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.

Snow Balls

If you're anything like me, which you're not, unless you're a forty-five-year-old Anglo-Armenian conductor/writer and father-of-one whose current extreme sleep deprivation owes much to the Australians' stubborn insistence that The Ashes be played once every four years in the antipodal hemisphere instead of, as any civilised person knows, its proper home, by which I mean the green and pleasant land that I call the nation of my birth and that you probably call England, although of course you all know that I just put that bit in to annoy Australians, of whom I am actually very fond, especially those of them to whom I am related, which is something I don't admit to very often, but there you go, there's no accounting for the things that come out at times like this, then you probably don't shop for clothes much.

That sentence does make sense, but it got a bit rambly in the middle. Rambly to the tune of an extended nested construction of 134 words, which, unless you are James Joyce, which you aren’t, is probably a bit... I'll start again.

I don't shop for clothes much.

I did yesterday though. I found myself, through a complicated concatenation of circumstances, at Clapham Junction early in the morning, trying to find my way home, having spent the night before at the bedside of my ailing mother (she's fine, thanks. I merely put that bit in to garner the sympathy of the reader).

There’s been a curious dual climate thing going on in London for the last couple of days. At least half of the capital has been looking around wondering where the famous snow that we've all been hearing about has got to, while those of us who live in the South-East have been perfecting our Captain Oates impersonations every time we step outside to buy a bottle of Vimto. As my mum lives in the non-Oatesy portion, and I in the heart of Titus-land, the journey home was, shall we say, interrupted.

Getting to Clapham was easy enough, but there I ground to a halt. There were so few trains going south, it was as if they were suddenly being driven by cabbies.

The departure boards weren't much help. "0633 to Sutton - on time", they declared, ignoring the inconvenient truth that 0633 was a dim and distant memory and that Sutton was for the moment as inaccessible and wondrous a concept as Narnia.

Displaying admirable (and, for me, rare) sangfroid, I opted out of the inevitable chunterfest that a prolonged spell on platform 15 would have entailed and decided to do some shopping. Trousers, I thought. Winter coat. Condensed milk. (Obviously.)

Coat first. Stick to the essentials.

I found myself torn. Groovy sheepskin-lined flying jacket, as sported by those dashing chaps from the Boden catalogue? Or functional-but-determinedly-ungroovy thermal walking jacket, as sported by those not-exactly-dashing-but-doing-their-best blokes looking wistfully into the middle distance at Black's?

I know my limits.

The boy in Black's was very polite. He allowed me a full five seconds of perusal before offering his opening gambit.

"How are you, Sir?"

Hard sell. Bastard.

"Assailed by existential angst," I replied. "Grappling with the futility of our brief sojourn on this earth, weighed down with the enormity and complexity of the myriad problems facing mankind, and staring the inevitability of our eventual demise full in the face with the haunted mien of one who has looked into the abyss too long."

"Oh."

“But, on the other hand,” I continued, before he had a chance to refute my Sartrean world view, “quite excited about the cricket. Now tell me, my good man, this garment, this '3-in-1' all weather jacket: is said Trinity as holy as the manufacturers would have us believe? Does the garment divide efficiently and seamlessly into three separate pieces?"

"Well, Sir..."

"Because it seems to me that there are only two portions: the inner and the outer.

“Yes, Sir, but..."

"Ah, I see now. You are about to tell me that when I combine the two vestments the third, and most thermally efficient, manifestation will make itself magically apparent to me, and in this you are not wrong. I like your thinking and withdraw my complaint forthwith. This is the all-weather jacket for me. It will be my lifelong companion. We will be very happy together."

"This other one’s very nice," he said feebly, gesturing towards one that appeared, from the price, to have been hand-yarned from the navel lint of Andean vicuñas. "Very warm."

"It is also one hundred pounds more expensive."

He yielded on the point, worn down by the relentlessness of my logic, and retreated, looking rather pale.

Funny, I seem to have that effect on shopkeepers. But at least I am now equipped with the toastiest coat in town.

Bring on the heatwave.

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)

Reading My Writes

Good evening.

There’s a website out there in Internet-Land called ‘I Write Like’, and, if I may make so bold, I would like you to visit it: http://iwl.me/.
If you feel so inclined, cut and paste the last email you wrote (let’s say), and come back here with the results. I’m sure we’d all be very entertained if you were to paste them into the comments below (be warned, the link is VERY small - damn you, Typepad).

Then I’ll show you mine. (NB Nothing will self-destruct if you don’t do this. This isn’t Mission Impossible. Just thought it would be fun.)

All done?

Ok. So apparently I write like (in no particular order):
Joyce, Christie (Agatha, not Linford), King (Stephen, not Billie Jean), Fleming, Nabokov, Twain, Carroll and Shakespeare.

Which is all very well, except those are the results from a children’s book I’m writing.

I’ve come to an unpleasant conclusion: it’s entirely possible that my use of language is a little too sophisticated for the age group at which I’m aiming (although I am encouraged by Joyce and Carroll in a weird kind of way).

The real killer, though, came when I entered the last two chapters. I wrote them in a hurry, desperate to tie up loose plot ends, and haven’t edited them.

In short, they are, frankly, pants.

In fact, if you’ve got a moment, they are the biggest load of unfeasible bollocks written by anyone since someone thought to themselves “I know, I’ll put an albino monk in there - that’ll be realistic”.

I’m sure you will not be surprised to learn that, on the basis of those two half-baked, feeble, raggedy-assed, insultingly dimwitted, semi-literate, downright unpublishable, please-for-pity’s-sake-and-for-the-good-of-humankind-never-write-anything-again, miserable apologies for chapters, I write like...

Dan Brown.

I am sure you will draw your own conclusions.

I, meanwhile, am going into the garden to eat worms.

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.

Not Waving But Drowning

Imagine you have a hobby. Maybe you do. Perhaps you like to paint. Or play netball. Or build models of San Francisco out of toothpicks.

You get the idea.

Most of the people I come across in my regular working life have a hobby: they play a musical instrument.

Incidentally, before I get on to the main business of this blog, I must urge you, if you haven’t already done so, to seek out and befriend an amateur musician. Two or three, why not? If you can steer them away from subjects like Bruckner symphonies, awkward fingerings in Sibelius tone poems, and the relative merits of recordings of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, they are extraordinarily invigorating and enjoyable company. What’s more, the standard achieved by amateur orchestras and choirs in this country is little short of staggering - as if I, a dedicated but limited Sunday cricketer, were taking on a County attack and scoring fifties, if not hundreds, on a regular basis.

If you are neither a cricket nor a classical music fan, you may not have made it through that last paragraph. Sorry about that.

Anyway, let me return to my muttons, as the saying very nearly has it.

My hobby is standing in front of the aforementioned musicians waving my arms, all the while hoping that my efforts will in some way improve the sound they are making. Luckily for me, I also make my living from it. I understand this is what is known nowadays as a win/win.

You may not know anything about classical music. Even if you do, it’s probable that you’re ignorant about exactly what it is that conductors do.

Yes, that’s right, we collect the fares.

Ha ha.

Well done.

May I continue?

The art of conducting (and yes it is an art, but this is the last time I will take it seriously in this post) is so complex that several widthy books have been written about it, a lot of them as off target as this penalty kick. They will typically include diagrams of what we in the trade call ‘beating patterns’ - ‘different ways of waving your arms around’ to anyone else - the practice of which can cause the budding conductor severe muscular and frontal lobe injuries should they not exercise due care and attention.

These very gestures, finely honed over decades of intensive and draining study, are the selfsame ones that are ignored by orchestras the world over, from Aalborg to Zanzibar (both now permissible in Scrabble, incidentally).

This is the natural way of things. Orchestras know best.

But what do these gestures mean?

Well it’s complicated. Let me talk you through some of the gestures that make up the average (and believe me, we’re mostly average) conductor’s stock-in-trade.

The All-Purpose ‘Starting-Everyone-Off’ Gesture
Otherwise known as the ‘upbeat’ (a misnomer if ever there was one), this is usually a nervous upwards jerk with both arms, somewhere during the fallout of which the benighted orchestra is expected to play together. The conductor, sensing an ominous silence of the kind not experienced since Marcel Marceau and Harpo Marx went on a day trip to a trappist monastery, then jiggles his arms about a bit on the way down, in the hope that someone, somewhere, will interpret it as an invitation to play.

This renders the meaning of the gesture, already oblique, completely impenetrable.

The ‘Oh Bugger I’ve Started Too Fast’ Flail
The trouble with this one, which resembles little more than a flightless bird trying to defy gravity and evolution simultaneously, is that it simply gets in the way. The damage is done. The orchestra, which, remember, always knows best, has already gone off at the speed you gave them with your first gesture (see above). Too late now, mate. If you wave your arms slower, half of them will go with you, and the other half will stay the same speed. The music will die, and it will be your fault.

Music-murderer. Blood on your hands. Shame on you.

The ‘You Shouldn’t Have Played There’ Shimmy
Usually directed at a player who has been sitting around doing nothing for a while, like a trombonist (and before all the trombonists reading this start complaining, and you know who you are, just take a long hard look in the mirror and then tell me I’m wrong).

Where was I?

Oh yes. The shimmy. The way it works is this:

1. The player, whether trombonist or not, has not had anything to play for a while, and has lost track of where they are. This is emphatically the composer’s fault for not giving them enough to do.
2. Thinking they recognise the bit the second clarinet has just played, they hastily stop playing ‘Words For Free’ on their iPhone, pick up their instrument and start playing music instead.
3. Loudly.
4. In a quiet bit.
5. The conductor, sensing something is wrong, but not sure exactly what, looks up, sees guilty trombonist (let’s say - it’s just a hypothetical example, for God’s sake, don’t be so touchy) and gives ‘em the shimmy.

The shimmy requires co-ordination: the left hand must clearly send the message to the errant player ‘you’ve come in two bars early, but it’s ok we all make mistakes, now all you have to do is keep calm and start the next bit, you know the one starting with the rising diminished fifth...HERE!’; the right hand must continue conveying flowing rhythm and expression to the rest of the orchestra as if nothing untoward was going on. The effect should resemble an expert maitre d’ removing a fly from a customer’s wine glass while diverting his attention with a well-directed compliment about his tie.

It usually looks more like a startled man hiding a pornographic magazine from his wife.

The ‘More Expression’ Left-Hand Flemble
A cross between a flap and a tremble, this gesture is designed to encourage a more expressive style of playing (usually, for some reason, from the first violins. Probably because they’re nearest). Unfortunately, as the co-ordination required to execute the gesture takes up all of the conductor’s available RAM, it usually results in stasis of the right hand, and the music, more often than not, falls apart just a teensy bit.

This can engender a modicum of panic in the ranks, which in turn leads to:

The ‘Getting-It-All-Going-Again’ Thrash
The conductor is under the impression that faster and larger gestures will be clearer.

Wrong.

It just looks as if he is drowning.

Eventually everything settles down, and the musicians remember that the conductor is like the national speed limit: everyone ignores him, but it's kind of comforting to know he’s there. They can then get on with the business of listening to each other and playing together (driving safely) while very occasionally slowing down to sixty-eight miles an hour (watching the conductor) when they see a police car (when they think he's looking).

After a while we come to:

‘The Wrapping-It-All-Up’ Lung
Somehow, the music needs to stop. Regardless of how they negotiate the final bars, the conductor must do one of two things, depending on the circumstances.
If the music finishes loudly: stiff outstretched arms, open mouth.
If the music finishes quietly: exaggeratedly long silence after the final chord, closed eyes.

NB These are not optional.

As the applause begins, a relieved smile and nodding head are usual. These purport to mean ‘well done everyone, you were great' but actually mean 'well done me, I'm great, aren't I?'

So there you have it. A crash course in conducting. Why not give it a go yourself?

Next week: the rehearsal, including 'Stopping After You've Made A Mistake And Pretending You Heard A Wrong Note In The Woodwind Section’ and 'Anecdotes - How And When To Tell Them'.

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.

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.

Tasty Bit of Crumpet

A hitch this morning.

Me to The Boy: ‘What would you like for breakfast?’

The Boy to Me: ‘Crumpets’.

Now this has been a habitual breakfast dish for The Boy since The Flame-Haired Temptresss birthday party just before Christmas. It was an ‘open house’ type affair, starting at 2. We had laid in several packets of crumpets with the idea that, come teatime, people, and especially children, might like a break from the champagne that they had been drinking for, ooh, all of forty-five minutes. The plan was that we would tuck into crumpets and grape jelly (genteelly but with vim and gusto).

That was the plan.

How do you make God laugh? Tell Him your plans.

So it’s been crumpets for breakfast for the last three weeks.

But now they have run out.

‘That’s ok', I offer cheerily. ‘I’ll make some'.

A seriously impressed silence from my family.

Now then. The crumpet is one of those foodstuffs that you imagine has always been bought from the corner shop, isn’t it?

There they are, next to the loo roll and man-size Kleenex: Malt Loaf. Swiss Roll. Crumpets.

All these things come from the corner shop and that's the end of it. Nobody, but nobody, has ever made them at home. It would be like trying to rustle up some after eight mints by yourself by fusing a bar of Bournville and a tube of Colgate over a Bunsen burner. There is a technique involved that is simply not available to the home user.
And even if there were, why would you bother? Just nip out to the corner shop.
So now panic sets in. I saw a recipe some time ago. Where was it? Oh yes. Guardian.

Of course.

Flour. Check.

Milk. Check.

Water. Duh.

Yeast, salt, baking powder. Check-check-checkeroo.

Crumpet rings.

Oh.

Ah.

Improvisation will clearly be called for.

We ended up with one tester crumpet (burnt on the bottom and gooey in the middle), one real crumpet (massive but really rather tasty) and a lot of pikelets (some of which were forgotten about in the bread bin and resurfaced a few days later - once you scraped off the green stuff they tasted fine).

Back to the corner shop for me next time.

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.