drift off-topic, like a...twirly, um, penguin...

Yeah, sorry about that.

Anyway, there are a few amendments I need to make to last week’s post, and then I’ll leave the topic subject alone.

Firstly, I made a couple of heinous omissions from the original list, highlighted by some of the commenters:

Toblerone: How could I possibly have missed this one off? The only sweet ever made that is designed specifically to cause injury to the roof of the mouth. It’s a little-know fact that the Toblerone was developed by Swiss army scientists during WWII - they were afraid that their knives would be too obvious a weapon and were looking for something that would incapacitate half the Western world by stealth in one go. Swiss neutrality - yeah, right.

Fry’s Turkish Delight: doesn’t really count. Too pink in the middle, the chocolate coating merely an afterthought.

M & M’s: deliberately omitted, I confess, because not ‘native’, but I suppose established enough in this country to warrant a comment. They go into the ‘Modern Pretenders, But Pretty Darn Good Ones At That’ category AND the ‘Down In One’ category. I don’t hear anyone disagreeing.

Star Bar: straight in the ‘Sorry, Repulsive’ category. Wrong, just plain wrong.

The book is now closed.

Secondly, not only is a finger of Fudge just enough, it still only costs 17p.

17p!!

Nothing costs 17p any more. Except, obviously, a finger of Fudge. There’s something reassuringly old-fashioned about that, as if I were walking down the street in the middle of December and saw a young boy with a pudding bowl haircut and the Ready Brek glow.

Thirdly, and this is (or rather, isn’t) the big one: the Curly Wurly. The thing that started this all off in the first place.

Well, I searched high and low in our area, and was beginning to come to the conclusion that West Norwood is too high-class to stock them, as if the area as a whole was sniffing disdainfully at the thought of anything so, well, YOU know, my dear.

Then I found one in West Hampstead, and realised I had it the wrong way round. The Curly Wurly is a magnificently classy snack, available only in the better parts of town.

But the thing about the Curly Wurly that most struck me was this: delicious as it was, it was TINY.

Now I know I’ve grown since 1975, but even so.

TINY, I tell you. Finished in three bites. The Curly Wurly of my youth was a meal in itself, like a pint of Guinness. Not as rib-sticking as a Mars bar, to be sure, but, unlike a Milky Way, you could eat it between meals and ruin your appetite.

That’s the point, isn’t it?

But, it has to be said, even though it was smaller than an Oompa-Loompa’s toenail, it was completely scrumptious.

I need more. Lots more.

So if you’re thinking of buying a Curly Wurly in West Hampstead this week, you might want to do it before Wednesday. That’s all I’m saying.

Hello Sweetie

Regular readers will know that I am not afraid to tackle the big subjects on this blog.
Politics, classical music, literature, food, ecology, social networking, technology...the list goes on. You name it, it’s probably been subjected to my ill-informed and unthinking scrutiny.

But I realised the other day that I have been remiss. There is one burning issue that remains undiscussed here.

Reader, I apologise.

All I can do is rectify the situation without further ado.

It started with an innocent tweet in my timeline.

The mere mention of the word ‘curly’ in conjunction with its natural rhyming partner was enough to send me down memory lane. I don’t know why, but some sweets belong firmly in my childhood. It’s almost as if they stopped making them in 1979. And even though the taste of curly-wurlys (wurlies?) eaten in my innocent youth remains with me still, I would no more buy one now than Sarah Palin would conjugate a prefixed imperfective verb of motion in Russian.

Or English, come to that.

Why is this?

They are still making them, those cheeky monkeys who call themselves Cadbury UK. They’ve been making them since 1971.

So why did I stop eating them about seven years later?

It’s got nothing to do with ‘growing up’, a pernicious process that I have managed to avoid with dextrous ease for forty-five years now. Oh no, I still eat confectionery on a quasi-daily basis: Mars, Twix, Wispa (plain or Gold), Crunchie, Kit-Kat (don’t get me started - just bring back the foil), Flake, Maltesers and on and on and on. I eat them all with a childish relish that makes my five-year-old boy’s innocent pleasure at the sight of a party pack of chocolate buttons seem debonair and sophisticated.

(Obviously I don’t let him have chocolate very often. Bad for your teeth, you know. Now pass me that King Size Twix.)

It’s just one of those mysteries of life, I suppose. I may have to try one soon, just to see what I’ve been missing.

Now, time for some interactivity. What I’m about to do will no doubt please some people, while enraging and alienating others. (I have already discovered, to my cost, the folly of extolling the virtues of cre*e e*gs in certain quarters.)

The fact is, people take their confectionery very seriously. Yet impassioned debate is entirely missing from the public forum. National news outlets, obviously, have to shy away from any accusations of product placement, which is why Charlie Brooker never writes his 800 words on ‘Why I Hate Lion Bars’.

Food bloggers, by contrast, probably could write about individual candy bars or brands, but are too busy doing vertical comparisons of single-estate Argan oils or writing impassioned and purple prose on the subject of their favourite root vegetable.

So to fill this gap I present below a vaguely categorised list of chocolate-based confections (there is one exception, but I couldn’t leave out Caramac, could I?). It is an entirely personal list - so even though you may disagree with me I will come down like a ton of bricks on anyone who says I’m ‘wrong’ or ‘deluded’ or ‘in league with Satan’. But I give it to you in the hope that you, in return, will embellish it with vigorous and informed debate.

As long as you don’t diss my creme eggs.

The Classics - Timeless, irreplaceable
Twix
Kit-kat
Toffee Crisp
Mars
Crunchie
Flake

Great When I Was Ten, But Inexplicably Don’t Eat Them Any More
Curly Wurly
Rolo
Caramac

Good Solid Stuff, But No More Than Once A Month For Some Reason
Minstrels
Galaxy
Aero

‘Modern’ Pretenders, And Pretty Darned Good Ones At That
Yorkie
Wispa
Wispa Gold
Dime

Down In One
Smarties
Maltesers
Buttons

Not As Big As You Want Them To Be, But Any Bigger And You Would Probably Feel A Bit Sick
Milky Way
Milky Bar
(Finger of) Fudge
Creme Egg
Ripple

‘Grown-Up’ Chocolates That You Just Wanted To Cram In Your Mouth But Were Only Allowed One At A Time
After Eight
Matchmakers

Passed For Sophisticated In The Seventies But We All Know Better Now
Bournville

Nice Try But We’re Not Falling For Healthy Stuff In Our Chocolate
Fruit ’N Nut
and especially
Whole Nut

Always Somehow Disappointing
Revels
Club
Penguin

Just Somehow Never Fancied Them, You Know. Perfectly Nice, I’m Sure, But...
Topic
Picnic
Boost
Twirl
Time Out
Double Decker

Can’t Imagine Why Anyone Would Want To Eat Them
Lion Bar
Drifter

Sorry, Repulsive
Walnut Whip
Wagon Wheels
Bounty
Marathon (and no I will not call them Sn*ck*rs even though that’s been the name for at least thirty years)

I Say Old Bean

DISCLAIMER: Despite the unpromising beginning, this post is NOT about football. Keep going. You’ll get to the bit about food soon enough. If, on the other hand, you prefer football to food, you might want to read the opening paragraph and stop there.

So. Hats off to the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea on a feisty defeat to Brazil in their World Cup opener last night. Funny how the countries that are keenest to show off their democratic credentials in the name of their country are the ones least qualified to do so.

Still, they played as if their lives depended on it.

In fact, come to think of it...

Anyway, their performance was in stark contrast to Spain’s. They seemed to think that if they just kept passing the ball eventually one of the passes would go into the net.

But that’s not what I want to talk about.

I want to talk about vegetables.

And before you jump to the inevitable conclusion, I have indeed steered the subject away from football and am not referring to the England team.

Ba-boom-ching. Thangyouveddymudge.

There’s been a certain amount of self-sufficiency in the Runny household of late. Why, only last night, the Flame-Haired Temptress and I partook of our own radishes, dipped in someone else’s salt; followed by our own potatoes, chives and spinach, paired with someone else’s butter, olive oil, garlic, pine nuts and raisins.

A veritable feast.

Peas are on their way, too. And we’ve got more herbs than the annual meeting of the Tijuana Brass Appreciation Society.

All of this has appeared from nowhere, it would seem, lovingly nurtured by the soothing hand of the F-HT.

It was different back in the day. When we first started growing veg, I was the instigator.

Our garden wasn’t big. Nor was it accessible, as we occupied a first-floor flat.

So starting a veg garden was not an undertaking to be embarked on without serious consideration.

I sourced, ordered and bought raised beds, compost and seeds, not making much of a fuss about how clever I was being.

And then, with a great deal of huffing and puffing, I planted and nurtured them.

There came the time for thinning out, the process whereby dozens of healthy pre-pubescent radishettes would be sacrificed to the merciless God of Waste in order that the fittest of the species be given a little Lebensraum.

It’s not for the faint of heart.

After several weeks’ consultation with the sage of all things horticultural, Dr. D.G.Hessayon, I took a deep breath, armed myself with tweezers and set about my grisly business.

The procedure was executed with surgeon-like delicacy and accuracy.

For about five minutes.

Then I got fed up and just ripped the buggers out willy-nilly.

Or left them where they were.

Surely, I thought, they can sort it out for themselves? It can’t make that much difference.

You live and learn.

Time passed and vegetables (some of them, at least) grew.

Then, disaster.

Slugs and snails appeared. Puppy dog tails probably weren’t far behind.

The best thing to do, I was assured, was to nail them at night.

Manfully, and again with the minimum of fuss, I donned waders and sou’westers (it was a wet spring) and strode into the fray. Eschewing all offers of sustenance, and protected only by the trusty torch of truth and the kitchen scissors of slug-murder, I dispatched them to all four corners of our small plot.

It only encouraged them.

If you’re not a gardener you may not appreciate the determination and downright evil exhibited by the average group of guzzling gastropods.

Think Simon Cowell crossed with Genghis Khan.

Still, eventually, we had a crop of sorts.

Modestly accepting the loving applause of an admiring throng, I made a very small meal of some very small potatoes with a couple of very small leaves of spinach on the side.

The slugs opened an ‘all you can eat’ buffet round the corner.

The next year we were moving, so the garden went by the wayside.

Now, established in the new place, where the garden is more accessible, we have enough room for the following:

A shed.

A dried-up pond (large enough for frogs to breed, but not large enough for them to hide from Felis Catus).

A vine.

A faux palm tree (Felis Catus likes to think he can climb it. When he is halfway up, he thinks again).

A couple of raised beds.

It is in these raised beds that we are nurturing the stuff of food fads.

You know how it goes. Every couple of years the foodie community rejoices in a new, painfully chic, fashion ingredient.

Never mind that said ingredient has been in plentiful supply and gone unnoticed for years. This year it is the thing.

Delia started it years ago with those blessed cranberries. One moment you couldn’t buy cranberries because nobody stocked them; the next you couldn’t get them because they were sold out.

Pomegranates, blueberries, Alfonso mangoes, rocket, chard, butternut squash, Jersey Royals, asparagus, artichokes, salsify, polenta, pea shoots, carnaroli rice, argan oil, etc etc. They’ve all had their moment in the sun, leading to some truly horrendous culinary disasters as amateur cooks chuck them willy-nilly into everything they cook, based purely on the fact that Nigel did a feature on them in The Observer last Sunday.
Pomegranate risotto anyone?

Thought not.

You’d have thought that we’d exhausted them all.

I beg to differ.

Broad bean leaves.

Rip them off, wash off the black fly (for black fly there will be), and wilt them in oil with garlic.

They look a bit like baby spinach, but taste like broad beans, which is a little disturbing.

But they are worth a go. At the very least they are more plentiful and require less patience than broad beans themselves, which always look so promising in their plump pods, but which invariably yield a crop barely big enough to coat the bottom of an eggcup.

All I ask is this: if broad bean leaves turn into the next superfood fashion, just remember where you read it first.

Pointless Food.

I don’t consider myself a picky eater. Oysters, tripe, sweetbreads, giant marine cockroaches (well what else would you call a lobster?), Ginster’s pasties - all part of a long list of potentially dubious foodstuffs that have passed my lips at one time or another. I hope that I would give anything the benefit of the doubt at least once.

Alas, ’twas not ever thus. Just ask my mum. Apparently I ate nothing but Grape Nuts and hard-boiled eggs between 1970 and 1976, only making the breakthrough to more sophisticated fare on a family holiday in France. I had inured myself to the lack of cereal and salad cream on restaurant menus, falling back on a restaurant diet of omelette followed by melon. Or possibly melon followed by omelette. I forget. In the 1970s, anything was possible.

Anyway, there we were, in a hotel a stone’s throw from the Bayeux tapestry, an exhausting day of Olympic 50km walking reenactment on Arromanches beach behind us. My family waited patiently while I surveyed the menu. Which would it be? Melon then omelette? Omelette then melon? Or perhaps a melon omelette?

I laid the menu aside. If I had been in possession of a pince-nez, I would probably have taken it off, tapped it thoughtfully on the table a couple of times and tucked it in my shirt pocket.

“I think I’ll have the quail.”

I’m surprised nobody punched me on my smug eleven-year-old nose.

I can’t remember how they tasted, but those quail gave their lives in a good cause. For there began a gastronomic journey that, over the years, has encompassed all the foods mentioned above and many many more. I can remember my first artichoke, my first dim sum and my first scotch (swiftly and disastrously followed by my second). From McDonald’s to Le Manoir, KFC to Chez Bruce, I’ve led a privileged and gently foodistic life. A sprinkling (and sometimes more) of junk, the occasional visit to foodie palaces, and a whole lot in between. There have been staggeringly good meals, dismal ones, surprisingly wonderful-but-dirt-cheap-ones and disturbingly expensive ones. Chips doused in malt vinegar while watching Oxford United plummet to another heavy defeat; scallops wolfed down at the stall in Borough Market while surreptitiously nudging Japanese tourists into the gutter; enough chocolate to quell the Eyjafjallajokull volcano once and for all. Each has its place, and success or failure often depends merely on your state of mind and level of hunger at the time of consumption.

But in all those meals I don’t think I’ve ever come across an ingredient that I regard as utterly pointless. I’ve eaten bad food, for sure - meals that have made such an appalling mess of perfectly decent raw ingredients that after eating them you want to grab the perpetrator by the lapels, drag them to Jeremy Clarkson’s house and leave them there as punishment. Sometimes I’ve been the culprit and have had to give myself a stiff talking-to.

But those meals have always been disgusting either because of miserable ineptitude on the part of the chef, or because the raw ingredients have been sub-par.
Even if I’ve not liked an ingredient (oysters, for example, don’t do it for me) I can see why other people might.

Until now.

Behold the kohlrabi.

I call him Helmut Kohlrabi, or The Chancellor. He looks quite sweet, doesn’t he? I particularly like his smiley face. So inviting.

Don’t be fooled, though. He’s a tough little bugger, is The Chancellor, and full of surprises.

There are usually leaves sprouting out of the top that make him look like some sort of space veg, but in actual fact he is a brassica, and thus related to everyone’s favourite vegetable, the brussels sprout.

Unlike that fine and much maligned beast, though, I have been unable to find a suitable purpose for Helmut.

The taste of the kohlrabi remains, to me at least, unaltered whatever the cooking method. I’ve boiled, steamed, roasted, sauteed, mashed, gratinated, finely-sliced-and-dressed-with-olive-oil-and-lemon-juice the beggar, but he remains resolutely...well, you know...sort of...meh.

Even the tried-and-tested ‘add a slab of butter the size of Maidstone’ technique failed.
The only thing I haven’t done yet is rolled the bastard in melted Mars bar and batter and deep fried him.

Beyond the taste, or lack thereof, there’s the woodiness. He has woody bits that run through him as if he were a stick of rock, and that give your teeth a good flossing, whether they like it or not (they don’t).

So why do I try, I hear you cry?

Good question, albeit a little too Dr. Seuss for my liking in an adult blog.

Well you know, they just got delivered in our we-don’t-use-air-freight-so-weren’t-affected-by-the-volcano organic box, so we felt we had to eat them. But after a while, we gave up, hit the don’t-ever-give-me-this-again button, and made do with more normal veg.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, the driver made a mistake and gave us someone else’s box.
Helmut and his cousin Herman sat there staring dourly up at us like a pre-debate Gordon Brown.

I tentatively gave Herman a good mashing with butter and nutmeg.

Bleuurrggh.

Helmut has lurked at the back of the fridge ever since, save the two minutes necessary for the above photo shoot. He’s still quite perky, even after a couple of weeks.

His fate is in your hands.

Come up with a really good way of cooking him. I will pick the best and report back.

Just don’t expect me to like it, that’s all.

Higgs Boson a la CERN

It’s a commonly held misconception that the creation of a Higgs Boson particle is the province only of the professional particle chef. But it’s quite simple to rustle one up at home. Here’s one of my favourite recipes.

Higgs Boson a la CERN (feeds 0)
For this recipe you will need:
Everything You Thought You Knew About Physics
A Window
Most Of Switzerland
A Great Big Bag Of Cash
1 Large Hadron Collider
1 Linear Particle Accelerator
1 Proton Synchrotron Booster
1 Super Proton Synchrotron
1 Super-Duper Synchromesh Tronatron Da-Doo-Ron-Ron Dustbuster
6 Particle Detectors: ATLAS ((A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS), TOTEM (TOTal cross section, Elastic scattering and diffraction dissociation Measurement), ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment), BOB (Big Old Bugger), CAROL (Crap AcROnym Lunacy), TED (TEDious list of stuff)
Some Particles
A Rubber Spatula
A Lot Of Very Clever Men Probably Wearing White Coats

1. Take Everything You Thought You Knew About Physics.
2. Throw it out of the window. Make sure window is open first.
3. Make sure you have your Great Big Bag Of Cash ready.
4. Take Most Of Switzerland. You don’t need to be that careful with it - it stands up to rough treatment, especially if you dip into your Great Big Bag Of Cash.
5. Dig up Most Of Switzerland and build a very big Circle Line.
6. Install your Large Hadron Collider in the Circle Line you have built.
7. Fire that baby up.
8. Oh.
9. Ah.
10. Magnetic quench in your superconducting bending magnets. Don’t you just hate it when that happens?
11. Fire that baby down.
12. Set aside for a year or so to cool.
13. Fire it up again.
14. You need to prepare your particles for injection into the Large Hadron Collider. First pass them through the Linear Particle Accelerator, then through the Proton Synchrotron Booster, then through the Super Proton Synchrotron, and finally through the Super-Duper Synchromesh Tronatron Da-Doo-Ron-Ron Dustbuster.
15. Now the particles are ready for collision. This is the fun bit.
16. Crank ‘em up and smash ‘em together. You are looking for a force of up to 7 TeV.
15. Don’t ask me what TeV means. I thought you were the particle physicist. It’s a lot anyway.
16. At this point there is a danger that the particles may curdle and that the entire known universe will be sucked into a black hole, meaning the end of existence as we know it. There is no need to panic, though. Simply take your spatula and carefully fold the particles back into the collider. Adding another egg yolk may help stabilise it, too.
17. You should now have a Higgs Boson particle. As it will only be in existence for a fraction of a nanosecond, serve immediately.

The Rewards of Culinary Incompetence

We’ve all done it. Don’t pretend you haven’t.

In a fit of brazen chutzpah (is there any other kind?) you imagine you know better than the recipe. A professional food writer has shared the knowledge and experience garnered over decades of hard work, but you look at their offering and think ‘pah! What do you know, Simon/Hugh/Delia/Nigella/Jamie/Albert/Marco Pierre/Heston (delete as appropriate)? I can do this standing on my head. Where you say butter, I will use sunflower oil. Where you say fifteen minutes, I know very well you mean thirty-five. Where you ask for the juice of half a lemon...well I’ve got all these lemons in the basket and they’re going to go off soon - I’ll chuck three in.’

For this recipe you will require:

Fillet of salmon. For eight. Three of whom are ill and have cancelled.

Some potatoes - neither the same amount nor variety as in the recipe.

Purple sprouting broccoli.

Those lemons.

Garlic. Plenty.

Fat of some kind. Whatever you have.

A chisel.

1. Check the recipes. Salmon wrapped in foil with lemon juice - piece of cake. Grated Golden Wonder potato cake - no problem. Steamed purple sprouting with garlic and anchovies - duh.
2. Put the books back on the shelf. You won’t need them again.
3. Peel and grate the potatoes. Some of them go a bit brown. That’s ok, they’ll be brown once they’re cooked anyway. Add the cloves of garlic, crushed, to the potato gratings.


4. Lay the salmon fillet on oiled foil.


5. Squeeze the lemon(s) over the salmon.


6. Pick the lemon pips out of the salmon.


7. Wrap the salmon parcels.


8. Foil torn. Start again.


9. Once that’s done, turn your attention to the potatoes.


10. They really have gone quite brown, haven’t they? And you haven’t started cooking them yet.


11. Heat the fat and add the potato/garlic mixture.


12. So far so good. Relax and watch a bit of cricket.


13. Shot!


14. What’s that smell?


15. Ah.


16. This is why you need the chisel. Hack the potato from the bottom of the pan. Remove burnt-but-not-actually-inedlble crust and set aside. Put the rest of it back in the pan and return to the heat.


17. Back to the cricket.


18. Got him!


19. Bugger. Fish.


20. Oh God when should I put the broccoli on?


21. Not now.


22. Idiot. You’ll regret that.


23. Potato doing nicely, fish ok.


24. Consider making broccoli puree instead.


25. Realise that success of dish depends on people being at table at the right time. People sadly not in evidence.


26. The potato is burning again. Never mind. Crunchy bits are good.


27. Assemble plates, cutlery, food, wine, people.

It was all so simple. And, despite your best efforts, absolutely delicious. Pat yourself on the back and thumb nose at food writers. Consciously or not, you knew better all along.

Spawny Gits

Dennis Hopper - the one that got away.

Do you remember Frogger?

Great game. I was addicted to it when I was 16.

But then I was addicted to everything when I was 16. Except any form of academic work.

My favourite was Space Invaders - the original, classic version. Asteroids was good too. And I fell briefly under the powerful spell of Missile Command. It had a trackball - need I say more?

I’ve got off the point already. Please don’t let me do that.

Frogs. That’s what this is about. Bloomin’ frogs.

Seems like there’s more of them this year. Especially in our kitchen.

The day after the above photo was taken, there occurred what shall henceforth be known as ‘The Unfortunate Incident’. Dennis (or it may have been one of his cousins) reappeared in our house, looking, let’s be honest, a little less perky. That tends to be the way when you are clamped in the jaws of a hungry felis catus (the one on the left).

Poor Dennis. I gave him as dignified a burial as I could.

Since The Unfortunate Incident, we have kept pretty close tabs on said felis catus, with reasonable success. He hasn’t brought any more frogs in as little presents.

Just spawn.

Great big mouthfuls of it, dumped on the kitchen floor. Semolina with twigs.

This can’t go on, we thought. We must nip it in the bud. Or buy some garlic and a French cook book.

We have a little pond in our garden. Quick-thinking and on the money as ever, The Flame-Haired Temptress deduced that this must be the source of the frogs and their spawn. Sure enough, when we went to investigate, we found a scene that wouldn’t have looked out of place in an episode of Dr. Who c.1975.

As well as some ill-looking reeds and leaky pond-liner, there was a mass of frog spawn, resembling nothing so much as a heaving soapy mass of flatulent bubble wrap.

What to do? We’re essentially animal lovers in the Runny household. I don’t know what the pro-frog-life lobby would think of us doing away with a bathful of spawn in a frogocaust of unprecedented proportions. I had visions of being bundled into a squad car while being spat on by protesters waving ‘Kermit Murderer!’ placards.

On the other hand if we do nothing...frogs in the kitchen, frogs in your bed, frogs in the bathroom, frogs on your head...

So we started plotting. Where’s the nearest pond? Have we got a bucket? Off we go then.

Only one snag - said pond is surrounded by head-high railings.

We might have to resort to a drive-by spawning. It’s either that or Exodus 7:25 - 8:11.

Smoked Haddock Man

The Lovely Pauline

Something so incredibly nice happened to me today that, in a fit of happy-clappy hugginess of the kind to which I am rarely prone, I felt I had to ‘share’.

I can be a bit...now what’s the word?

Forgetful.

Ha ha.

So, having patronised (in a good sense, you understand) the local fishmonger to the tune of salmon cutlets, smoked haddock, parsley and a bottle of mind-bogglingly good value olive oil (with extra virgins thrown in), I walk out without the smoked haddock.

D’oh, as I believe young people are fond of saying.

The plan was kedgeree, a dish made fabulously by the Flame-Haired Temptress. All part of a cunning plot on my part to avoid doing the cooking.

Kedgeree isn’t exactly the same thing without the fish.

So I pop back in after picking up The Lad from school. And, incidentally, after an unseemly struggle to get him out of the car. Jings but he’s got some muscles on him for a five-year-old.

The shop is deserted as we enter. Then, from just inside the bit-at-the-back-where-they-do-stuff-to-fish, comes a disembodied voice.

“Customer!”

Out comes the lovely Pauline.
No sooner have I formed the first syllable of the word “Hello”, (after which were supposed to come the words “I’ve been a bit of an arse and forgotten to take away my smoked haddock. I don’t suppose there’s any chance that it’s still knocking around the place?”), than she turns on her heel, and with a broad grin calls to the back “smoked haddock man is here!”.

There is what can only be described as a flurry of excitement from within.
The girl who served me earlier in the day (whose name I now cannot remember - told you I was forgetful) emerges. She is either a very good actor or the worry has been gnawing at her soul for the last five hours, rendering her but a pale shadow of her usual cheerful self. Decorum dictates that she doesn’t actually hug me, but the relief in her voice, her demeanour, her very being, is palpable.

“Thank God! We thought we’d lost you. We ran down the street trying to find you, and the man who was in with you said he would let us know if he saw you. We would have had to close the shop for three days’ mourning if you hadn’t come back.”

I made that last bit up. But only just. They really really wanted me to have my fish.
Now I know I’m probably over-reacting to a small show of kindness - it’s in their interests to be nice to their customers, after all - but that’s what service is, isn’t it? And when you read about Pauline and the story behind this excellent local business (go on, go back and click on the link - it’ll only take a few seconds) it makes you want to jump up and shout ‘Hallelujah for West Norwood!’

And that’s not something you hear every day.

This is a seriously good shop. There is a genuine smile on the face of the whole enterprise, the fish is really good, and they know their stuff.

And they call me Smoked Haddock Man.

All I need now is a cape.

West Norwood Fishmongers,
326 Norwood Road
London SE27 9AF
020 8670 0880
Go there for your fish.

Make mine a slinky arty-fartay

Who would have thought a drink could change so radically in a decade or two?

You’ll be calling me a Luddite and stuck in my ways (the truth always hurts), but what the flarking doowogglers has happened to coffee?

When I were a lad, not only was it all fields around here, but coffee was coffee. You could have milk, or you could have sugar, or you could have both. Or neither. Those were the choices, like telly.

But nowadays to order a coffee is to enter a surreal and arcane world of perturbation, confusion and despair from which you will be lucky to emerge with your sanity intact. It is quite bewildering. You thought The Wire was confusing? Lost in Lost? Try keeping track of coffee in the tenties. The quest for a decent cup of coffee is increasingly becoming as lengthy and fruitless as a boa constrictor.

Let us consider this document.
Yes that’s right. A Wikihow article on How To Order At Starbucks. It has 12 basic points, 13 examples and 11 ’tips’.

Ladies and Gentlemen, there are many madnesses in our modern world. They defy analysis or reasoned thought: The Iraq War; The Continued Employment of Noel Edmonds; Farmville.

But this one really takes the almond biscotto.

Here’s how to order a coffee:

1. Go to a cafe.


2. Ask for a coffee.


3. If you like milk in it, add the words ‘with milk please’.


4. If you are in any way tempted to add any of the following words to your coffee order, seek medical help immediately: skinny, tall, quad, venti, iced, syrup, frappuccino, sham-a-lam-a-ding-u-cino.

Try not to do it in the wrong order or you might confuse your ‘barista’ (although you’d have thought with all those years studying a complex subject like law they’d be able to understand a simple coffee order).

You might want to practice it a few times with a friend before you take the plunge and do it for real. There’s a lot to remember.

Luckily, though, and thanks to some clever Antipodeans a couple of decades ago, you may not have to worry about COPS (Coffee Ordering Paranoia Syndrome) any more, because I think we can now call off the search for the perfect cup of coffee.

Make mine a Flat White.

Apparently ‘invented’ in New Zealand in the early eighties, it has taken nearly twenty years to gain leverage in this fair town, but it is now, so I’m led to believe, the beverage of choice for the discerning cafficionado.

The secret of this novelty elixir?

Less milk than in a latte.

Wow.

Crikey.

Now why didn’t I think of that?

Oh, silly me, I did. It’s the coffee I’ve been making at home FOR THE LAST TWENTY-FIVE YEARS.

Otherwise known as ‘coffee with some milk’.

I’m clearly in the wrong business.

Now obviously it’s easy for me to stand on the sidelines and hurl abuse at some of the largest and most successful corporations in the world, who have, with no help from me, mastered the art of marketing the bleedin’ obvious. And of course they have very clever and expensive coffee machines that heat the milk to just the right temperature to render your beverage undrinkably hot for forty minutes, at which point (and not before) it becomes undrinkably cold.

I am, however, English.

So it naturally behooves me, at this point, to be a bit embarrassed, shuffle from foot to foot, and offer a peace token.

In the interests, therefore, of international co-operation and compromise, and with the generosity of spirit for which we Anglo-Armenians have become renowned the world over, I offer, free, gratis, and for nothing, my new invention:

The Caffe Arty-Fartay.

Here’s how to make it:

Tinker around with different combinations of coffee and milk, thinking up ever more ludicrous names for them, until you disappear up your own bottom in a puff of finely grated chocolate powder (70% of course).

I thank you.

Next week: Dressing Emperors - A Twelve-Step Plan.

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.

Cheap and dirty

I don’t want you to get the impression that I’m a food ponce.

Well, I am. I’m never happier than when complaining that my chenin blanc is half a degree too warm, or doing vertical tastings of artisanal balsamic vinegars. But sometimes all any of us really wants is instant, cheap, and frankly rather shameful satisfaction.

And where better than here?

Yes, the other day I had it my way. Just this once.

There was a time when I regarded the burger as the gourmet option. I still mourn the passing of the incomparable Bret’s Burger Bar - this bastion of 1980s Oxford life (a tiny shack parked fifty yards from the station) presented you with a slathering pile of red meat covered in twenty kinds of relish that filled the gap between getting off the train and arriving home for supper half an hour later.

But age brings wisdom and after a while I was hit with the stark realisation that maybe this wasn’t the healthiest lifestyle choice I could make.

Sometimes, though, nothing else will do. Because when you’ve been on the road, and it’s raining, and the alternative is a dried-up ‘all-day breakfast’ sandwich, well, you know what?

It’s BK time.

But then, in a tactical blunder of an enormity not seen since General Custer won the toss and asked England to bat on a belter, I let my ‘better’ self take over.
So instead of the logical choice (Whopper, large fries, extra saturated fats in a bucket, Coke the size of Hampshire), I ordered the ‘healthy’ option (some sort of chickeny thing wedged between a couple of slices of polystyrene, microscopic bag of chips, tasteless piece of limp rag calling itself lettuce).

Schoolboy error.

What on earth possessed me? It was the equivalent of going on a stag weekend and sitting in the corner of the lap dancing club all night with your gaze averted, nursing a half of Kaliber. Or finding yourself on a double date with Michelle Pfeiffer and Jamie Lee Curtis (showing my age there) and leaving early because QI is on.

As soon as I ordered the ‘food’ from the ‘waitress’ I knew the whole enterprise was doomed.

And so it proved.

I chomped my way balefully through the alleged meal, staring out on the service station car park of despair, and made a decision.

McDonald’s for supper.

Late Supper

What's in the fridge?

Cheese, prosciutto, goose fat, a bit of red cabbage, a bigger bit of celeriac, a lot of odds and sods and this and that and the other and Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all.

Ah.

Tucked away behind the large Le Creuset that contains a disproportionately small amount of meat sauce, there is a bag of purple sprouting. On the shelf above, a quarter jar of anchovies and the remains of the paprika/parsley/anchovy butter from a couple of weeks ago.

Parsley, lurking.

On the hob, the rice from lunchtime, with just enough of the chicken stock to warm it up without it drying out.

Heat butter, slice garlic, chop parsley, extract anchovy fillets from the narrow bottle with the tip of the sharpest knife you have,.

Recover anchovies from floor.

Bop cat on nose - it can smell an anchovy at a hundred paces.

Take butter off hob just before it burns. Set aside.

Slice purple sprouting. You want the stalks quite thin, the florets bigger and mostly intact.

Butter back on hob. Chop anchovies garlic and parsley together. Roughly. Don’t go overboard. Add to butter. Fry for a minute or so on quite high heat. Add broccoli. Mungle it all together. Throw in glass of white wine and bring quickly to boil then turn down heat and shove on lid. The idea is that it will steam a bit to cook the stalks but the other bits will not get drowned in liquid. Timing is key.

The rice is warm now.

What do you mean I didn’t say to put it on the heat?

Ah. Sorry. That’s why a) I’m not a professional cookery writer and b) you should always read the recipe first.

This makes, incidentally, a delicious pasta sauce. Or on toast. Maybe a bit of Greek yoghurt on the side.

Or mixed in.

Look, just make it up as you go along. It’s much more fun that way.

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.

The List

Today’s food. Not all on the same plate, of course. And not in this order.
A mackerel fillet
Some oats
About 8 little dark chocolate biscuits
A banana
Two rashers of bacon
Some bits of one of the christmas cheeses, the name of which eludes me, but I had to cut all the rind off because it had gone a bit manky
Probably about 5 garlic cloves
A similar amount of ginger, actually wait a minute maybe less
Some thyme
Several glugs of olive oil
Some sunflower seeds
Courgettes, roasted slowly in the oven with rosemary
A squeeze of lemon juice
About four spoonfuls of yoghurt
Three small to medium potatoes
Some milk
A cup of coffee
A cup of tea
One of The Boy’s animal biscuits (given, not stolen, I might add)

Is that a lot? I have no idea, but it seemed to do the trick. The important bit, of course, is making sure that you combine the right foods.

Mackerel fillet + banana = maybe not

A cup of coffee + some milk = a bit better, but not very nutritious

Courgettes, rosemary, potatoes, yoghurt = happy punters all round

Taking the fishcake

Toast and sarnies for the first half of the day.

Guacamole and crisps followed by the other fishcake for the second half.

Pret choc bar at half time, with one of those pomegranate drinks that didn't seem to exist two years ago.

Rumours that I also demolished a honey sandwich are speculative, scurrilous, and absolutely true.

A make-do-and-mend kind of day, foodwise. Running late for lunch so I throw together tuna and sweetcorn sarnies for us all. It's one of the few things we're all guaranteed to eat, and time is short. The linseed bread helps lift it from the 'staggeringly mundane' category.

This evening is haphazard too. There seems to be, as so often, a lot of bitty food that needs eating up. Four avocados, each at a different stage of squidge; a couple of cold sausages; the last fishcake; several bundles of foil, each giving no clue as to the contents. The foil parcels can be tackled another day, when I'm feeling stronger. I have a feeling they are mostly the Christmas cheeses.

Improvising an edible meal from cold sausages and a fishcake would be beyond even the most Charlie-Parker-esque of kitchen extemporisers, so The Wife and I agree to go our separate ways: she will tackle the sausages, while I will attempt to give the fishcake a good talking-to. We are united by a hastily-mashed guacamole with kettle chips. So far, so dippy.

The main course of this two-course extravaganza is less successful. Let's be honest: the fishcake is a dowdy invention. One cannot imagine it as the signature dish of any aspiring chef, for example, no matter how much they might drizzle it with deconstructed tartare sauce or tower it upwards, surrounded by finely minced lemon zest and ginger. It is a relentlessly unglamorous concept. The ones that have been in the organic free-range dolphin-friendly carbon-neutral don’t-you-dare-put-that-pesticide-anywhere-near-my-food delivery box every few weeks for the last six months or so are always a huge disappointment. They'll be light and crispy, I think to myself; moist and tender; accompanied by green beans, they'll make a simple but wholesome supper dish, washed down with a lightly chilled glass of chenin blanc.

Pah! they may be wholesome but blimey o'reilly do they let you know it. 'I am good for you', they seem to cry, as you force down each dry and mealy mouthful. 'Don't even think about enjoying me.’

The crust formed is barely rizla-thin, the fish has been mashed to within 2.54cm of its life, and each cake is about 35% too big. It's a bit like reading Steve Waugh's autobiography: dense, worthy and interminable. Come to that, not totally unlike one of SW's innings.

I try to liven it up with some ketchup, but it's no good. Finish it and move on.

Splat

Breakfast: the two slices of toast with the thinnest spreadings of the butter and the grape jelly. This was the first thing I had eaten for 36 hours. Yum.

Lunch: the fishcake and the sweetcorn. Oh and the some chips.

Supper: the rescued bowl of soup followed by the scrambled eggs on the toast.

A couple of Penguins may also have passed my lips on occasion.

The Rescued Bowl of Soup

Well. It was all going so smoothly. A gnomic butternut squash and a slightly fatigued sweet potato, each yielding a disproportionately large pile of peelings. The inevitable goose fat. Some two-day-old roast potatoes that were lurking in a bowl in the fridge, added to the roasting tin at the last minute to revitalise them. Another spoonful of goose fat (I think it's breeding in there) for onion and garlic, heated slowly until temptingly glossy. Plenty of thyme, ripped roughly from the sprigs. A bag of the goose stock that I froze yesterday, and then the roasted vegetables into the stockpot.

Blender.

A winter soup, delicious and warming, enough to stave off the snow that they say will arrive tonight.

Whizz. Whhiiiiizzzzzzzz. Phhhhzzrrrrrrrrrr.

And then, as I lift the blender jug off its spindle, the bottom of the jug gets all stubborn. Displaying admirable loyalty, it remains attached to the main body of the food processor, which has treated it so well over the years. The top of the jug displays a more adventurous spirit, striking out on its own. The soup within the jug can’t make up its mind.

A token amount lands in one of the bowls, and some on the worktop. But mostly on my clothes and the floor. I am tempted to squeeze out the cloth into a bowl, just to salvage some of the precious golden gloop. But then I realise that the cloth in question is the one that hasn't been washed for, ooh, let's pretend it's only a week.

Scrambled eggs then. And that, as anyone who has ever ruined them (and let's face it, we all have) is another story.