angry foodie

The perfect day for dining in silence

2007-03-15T23:29:00.000Z

Creamy linguini with cheese, garlic and rocket, eaten in separate parts of the kitchen-diner in utter silence while two fat sirloins continued in their blood marinade in vac-packs in my fridge. I would never have bought such steak just for one. I would have done so a year ago, but now on nights alone I opt for the opportunity not to fillet a boney sardine or herring or two. Indeed, it was precisely to replenish the Wife’s monthly dip in iron levels that I had picked up the flesh in the first place. This being the 5th or 6th or 7th day of a particularly bad cold/flu, however, she was in no mood for chewing meat.
There is nothing sorer than silent dining, although being sat opposite one another for the duration would have definitely been more painful. And, as I can safely guess is typical of so many midweek post-Office nights for the married and young-child-worn, the situation was entirely avoidable.
Of course, she couldn’t have known that I was up tight like a cunt on account of not having any gear left, nor that I am increasingly struggling to come up with some sort of ritual or another to mark one year of being alcohol free in two days’ time thus giving me rough directions from here. She was ill and in need of basic comfort and reassurance the likes of which have deserted me in recent days or weeks. So, in classic histrionic style fit for a marriage of three and a half years, I took offence at being accused of not caring. Can she really not see that my every move in food and booze is executed with her in mind? That, honestly, if it weren’t for her I would probably never get beyond pasta and steak for my midweek suppers? Beneath the surface I am desperately seeking recognition, praise, even gratitude for my feeding her first class meals every fucking single day of the year. And I know just as well that she would exchange all of it in a moment for a few simple words of understanding. It’s fucking pathetic and I hate myself for it. But today was just not the day for reflection.
This time last year I was walking home from the Office purposefully finishing off a quarter bottle of Royal Stag from a plastic water bottle, stopping off in the underpass of a deserted A-road roundabout for a blast on my pipe and then into a news&food outlet for a couple of cans to mask the smell before arriving home to my young family to begin the next session of the evening. Today, my life is anchored in a rhythm of necessity, pinned around the Shop and the Fanny’s market and the occasional Tesco for my coffee and shit-roll. I really don’t go anywhere else or interact with any other people other than those in the Home and Office. And that’s minimal. I don’t eat any vegetables any more, just premium leaves. I don’t eat any fish but mackerel and the odd crustacean, meat other than beef, and my only guilty pleasure in processed fare is the sugary, vinegary, dried-herb-spiked salad dressing in the Office café. I try to occasionally break the routine, but I underestimate how important it has been for the last 12 months.
Yet as solid as it might appear, I am lost this evening. Fighting the mild urge to jump in the car under the cover of the domestic to pick up a wee baggy from the depths of social decay across the other side of town. It’s this one- to five-day long dead-zone period I’m where I haven’t yet made enough progress to rule out a trip back for more. I’m not locked into this rut just yet, so I tell myself.
It’s time to get hard now, and perhaps next Tuesday is the perfect day to start.

Humanity is overrated

2007-03-14T23:23:00.000Z

Something different has happened. It began this morning with a call to a taxi firm from the Wife who, feeling ill, had decided to commute to the train station by cab. As the all important pick-up time drew nearer she began to fill the empty minutes with mild obsessive-compulsive disorder while the also ill and especially dependent children got progressively closer to the edge. So on the minute she decided to go outside and wait there instead, only the children could see her from the window which made the occasion even more scream- and table-banging-worthy.

I felt a deep sense of sorrow at the figure she presented, still clinging on to the hope that the world makes sense, that people who say they will do something for you will actually do it, while I knew with virtual certainty that no car was going to turn up any time soon. Five-minutes in she knocked on the window and came back inside to call the firm, upon which she was assured that the car was in the area and would be there any minute. Another five minutes later she knocks again, this time to get her bicycle so that she could get to work on time.

So there I found myself, dressing-gown- and sandal-clad with two screaming kids, swelling with rage at the idea of my poorly wife having to pedal like fuck to catch a train that Those Bastards had assured her she would catch, with nothing to do but down a cafetiere of Lavazza and wait for the man to actually turn up. Which he did another five mintues later, knocking in that rhythmic but irritating “I’m not going to throw sulphuric acid in your face” fashion.

I was going to wait until I had a good three-seconds’ look at him before I decided how to vent my personal hatred of him, all the staff in his firm, the transport system, the government, and my own incongruous ideology. But he turned out to be so bemused by the concept of someone leaving before their taxi had turned up that there was nothing to be gained from insulting the man. So I picked up the phone and pressed redial to get at someone more appropriate – the controller of course.

Controller – [female voice] hello, c to t taxis.

Me – My wife ordered a taxi from you this morning to the train station which arrived 20 mintues late, forcing her to abandon the idea and cycle instead – while very ill -- in order to catch her train. Is it normal for your cars to be 20 minutes late?

C – Don’t start getting aggressive with me [voice rises quickly to a shout] …

M – [interrupting] So I suppose you’re not going to apologize for the fact that you lied to her when you said the car was in the area?

C – No, I’m not. She was told that we cannot guarantee travel times at this time of day.

M – But surly that doesn’t apply to pick-up times?

C – Is there anything else I can do for you?

M – Yes, you can fuck off.

I slammed the phone down and felt good about my actions ... for about a minute. Then I started to get the fear. Partly this was fuelled by the prospect of a meathead husband/brother/boyfriend/all-three, having access to my full address and phone number, turning up here late in the evening looking for some action while I bumbled around like a paranoid stoned twat. But much more troubling than this was the feeling of badness in my bones for having just told a complete stranger to fuck off in a loud and aggressive voice. It was strange to feel such optimism for humanity -- that I cannot reasonably expect things to ever improve so long as I go around telling strangers to fuck off. Indeed, I don''t even have an interest in things “improving”; all I want is to sign out and watch the whole shithouse go under from the calming Atlantic view of my successful Highland restaurant.

So without giving it much thought at all and acting purely on impulse, I pressed redial once more and, once I had established it was the same woman, apologized for having told her to “F-off”.
But it didn’t at all have the effect I thought it would. Rather than connecting two people who have no reason to hate one another, my butterfly-inducing debut reaching-out to humanity was met with a grunt of indifference. This time I put the phone down with the distinct impression that today wasn't the first time this woman had been told to fuck off. But on I clung to the fading reckoning that my call made a difference, that while decomposing on the couch in front of Eastenders later this evening she would question why a total stranger had bothered to put her before his stubborn pride. The pathetic truth is that it made me feel good. It made me feel alive for a moment, even though beneath the veneer I knew I was witnessing game theory in action -- that the whole episode had been nothing more than a selfish individual watching his own back.

As the day wore on, however, this feeling subsided and was replaced with annoyance at having sold myself out. Like the battery drones that pack call centres up and down the country, nobody should be shielded from the injustices that are being perpetrated by the complacent disregard of the C to T firms of this world.

But I also had much more pressing worries to hand: the end of the gear. All day I had been coping with the mild irritation in the back of my mind that this was my last day of it for some time. It was a day of torment and ritual on this front, initially because I kept coming back to the problem of whether to have two moderate pipes with a couple of hours in between or one big bastard to wipe me out. Then there was the optimization of the timing of it all so that I could enjoy the company of my two little girls, cook, listen to music, fantasize, eat etc all while in the most appropriate haze.

My tiny stash turned out to be enough to fuel two blasts in fact, although sadly I am still here. And as I strolled around the back garden with the second one, looking up at the stars and turning the event into much more than it really was, I felt a sense of purpose. My pipe, for example, had been busted recently while I stopped with the children on the way home from the nursery to get a hit and found that it had been blocked with tar from the heavy, heavy strain I've been stoking it with lately. Having failed utterly in my attempts to unblock it with twigs and hardy grasses, I had continued to work on the problem back home, essentially having to write-off the shank (on account of it now being stuffed with sticks) and do a Blue-Peter job with a snapped biro and a roll of red insulating tape. The result looked druggy and dirty, the pen having clouded up with a dark green coating after a few smokes.

Perhaps this was its thousandth refill, I thought as I drew down hard on my last pinch of burning grass. I had planned the evening well as it turned out, feasting alone on blissful courses of scallops&potatoes and mackerel&leaves with bread and butter and chilled S.Pellegrino. For a hardened rationalist and despiser of all things metaphysical I surprise myself with my fondness for indulging such ceremony. I remember the night before my finals sitting down at what some might have viewed as a lonely scene, a salmon steak with boiled potatoes and mayonnaise and a single ice cold can of Stella Artois. I sat there all evening without a book in sight, savouring the simplicity of the moment.
Back under the stars, however, the sticky little clumps of bud were soon reduced to a light ash. I then snapped the bastard pipe in two, hurled it as far as I could across the city sky, and went inside to spoon half a litre of Green&Blacks vanilla ice cream into my mouth with shavings of dark chocolate and crumbled butter cookies. It sounds melodramatic, but it was vitally important that I got rid of the pipe for this new phase of management that I am about to embark on. Having to interact with those new-age, jostick-burning tie-dye types with the black eyes and fingernails to buy a new pipe is something that I will put off as long as possible, at least providing a shadow of a safety net. And then I will be justified in another few weeks' worth.

This is why cannabis should not be legalized: there are others like me, who will abuse it until they start to crack. I know this only too well, having lived in Amsterdam for a year where I was getting through two boxes of Luckies a week without smoking a single fag. Not to mention the crate of flip-top bottles of ice cold Grolsch. Civilized in the extreme.

Food is the new cannabis

2007-03-13T23:22:00.000Z

It is a downer on the whole. Irritable with the children, again. Feeling tired and vacant, and suffering confusion over what is real and what isn’t. Why have I decoupled from the Office, for instance? Is it because: A) the drugs are fogging my brain and rendering me incapable, or B) the drugs are bringing the tedium of the workplace into full bloom, showing me just what a fucking waste of my life it is to sit here every day? No, no, of course, it’s always option C), that for reasons I will doubtless never understand, I am addicted to the escape of getting drunk and high and my every thought and action is directed towards managing this goal in some capacity.

But I am bored with it and its grubbiness; not to mention the munchies, which have jumped by an order of magnitude from anything I’ve experienced before. I have been gorging myself on chocolate-coated shortbread and glasses of milk, Italian blood oranges by the half dozen, buttered hot-cross buns, buttered bread encrusted with wafers of Maldon and chocolate cake with hot chocolate sauce. I am ballooning and just can not be fucked controlling it. I buy it all in in advance, just as I would my fags or booze. And I do it with quality biscuits, premium ice creams and fine chocolate. I am abusing this drug because I know it is temporary. Or is that the biggest delusion of them all?

I have realized that you need to host two personalities at the same time to maintain a life as a managing stoner: one to be your stand-in and the other to live with the guilt and small-time depravity. Take yesterday’s Sunday lunch with the neighbours. I mean, it wasn’t as if they weren’t hungover anyway and nobody could hear themselves think on account of the teething Infant we’d brought. But they didn’t deserve me missing dinner on account of my need to score, dressed up as a trip to the Tesco for some Bonjela. I must have been gone for 40 minutes on my return trip to the other side of fucking town, having set out just as the kids’ portions were being doled out.

I would fucking want to kill a bastard that did that to my food. And the beauty of it all was its utter pointlessness, spending as I was the afternoon in the kitchen of a bloke who can sort things out in an relative instant without my moving so much as an arm to a jean pocket. Remarkably, while driving back in the Sunday sun I was not working myself up with guilt in the distant knowledge that I had already missed dinner; and I had left my passenger to worry about the practicalities, such as: “how would I feel if I had bumped into someone from the Office while I was in there getting my ten-bag?” No, nothing like this at all was going through my mind – just the nagging feeling that the size of the bags are shrinking these days, convinced I’m getting regular 5-bags for the price of ten, possibly a result of my soggy brain perceiving the contents of the bag to be much less than they really are because it knows how much it needs these days to get itself properly high?

So, as it was with my secret transfers of Litre Pantry Smirnoff to Half-bottle freezer Smirnoff one year ago, I am now hiding my dependency even from those to whom it doesn’t matter. The Wife doesn’t know a bit of it either, although I don’t actually believe that’s true. It’s selfish and greedy and grubby, and I am abusing it because I want to hate it and want to be free from it. But fuck, the vast open space up ahead is daunting – particularly since I have just had a glimpse of it and been beaten before I even got there.

A visit from the North

2007-03-11T23:00:00.000Z

Cycling home from the Office on a Tuesday night I floated in the cold light rain powered by ludicrously high-THC Skunk, Red Bull and Professional Widow. I felt a part of the wet tarmac bumps and was acutely aware of the fact that I was the best driver out there. I could have pedaled for hours instead of crashing in as I did on my stable and normal home-life for a plate of Wife-cooked meatballs. She must surely realize that I’m out of my head most nights. My eyes resemble those fading turds which develop a blood-red hue after a few hours’ steeping in urine; my face is pasty and drawn. And my chat is inane really, consistently missing the note and losing the thread of arguments mid-sentence; the paranoia of being rumbled with every vacant pause making it all the more difficult to hold the show together under the rarely truly comfortable spotlight of the dinner table.

I am slower in the kitchen, too, obsessed with wiping down surfaces and washing up items as they become dirty. It’s as if I’m being watched or examined, waiting for someone to pop-by and notice the fact that my leek-wrapped bouquet garni was tight and barrel-like. There isn’t even anybody who could be that someone. I try to properly think about ingredients, my creativity buoyed by the cannabis yet the tide marks of my knowledge remaining unchanged; and in any case, my attention span only permitting a minute or two of such activity.

By dinner the next day we had to get as far away as possible from the vat of background beef stock that had been steadily coating every square inch of our bodies with a fine layer of grease all afternoon. Not to mention the children, who were disappearing in a muted haze of fat globules, nor the daffodils which were starting to droop heavier in their vase. So I fried some fresh fillets of mackerel, again, with a rocket salad, again, and a few soft heaps of capers in a thick emulsion of bay-infused olive oil and sweet Italian-lemon juice to help mask the smell of death and the feeling that, due to the meatiness of the brew and the lifelessness of the bones boiled dry of all their goodness, my bold exterior had been stripped back a layer or two.

I find myself in search of purpose on stock days, fixated with basic tasks and thoughts, exacerbated by the fact that I am housebound for 12 hours. Masturbation springs to mind, as one returns trance-like to the sticky collagen soup to skim off another layer of scum. The atmosphere is Stone Age, clinical.

There is meat everywhere: a 1.3 kilo joint of silverside, a pound of banquet beef sausages, half a dozen chicken thighs and mince picked up at the Fanny’s market with the aim to both satisfy the tastes of a choosey nephew and cure mild guilt for nabbing every last one of the money-grabbing bastards’ free bone-bags. But none of this compares with the work of my excellent Highland contacts: a 2.5kg rolled haunch of Sika and a tail-end of wild smoked salmon.

I was beginning to dwell on the possibility that my packed fridge is the result of classic stoner indecision -- that a seven year-old is really going to want to have to choose between a spaghetti bolognaise and sausage, mash and peas on his first night in a distant, up-tight and never-particularly-interested uncle’s house down in England. But a solution soon appeared in the form of an all-round favourite of thumb-suckers and straw-feeders alike, the Cottage Fucking Pie. This one aimed to reach deeper than most, the prime beef mince bulked out and made child-friendly by the contents of two fat beef sausages, all of it simmered for two hours in a few ladlefuls of stock with some neeps and carrots and finished off in a high oven to crisp up a thick layer of rough creamy mash studded with salty butter.

The Boy knew this was different to the mince and tatties he gets at school. It didn’t matter that he didn’t know why, he just knew this stuff made him feel good. But then, in what some might say is a tragic turnaround, he signaled that the chocolate sauce mixed up by the Wife from some double cream, milk, soft brown sugar and fine dark chocolate was “too choclatty”, and that he wanted “the strawberry one” instead. As soon as I find myself despairing at the dehumanizing otherworldliness of marketing and modern food production, I stop in the fear that I am repeating what everyone in every other bastard generation has said before me and therefore can only conclude that I am but a worthless flash in the pan.

But then, by chance, I was given some hard evidence which corroborated my view that I am, in fact, living in the future. It took the form of a Friday night at the outta-town Showcase Cinema Complex. To understand how alien it is to enter this Temple to Mediocrity, you have to imagine having just scoffed down a large, hot bowl of creamy linguini with smoked salmon, rocket and watercress in the comfort of your own home, a couple of glasses of wine for those who aren’t alcoholic and some hearty chat about how much fresh air the grandchildren got this afternoon. Then, armed with a few safeguard expectations about the depth in ankles of fast-food debris and the number in gangs of “young” people who have driven there to ruin your evening, you suddenly find yourself in the midst of a vast moonscape of car park. Guided towards the 16-door entrance by blue luminous lights and the sound of overproduced “feel-good” rock/pop fodder through tinny speakers, one is immediately under-whelmed by the smell of sweet ketchup, boiled dogs and failed promises.

Straight into the check-in queue we went, talking to each other as if we were surrounded by a different, and mute, species. Then up and into the vast blue-carpeted space I quickly spotted alcohol for sale, and could see a Lounge Bar Area lit in red neon against one of the huge vertical walls. Up close it was not much more than a student-fridge worth’s of Breezers, Becks and WKDs, but while trying not to think too much about the irony at our playing at being a pair of cinema-loving class-snob “wankers in the wrong shit hole” it was appropriate to down a Smirnoff ice before the show started. Which, after some silent confusion over protocol, was brought over to us in a plastic beaker just as soon as we had been seen to be sat over in the LBA. From there we were able to survey the task ahead, taking into account the two possibly-armed security guards at the pick ‘n’ mix stand and the LED codes displaying which gate to go to. Then, after successfully presenting our tickets and negotiating the departure hall, it was time at long last to sit down and disengage with reality.

You cannot help but associate with such 21^st century entertainment a disposable food culture of the lowest common denominator. You just knew, for example, that the fat cunt with the shaved head and football shirt stood at the cinema bar pushing the dry, bland and dangerous hotdog into his face had already eaten a full meal before he had come out and was need of just one more fucking hit to raise the blood-sugar levels before sitting on his doughy white arse for the next two hours.

It is a culture in which my fridge was partially immersed this weekend. When visitors, especially kids, turn up the fridge soon fills with vac-packed cheese sticks and cartons of luminous liquid, the cupboards with sugar-coated cereals and trans-fat-laced biscuits and cakes. Chocolate for treats, an aftermath of half eaten matter spread across the floors and tables for most of the day. And just when I thought that I was going to achieve three hits in a row in my attempt at please-all family food, by doling out early evening thin slices of best roast beef and a tray full of sticky roast tatties and parsnips, I realized that the aliens had won. Not even the most caramelized of the waxy roast potatoes, coated with beef fat and the distant scents of roast onion and garlic, was powerful enough to win out over the crisps and buns and chocolate and fizz. He eats “mashed” potatoes, but not roasted. And the meat, it was said, was too cold – a problem which, obviously, a short period of reheating in a frying pan was unable to remedy.

Food relationships can be brain damage. I was sat there having not anticipated such rejection, while the Boy was simply trying to live up to somebody else’s expectations. In fact, he would have preferred fish because fish is what the new father figure in his life likes to eat after a day on the river. And so my buttery tart tatin with vanilla cream, intended as a treat for eating so much tattie and meat, turned out to be the main meal of the day, with big refined-ingredient smiles all round.

And that was it. I had managed to spend a weekend with my own mother while hardly exchanging a word, hiding myself away at the worktops while the children were entertained and flirting with the strong urge to get good and drunk with her across the kitchen table, drinking gin and whisky with familiar ferocity and smoking hard on 25-packs of Richmond. Collapsing in the shower to come, ranting at the moon…It didn’t seem to fit, and the craic was poorer for it.

Blind optimism

2007-03-04T22:09:00.001Z

I seem to be riding on a rare crest of control over my weaknesses for addiction. It will be short-lived, you can put your house on that, but that makes it all the more tense. For with each waking minute it threatens to die away or crash. The whole image could also very possibly be a deluded fantasy dreamt up while as I am every night as high as a kite. But its seems I have found myself at this point partly because it’s en route to a year of being alcohol-free and partly because I am still just about managing to convince myself that this one-off bag of knockout grass is going to be one of only a few more and hence my springboard to building a proper relationship with it, a success-story which I shall then transpose to my alcoholism and, finally, be free. Etc.

At least it is keeping us well fed, since this wave of optimism is coupled with life outside my own head and is somehow fuelling confidence in my kitchen, not to mention the Office. Indeed, in the latter I have unknowingly struck gold – having had a “business idea” which provides on a plate a desperately needed Shining Example of their tens of thousands of pound’s worth of corporate strategy being put into action. While trying to sell its merits I found myself fumbling in an attempt to avoid terms and phrases such as “monetize”, “move forward” and “exploit potential”, and just when I found myself resorting to vague and vacuous sketches accompanied by some grand hand-waving and thoughtful frowns, the MD suddenly interrupted me:

“Stop right there,” he said, with his hand out and a reassuring but deeply troubling smile on this face.

“That’s called a Vision”.

It was fucking priceless. It had taken their most cynical employee in his desperate bid to escape a dead-end position to bale them out of the sinking ship that is their Corporate Strategy. Before I know it I’ll be being hauled out of the Christmas-do to pick up my engraved silver cup and three-figure cheque, the rancid tang of industrial brandy butter still keen on my breath.

At home my period of clarity is materializing in slightly more style. Yesterday I made a fish stock with the fleshy frame of a large halibut and a few aromatics. It had the look and feel of a thick chicken stock, like nothing I’ve seen with other fish. I put a litre or two away and the rest into a fish soup. The Wife, possibly due to her rampant and enviable rediscovery of cigarette smoking, has been in need of creamy meals – ones that are comforting too, ideally, so as to blot out the need for a painful drink.

This stock had the complexion of bull semen. I ladled it into a heavy pan of reduced wine, leek, shallot and lemon grass and threw in a couple of tatties. Then I used it as a bath for the meat: first the haddock for a minute or two, then two fat twitching langoustines for three, followed last by a handful of mussels. It blitzed to a smooth sheen and was made table-ready with a handful of Maldon, a pile of cream and a few stems of flat-leafed parsley; crusty white bread; good quality, salted butter.

I have no idea what sort of culinary culture my children will inherit, however. Earlier today I noticed the Eldest being fixated with my hacking out of the eyes and ripping out the gills of a triangular fish-head the size of my sink. And, later, I quietly enjoyed watching her taunt the sleepy langoustines that I had merely intended to show her for general-education purposes. Couple that with my odd and uptight behaviour at mealtimes generally and you’ve got a classic recipe for disturbed teenage tendencies.

So I march onwards to fuck-knows where. Because I am perpetually caned I’ve been cooking up some oily and Malden-encrusted treats. This evening was a super-rare lump of Barrow Gurney topside with wedges of soft maris pipers roasted in rosemary and garlic, sweet Italian cherry tomatoes rolled around in hot olive oil and balsamic vinegar, a portobello mushroom and some rocket coated in a Dijon vinaigrette. The food was so juicy it had no need for a gravy. A forced rhubarb & oaty crumble with vanilla ice cream for a munch.

But it’s all temporary and will end soon once the mundane bores back in. I cannot afford to consume cannabis of this strength with everything else that’s happening around me, not least my family. It will crumble. But it’s good to be here one-last-fucking-time again.

Wake-up gear

2007-02-28T22:59:00.000Z

It was inevitable. I’ve known for a while that my break of a couple of weeks would be rewarded with a bag this weekend. I had factored it in. The Friday night ritual of bar and conspicuous nods and robbery would kick in and by seven I’d be happy. Well, it is Wednesday now, and the pace of anticipation has been shifting up a gear, as has my general happiness and sense of well-being I might add. Just like with fags or booze, it’s the knowledge that you can enjoy them that really lights up your day and not the actual moment when you do. And my good spirits made me a more relaxed husband and father, as well as less sociopathic in the workplace, a better cook and generally an all-around slightly nicer human. Although at the same time I am completely in the dark as to whether my positive outlook was, in fact, due to the looming prospect getting off my tits or the fact that after two or three weeks’ rest my dopamine receptors were starting to fire on time again.

Tonight, three days sooner than planned, I found out. It is thanks to a twenty-bag of the most potent gear I’ve tried, scored in civilized surroundings much closer to home than amongst the socially handicapped in the bar. The rest of the evening was a haze as I wandered around the house seeking purpose. At one point I managed to stagger outside to admire the rather odd looking moon, which was forming an unnatural looking upside-down crescent and which later turned a deep and eerie crimson. It wasn’t until the following day when I noticed the next day’s headlines such as “Lunar eclipse wows sky watchers” and “Best show for a decade” that I realized how far gone I must have been, to have seen the moon disappear and then turn colour without stopping to think why the Fuck that might be happening. How the fuck was I doing this every day for so long?

Anyway, the conclusion is that I have no choice but to use this stuff carefully, to ration it. And this surely presents a fateful opportunity to attempt to attain a working relationship with an addiction? This could be just what I have waiting for, the culmination of my year of abstinence, like a giant insane relay-race, the baton about to be passed from one to another: it is safe to drink again at last!

Yes, that’s it. I’ll stow it away in an out-of-reach place such as the garden shed though the week, pinching off a wee bit to perk me up at the weekends and feeling like the master of ceremonies. I will learn how to be able to have close to hand a substance to which I am addicted, to “just live with it” as a good friend helpfully pointed out recently.

I will then sail past the one year milestone with a summer’s project to start slowly reintroducing the drink. There would be no quiet frenzies of vodka and ice and citrus fruits to accompany a Saturday afternoon in the sun, nor steady-can-Sundays with the newspaper and the smell of cut grass. There will be peace at long last.

But, then, there is every possibility that I will cane this entire bag and its striking potential for vacancy in the next 4--6 days. And Fuck Knows what that is going to do to me.

Just when I thought I’d forgotten how to loath Nigel

2007-02-26T22:06:00.000Z

Nigel’s leader in this month’s OFM really engaged me and made me want to be like him. Just replace the word “evangelical” with “like a smug, self-satisfied, middleclass Guardian-media-twat living in a West London bubble with nothing but the intimacy of his bonds with root vegetables left to worry about” and then decide whether or not you want to eat his food:

“I like to know everything about what is on my plate. Not just whether my food is organic or not, but more than that. Much more.

If I shop at the farmers market or farm shop rather than the supermarket I can get to know who grew it and what variety they planted, if I buy from a vegetable box scheme I will sometimes get a note with it too, about the trials of getting stuff planted and picked.

But it is the fruit and vegetables I grow for myself that I really appreciate; I know their entire story, and can look at the carrot, the tomato, the cabbage on the plate and know I have some connection with its entire cycle from ordering the seed from the catalogue through to pricking out, planting, tending and harvesting.

Okay, so it has a few holes in it and is a prime contender for the rude vegetable competition, but somehow that makes it all the more special. It has an integrity and honesty to it that exceeds anything I can buy.

If this sounds a bit evangelical then so what? I guess that is what happens when you get your hand into the soil in order to make your own supper.

If cooking is a pleasure, then it becomes tenfold the moment you lift your own vegetables from the earth and rub the wet soil off them with your thumb.

Yes, I can say it tastes better, and some of that may be true, but there is so much more to it than that: I feel some kind of bond with what I am eating and, when I put that food out on to other people's plates I feel I am sharing something very very special.

Which of course I am.”

Get the fucking wood chipper fired up, would you.

The death of the customer

2007-02-23T21:55:00.000Z

Today I took great pleasure in watching the brain-dead secretary eat herself alive, at least what’s left of her thanks to years of yo-yo bullshit dieting, on hearing that someone else in the Office is buying a flat in the poshest part of town. It penetrated deep into her steely but fragile core and although not one for incisive comment left her with no other coping mechanism than to wish out load that she too had a rich mummy and daddy. So I went upstairs for some lunch, feeling buoyant and friendly and being met without a single smile or anything bordering on acknowledgement by the people who I have seen and handed money over to virtually every day for the last five FUCKING years. The till rang up two pounds poxy fifty for my platter of bland carb-fat-salt slop and a pale and elegant hand reached out. Nothing was spoken, no eye contact made. I felt as if I wanted to throw a handful of loose change all over the floor and walk off, leaving the fucking tasteless matter on the counter as I went.

This is the reality of Blair’s meritocracy, if we can stretch the imagination for a moment to accommodate some sense of cause and effect in this buckled and disjointed society. Everyone is so fucking sure that they have a fundamental right to fortune and fame that they can longer work in the only fucking jobs that anyone will ever employ them to do; they’re too busy figuring out how many loans they will need to secure that place on a retail-therapy HNC to tell me how much my needlessly mediocre meal is going to cost me.

Meanwhile the BDS refuses to pick up my phone because she thinks she should be a PA to someone more important; waiting staff look at me as if I’m the one shoveling shit; car hire staff, utility companies, customer service of any kind – you have to fight every inch of the way to restore your role as a customer. Being nice, as I see most people being, or being a cunt, as I have ended up, it doesn’t seem to make much difference. Either way they will still hate me for it. A dangerous lie has been spread by those fucking bastards in power, and us drones are turning on each other as a result of our unmet expectations. I am helpless. The customer is dead. When did the customer die?

One day at a time

2007-02-21T23:09:00.000Z

What the fuck can I give up for lent? It’s been 11 months now. Somehow the anniversary of my stunt is taking on more meaning as it draws nearer. It’s as if I’m waiting for some kind of closure, as if 8760 hours makes any fuck of a difference whatsoever. As if some clarity is going to suddenly appear from nowhere, a signpost to help me go further. Or maybe the event will con me into thinking I’m able to have another go at drinking properly, having “managed” a whole year without it. I am fucked whichever way I turn.
I need something.
I am a better person when I’m levered off the plane, I know I am. I am presently a fucking nightmare; the kids, the Wife, the Office, my temper is short and fierce with everyone. Really, I am being eaten alive by this all-consuming emptiness generated by my need yet self-diagnosed complete incapability to get out of my fucking head on something. I thought I had gear to turn to if things got tricky, but my recent reunion told me otherwise: I just wanted to pack as much into the shortest space and time possible so as to get as numb and fucking mongoloid as a human has ever gotten. Even with this empirical evidence behind me, I appear to be unable to learn anything from it. I have, for example, been entertaining delusions that by learning how to use gear properly I can eventually switch it for drink and thereby live a life of controlled, high-functioning alcoholism. And, fuck, it has been just three days since my little experiment and I am right now seriously considering making yet another “final” trip to the socially handicapped for a restock.
There must be something else at work here. I find I have largely shut off from the world. I even sat down in front of the television the other night to shout at Nigel Slater and his unfunny friends on a food&drink roll-out of the grumpy-old-men format, but had to switch it off without comment after 23 seconds. And today should have been spent sourcing bones and making stocks, but the idea seemed utterly pointless because I just couldn’t imagine a time when I was going to use any of it. I cannot see beyond a short horizon right now, a day or two at best. Perhaps it’s time to reach out and up and embark on the Twelve Steps to enlightenment without which I am told I am a dead-man. I certainly feel powerless right now. But I’m fucked if I trust anybody else enough to hand myself over.

VD and gout

2007-02-14T23:23:00.000Z

The thought of a lump of meat surrounded by a buttery sauce didn’t appeal this VD. We have been eating highly seasoned, munchy-driven gastro-pub type food for a while. And of course having been together for some time, we the Wife and I are far too “ironical” and, more to the point, cynical to go overboard on VD. But that is not to say that no thought went into it. I knew she had a hangover, for instance, and so would appreciate a deep bowl of hot and comforting penne.

So I made a tomato sauce, enhancing the tin of chopped with a handful of reconstituted sundrieds and a punnet of velvety beef stock. After cooking it down with plenty of browned bacon, red onion and chili, I tossed it into the pasta with some wild leaves, truffle oil and a scraping of ageing parmesan. We ate it with hot crusty rosemary and olive-oil bread and it was more than sufficient to temporarily fill the marital potholes and divert attentions from the more unsettling sides to an eight-year-long relationship. That sort of thing could take the wheels off a meal.

But I had prepared a backup just in case the beef didn’t reach far down enough: a desert that could, in fact, kill in quantity. It was meant to be chocolate ice cream. It was fucking chocolate ice cream, but not like any I had tasted before. It began with six supremely fresh and deep-orange yolks in a bowl, into which I tipped a good handful of icing sugar and whisked until smooth and pale; cooked up with a pint of warm double cream and 120g of dark Lindt chocolate; a splash of milk to slacken it all up. But by the time it had chilled enough to be presented to the churner it was far too stiff to pour. So I folded in some more cream and watched the cheap plastic blades scrape their way round, making their task slightly harder by chucking in small handfuls of crushed roasted hazelnuts. It didn’t take long to grind to halt, and I quickly transferred the mixture to a tub, stirring in some more double cream to create a crap marbled effect.

I served three small boules of the stuff in a puddle of Kahlua (for those who aren’t alcoholic) and dusted them with some sieved icing sugar. It was like eating a giant frozen Belgian chocolate. To illustrate just how outrageous this substance was, I very nearly (and should have) served it with a dollop of chantilly cream to lighten it up. It reminded me of a Cruzan rum by the name of 151, so called on account of its agonizing potency (75.5%abv). The bottle carried a bright red flammable-liquid warning, and we were mixing it with neat Absolute to make it drinkable. It burned and made us salivate so badly that the last two hours of the session were spent in silence, crouched over a table gobbing thick, salty and acidic spit onto our own floor. It would have been a fitting end to VD really.

A social menace

2007-02-11T23:00:00.000Z

Things were definitely continuing on the up. It began with a £20 find at the farmers’ market and culminated with a ten-bag from the socially handicapped. Thieving and purchasing quasi-illegal drugs. With the former I went to town on a large wild sea bass and a good handful of venison steak. [Such serendipity would have normally been met with a bottle of malt, which is more fitting than a couple of meals.] The latter was the result of “decision-overturn”, a process I entertained for a surprisingly long time given that I knew all along what the outcome was going to be.
Evidently, the psycho-switch that has been so powerful in keeping me away from booze for the worst part of a year doesn’t seem to have been wired up properly for the gear. I know why, of course. Principally it’s because such a black&white decision would bring me too close to an existence with no bolt hole – however obstructed it may have become from overuse. Despite the lonely ceremony on January 3rd when my supply came to a foggy end, I knew I had to keep the option open if I was ever to make sure that the drink didn’t spot the opportunity and raise its game accordingly. I knew that when I stood in my soggy back garden with my pipe in my hand contemplating hurling it into the night.
So with all this brought much closer by the imminent prospect of a weekend with just the children, the idea was rasping away at my Friday-night mind. By the time the morning came I had reasoned a bullet-proof case for getting some in by the end of the day, which was boosted by some kitchen DIY success in the shape of some Swedish-designed under-shelf lighting. And I felt good about it.
The core strand of the argument was this: it was an opportunity to show to myself just how mature and sensible my approach to my addictions has become, how I understand myself so well that I can coolly and calmly afford myself a few day’s of societal outage as and when I need it. And just in case I started to see through it all, I covered my ass with the “if I am ever to have a healthy relationship with this stimulant, then there is no sense in just stopping forever altogether – you need to keep in touch though the bad times, test each other to see if the space has had any effect” routine.
But it was all academic.
It took all of three minutes of having the stinky little bag in my hands before I was coughing like a cunt in the car park next door. And rather than sit back and enjoy the clean high I had expected to get from only the minimum of material filling my freshly ventilated lungs, I found myself doubly hungry for the stuff. I hit it hard for a few days, enjoying the heightened enjoyment of food and fantasy. Rolling soft strips of purple venison steak in hot butter, spiking the juices with some crushed juniper berries, reducing the seepage from a handful of reconstituted porcini and tipping in a tub of single cream to make a stoner’s stroganoff was just one example of the kind of self-indulgent concoction I was immersing myself in.
But I felt slow too, forgetful and much more paranoid than I thought I ought to be. One of a rare few occasions when I have been utterly aware of how the substance I’d just imbibed was altering me. I disliked the heavy, hazy hit and my quick transformation into insatiable monster. I fucked a filleting job on a mackerel and have been consuming shite like I can’t recall, gorging myself on cheese and pickle crackers, premium ice creams and bars of Cadbury’s chocolate. The high made me want to indulge, instantly, in everything. I hadn’t expected this to happen at all, rather that I would be knocked totally off my tits and care-free. It flicked an altogether different kind of switch. Just like drink used to do, all it did was trigger a behavioural pattern that I had grown used to. I was back on the Red Bull, taking longer to do everything than I should have been, tetchy but worst of all craving getting more fucked.
So it seems as if smoking high-strength cannabis has now been added to the small but growing list of things I cannot do properly. I would feel the loneliness if it weren’t for the comfort of knowing it’s not going to be taken away just yet. Although things are different to the way they were five days ago. This ill-conceived little test did not turn out too well. I feel even more trapped than I was. And I cannot afford to be slowed down right now, in the beginning of my supposed prime. Like a man with which I have in common nothing but age: rock/pop-star/teetotaler AANA Robbie Williams, drinking 36 espressos and 20 cans of Bull every day and now checking-in to rehab to wean him off subscription drugs. We need to talk. I am already thinking about how I’m going to get past tomorrow without scoring another bag.

Welcome to Flatland

2007-02-04T23:04:00.000Z

Buttered brown bread in abundance, and all helped down by several fucking litres of Highland Spring. There are signs of hope on the horizon. I find myself here, anticipating an overdue dump of snow, with 160,000 gassed turkeys and the world’s most expensive meal on my mind. The former is an attempt by the bio-police to hold back the inevitable explosion of H5N1 in one of Bernard Matthews’ bootiful battery factories, the latter a one million baht wank-fest involving 18 star’s worth of signature dishes accompanied by a predictable “uninterested investor” wine selection. The news provides coarse culinary orientation of sorts, lying at the extremes of the Epicurean scale; my cantankerous existence would appear to lie somewhere between the two. It is especially useful to visualize this scale as being one-sorry-dimensional, for there is no doubt that I am currently staring down the barrel of a life devoid of peaks and troughs.

But it could be that I am beginning to settle in to Flatland. He no longer, for example, turns in an instant from calm and considerate father to deranged maniac at the sight of his one-year old trying hopelessly to consume a banana or deciding half way through a spoon-fed plate of rough vegetable mash, which he spent good time he didn't have preparing, to mix it with sticky warm snot and rub it all into her eyes. Notwithstanding the rage as the three-hundred-and-forty-fifth flattened raisin squelches between his morning toes. But more telling is the clarity with which I have been approaching the evening meal. Like a foggy film that has lifted from my brain, the food has cut through the crap and been quick and fuck-free for a while.

There was Monday’s hot-shit soup of water, carrot, ginger, coriander and salt; Tuesday’s fresh butter-fried herring fillets floured and egged and rolled in oats and served with parsley and lemon; Wednesday’s seared slices of rare rump steak with neep & thyme mash and truffle-dressed leaves; Thursday’s roasted Chinese-five-spice duck leg with celeriac puree and some stir-fried purple-sprouting with soy; Friday’s fresh mackerel, pan-fried until crispy and bursting with oils cut by a caper and watercress salad dressed in a simple lemon vinaigrette; and today’s crispy pork belly with fennel seeds and a stew of cannellini beans cooked in cider – no more than an elaborate excuse to walk back from the newsagent's with the paper and a can of Blackthorn at ten o'clock in the morning. Nobody batted and eyelid, as it turned out, which helped crystallize all the more my little fantasy of taking my purchases home via a park bench. (A lovely chilled can to take the fur out my mouth; a wrap of Cutter’s Choice too to numb the itchy rasp at the back of my throat; a packet of mints to counter the deathly stench of bitter sweet sweat; a newspaper to bring purpose to my actions; and endless hours trying to convince myself that it’s all being carried out with irony, merely childish and attention-seeking play-acting.) It would be a bleak picture indeed if this were for real, of course.

A day in the life

2007-01-29T23:57:00.000Z

Schizo-confusion is the real killer with addiction, tormented minutes or hours spent trying to work out what is real and what is the work of demons. Both are real, of course. It gives you a hint of what it must be like to be mentally ill. Perhaps I am mentally ill. But one thing which is not in any doubt whatsoever is the dual or more existence that an honest-to-goodness dependence on alcohol, drugs, diets, gym membership or sex with strangers offers you. It’s extremely dangerous in fact, and you only realize just how much when it is taken away.

Take a typical day of modern life. A man gets out of bed and the first thing he asks himself is: “why?” It’s not as if he really feels that there is any point to his job anymore. He can see right through his boss, knows full well he could run the place much better himself, and instead of giving the 110 percent he knows he’s capable of spends his days reading bullshit Internet news stories and torturing himself with the seemingly blissful existence and higher salaries of others around him. He knows that he has a greater purpose in life, of course, but is also cynical enough to realize that it isn’t going to be realized by spending all day sitting around this fucking Office whining.

So he takes up a personal-bettering hobby such as running to help focus the mind and to impart a sense of control over his life. Get a kick out of life, he reasons, by getting fitter and pumping some oxygen through his slowly decaying brain. And he spends a while on the treadmill, finding solace in the subtext of competition with other men in the Office. But he soon starts to feel terribly alone out there. It starts when he ceases to notice any further weight loss or toning, and continues until he admits to himself that the whole exercise has been a diversion to permit him to procrastinate over his exit strategy. He decides to throw himself into the work again in the hope that all the advice from friends and family and books and corporate art ‘that you only get out of life what you put in’ is really true. And the whole cycle starts over again, trundling mercilessly down a bland and heartless suburban cul-de-sac.

But what if he had something so great to look forward to each day that it turned his in-tray into a fucking advent calendar? Something which at the same time allowed him to really set himself apart from the pack because he knew that he was the only one doing it; something whose effects continued to fuck with his dopamine receptors well into the following day, providing a welcome disembodiment from his work yet simultaneously giving him more incentive than ever to get through it so that he can enjoy his reward guilt-free at the end of it. With exercise you get the precise opposite effect – nothing to look forward to but pain and cold sweat, and an enlivened brain which only serves to make more stark the mediocrity of your 9-5 existence.

He has, of course, found drugs and alcohol. Everyone is doing it to some level -- just think of the atmosphere after four o’clock on a Friday afternoon as the smoke-filled, decibel busting, suit-filled bar looms. Behaviour becomes more animated with every degree the minute-hand traces, the scene quickly verging on one of lost panic as people start to readjust to their real selves in preparation for the weekend. But sitting there quietly knowing that he is going to get even more wrecked than all of them, in infinitely better comfort and grander style than the meat market of a city-centre pay-day post work session and also using illegal, if soft and recently declassified, drugs brings a sense of calm and inner peace. And when he does arrive home to familiar familial surroundings and starts to get himself into a proper nick, he wallows self-satisfied in just how ahead-of-the-game he is and, more importantly, redeems his sense of individuality.

This can go on for years, his fogging brain finding it increasingly hard to make anything more of the job and causing him to miss out on all opportunities to progress or bolt. For this stuff doesn’t come for free. The paranoia starts to show itself and he begins to think that everyone knows he’s stoking his hash pipe in the gents’ before he heads home of an evening and then nipping into the newsagent’s for a couple of journey-cans. Before he knows it he has become so used to the effects of being high that the incentive to get through the day becomes less and less. His nerves start to shatter and the paranoia spreads to the family, shrinking the Safety Zone until it is no more appealing than the Office he was trying to escape in the first place. Soon he can face neither, and the only hope of averting the mid-life crisis is to sign up for a much better hydroxyl compound.

Suddenly take the drink and drugs away, however, and the scene looks even more desolate. For his mind will be fucking dross and the job still in the troughs of bare necessity that it was left in the day before, and not just for a few days. Indeed, time appears to slow to a virtual singularity while space takes on a cold and portentous light, the objects within it sharper and more menacing than he recalls. All a sensate occupant can do is sulk and snarl and drown itself in the gross unfairness of the world.

And then the punch-line starts to rear its demonic head, only our shell of an individual is now incapable of appreciating the tragic humour. It was cigarettes all the time that he was missing, that he was trying to replace, first with harder drinking and then with regular cannabis abuse. The master of all addictions has worked its magic so savagely that he hadn’t even noticed. But in fact all he wants is a fag and, deluded with the partial progress he has made towards conquering what he deemed much more serious addictions, the idea of sparking one up has lost all taboo and sense of failure. It seems so harmless in comparison. It would be the right thing to do in order to keep everyone happy, he reasons. And he suddenly realizes that he doesn’t know who or how many were listening to the giant conversation that has been going on in his own head for several years.

A true masterpiece of the self.

Burn it off

2007-01-25T23:44:00.000Z

A recipe upon which to unleash some real anger, yet giving you just enough time to cool off and become receptive to its soothing reward; a one-pot, two-day meal that will melt away the worst of January’s hostilities; and all for the price of a box of fags.

What you do is this. Go into your nearest supermarket, probably a Tesco, and pick up a half-shoulder of lamb on-the-blade. Pause for a moment to ponder why there is nothing but New Zealand lamb on offer, until you find yourself getting frustrated by your paradoxical helplessness as a consumer immersed in the runaway capitalism of a nouveau riche society, then toddle off to the FIVE A DAY zone for a pillow of reduced spinach and some fresh coriander. Entertain for a second the delusion that you have the power to choose which queue will get you past the checkout safest and quickest, then proceed directly to the one containing the invisible sixty-something with Parkinson’s and a fistful of vouchers. Be ready with your cool and calm response to the relentless inquisition of cards and points and schools and cash, then attempt to take home your purchases in the free carrier bags that are being repeatedly slashed open by the edges of the unfathomably large plastic cuboid that contains your meat. Check your watch to make sure you have at least five hours left before the time when you want the ordeal to be over, then go home and turn on your oven.

Take out and admire an array of blunt and heavy implements. Then smash up a fuck-load of garlic and pound some chilli, lots of it. Use a rake of chillies, dried, fresh, mix them up, it doesn’t matter. Just guess at how much you want to suffer and then add some more. Pulverise some coriander and fennel seeds, plenty of both. You must work as fast as you can to ensure you are running on your innate sense of reason and gut-feeling only; it is vital that you measure nothing. Smell the seeds to find out how much you want them, forget about the chillies, don’t shy away from the garlic. Mix it all together with some oil, salt and lemon to form a thick paste and then launch a frenzied stabbing attack on your shoulder. Rub into the dry wounds and spaces between fatty layers your gritty potion, and throw the job into the oven for a slow 2-hour roast.

Forget about your dinner. Do something less boring instead, such as install a dishwasher. But when your eyes start to water and you start to feel something tickle and rasp in the back of your throat, it’s time to sweat some onions and any celery, leeks or carrots that you have to hand, in oil in a large heavy pan. This is your pot, and it needs to be big. After a while throw in a little more fennel, coriander and chilli, but most importantly a load of turmeric. Let it all cook away until it smells like curry and has taken on a good deep yellow colour, and then tip in a good couple of cupfuls of water and let it boil. Empty-in your spinach, put the lid back on, and set about hacking the meat from the shoulder into rough chunks, fat, gristle and all. Throw it all into the pan along with the naked blade, making sure all is just submerged, and then top with a pound of peeled King Edwards chopped in half. A handful of salt, a lid, and back into an even slower oven for another two hours.

It doesn’t matter what you do next. Your house will slowly fill from bottom to top with deep meaty and spicy odours. After an hour, stop what you are doing to check things haven’t gone awry, spooning a few pools of sheepy fat over the tatties. Then, when the end is near, retrieve again your pot, transfer the surprisingly crispy potatoes to somewhere warm (i.e. the oven), remove the bone, stir in some yoghurt and any creamed coconut you might have, and return to the oven for five minutes to melt into a pale orange and green sludge while you roughly chop large handfuls of coriander.

You are ready to spoon it all into large bowls and eat. And you will find meat that falls apart at the mere prod of your fork, yellowing tatties full of unexpected earthy flavour, and a thick fatty sauce that warms and refreshes in equal doses. The unparalleled soothing qualities of the meal, you realize with smug self-satisfaction, are down to the lack of metrology. You are surprised by how good it has turned out, and will remember next time what needs to be adjusted to perfect your brew. What’s more, you will never again consider the twenty-fifth of January fit for Haggis.

The Fucking Chicken

2007-01-21T23:38:00.000Z

Call it a lack of culinary balls, ability or inspiration; and level a few accusations of being a pathetic whining male while you’re at it. But the truth is that, like always ending up at the cinema when in search of an alcohol-free night out, I was essentially helpless in my choice of Sunday meal this week. In need of a move away from the red meats and heavy Christmas stocks, yet looking for something that I could throw into a pan without much thought so as not to impinge too rudely on my great sulk with the world regarding (mainly, but not exclusively) my inability to use alcohol and/or soft drugs to obscure it, I was obviously going to end up with a fucking chicken. And let’s face it, everyone loves a chicken don’t they? I couldn’t go wrong, I thought. But when the time came I started fucking things up right left and centre, dangerously so as I was about to find out.

I should have just plumped the bastard into a pot with some veg and wine and let it roast away all afternoon. That’s what I should have done under the circumstances. But, of course, I was not thinking straight on account of my straightness. So unfortunately, while standing there with my hand up the bird’s arse retrieving its giblets, I started imagining prepping the bird as I may have done had I been up to my eyeballs in super-hybrid skunk. I’ll roast it with tarragon butter under the skin, I thought, packed full of a rich bacon, liver & herb stuffing and served with root vegetables roasted beneath it in the slow drips of fowl fat, an “independent gravy” tying it all together for its place at the Sunday family table that I wearily attempt to resuscitate from one week to the next.

But I wasn’t firing on all cylinders, and before long the scene before me was one of cowboys & Indians scrapping over chopped liver. There were herbs all over the place and pieces of misshaped onion, too many knives and pans and evidence of indecision everywhere I looked. All the while I was becoming more and more angry for having made it so unnecessarily difficult for myself (it’s not as if anyone else gave a shit). It was as if I was trying to follow a badly written recipe or something. I just couldn’t get into it. Nothing felt right. And it came as no great surprise that I could barely summon the motor skills to spoon it into my face when the time came.

The stuffing was too strong and, I suspect, undercooked. Moreover, it lacked the crucial crispy coating that had tricked me into thinking the job was a good’un when I fried off a quick sample. The skin on the bird was not crispy enough, and the tarragon butter (a freebie from the Shop) had lent a claggy, bitter taste to both the flesh and the unsuspecting vegetables beneath.

As for the independent gravy, it was a waste of fucking time. Sacrificing any hope the bird had of producing a sauce for some grease-coated carrots, courgettes and potatoes, I browned the neck and a good handful or two of diced carrots, onions and celery, then deglazed with plenty white wine and cooked it all up with water and a fat bouquet garni for a half an hour before pressing it through a sieve. It made perfect sense, but I might as well have mixed a reconstituted Knor stock cube into a pasty roux for all the effect it had on my internal well-being.

The worst, however, was still to come - and it was much worse than I could have imagined. It meant I would not be able to eat for five whole days, nor participate in any task, trip or conversation for more than five minutes before having to run to the nearest porcelain bowl to jettison another 2-300mls of hot liquid faeces. I was as sick as a pike. I had given myself salmonella.

At least, that was my diagnosis. The medical establishment would have asked for all manner of stool samples that would have to be left under a heat lamp for a week before I could possibly be told what was in there, not to mention fobbing me off with helpful suggestions about the possible route of infection such as the usual Office air-con et cetera. But a modicum of cerebral activity pointed directly to the Fucking Chicken. Apart from the fact that those bastards are all full of the stuff, especially happy flappy farmyard ones like mine was, it was the only explanation as to why nobody else around me had got lucky too. Being too liver-like, the Wife hadn’t touched the lukish-warm stuffing that had been nestling up close to the unwashed walls of the body cavity for a good 45 minutes in bacterial-multiplication heaven. The children neither. And in a last attempt at making me feel that my sober efforts had been worthwhile I had decided to make a show of stuffing as much of it down me as I could (which wasn’t much) at the table. I have only ever poisoned myself once before now, and that was pale in comparison.

But somewhere in the midst of crippling stomach cramps, dry-retching and almost hallucinogenic headaches, I received frustrating confirmation that my sobriety is having and adverse affect on my home life and, importantly, on the way I cook. I received a little green present from the neighbour, a pipe or two of dried up old skunk. And thought - for Christ’s sake - that the world owed me that much. And even through the mist of my diarrhoea delirium, I suddenly felt alive and well. Within a few hours I was throwing out effortless bowls of impeccably seasoned fish curry followed by sexy squares of warm treacle tart with thick dollops of clotted cream, and by the time my serendipitous stash had run out we had put away plates of prime veal & pork sausages & mash with a blood-red sauce made from the best part of a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape and tubs of beef and veal stock, garnished with char-grilled courgettes and tomatoes. And before I had time to fully experience the unparalleled glow that such ingredients bring to a cold January soul, it was back to the numbing reality of porcelain, dihydrocodeine and electrolytic sports drinks.

Think before you quit

2007-01-13T23:30:00.000Z

I wasn’t thinking straight. The world was shimmering ever so slightly in the darkening mid-afternoon light, my hands like protheses over which I hand no control, and the car I was driving with nonchalant abandon floating centimetres above the road in defiance of physics. How could I have been thinking straight? I was running on fuck-all, dry, empty, lean, vulnerable, cagey and as pale as tripe. I hadn’t had a cigarette in two and a half years, a drink in ten months, or a blast of THC in nine days. I was a fucking liability, and shouldn’t have even been contemplating an attempt to employ my ill-coordinated senses in preparing an evening meal.

Ostensibly, I was marking an end to the festive cholesterol with a trip for some fish and chicken. Chicken? By the time I had got myself through the Shop doors, hovered towards the meat counter, and pointed wearily to an oven-ready carcase it was too late. One fresh fat winter mackerel and ten quid later, my fate was sealed.

I got back to the safety of my void-like home and rushed the ingredients into the fridge before I had a chance to get out the knife. And after spending some time pretending to consider the meal I would make, when in fact all I could think about was the fact that by the time I came to eat it I would be feeling exactly the same as I was now, decided it would make good use of my disembodied hands to throw together as quickly as I could some sort of one-dish baked mackerel affair.

It is obvious when you should stop cooking when you find yourself chopping roughly and unevenly your vegetables without a care in the word. It takes no more time to prep them properly, to normalize their cooking times and render them appealing on the plate. But like wrecking your own bedroom in the search for the sock that you know must exist, the sight of your cowboy cutting sends you up and produces dregs of inspiration such as throwing a few sliced parsnips into the fray and scattering the whole fucking lot with cumin and fennel seeds. As for the fish, it seemed ridiculous not to snip off its tail and leave it looking just slightly deformed, for I would be so fucking straight by the time it came down to eating it that I’m sure I would hardly notice.

It was all over within five minutes, the dish in the oven leaving time once again to fidget and twitch and snap at anyone crossing my path. And after an attempt at making presentable the pile of veg by tossing it in some, err, al dente sliced spring greens, I remembered why I don’t like mackerel cooked on the bone. It is too oily and claggy and bursting with fishy fat, made more sickly thanks to the sweet cumin and parsnip slices, nothing in the meal holding together and cruelly hammering home my feeling of fractional existence.

But nothing that fish could do could have prepared me for the chicken.

100-unit man

2007-01-06T20:45:00.000Z

The kitchen looks different somehow. The edges on the cooker are steely and sharp, the lighting cold and dim, and the fake marbled worktops black and bare. The condiment shelf holds the same limitless potential as it always does, the fridge and pantry standing-by to offer their (albeit wilting) support. But nothing about the scene before me spoke of inspiration for tonight’s solitary tea.

It occurred to me that I haven’t properly suffered the harsh light of day for several years, whereby I am not either under the influence or comforted by the imminent prospect of being so. Nowhere is this more evident than in my kitchen. A bottle of Red oils the cogs of a weekend roast; a chilled opened White turns the fridge into a secret lucky dip; a stiff vodka tonic jumpstarts a midweek pasta special; while a blast of White Widow magically transforms the mundane into a joyous moment of self-congratulation. None of this was around, however, to take the edge off this particular Friday night.

Instead, I got through the boredom and pointlessness of my meal prep (I wasn’t even hungry - I just wanted to gorge myself on SOMETHING) by imagining a moment when things will be different. Saturday & Sunday mornings, I thought as I fried some smoky chunks of bacon for my eggy pasta bowl, were so much more relaxed now because I didn’t have to try and find ways of putting off the start of the day’s drinking or smoking; my ability to spend freely on the best food I can get my hands on, I told myself as I tossed in some black olives and garlic, would not exist if I had a two- to three-hundred quid intoxication bill each month; and one day, I mumbled out loud while stirring some milk and grated parmesan into a beaten egg, I would get back that feeling I had as a kid before I drank or smoked and never saw the point of either.

Unconvinced, I sat in front of YouTube all night slurping down great forkfuls of olive- and rocket-enhanced carbonara, trying to manage the sporadic microsecond moments of excruciating anger and frustration by actively telling myself to remain calm and ride them out. They’re not physical junky pangs, of course, just occasional peaks of white noise that threaten to take over and turn a Friday night into what it always was and should be.

And then I found myself lying in bed, tossing and turning and stuffed full of eggs and cheese, thinking hard about the story of a man who drank 100 units of alcohol on Wednesday. New Year is only now beginning to taper off in the Highlands, and tales of horrific abuse spread out over several days will have been widespread. But at 33 times the recommended maximum intake, 100 units in one session - imbibed in the form of three bottles of red, 15 pints of lager and a good few drams - is surely a record breaker. It sickens me to think about that. But not nearly as much as it does to know so well just how much craic I missed out on by not being there with him in that tiny, fucking bar on a dark and otherwise lifeless post-Hog evening.

A different kind of shopper

2007-01-03T23:16:00.000Z

For the first time in my life today I entered and walked around a Waitrose. I knew what to expect in terms of the food -- the walls of roquette (rocket), abundance of locally sourced fruit and veg (it’s amazing what you can grow in the English winter these days) and rare-breed sausages (each with its own name). But I had overlooked the clientele.

I mean, the place is famously pricey so it wasn’t surprising to find a car park full of Mercedes and SUVs and a shop floor teeming with well-out-of-season tans. It was the expressions of disgust-in-waiting that these people were wearing as they pushed harassed through the empty aisles, however, that caught me unawares (the same one they wear on the street in preparation for the lonely cyclist, who they would rather see mangled before them in pile of twisted flesh and metal than share their pavement when the 2.63m cycle lane along side comes to an unexpected end in the middle of a busy dual carriageway). The women looked like Cruella De Vil on imaginary missions to out-buy each other, while the markedly fewer blokes were the bulging-belly-beneath-hand-made-shirt types in search of meat and bargain clarets. There were a few sandal wearers in amongst it too, but you had to look twice to notice them.

The contrast with my local Tesco couldn’t have been more rude, with a distinct lack of doughy midrift, nothing in the way of sickly sweet alcoholic sweat, no babbling Poles with baskets of battery eggs perusing own-brand forty-ouncers of vodka and, most sadly of all, not a single smile in the aisles. I could draw some crass conclusion from my trip that money can’t buy you happiness. But that’s just not true. These people were just as bothered as they always were, like I am, yet have perhaps bought-out the ability to reflect on this and have a good old laugh at themselves.

Going to a new supermarket is always an exciting experience, but one which is short-lived as it dawns on you just how much your diet and cooking is defined by powers outside your control.

Seeing as fish is pretty hard to come by at this time of year, however, I thought I would take advantage of the Waitrose fish counter by picking up a fillet of smoked haddock for a Cullen skink (bizarrely, the only other item the “fishmonger” had on display apart from some overpriced and far too old tuna loin was three rows sardines standing upright like miniature obelisks, frozen solid with their tails snipped for ease of insertion). And then, in all the excitement of flicking through the supermarket’s exceedingly glossy magazine, I went and left the bastard haddi at the checkout.

Angry with myself for not being able to present my family with a hot bowl of thick fish soup to counter the chilly January air, I decided instead to substitute the fish for the scraggy leek in the fridge and to make the best fucking leek & tattie soup the world has ever seen.

So I fried some thick bacon chunks with cross-sections of leek until they were good and brown and transferred them to a plate while I set some chopped leek and half an onion sweating in the pan and peeled four maris pipers and half an ex-festive parsnip for sweetness. Next went in a pint or two of aromatic veg stock. It may have looked like manky tap-water ice when I hacked up and threw large chunks of it into the pan, but once it started to melt it underwent a magical transformation to cloves, star anise, apple, leek, onion, celery, bay, parsley ….

Half an hour later I blitzed the lot into a silky smooth soup, slipped in the plate of leek and bacon and adjusted the seasoning (read: threw in an ungodly quantity of Maldon). It was tasty and wholesome, and the leeks had taken on a strong hint of peanut. We dressed it ourselves at the table from a bag of roquette and a small bottle of truffle oil, ate it mostly with our hands with hunks of crusty white bread, Nige-style. It would have been the greatest leek and tattie soup had I fucked-in some double cream too.

The end of the green

2007-01-02T23:26:00.000Z

A saline assault of the senses on my first day back in the Office: a celery and stilton soup that almost burned the tongue. I have noticed this before of their cheesier soups, but now I think I know why it happens: they don’t realise (i.e. take five less spoonfuls of stock powder) that stilton, particularly the shit they buy, has a fierce saltiness of its own. I can’t decide which is more worrying: that nobody thought to taste the gloop before whacking it out, or that someone did taste it and deemed it sellable. Either way, combined with my dry “cheddar” sarnie with strong notes of cheap vegetable oil and yeasty preservatives there was no hiding from the fact that I was no longer in the fuzzy comfort of my own home.

It didn’t help either that every single newspaper I glanced at to try and take my mind off the nasty taste of modern life was offering twenty or more ways to create the new 2007 you. Coping with booze and food featured large, of course, with one rag offering a few special “advice from the experts” boxes to help us along. But the relevance of this for civil servant Geoff, 44, from Newcastle -- who had recently vowed to try to address his six-pint a day habit with the help of Leigh Clarke of the North East Council on Addictions – is highly questionable.

In the left-hand column there was Geoff describing how surprised he was that his newfound alcohol diary rang up an impressive 86 units on his first week, followed by his pride and satisfaction that he managed to get it down to 55 the following week: “If I get it down to 40, I'll be happy,” he added. But this is hardly going to cut the mustard for Leigh who, in the adjacent column, spends most of the small space available telling us yet again that the safe weekly limit for men is 21 units, and that anything more than 3 or 4 units in one sitting [i.e. a pint and a half of Stella] constitutes a “binge”. So Geoff is a chronic binge drinker who I can only guess, according to national health guidelines, is already dead.

I left the Office arrived home the same me, or at least that’s what I am telling myself. In fact, for the first time in several months tonight my brain will not be enjoying the thoughtful detachment provided by increasingly large doses of tetrahydrocannabinol, knowing full well as I do that I have been using this increasingly as a dangerous replacement for drink in the last few months. Strangely, the papers contained not a single mention of how one might go about coping with such a loss.

And if food&cooking is to be my escape then I shall need to come up with a slower meal than tonight’s leftovers of prime rare ribeye and a great little salad made by tossing small florets of al dente broccoli, a few fine beans, some leek, rocket, dill and tarragon in a mustardy dressing. It only took five minutes to prepare.

An untraditional beginning

2007-01-01T23:27:00.000Z

The holiday season is over and, judging by the spring in my step this morning, this can only be a good thing. I was not rough, of course, and a million miles away from the whore-of-a-nick I would have been in had I joined in the vodka session next door at the Poles’ house as I had so wanted to. It wouldn’t have ended up simply as a vodka session though, you see, as I would have turned up myself with a good dram and got me and them even more horrible, probably passing out at the table by about 3am and having to be carried home.

For there wasn’t much other than a table there. It was almost a proper Highland Hogmanay in fact, with people sitting around sober with all the lights on and the only action being the occasional rapid and synchronized right-arm-raising of three ugly men and the sparking up of the odd heavy Eastern European fag. Admittedly this action became more frequent and animated as the night wore on, and suddenly they had got enough inside them (about two litres) to be able to launch some extremely large rockets by hand in the street out front. Trying to explain why you don’t drink in such circumstances is futile to say the least, especially when you have less than a dozen words in common of which most relate to drink anyway.

So the first and least surprising hurdle I came up against on this annual celebration of alcohol was the disheartened feeling that, culturally, the human race was missing out here. Had I been drinking, naturally, the evening would have been very different indeed: language wouldn’t even have entered into it after a while, and we would have stumbled or been carried to our beds buoyed every so slightly by the bonds we had made. It would have made us happier neighbours. Because in the main it doesn’t matter a flying fuck where you come from once the playing field has been levelled by a few bottles of hard spirits.

The next hurdle, however, was much more of a struggle. There was nobody around by me and the Wife; it was one minute to midnight; and I had in my hand a heavy bottle of good, cold Champagne. Nothing in the world seemed more normal, more human, than to share a simple glass of this wine at this moment, and I had been anticipating my reaction to this all day. Because the dreadful thing about being addicted to something is that you cannot unravel what is “you” talking and what is down to your dependency. I felt as if I wanted to show to my Wife that she was worthy of my breaking down for this single occasion, but I couldn’t take the risk. It was then that I think I fully came to terms with the reality of my predicament – the lonely trap of sobriety.

This morning I felt better about it. It was nice to be up doing things with the children early in the morning in the knowledge that there wasn’t a single person in the world right now who is likely to call or knock on the door. I hung around in my all-round dish-cloth again, nipping outside in the crisp quiet air with my coffee for a strong blast on the last of the grass, before returning to my prep.
It didn’t take long at all to slice a few carrots, sprouts and greens, parboil some tatties and boil up some shallots, rosemary and peppercorns in some red wine. So I for the eldest to help me make a buttery apple and apricot crumble too, the topping made from equal ratios and full of toasted almond flakes.

Once again I was cooking as if for a family of 6-8, when the reality was that my only dining partner was lying crippled upstairs and would probably still be in her dressing gown by the 3pm schedule. I mean for fuck’s sake, I had before me a bloody 1.5kg rib roast. Those bastards always look smaller in the shop, but I suppose I should have noticed when it rang up £20 on the scales – all measly one-rib of it. It is really tricky to cook such a thin slice, so I chucked it on the rack with a good hand-full or two of floury tatties, parsnips and some smoked bacon chunks that needed to go, all of it waiting below the sprawling joint for the beefy baste of sweet yellow fat, and cooked it for 40 minutes. I don’t fully understand why, but there is something incredible beefy about a rib roast, the eye having the texture and bite of fillet yet tasting like the darkest marbled steak you’ve ever had. The sauce was equally meaty, based on a tub of veal stock and good red wine. All roast dinners look the same after a while, even if they are traditional New Year’s Day affairs.

The festive holiday season ended the moment the last mouthful of hot fruit crumble and sweet whipped Devon cream entered my mouth. And I cannot say I am too upset by that fact.

Let down by a Hogmanay Haggis

2006-12-31T23:12:00.000Z

It wasn’t just the immediate descent into disharmony that took place due to children being tired and adults feeling misunderstood just as we all sat down for the last meal of the year. Nor even the prospect that this sacred evening in the alky calendar was going to be spent Stoned Cold for the first time in some two decades. No, it was the vegetarian haggis that really brought about the demise of my Highland new-year’s eve meal.

I hadn’t given the event much thought and had left it too late to get hold of an appropriately sized meat variant. “Oh there’s not that much difference between them really,” said a friendly but unconvincing man from behind the shiny new till as he realised that I wasn’t going to be able to find a use for any of the six to eight-man haggi he had in his freezer. Thinking that the amount of salt and pepper likely packed into these fuckers would indeed mask and major taste differentials, I was inclined to believe him. So even though it didn’t’ feel like I really had a meal in the house at all, I went about preparing the neeps and tatties as if I had, plus a whisky sauce just for the craic to prod my stubborn resilience.

We started with hot bowls of thick and yellow ham and lentil soup from yesterday’s birthday vat. All seemed well, with minimal volumes being tentatively placed into small mouths and the Dashing White Sergeant fiddling away in the background. But somewhere in between mopping up the cool, salty sides of mine with soft brown bread and delivering plates of easy-to-eat haggis, neeps and tatties to the seated, the familial dynamic had been stretched beyond breaking point thanks to yet more relentless screaming from infant overtiredness, aches from restraining writhing 10kg torsos, and the mental exhaustion of being locked up together for over a week.

So I stood there beating up my whisky sauce with a milk frother, feeling like a right prat in the middle of a room full of so many unhappy and departing faces and, even more despicably, like I was not being properly appreciated. Couldn’t they see that it was for them that I have been standing every day in the kitchen for the last 10 days? That it brought me no personal pleasure whatsoever to pour a good splash of Morangie into a small pan of beef stock and whisk it all up with some cream to make a light but rich foam to cascade around the domes of white, orange and brown of this traditional Highland feast?

It didn’t really work-out that foamy. But it didn’t really matter because the haggis didn’t deserve it. Nut-brown and orange in appearance, dry in texture, under-seasoned in taste, and lukewarm in temperature owing to its low thermal capacity, this was nothing like the conventional beast at all. It was like eating a cross between a nut-cutlet and some undercooked cous-cous – a dream come true for your run-of-the-mill vegan no doubt, but hardly a match for the fatty spicy pluck of a pig softened up with meaty grains of gravy-soaked barley or much in the way of celebration to mark the last day of the year. You just know you’re off to a bad start when you try to vegetarianise a recipe that begins with a sheep’s stomach and a sewing needle.

It was all the more fitting that I dined on this flatulence buster alone at the new-year’s eve table, Ceilidh Classics on the stereo and, most hilariously of all, not a drop of alcohol in sight which to blame for the cacophony surrounding me. Somehow, the tragedy of Highland culture is never far from your door on this most unpredictable of winter nights.

Poor man's skink

2006-12-29T22:25:00.000Z

The ultimate mid-week winter meal: a hot and thick smoked mackerel & potato soup with rocket, parsley or any other green herb you fancy. First, get a couple of kids and a career so that you have no more than 2.71 minutes per day to cook. Then, on the way back home one day from another day of living the dream, jump off the treadmill at your handy local-metro-express store for some vac-packed smoked mackerel and a plastic salad-bag of rocket/watercress.

Next, finely dice half an onion or a shallot and fry it in butter along with large chunks of a few peeled tatties, cover with milk (throw in any cream or decent stock if you have it too) and simmer until you can crush the potatoes against the side of the pan with a spoon (about ten minutes). Do this until you reach the consistency you desire (thicker soups are better for taking the edge off corporate disillusionment) and toss in bite-sized pieces of fish to heat them through. Adjust seasoning and serve hot in bowls with a pile of greenery.

The foie gras conversation

2006-12-27T23:51:00.000Z

Having not played around much with foie gras before, I had turned to Google to look for any pointers as to how to put to best use the thick chunk of fresh fatty duck’s liver I’d picked up for my Christmas breakfast. But instead of getting two or three bog standard recipe ideas as is usual for such search strategies, this one returned nothing but links to photos and grainy video footage conveying the horror of the production process.

Fuck it, I thought, I’ll just spread it on hot toast then. The sight of all these people campaigning tirelessly to cure the world of this depravity had recalled all those routine conversations I have had or overheard about the rights and wrongs of eating foie gras. It’s the same conversation as the one about euthanasia or abortion or about Christmas becoming too commercial, each as much a waste of life as the next once you’ve endured two or three or however many it takes for you to arrive at an opinion of your own.

You’ve just got to keep things in perspective when working out what your opinion on foie gras (or veal or anything else that the animal rights army dreams up as its enemy for that matter) is. The single most formidable obstacle that most people come up against is their attitude towards social class, which tempts many to conflate their fledgling interest in animal rights with their well-honed dislike of the monied and landed. Next, some people confuse images of anatidae suffering (the bulk of which have been constructed from stories about the tubes and force-feeding or some other horrific factoid from the animal-liberation-front PR machine, or the Daily Mail) with their revulsion towards the taste and texture of the substance itself – or perhaps even the idea of eating internal organs in the first place. Finally, people generally fail to consider the actual numbers involved: just how many ducks and geese really are suffering at any one time? No single human can realistically eat more than one short and painful life’s worth each year for more than a few years, and very few manage that.

Failure to spend any time or energy unravelling issues like these usually allows hypocrisy to creep in. Somehow the public’s knowledge that the vast majority of the West’s pork, for example, comes from animals genetically much closer to us who spend their considerably longer and sorrier lives slowly burning to death in the ammonia of their own piss and shit on two square metres of concrete floor in a darkened hangar doesn’t seem to get them into such a fever, not to mention the chickens or the salmon. And what about the several species of large mammal that are on the brink of disappearing FOREVER from the realm of existence thanks to human greed?

A few ducks being stuffed to death for a small bunch of arseholes a few times a year is hard to lose sleep over given the atrocities carried out daily in the rest of the food chain – and that includes, if you want to get all Blythman about it, the slave labour that underlies the rock-bottom supermarket prices we all enjoy. Fuck the ducks is what I say. Their time will come when we’re all lying dead from H5N1, probably fairly soon.

And fuck Roger Moore too. Tonight, perhaps brought on by my eating nothing but goose and duck for the last three days (today, thankfully, being the last of it, served cold with a fresh, sharp Cumberland sauce and crispy hot stuffing), I thought I would put my apparently minority views about foie-gras-eating to the test by actually looking at some of the footage of the farms. I clicked with hesitation though. Just because I may not care much more than a thimble of mid-range Sauternes about the welfare of the bird whose artificially engorged liver is melting atop my hot crusty toast, seeing it as an acceptable crime to commit on the very few occasions that I do, I don’t like unnecessary cruelty to animals any more than those in the ALF. But when the video – on one of the more mainstream of the opposition sites – opened with Roger Moore’s sleazy husky voice describing how free ducks and geese like to be in the wild, accompanied by strings and piano in the background and slow-motion sunset shots of webbed feet skidding along mirror-like lakes, the whole thing fell apart for me. I was just waiting for the cut to the tubes and cages and shattered bills, and sure enough it came after about a minute and half -- with Moore’s grainy voice trembling as he described how the human equivalent of the amount of food being delivered to the stomachs of the birds in one sitting is about 45lbs of pasta (why pasta I’m not 100% sure, and he also didn’t state whether that was cooked or uncooked) and how, on account of being unable to move due to the sheer weight of their own livers, the poor critters have to sit there powerless while resident rats nibble at their open, festering wounds (cue close-up of the gaping action). His voice was breaking up so over-dramatically at one point that I expected him to burst out laughing.

It's not very Bond, is it.

The best pudding I have ever eaten

2006-12-26T23:45:00.000Z

It must have resembled a scene from Withnail, wandering dishevelled as I was around my kitchen in my loosely tied dressing gown until almost two o’clock on Christmas day, stuffing myself with foie gras on toast and wiping my variously flour-, grease- and dishwater-stained hands on what was proving a highly absorbent all-round dish-cloth and getting quietly sentimental at the sound of young carol singers on the radio. The only thing lacking was the hangover and glass of sherry, although I made sure I was as up to the eyeballs as I could have been in the mild intoxicating substances that I do temporarily allow myself these days.

I spotted the small tub of fatty fresh liver in the Shop on Christmas Eve, along with a jar of geranium & apple jelly, and thought the combo would make a fitting replacement for the wild smoked salmon that we had scoffed too early. I got into it by the third slice, but I always underestimate that sensation of being revoltingly stuffed as soon as I put a piece of FG lobe into my mouth. A glass of smooth, chilled breakfast wine would have helped enormously on this front. On several fronts, in fact.

Owing to the gear, there seemed to be much more to do than I had allowed time for. It was things like mince pies that were throwing spanners into the works, almost forgetting to spike the rich sweet pastry with orange zest and then not having enough of the stuff left over from my Main Pie to make anything but a dozen little mincemeat raviolis. Then there was the fucking goose, which was still sitting there waiting to go as the small hand passed twelve.

The end result was the realization that my cooking is starting to adversely affect those around me. I hadn’t reckoned on this until a few minutes before I knew the meal was ready to serve and I was about to sit down before my modest but rich goose platter. I use cooking as escapism, I thought. I do it to avoid talking to guests who happen to have been invited over, and certainly don’t get “stressed” by it? Yet here I was -- staring down at a small pile of dark red meat; sweet sausage stuffing with chestnuts, pears and dates; crispy roast potatoes cooked in the spicy salty fat of the bird; sprouts halved and fried lightly in butter with smoked bacon and finished off with spinach and herbs; carrot batons glazed in tarragon butter; all sitting in a pool of red wine, pear and apple jus made from a good quarter of my special festive three-meat stock -- when suddenly I felt a definite sense of relaxation: it was all perfect, bar perhaps the bird, and it was all downhill from here, drink or no drink, because I had nothing left to prove.

Not that I was in the slightest bit interested in the food. And that wasn’t just because the goose was overdone (I didn’t take into account the shorter time required for a wild bird such as mine than that demanded by the fatter domesticated variety, and shouldn’t have been so heavy handed when I pricked the skin). It was because it felt as if I had been cooking for a long time. We all sat there as a family unit, in moderate peace and harmony for the duration. Tipping point had passed and I could immediately see that they too were as relieved as I that I was happier. It was just the two of us eating, though, of course.

The goose didn’t look quite as pretty as the pictures I’d seen in the recipes (shock horror) I’d peeked at, appearing more like the decaying torso of a child stab victim than a crispy golden prize when I took it out of the oven after an hour and a half. But the gamey taste and firm, lean texture of the meat more than made up for it.

Even so, the meal pales into the scattered alcoholic memories of so many other candlelit Christmases when compared to the pudding I’d made for afters. Not literally a pudding, but rather a trio of christmasy pudding pieces that together made this the best desert I have ever eaten. The first was a small triangle of the aforementioned mince pie, hot, with its thin layer of crusty orangey pastry and filling of quality, not too sweet, mincemeat. The second was a halved pear that had been slowly poached in brandy and a loose pile of rum-soaked raisins and their thick warm boozy marinade. And the third was three small boules of firm, smooth, creamy cinnamon ice cream the likes of which I have never equalled (a handful of cinnamon bark that wasn’t handy). It was a fucking incredible combination of Christmas flavours and a lovely way to bring the meal to the somehow all important extra heights demanded of such affairs. Fucking Christmas.

And it continued ob to a Boxing Day spent similarly, with a big casserole made from chunks of cooked goose, stuffing balls, and diced celeriac, parsnip and carrot. More of the stock and a layer of sliced tatties on top, which should have first been roasted in the spicy goose fat that I’d retained from the roasting but then tipped away thanks to my foggy and disintegrating mind.
There was more of the decadent desert to follow. But I cannot say I am looking forward to a third day of the goose. I ended up, after pausing for thought for 2 minutes about it, boiling the bloody carcass for a good couple of hours with some aromatics to get a small tub of rather salty and over-seasoned stock that will make an evil mushroom risotto on some otherwise nondescript January evening. I just can’t stop making that ten-pound bastard bird feed even more mouths than it already has.

Christmas cheer

2006-12-24T23:59:00.000Z

The goose looks like a small baby, round like a barrel and dead for maybe three days. Its clammy fatty breast is pitted with what look like pustules from a horrific medieval disease, dark and sometimes sprouting feathers and surrounded by dark red and purple bruises. It looks disgusting, and the fact that it only cost a tenner seems to add to that. But it signals for sure that the Day is almost here. Once again I have spent the entirety of this day in the kitchen, making the place more festive than a fire in a fireworks factory.

There was a pan of warm cream and piles of cinnamon bark, star anise and some cloves to make tomorrow’s cinnamon ice cream; a tray of hot roasted chestnuts to go into my pear and date stuffing; and a small bowl of large raisins into which I poured a good glug of brandy and some Havana Club, and which I then stuck my nose right into just for the fucking craic.

Suddenly, although totally expectedly, I had the answer to why I was approaching This Christmas in such a tense manner and dreading it like a lagging Greylag. Of course: it was the lack of drink and its intoxicating warmth and childhood comfort. Some carols on the radio in the background nearly tipped me over the edge. This wasn’t to be the first time today that I would flirt so dangerously with alcohol. I later found myself with my head buried deep into a pan of port that was reducing for tonight’s tea and whose ethanol vapours near knocked me off my feet. I tried to divert the issue by marvelling at the clarity and structural properties of my stock as I spooned satisfying scoops from its plastic tub into the port reduction. I have no idea what I will do tomorrow.

But in the mean time I continued to distract myself with my Christmas Even feast. It was hardly a feast, mind. I had confied the legs of the mallards in goose fat all day, legs that had been marinating overnight in Chinese five-spice and the like. There wasn’t much meat on them that hadn’t been crystallized, but enough to be bulked out with some chopped chestnuts and sweated shallots into a filling for a dozen tortellini. So there was a little pasta to be made along the way.

A posh chinky really. I served the pasta, which even resembled a steamed dumpling, on a pile of shredded winter greens livened up with some chopped herbs and surrounded it with a glossy pool of this refined part sauce, which I had sweetened up at the end with a teaspoon of plum jelly. And it tasted of Christmas. And everything is now in place for Christmas. Just some stuffing, churning and chopping to do. Not to mention learning how to cook a fucking 3kilo goose, for two.

Stock can buy you happiness

2006-12-23T23:17:00.000Z

I wanted to see for myself what it would have been like to sit down before a warm bowl of hot celeriac soup poured over a pile of wild smoked salmon anchored with a dollop of crème fraiche and garnished with a small herb salad, parsley oil and coarsely ground black pepper, cool and calm having not just ladled out 40 portions of it to my sister’s wedding guests. I knew it was good as we had wolfed down a lukewarm test-bowl with feverish hunger in the kitchen during the afternoon. A posh Cullen Skink really. But having this time just spent 7 hours on my feet in clouds of gamey steam, skimming the richest duck, pork and chicken stock and siphoning a little off to make comforting cottage pies and the like for the sick excited children, I’m not sure I quite managed.

I don’t relish stock-making days like I used to, and try to get them started as early as possible so that we don’t have to sit there at the sticky table with our sinuses infused with slightly-antiseptic-meat-flavour as if we’ve been in a sweat shop all day. I didn’t get the bones into the oven until 14:00 today, and there was water running down the insides of several exterior walls all evening, not to mention windows dripping with a several-micron thick layer of fatty residue, by the time I had strained and reduced it to a useful concentration that would allow me to help myself to spoonfuls from the fridge for the next few days. The house was trashed, my Christmas present almost ruined by condensation, and the rest of the family were mildly put-out, although more by the general scene – this, their father and husband, standing yet again for hours and days with his back to the world, cooking for two, or one -- than with the stock itself.
Wander upstairs for a piss, though, and you couldn’t help begin to smile at the centuries-old scent of orange, cloves and cinnamon making deeply pleasing the rich meaty flavours of the gamey meat. I put some star anise in there too, all of it about half an hour before the stock came off. It brought a festive mood into the house, and the large quantities of flesh on the bones had yielded a thick glossy sauce. Re-sticking a few patches of wallpaper is a small fee for such a desperately-needed personal atmosphere.
And it is but one of the many DIY jobs that I have lined up for the festive break none of which will ever happen owing to the amount of time I spend in the kitchen.

Nevertheless the soup was fucking tasty. I had used some very aromatic veg stock from the freezer plus a ladle of the Christmas brew, throwing it on top of the steaming chunks of celeriac that had been sweating with shallots and Chablis, simmering it all along with a tattie for half an hour with a big fresh bunch of herbs and then blitzing it to a smooth, creamy state. This soup can’t get too aromatic (on top of the stock I had topped the firm ribbons of fish with a salad of tarragon, parsley, dill, basil and chives) nor seem to take enough Maldon (we’re talking handfuls here). I could never afford to eat like this were it not for my fortunate Highland contacts.

But to complete the meal, and in an attempt to reach out to the Christmas spirit, I made a cross between a tarte tatin and an apple crumble by caramelizing some coxes, studding the gaps with dates and topping it with a buttery crumble full of walnuts and almonds. It almost worked.

Christmas shopping

2006-12-20T23:13:00.000Z

You’d never guess that it was just going to be the two of us for Christmas this year, not looking at the clobber I picked up today. The air was cold and damp, misty and Christmasy, and it felt right to be trawling meat counters for bones and freebees. Admittedly, I hadn’t intended on bringing home a fresh pig’s head. As if I’ve got the time to be fannying around with gritty snot and meaty ear wax, not to mention dealing with the horror of having to separate and remove a large wet brain.

But I couldn’t say no, not when faced with the terms on offer – the mere exchange of a charitable donation of 22 pence. I always get the feeling they don’t like me up in that organic butcher. I always seem to arrive at the wrong time of the week no matter what I’m after. But perhaps the Christmas air had got to them too, seeing as they were only too happy to throw me a large bag of pork bones. So I felt obliged to pick up a couple of slices of their beef shin and a bag of chicken wings.

On top of the 5kg Canada goose and brace of wild mallard with all but their breasts, some mince, bacon and sausage-meat, my 2006 Christmas shopping was near complete. As was the end of the lives of several animals and birds. Christ knows when I will get round to doing any of it though. I have never cooked a goose before, nor butchered a head. The pork bones, wings and duck carcasses are going to be turned into a special festive stock to get me in the mood. But in dealing with the head I have delusions about separating the three different types of flesh, binding them into a cylinder with muslin and simmering it for several hours in head stock. It’s a French Laundry job, served in medium-thick slices painted with Dijon mustard, coated in light breadcrumbs, fried in butter and topped with sauce gribiche.

But getting away from the turkey is the priority here. I can’t stand the idea, nor bear others harp on about how it has to be turkey and sprouts and bread-sauce or else it just isn’t fucking Christmas. They’re quite militant about it. I used to feel like that about the Christmas dinner. But I think several consecutive years spent variously passed-out in the wrong house, witnessing family ideals descend into brutal selfishness, lying stranded on a sheet of ice at the top of the drive having mysteriously awoken there without the ability to stand and spending three days in bed imbibing nothing but water, peach yoghurt and, eventually, soup that I was unable to transfer from bowl to mouth on account of the tremors, may have taken away some of the appeal.

Still, whatever I do this year will take less time than it would to synthesize this month’s OFM molecular-gastronomic take on the traditional turkey&trimmings. It involves fun stuff like parsnip ice-cream, sausage jelly and chestnut dust, and for once the editorial team has put together something with a sense of humour. There are a few articles that are worth reading, as well as the latest Blythman doomsday scenario, which always make me feel as though I am the last human alive.

But, oh no, what was that eight-page feature at the very beginning doing in there amongst it all? How on Earth could that have been seen as a good piece of editorial judgement? An entire issue exploring the future of food by the freaks at the forefront and there he was, peeking out from behind his teaspoon in one hand and pot of ice cream in the other, a pair of Converse trainers and the look of a small boy guilty of his sensitive criems in the playground. And we’re not just talking recipes here, although indeed a full 6 pages are devoted yet again to his best of the best, we’re talking the Story of how Nigel Became a Food Writer.

Yes indeed, 800 words or so revealing just how at first he rejected the publisher’s invitation to write a book because he found it too intimidating, but now, “fourteen years on, the outcome, my first book has sold somewhere around a million copies.” Would you ever buy a newspaper again in which the editor, or worse, a columnist, thought it good use of space to publish a story about how he became as great as he was – when there’s not even a point to be made about, say, how different the newspaper business was back then. No, no, just Nige and Nige (whose current luscious offering, I noticed the other day, wasn’t shifting many copies in Borders despite having been slashed in price). Anyway, at least I can console myself with the fact that I didn’t pay for any of it, being as I am one of those despicable figures who occasionally slips their favourite Sunday supplements between their many newspaper sections on the way to the counter.

Left--right split

2006-12-19T22:05:00.000Z

A difficult moment for the hard-nosed anti-foodie, perched precariously as he or she is between blindly securing a top table in the comfort zone of organic food shows, cuddly food writers and celebrity recipes, and fighting on an almost daily basis conformity and the admission of helplessness in the face of mass marketing.
There I was, reading a little filler story about a new survey which reveals that: “Eating out in a restaurant is a source of intimidation, embarrassment and shame even for young professionals, due to ignorance of restaurant protocol and a lack of knowledge about food and wine.”
And so I felt myself smiling slightly smugly to myself, thinking “tell me something I don’t know. They’ve got it all so wrong. Let me open my own joint with a stripped down menu in plain English and simple service and surroundings that make the customer feel at ease. Etc.” And I read on in comfort, chortling quietly to myself that 65% of those questioned “have made food or wine choices based upon their desire to impress others rather than what they actually want, and a similar fraction would rather sit in silence than complain.”
Ah ha, I laughed, at the paradoxical observation that our food culture has evolved to the point where eating has been dislocated so badly from everyday life that enjoying it has been reduced to a pitiful inability. But then I found that the source of all this rich and valuable information, and thus some pretty favourable press coverage, was Devon-based Ashburton Cookery School – a place I stayed at for a week last year.
Nothing odd in that, of course. It was nice to read a familiar name. But the rest of the sentence continued: “ …, which earlier this year was voted one of the top five cookery schools in the world by Waitrose Food magazine.” My little heart went all warm for a moment, basking in the knowledge that I, the obsessive amateur gourmand, have that stamp of approval on my knife skills and creme brulees. And then I felt guilty for having succumbed to the bullshit of it all, that I somehow craved the recognition from the world that I deserve having attended not just any cookery school but one of the best cookery schools in the world. The survey is probably biased to the point of redundancy with loaded questions and too few statistics, yet still I felt I wanted to believe in it. Like I said, it’s a precarious position.

Recipes for Christmas

2006-12-18T23:48:00.000Z

Gorging for two days on meat that tasted like a kiss. It sounds pretty corny, but I have not tasted beef like this before. I also don’t completely understand how this good but not unusually so roll of topside acquired the soft texture and sweet, bloody flavour that it did, as I thought I had overcooked it at one point. It was in for almost 40 minutes, and didn’t particularly ooze much blood while resting on the board. Its caramelized surface was encrusted with a thick rough layer of black pepper and mustard, through which you could just make out the shiny channels of juice keeping each fibre compartment tender and moist.

For some reason I wanted to eat fine food this weekend, some port and red wine in there to help me get the festive spirit that I need so badly to survive. But I didn’t want anything too fussy as I intended to free-up my wintry Sunday afternoon while also eating early en masse like a civilized and well-functioning family unit. So we began with the world’s simplest turnip soup, made by sweating turnip dice in a heavy pan and then pouring over a litre or two of hot vegetable stock. This stock I had made the night before, with oranges and fennel and sage and rosemary in addition to the usual aromatics, and left overnight with some raw shallot skins to sharpen it up. I garnished it with parsley oil, parsley, butter and coarsely ground black pepper. Plenty of Maldon and some sesame seed bread.

And then, in amongst the screams and cries of a child and an infant as they stuck raisins up each others’ orifices, I dished up a standard but swanky pile of soft, pink meat next to a small square of potato and horseradish cake, some shredded and steamed spring greens and a pool of glossy port sauce. The cake was simply some slices of tattie over which I had poured a mixture of warm cream and creamed horseradish sauce (really hot fresh stuff) and baked for half an hour. The sauce began with the boiling of a chopped shallot in port until it had reduce by two thirds, to which I added a tub of best beef stock and left to reduce by half along with a tight bundle of thyme, rosemary and parsley to freshen things up. It was boring but unbelievable. The meat tasted almost human, and had a texture the likes of which I have never experienced. I don’t understand this meat.

But no matter. Tonight we dined again on it until stuffed: more soup followed by more meat and more tattie and more greens and a thick mustardy gravy reclaimed from the base of the roasting dish with more wine, stock and cubes of ice-cold unsalted butter. It looked the same and has made me feel the same: like a fat carnivore.

Greed

2006-12-16T23:14:00.000Z

You have to look closely to see just how much of a rip-off £2.20 is for 120g of fucking feta and olive salad. I counted seven olives and three pieces of cheese, mixed up in a nice enough slodge of fresh herbs and decent olive oil in my punnet, which I picked up out of courtesy from a curious visit to the doomed deli down the road. It was tasty enough, for sure. The woman, a thirty-something sandal-wearing type who is clearly into her flans, quiches and bakes, felt so guilty about asking me so much for so little that she first asked me if £2.20 was aright and then, when I resignedly murmured “yes”, threw me a free wholemeal mince pie. But she won’t instead think to drop the price a little because she probably views her little venture as if it were some kind of fashion statement to her friends rather than a shop where local people might want to buy food from. I left, looking forward to my little plastic lunch, in the full knowledge that I would never return.

More worryingly, however, is a similar waft of keenness to chase the Christmas buck at the airport shop – my single supplier of everything really, and where I was certain to spend £50 stocking up in this week. But the bloke on the butcher counter put and end to all that by refusing to put aside a couple of turkey, chicken or game-bird carcasses for me so that I could do some nice thick saucing with the roast goose that I am trying in vain to get excited about cooking next week. But it wasn’t to be, since their kitchen department had allegedly instructed him to save all such waste for some turkey gravy of their own. However, I could “buy some ready-made from the shop when it’s done” pointed out said butcher helpfully. I turned away in obvious disTaste, scrunched up the A5 sheet of festive offers I had picked up to peruse and headed for the till with my bag of sardines and lump of best Barrow Gurney topside.

What is the fucking point of spending months nurturing a good relationship with your fish and meat suppliers -- via a skillful combination of the right amount and frequency of trade, time spent making staff feel as if they have just taught you something new and a slow but steady personalization of the chat about the “real each-other”, kids and jobs and background etc -- if you can’t rely on them for a few poxy bones three or four times a year?

I couldn’t have been more courteous. I had waited until the queue at the counter had subsided before bothering them with the bones question, swiftly ordering my beef and then coming back when it was free. And I know these people very well indeed, given the constraints of the staff—customer relationship. In the year since they opened they have become some weird kind of second family, themselves being largely made up of one family. But yesterday’s scene couldn’t have been more different to that of a year ago, when fresher faced butcher bloke was only too keen to cut and sell me for half the price all but the crown of a free-range turkey plus a free bag of all the bones I could use and more. Oh no, there was no problem at all before he realized he was going to see me virtually every week of his life from then onwards. Not to mention the fact that his fillet steak has shot up from £22 to £28 per kilo in the same period.

Am I expecting too much? Am I too loyal and deluded by my own sense of importance? Insisting on boiling up your own bones rather than pay someone to do it for you is, after all, clearly an arsehole sort of thing to do that only an obsessive amateur cook would bother with. But all I am asking of the human race is for people to think. If they then decide “fuck him”, then fucking great. But to divert me to the processed version is to cease treating the customer as an individual. And all I can do with the might of my single consumer vote is, go elsewhere for my festive fayre this year.

Corporate Christmas Nightmare, Part II

2006-12-15T23:36:00.000Z

Today’s departmental Christmas lunch was meant to be more informal than Wednesday’s catering freakfest. So there we sat, we 30, in two rows in the backend of a city-centre Zizzi at midday on the last-Friday-but-one before Christmas. There was never a more efficient way of zapping the individual from a human, not only because we were just one of several departmental cohorts being processed that afternoon but because we were immersed in shopping-centre-décor as bland as surroundings can be. I understood this chain to offer contemporary Italian cuisine, but there was nothing Italian about the scene around me. We could have been in a slightly up-market McDonalds, or a service station, or some euro-restaurant dishing out nightmares to one-off tourists. Moreover, we could have been sitting in practically any eatery in any town centre in the country. All this place said to me was: we are here to take your money.

You just know from the minute you walk into these holes that the food is going to follow suit: overpriced, bland and mass produced. And you can pretty much count on the service being a handful of surly twenty-something, foundation-clad girls working what would appear to be their first shifts as waitresses and hating every minute of it.

We were not let down on any front.

I mean for Fuck’s sake, we had preordered – and paid £21 in cash for -- this set-meal slop four fucking weeks ago. The kitchen knew exactly what each of us was having for our first, second and third courses. Yet when, after an hour of fumbled drinks orders, the first plates started to arrive, the scene was one of a collection of androids whose programs had got out of synch and left them banging into each other and getting impatient with customers for not accepting whatever they did happen to have in their hands. Not that any of it was worth fighting for, mind. I couldn’t even remember what I had ordered, but judging by what was being dropped around me it didn’t make much difference: everything came in the same form of thick toast topped with either caramelized onions, roast cherry tomatoes or some cheap and nasty goat’s cheese, along with some balsamic and olive oil. It was fucking disgusting.

Another hour later the mains started to appear, again as if nobody had thought to look at the booking sheet. By this point, however, my gaze was starting to drift into the middle-distance, anywhere to take me away from the zany tales of drunken antics accrued long after I had left Part I of this horror series on Wednesday. “Ladies’” heels had been snapped clean off, necks bitten ragged, train-stops missed, and all against a backdrop of reciprocated mutterings about the need to take things easy what with the festive sessions on the imminent horizon and the general noise of alcohol-related messages from government, media and marketers.

Regarding the latter, I have seen in the last two days two ads that fail drastically the dipstick test of our society as one which has a healthy approach to food&drink. The first was for Bacardi, sold on the spiny back of the number of calories a Bacardi&coke(diet, obviously) contained (“only 54”, I think) as if it could reasonably be part of a healthy weight-loss plan, and the second an advert for the until-now mythical driving lager: Carling’s “C2”, where the 2 represents the percent alcohol by volume, punted as the ideal “lunchtime pint” as if it was the taste anyone was ever after.

But back to the pizza that was by now before me, looking fairly promising really with its quarter-segment toppings. As I indicated to my drinking buddies left, right and in front of me, I don’t want to ruin anyone’s Christmas by being an arsehole who “just can’t see that there so much more to eating out than the food”. So I muttered a few words about the base being too thick, floury and under-seasoned, the sauce having no discernible taste nor texture and the toppings comprising the most horrible “pepperoni” I had ever attempted to eat, three slimy artichokes, some wrinkly white mushrooms and a strip of Tesco parma ham at the end, and simply left the nastier bits on the plate.

The meal, in any organizational or social sense of the word, had all but disintegrated by the time the deserts started to arrive. But once again, it wasn’t as if people were missing out on much. Our mid-range Christmas deal offered as a choice of two: Tiramisu, of course, and a chocolate cheesecake. And when you see such single-piece chiller jobs on a menu near you, you know those lovely caterer suppliers Brake [formerly Brothers] has got there first. Sure enough, you only had to look at the precision of the cut to know that this thing had been sitting around for a while, without decay. The commercial aftertaste of preservatives and chemical agents is never combated by the higher-than- necessary sugar content, and people in the main seemed to be leaving their lot before their plates were clean.

At this point I dropped my £2 in the tray for the drinks bill – which, mysteriously, appeared efficiently and to the penny – and left. These things are hard without the lube of drink, even when you’ve landed a good place-setting. Everyone unconsciously buys their ticket into the arena, usually in the form of thee or four bottled beers and maybe a brandy with the coffee, and everything’s fine. So as I wandered around filling the rest of what was left of the afternoon while trying to avoid Christmas I found myself with a strong urge to get into an unknown bar and drink myself into unconsciousness on whisky. The season is bearing down hard, and I think one of the main reasons why I can’t seem to look forward to any of it. I can’t even decide what we are going to eat on Christmas day. I just can’t see any of it actually happening without the bottle of bubbly and dozen oysters for breakfast, followed by a good claret-soaked afternoon transferring, perhaps via a ceremonial glass of sherry over a mince pie, to some vintage port and ending, always ending, in the gubbing of tumblers of malt. Sparkling mineral water anyone?

Fuckoffee pie

2006-12-14T23:59:00.000Z

A box of bananas for a pound is not to be sniffed at, even if you do know that there is no chance you will get through them before they dissolve in less than 24 hours' time. So I picked one up a few days ago from a random fruit&veg shop and, having stopped at a few houses on the street to offload a bunch or two, started to work out what I might do with the bent yellow bastards.

I don’t know what drives this kind of logic. I once found myself with a catering-sized bag of carrots and cauliflower and so decided to make chutney. At least three shopping trips later to pick up essential extras such as Kilner jars and vinegar and a few fruits and spices I didn’t quite have enough of, I end up with a stinking pan of the stuff which I piled into the [sterilized at great temporal cost] jars, stored for a few months, and then scraped out into the bin so that I could fill the back of my very small pantry with glass jars that I may never use again a few months later.

But there is nothing you can dream up that involves a BOX of bananas, nothing at all. Instead, you have two options to choose from: banana bread and banoffee pie. Neither of these requires more than two bananas, but you don’t want to worry about that. The rest saves you two days of cooking meals that your children never eat, although the fruit seems to bung them up a bit. Anyway, I had never made a banoffee pie before and I thought this the only time in my life that I probably would. It was a minor disaster. It's not a pleasant thing to eat at the nest of times, but I had got the ratios of cream to toffee wrong and the base was too biscuity. A killer of the heart and arteries, it is also a danger food to those who cannot resist fat and sugar. So I slapped a warning sign on it, popped a couple of banas in my pocket for lunch, and headed to the Office.

Corporate Christmas Nightmare, Part I

2006-12-13T00:01:00.000Z

Merry Christams from The Office! Even the entertainment was actually entertaining this year, and the venue DIFFERENT. It was all going well, my fellow employees looking good for the little extra grooming and the smell of petty bonuses in the air. And then it was time for lunch. So once I had nuzzled my nose in amongst the corporate sweat of ten others in order to find out with whom I would be sharing this memorable dining experience, I made a quick survey of the tables to see if they were each adorned with 8 sorry looking pastry cases filled with something safe and vegetarian and surrounded with balsamic vinegar etc. But what I found was even worse.

You could tell from just looking that it was going to be foul. A rectangular slab of dark grey sludge, as aesthetically unappealing as you could get by being too long by far for its width and thickness, surrounded by lumps of watery, orange-coloured matter. On closer inspection a few slices of mushroom began to appear, but I was still none the wiser about the stuff in between, which formed the vast bulk of the horror before me. When the time came to place some in my mouth I could hardly believe my senses. Not only was this the most insipid, under-seasoned food I have ever tried to taste, but it had the texture of phlegm that had been harvested from a fly burned lung, chilled and compressed. There was some garlic and possible tarragon in there somewhere, possibly, and the orange matter turned out to have come from bitter, unripened tomatoes. It was inedible. And for once, bar the remedial contingent, the starter was left almost untouched by my 5 new friends and 2 IT boys.

The cranberry sauce had already given away the main. But at least we were on safer ground here, weren’t we? Bizarrely, the one thing that almost everyone gets wrong -- the roast tatties – were reasonable (i.e. they weren’t deep fried and re-heated). But everything else was, quite simply, fucking disgusting. I have never experienced animal matter this dry before. It was impossible to eat more than a knife-tip’s worth at a time, no matter how much of the gloopy, thickener-based “gravy” you coated it with, without your entire mouth seizing up. It had been fucking obliterated, no doubt on health&safety grounds. The accompanying veg, some slimy parsnips, rock hard sprouts and overcooked carrots completed the dish seamlessly. And to take away the unpleasant scratchiness left on our tongues, we were then handed a soggy, tepid, trans-fat based strudel injected with factory apple pulp sat slap bang in a dish of watery cream into which some Cunt had poured a bottle of cheapest brandy essence.

This would have cost us something like £20-30 a head, for sure. And despite no work needed for the starter or desert, it took a team of more a dozen waiting staff TWO FUCKING HOURS to slop it out. It beggars belief. And when you’ve even got the computer geeks excited by the chance of discerning what your food is made of – just so that they can compete with one another, not eat it – you know you’ve hit the big time.

So I came home and fried us up a bloody best rump steak, picked up from the farmers’ market en route in my suit and which had been sitting safely in the cool bag in the boot of my car while my saliva glands were working overtime with a stringy piece of knackered turkey. I plastered it in good oil, salt and pepper and griddled the fucker to fuck. We ate it with roast cherry tomatoes, rocket and bread. And it was delicious. I am not going to put myself through the company catering ordeal ever again, and I need several tens of thousands of others to join me if we are ever to stamp out this culinary atrocity.

Drinking dilemmas

2006-12-12T23:19:00.000Z

It’s the same feeling you get while listening to a recording of your own voice and trying to convince yourself that it doesn’t really sound that awful to others. Or happening across yesterday’s glossy foodie column in your newspaper and finding a big photograph of the meal you cooked last night in a moment of imagined spontaneity. But what else are you going to find in a G2 “Christmas drinking special” when you haven’t had a drink in nine months, and come across a helpful wooly-scarf wearing journalist “talking to three people about how giving up alcohol has improved their health and self-confidence without ruining their social lives”?

And so it kicks off with Brendan, a 52 year-old publishing director who hasn’t touched a drop in seven years and finds theatre and art an agreeable substitute. He tries hard not to “get preachy”, but then he all but falls apart when he admits that in order to appear presentable to others in a social context he feels he has to justify his existence with lines like “I’ve had my allocation”.

Penny Jones, 26/dry for two years/London again, also seems to be more concerned with how her abstinence appears to others than about any inner purpose. “People in the pub don’t really notice,” she insists, while being able to rest assured that she won’t fuck-up at the office Christmas party. Still, I suppose it’s hardly surprising when the reason she stopped in the first place was accidental, having been on antibiotics for a month and then seeing another as a good opportunity to better herself.

Finally we find cab-driver Martin, 29/guess where from/off it since 2 years, who seems to have been affected least by this crashing change of lifestyle. He gives his main reason for quitting: “because, first, I can and, second, I didn’t like the hangovers,” and concludes by admitting that he doesn’t even like the taste that much anymore.

These people are all alcoholics, people who cannot drink properly either in their own eyes only or further a field. But why does such a strong wiff of self righteousness always have to accompany such admissions of failure? They each report – as does the standfirst, in great black ink -- feeling much better for it, but I’m convinced they’re all lying. Sure, there is a moment when you notice that your eyes aren’t puffy, your head mince and your limbs numb, but after a while you simply adjust to feeling great each morning. Your reference point shifts, but you invent highs and lows on either side that feel every bit as good and bad as the spikes of a hard binge.

But back to my dilemma. I loathe these people and media trends because I see a reflection of myself in their pathetic testaments. It fucking has ruined their social lives, by definition, as it has mine. But, then, what has one human-gestation-period of sparkling mineral water done for me?

There is nothing like feeling at the top of your game, in whatever you do. I had complete control over my drinking, but only in a separate version of personal reality which overall I had absolutely no grip on whatsoever. The general tolerance I had built up meant I could spend a good 15 hours on a session with no one really noticing, using spirits, wines and beers in appropriate measures and moments to reach the gates of oblivion by midnight. I could, contrary to pharmacologist and president of the forum on food and health at the Royal Society of Medicine Dr Paul Clayton’s view in the next article in the Christmas drinking special that “alcohol is alcohol no matter how you slice it”, use my experience of what and in what quantity would provide the quickest and safest route there, depending of course on everything going on in the more real world of Wives and Children around me. And I miss it all terribly, even though ultimately I could see that I had began to lose control of either existence and that things were going to start crumbling. No amount of weight loss is going to change that memory.

Which brings me to dilemma number two: I am a rational person who likes to reason via theory and experiment, and therefore hold in high regard the mass of scientific knowledge. Yet I disagree with the chemists on this, Clayton in particular. It’s the kind of thing they love to chortle about in their labs together – “isn’t it so sweet that the masses think gin makes mascara run, particularly in the post-menopausal female. Or that they think the famous tequila worm is hallucinogenic because they confuse mescal with mescaline.” Fuck, I would love to believe it was all mythical too. But this is where my logical credentials are bent out of shape, as it simply isn’t true that whisky makes you feel the same as Champagne. And a proper vodka tonic buckles you in an instant like no other drink can.

Christmas drinking specials. Give us something more interesting, like what the other side gets up to for example. Fucking hell, you’d think people had forgotten just how wonderful Christmas spirits can be.

Schadenfreude

2006-12-11T23:59:00.000Z

If I was a better person I wouldn’t want them to fail. They are probably a bright young couple, like us, trying to get away from open-plan hell and putting everything on the line for it. Perhaps they have children too, toddlers and babies and such like, and doubtless countless sleepless nights from which to recover, daily. And with Christmas around the corner, they will surely be buoyed by a false sense of security and, more worryingly, the total belief that organic, locally produced honey and oatcakes-for-twice-the-price-they-are-in-the-Tesco-metro-down-the-road will facilitate their bread&butter trade during the desolate, debt-riddled Januaries and Februaries that are looming large. This is a deli with a death notice.

But it is the reason why they thought their formula would work in the first place that is the most interesting thing to be learned here. We do not, for example, live in the best part of town. The nearest competition in the food department is the news&food shop across the road, holding nothing but sweeties&crisps, and a couple of general newsagents stocking six different types of white cider -- behind the counter – and 29 types of pornography. There is just one restaurant, a Siamese one, in over a mile of high street, and not a single bar you would want to go into unless you were alone and unwashed. If it’s a Belly Buster Special you’re after or a low-grade Indian, you’re in fucking Disneyland. But what you tend to find less of is those little tiny delis you see in covered markets and the like, glimmering windows full of wicker baskets of tea and lavender and overpriced chocolates, and overpriced everything, and open wooden shelves adorned with twirls of pine shavings and sawdust and boxes, and dishes of olives and a few roasted peppers. And a pile of dry organic bread.

Did they have one too many column-inches of Nigel and think there was a thriving community of day-trippers twaddling around with their shopping lists, with a fiver to spare for a mysterious silver bag of coffee beans? This is not what this place needs. It’s not what any of us fucking need. Why don’t they sell food that people can Eat? A small counter with a ham or two, some ultra-rare topside, a game terrine and a small selection of good cheese; a selection of bread, a load of wine in the 5-15 quid bracket, sandwiches made to order, soup on offer in the winter…open until ten every night. Nobody thinks about what people want. We don’t want honey, we just need somewhere we can get a good bag of pasta and a loaf of bread on a Friday night.

A night at River Cottage

2006-12-10T22:35:00.000Z

It seems I’m with Hugh Curly-Twitteringsville on this wet December Sunday evening, glowing with the energy of a “one pot wonder” just like the kind advocated in his Weekend column yesterday. Mine was a shank-end leg of lamb, marinated overnight in a mash of rosemary, garlic and olive oil, simmered with a pile of good cannellini beans and a bunch of aromatics for three hours at 150 degrees in some best beef stock. However, motivated by the need for meal we could eat before 1700 while being out all afternoon occupying a cabin-fever-suffering three year-old, I was not apparently thinking along the same lines as HFW on the dish.

As his bacon and borlotti brew bubbled away, probably on his Aga, no doubt filling his stone-walled kitchen with warm cuddliness, Hugh was thinking about a mission to get the nation cooking.
“People who think cooking is a tedious drudge are, quite simply, deluded,” he begins. “The problem is, they'll never find out how wrong they are until they start to cook. Then they will discover very rapidly that cooking is a life-enhancing pleasure of limitless satisfaction and reward.”
While the language is flowery, I obviously can’t disagree with him given that much of my life revolves obsessively yet effortlessly around my evening meals. But I would just like to say one simple thing to him: it’s easy when you know how.

There are three-star soups made from nothing but broccoli, water and salt. There are fine ingredients being offered barley preped in exchange for tens of pounds at thousands of restaurants worldwide every minute of the day. Some dishes are so simple it is mesmerizing. But to suggest that “given the right recipe, [the culinary impoverished nation] can - with just a few simple ingredients, 10 minutes of the most basic preparation and a single pot - put together a meal that will sustain, delight and impress in equal measure” might act as a lifeline to the ready-meal-munching masses is like trying to introduce a heathen to art by way of a large square canvas covered in nothing but uniform, blue paint. It takes experience, sometime genius, to strip bare a recipe. To most people there is a fine, if at all existent, line between a late night pan of student stodge and a rustic, slow-cooked fashion statement.

And just as I found myself blaming Hugh for trying, I came across his bizarre admission of communication shortcomings: “The problem is, you're reading this and [the disadvantaged fools] are not,” he concludes. “Please cut it out and send it to them. Then invite yourself round for dinner to sample their success [read: have a good old chuckle with your foodie friends about how honest yet far off the mark it was]”.

But he was right about one thing: something indeed wonderful happened to my lamb in the process of marinating and cooking. It was the most tender I have ever eaten, each faintly purple muscle fibre clinging only just to its neighbour via a think layer of collagen. It fell off the bone in domes and bulbs and slabs laced with crispy salty fat, and a small pile of this magical matter sat proud of a deep bowl of soft creamy beans and a deep, thick, silky-smooth broth charged with rich lamby fat. Some boiled Savoy with parsley and spinach to garnish. It has put me to sleep.

Catering for life

2006-12-09T22:26:00.000Z

Cooking for 40 is different. It doesn’t sound that many -- not much bigger, I imagine, than many family meals that will be thrown out with nothing but a single 60cm appliance to hand in the next two weeks. But we weren’t using white goods; we were surrounded by a Precambrian range spanning the length and height of an entire wall; silver fridges both tall and squat fixed with white, laminated signs dictating what passes though; yards of assorted stainless steel surfaces dulled by the slips of a hundred brain-dead commis; and the background stench of used vegetable oil, detergent and aluminum.

This was a real kitchen, albeit one that hadn’t properly been used since is was installed two decades ago. In fact, the only action it seemed to have been getting until us pair of cowboys turned up was the frying of a few greasy breakfasts on the – wait for it – four-ringed electric cooker standing next to the 6-ringed Beast.

The place wasn’t clean either. But as soon as we slapped our four large shallow cardboard boxes - overflowing with fresh herbs, bright purple cabbages and Tupperware tubs of veal stock and rose sauce - onto the metal tables, it felt right. We were in our fucking elements. The music was pumping, the weather bright, and the day ahead holding nothing but the prep and cooking a one-off five course meal for my sister’s wedding guests in 36 hours’ time.

There is no better way for the dreamy amateur in the kitchen to find out whether or not he or she could enjoy a life in catering. Even though I knew the people who would be eating it, I became totally detached from the food. It just felt like matter that had to be shifted from A to B, cleaned, processed, stored, cooked, served.

We were working with the best ingredients money can buy -- 2kg of wild smoked salmon, 7kg of prime diced venison haunch, live lobsters straight from their sea cages, herbs, cream and two outstanding stocks – and still, somewhere just beyond the 1kilo mark, they ceased to trigger any thought processes. The worst was the veg, and the vacuous task of fumbling 120 turned carrots and peeling to a uniform radius the same number of slippery, eye-watering shallots.

It took the whole day to put it together, but by the time we left we had two huge trays of potato and parsnip dauphinoise in the chiller along with two huge tubs of venison stew (say “stew” but it was, in fact, chunks of tender meat in a proper sauce of red wine, veal stock, game stock and a little redcurrant jelly); a huge pan of veg stock (more of a nage, packed as it was with lemon, fresh herbs and the redundant layers of shallot), another of thick ham-hock and lentil soup (for the post-meal masses); and some proto peti fours in the form of some creamy hand-rolled truffles and a few small trays of fresh orange jellies. We left happy after 12 long hours, my freshly sliced thumb from having taken my eye off the blade of the mandolin throbbing and my thumbnails red, swollen and probably infected from digging them through shallots, and fuelled ourselves with a big plate of basic spag boll back at the wedding HQ. Pasta never tasted this good.

The craic was good, although with themes including unconsenting anal sex with Gordon Ramsay at knifepoint, I guess you had to be there. By the time it came to service, however, I had all but stopped caring about the food, which was a mistake because a few unnecessary errors crept in in those vital few minutes. And the thought of eating it was a million miles away. But the audience was bowled over.

And so it should have been, faced as it was with a mouthwatering amuse of lobster-stuffed mango raviolis served on two spinach leaves and garnished with iced red pepper skin, followed by an outrageously aromatic celeriac soup with smoked salmon&creme fraiche and garnished with parsley oil and a small herb salad, venison in rich game sauce with a perfect square of creamy potatoes and spoons of red cabbage, shredded and braised with red wine, star anise and apple, and savoy, tossed in wholegrain mustard and cream, all finished with a boule of brown-bread ice cream served atop a small slab of warm, gooey oaty biscuit surrounded by a deep crimson rose sauce, and dusted off with coffee, truffles (the jellies didn’t work out) and a 12 year-old Jura, which we were just in time to pour having changed out of our whites.

It was the first drink I had had in 9 months, and it felt right to toast my friend the real genius behind the meal. And to my surprise it felt like it was only the day before when I had last had a whisky. It was horrible. I was looking at half-empty wine bottles in an unnerving light for the rest of the evening, but have never been surer that I still have some way to go, if ever, before I can drink properly.

And I have learned a few things about deluded fantasies too. I don’t want to work in a kitchen. The job is hard, hot and repetitive. Service is unrelenting. And this is with a single set menu prepared mostly a day in advance. And just as in the home, people seem to gravitate towards the kitchen and hover around it like confused parents, trying to endow themselves with a sense of purpose in the face of utter disinterest or even contempt. Because being in the kitchen fuels the ego. People are relying on your mysterious ability to prepare things they don’t understand and your territory is clearly defined. Kitchens are also the stationary hubs of small-scale establishments. And this wedding needed a lot of sticking together.

Since my return I have bee eying food more mechanically than usual, feeding the pair of us with random suppers of bacon&chili penne; potato, spinach and mackerel soup; mushroom risotto;

pot roasted pheasant with truffle and walnut stuffing; herring in oatmeal with a watercress, spinach and rocket salad; a “stampot” wank-style, comprising crushed roast potatoes with bacon, savoy cabbage and a thick mustard sauce; and tonight, another pair of herring, slashed and grilled and eaten with bread, lemon and salad. And yesterday I walked into the old tranny café at the end of my street and asked how much they wanted for it. What the fuck am I thinking?

An affront to humanity

2006-11-26T23:06:00.000Z

The stress brought on by kids’ birthday parties is another notch surely worthy of some weekend newspaper article about stress and modern life. A weekend spent gearing up for the event, which was over in under three hours. Two people in dressing gowns trying to cook in the same kitchen with nothing but recipes for disaster. Unable to talk to one another for want of murder. Of course the fucking soup was going to be ready in time to eat soon after everyone arrived; it had practically cooked itself yesterday while nobody was looking.

It was a winner too.

I had marinated the rather bland tasting pigs’ foot flesh in a little olive oil, lots of lemon and some salt. I tossed this into the steaming earthy bath of lentils and split peas, along with a handful of best streaky bacon that had been fried until dark and sticky. Served with a pool of double cream and some flat-leafed parsley, its meaty depths were apparent on people’s faces. Which is about all they were wearing in terms of an expression, as it’s socialy demanding to have conversations with people you don’t know in your own house. I wish they had all just got good and drunk or something.

But, then, I could have been driving back down the M6 in the pissing rain with 14,000 other Smunts, having spent all weekend at this year’s Good Food Show. And what a weekend that would have been. For my £20 entry fee (£18 if I had booked in advance) to the giant NEC I would have had the opportunity to allow over 200 exhibitors from stall upon cocktail-stick-nibble stall try and sell me things, as well as the chance – if I was one of the early birds – to see one of many 15 minute celebrity-chef performance shows – blatantly sponsored by Sainsbury’s and headlined by J.O. himself.

“This is the ultimate shopping experience for those of you who are true food lovers,” churns the foodie marketing machine. “If after a few hours of shopping, you can no longer carry your bags, why not take advantage of our Shop and Drop locations where you can leave all your shopping secure while you are going back for more. You even get a complimentary Mr Kipling mince pie when you return to collect it, and yes he makes ‘exceedingly’ good mince pies as well as cakes!”

How did consumer culture ever come to this? Just think of the amount of cash that’s swimming about up there. £20 per fucking person, handed over in exchange for the being sold things, your every glance while wandering desperately through this culinary circus filled with branded and logo-ed crap endorsed by your heroes, the Celebchefs, teasing you for just long enough to keep you buying the books while you sit there in your mini theatre with 100 other hopefuls cheering every time the leaping head-miked figure in the distance lands upright.

This annual freak show -- and all its provincial fall out such as Aberga-fucking-venny -- epitomises our pitiful food culture in the UK. And why does it get me so angry? Because it puts the costs of kitchenware and berries up, and ramps the mongoled masses’ dependence on the state. And because I cannot understand someone who does not realise that being charged to be robbed is an affront to humanity.

A foray into vegetarianism

2006-11-25T00:28:00.000Z

One which was raidly followed by a juicy rare duck breast with tatties roasted in duck fat. In fact, I was impressed by how much flavour the veggies were. They weren’t really veggies for one, the main component being reconstituted porcini mushrooms and a good handful of crushed walnuts. I mixed in some bread that had been soaking in milk and some shallots, leek and garlic that had been browned in butter and then boiled up with a glass of white wine until a soft, silky mess, and bound it all with an egg.

I then plastered one layer on the base of a buttered dish, topped it with handfuls of grated Gruyère, another layer of mix and finally a packet’s worth of supermarket mushrooms sliced thickly and tiled to cover as mush as possible of the surface. The holes I plugged with half walnuts, each dotted with a daub of Exmoor blue that I still had lying at the back of the fridge, and the whole lot coated with well seasoned double cream.

You might say it would be hard to fuck up a dish with that sort of volume of goodies and fat, but I didn’t really have too much of a clue as to what was going to come out of the oven after 30 minutes. Fortunately it was better than I had hoped, the mushroom mixture having taken on the texture of fine mince and the walnuts shining through. It was delicious.

But the duck, encrusted with half a cm of crispy skin spiked with sage, bay and some Chinese five-spice and served with a sauce made from a couple of scoops of my pigsfoot stock, a tablespoon of damson jam and a dash of dark Soy, stole the show. The texture of tender meat, I will never surrender.

Eggs, fish and pigs

2006-11-24T23:09:00.000Z

I knew those pig’s feet would come in useful at some point. It certainly isn’t the kind of spare parts you normally have lying around, but when you see pig’s feet for free you need to buy and store them regardless. In this instance they are going to be put to appropriate use as the heart of a thick winter soup with pulses and crusty buttered bread to keep awake the parents of children attending the Eldest’s third birthday party this weekend.

They don’t deserve a morsel of it, the mongs that most of them are. And there is a vegetarian who is going to be missing out, and I have for once deliberately done this. It’s pissing down outside for fuck’s sake, and cold with it. You need some Meat to keep yourself going. Which is what I needed tonight to try and regain some sense of self respect after it transpired that I have been rejected for the fourteenth job I have applied for in two years.

Numbed to the same conversation that I have now had many times on coming home with the bad news, the usual empty phrases searching for some sort of meaning, I sat there instead in front of a fish omelette and a pile of chard. A smoky over-salted Tescocunt peppered vac-pac mackerel fillet in a bright yellow egg envelope, sharp and simple and tasty. And no drink, even on a Friday. Just the usual domestics.

Gaysanne

2006-11-23T23:43:00.000Z

The fucking world pie-eating competition has been sabotaged by the fascist state. Due to be held up North in Wigan tomorrow, the rules of this annual and wholly worthwhile ritual have been changed in response to the government’s “healthy eating” campaign (think J.O.). The winner of the event will no longer be the fat bastard who ate the most revolting number of pies, but the fat cunt who ate a single revolting pie the quickest. What’s more, says event organizer Tony Callaghan, this year will see the introduction of a veggie pie for the first time, although he points out that due to its high gluten content the veggie pie will be slightly smaller than its meaty counterpart.

What a fucking waste of pastry. How on Earth can people seriously be trying to apply vague forgotten rhetoric about eating healthily to a fucking eating contest? What’s Tony going to do next year, cancel the event altogether in case it encourages, er, bad table manners? And let us applaud those who can push kilos of chemical dough, flour and gristle into their faces in mere matters of minutes.

Having said this, I myself sat down in my wooly 90s cardigan to a dinner of salad paysanne with dry smoked bacon, crumbly Welsh goats cheese and salty Greek olives; thyme and oil and flakes of Maldon. I felt like a right Tony. And I am shattered by the shear number of things that keep falling through with the impending wedding. One week from now it will all be cooked. And I will be fried on cocaine.

Mussels and faeces

2006-11-22T23:59:00.000Z

It was the strangest interlude from the kitchen for some time, and a none too pleasant one either. I was scrubbing a kilo and a half of mussels at the time, standing at the sink with the mother-in-law reading the paper in the distance and my mind on precious little, when suddenly I found myself with my hand in a pile of human shit. Okay, it may have been my three-year-old’s, but shite is shite whichever way you look at it. I came very close to vomiting. There was something especially disgusting about the fact that I was cleaning bivalves at the time, full as they are of fecal matter. And in a less than hilarious twist, it turns out that the creatures had a nasty stench of piss about them.

They turned out ok once they’d been boiled up in Chablis, double cream and fine fish stock. But the ammonia was present for sure.

The second course took the taste away thankfully, a posh bangers and mash comprising a pile of venison sausages [bought out of way of thanks to the game bloke at the farmers’ market for his unbelievable roe saddle last week], some creamy tattie&celeriac puree and some shredded cabbage in mustard. Around this I spooned shiny purple dods of a makeshift Cumberland sauce, made by melting a few spoonfuls of damson jelly and boiling it up with orange, lemon, shallots and wine. I have eaten a lot of venison lately, and the stools speak volumes.

Sorry standfirsts

2006-11-21T22:32:00.000Z

Please tick which of the following statements you think best conjures up a snapshot of your own life (you may tick more than one):

1) “We claim to be a nation of foodies, yet vegetables still mystify many cooks - especially those weird specimens that turn up in the weekly organic box.”

2) “It’s cold outside, so snuggle up. That’s the only way to get a good night’s sleep at Norway’s Alta Igloo Hotel. But think of the stories you can tell at your next dinner party…”

3) “It’s the stench of stale lentils and damp wool around the organic veg stall at the farmers’ market that makes Wednesdays what they are, especially when the only reason you are anywhere near this crew at all is to escape a similarly deluded self-righteousness in the workplace as the midweek slump kicks into gear yet a-fucking-gain and the promise of a free glass of mulled wine at the inevitable company Christmas do is failing to keep the light on.”

Well, I don’t go to or host dinner parties, nor have a weekly delivery from someone wearing a cushion cover. And what is it about the tone that tells me the only reason I might want to stay the night in an igloo hotel is so that I have something worth being alive for in the eyes of my supposed mates? Is the middle-class brand so transparent that the national media can confidently join in, chortling at their big joke?

Tonight I made sandwich for tea, two thick slices of sesame seed bread toasted and topped with grilled best bacon, green peppers and melting Exmoor blue. The last of the beetroot salad with a red wine & shallot dressing. I was on my own, and this was good sulking food.

Upside down stew

2006-11-19T23:13:00.000Z

An interesting psychological experiment to try out on your children: make a venison stew from veal stock and leave it over night to set, before turning it upside down and scaring the shit out of them when the molten-looking meaty mass doesn’t move an inch. You’d have to have been around some under-threes for while to full appreciate it, I imagine.

I had hoped this would happen. This meal, a dry-run for the wedding, was fucking posh. It was also extremely simple. I first diced the already well-trimmed haunch into bite-sized pieces and fried them off in batches in hot oil, browning some neatly prepped uniform shallots, whole, at the same time. Then I took out the shallots, tossed the seared chunks of meat in seasoned flour and then deglazed with a large glass of the exceptional red burgundy that my rich and cultured friend had married so thoughtfully with the venison loin in the week. Once that had boiled down for a while I slid a small tub of veal stock in, poked a bouquet garni of leek, thyme, parsley and bay between the dark cubes and let the whole thing simmer away for a good half hour, adding a handful of cowboy-turned carrots and a spoon of redcurrant jelly towards the end, checking the seasoning and leaving it to cool.

Today I was rewarded greatly. I had been checking the meat at various stages to try and fathom the dryness issue. After about 15 minutes it was tasty and chewy, but when I had switched it off half an hour later it was as dry as fuck. But it didn’t let me down overnight, as I had hoped. When it came to about 15 minutes before dinner-time I simply melted the pot over a slow heat, and served a spoon of it with some uniform blocks of roast parsnip and tattie, and a pile of braised Savoy cabbage tossed in mustard and sharp, wholegrain mustard.

By fuck it worked. The stew was a piece of luxury, traditional but extremely classy indeed. A simple but very deep richness, and a sheen like fine gold lace, the parsnips providing a mushy sweetness and the mustard-cabbage a valuable edge. It was flawless, although I will cook the meat for even less next week. What is it with stews that makes me want to fucking cook the fuck out of them for hours? I mean, I was the one who made the stock, so I know how much stewing has gone on. It’s that horrible nagging feeling I get from time to time, reminding me that my cooking has not quite reached the heights of abstraction from student-cooking that I often think it has.

Foodie fashion

2006-11-18T00:41:00.000Z

I’m clearly not up to speed with the latest in foodie fashion. Just the other day I mentioned to the Wife two items that would make great Christmas gifts for me: a pastry knife and a multipack of dish cloths; no more than a tenner each. But I find in today’s Weekend magazine that I should in fact be aspiring to greater, rather more expensive, things.

First, I should be reading the remarkable story of an Italian chef who set up an Italian restaurant in London: Giorgio Locatelli, who has a column in Weekend magazine and who I would guess, thanks to numerous TV and media appearances, is far better known for his grubby great hands and Romanesq features than he his for his 22 different types of risotto. Next, I should be making sure I’m armed with one of several River Café Pocket Books (£8.99 each from bookshops nationwide) just in case I happen across a pile of rocket, basil and some sun-blushed tomatoes this yuletide and am unsure as to how to turn it into a quick, rustic pasta dish. Finally, for £65 I can engage in some “Outrageously Organic Tasting” at Berry Brothers which includes wine and canapés. It’s a damn shame I don’t live in London you know.

Branding, branding, branding. A huge-conked personification of classic Italian food, a bite-sized serving of the contemporary version, and a trip to the only wine merchant’s you’ll ever hear anyone go on about, at length. Oh yes, the metropolitan foodie set is going to be skimmed proper this Christmas.

I, meanwhile, have been skimming the froth from a venison stew in practise for the Wedding next week. I need to get that meat cooked to perfection if this is to come off at all: not too chewy from undercooking and not too dry from overdoing it. So I put together a classy little pile of meat&sauce made from excellent wine and veal stock which is setting in the fridge ready for tomorrow, studded with properly-attempted turned carrots and uniform, peeled shallots. It is an experiment. By the time I was able to sit down to supper myself, on account of the stew, a lightning-speed fish pie I felt I had to make for the kids and the fact that I had said kids to myself all FUCKING day, it was almost 11pm. But I couldn’t have chosen a better meal, having only to slip half a dozen firm sardines under a hot grill and slicing a lemon in half.

Human stock

2006-11-16T23:27:00.000Z

I fantasise about piling up on the richest creamiest buttery frenchy food and bolting the door shut to spend three slow months eating myself to death. With the Wife too, although she helpfully pointed out over dinner that this would put too much strain on the kids. But fuck it, we can use them for stock and prolong our twisted feast for weeks. I feel like this, I hope, because I have for two days now eaten nothing but fine fatty food the likes of which can kill if not kept in check.

Tonight, for Christ’s sake, were leftovers. Yet I sit here bloated and slow and hurting at the seams from the richness. I had held over half a celeriac and a quarter of a red cabbage from yesterday, so I braised the latter with half a mango that I found in the fridge and grated the celeriac for a rosti. This rosti ended up as the base of my tower, standing firm thanks to its egg-bound structure and supporting a spoonful of purple cabbage, a twist of rocket and five tiny discs of the tenderloin that I had eased out of the venison saddle and just rolled around in hot nutty butter for a few minutes. It looked spectacular indeed, surrounded as it was with some of the purple cabbage juice (which should have been a mustard vinaigrette to cut through the sweetness).

But it was blown over by the courses either side, the first being more crab ravioli and cream sauce. I spiked the crab with small-dice mango and the sauce was made by reducing a couple of glasses of leftover Cava, adding in the remaining cooking stock from yesterday’s celeriac and finishing it off with double cream and finely chopped parsley. There was a huge ratio of filling to pasta, and this is the way it should be done. The finale was precisely the same as yesterday’s, only the pie had had time to go slightly soggy and responded well to 15 minutes in a hot oven; and the ice cream had had time to shine.

Lonely success

2006-11-15T22:49:00.000Z

The only thing I have eaten all day is the finest three-course meal I’ve ever made. That doesn’t mean I enjoyed a bit of it. It was by no means a delight to put together, for instance, and I barely savoured a mouthful. This is what happens with a meal of this nature, which basically took a day and a half to make: I end up gobbling it down in mere minutes because I am running high on mild adrenalin as I sit down before it.

It must have been a different experience altogether for my guests to be presented with spaceship-shaped ravioli stuffed with fresh crab meat tossed in melted butter ready for take-off on a mound of pea puree and coated with a truffle cream sauce. After all, these were not your run-of-the-mill guests -- a university friend who is much more successful than I and who is no stranger to high-end cuisine. I remembered how pointless the pursuit of percieved success is when he politely interjected as I poured a welcoming glass of chilled Cava and asked if he could use the taller, slightly more slender article he spotted on the shelf above. Now I know that Tesco value balls-on-stems aren't the last word in table glassware, but was it really neccessary for him to make his stand there and then? It wasn't as if the Cava was up to his usual standards no doubt.

In any case, I knew that expectations had to be met today, so I threw out the frenchy stuff as best I could. Gastronomic grammar my guests could understand. The crab I picked up at the farmer’s market this morning, the peas a pack of sugar-snaps that happened to be in the fridge and the sauce made from reduced beef stock with white truffle paste and double cream mixed in at the end. The dish completed with a neat pile of flat-leafed parsley.

But rich and fine as it was, the main overshadowed it by far. It was all thanks to the venison saddle that I had ordered from the game bloke last week, a foot or so of prime roe spine, from which I gleefully slipped off and trimmed two dark striploins to be tied up with string, wrapped in cling-film, twisted into a cylinder, and left to set a bit in the fridge. And with the vertebrae I hacked them off and boiled them up in a good half pint of veal stock with some shallots and red wine for half an hour. They imparted a deep gaminess to the sauce, which I countered with a tablespoon of redcurrant jelly and a few cubes of ice-cold unsalted butter towards the end.

The loins I browned off in a hot pan and then threw into the oven for about 8 minutes, and then sliced and arranged them in overlapping discs on a large white plate. They were soft and reddish purple, perfectly cooked at rare and coated with the deep brown hot game sauce. Next to it sat a small pile of red cabbage that I had braised with apple for about an hour, topped with a quenelle of celeriac puree that had been cooked in aromatic stock, and a small pile of rocket and herb salad. The colours were rich and classy, the food similarly. I don’t recall ever eating a more tender piece of meat, and one with such a deep flavour for such a lean cut. It was gamey without the sulphur; it was fucking mind-blowing. The rest of the stuff was up there with it, with definitely more precision involved than usual.

The finale was an(other) almond-studded apple pie, served warm with a few curls of fresh vanilla and cinnamon ice cream. It was a show-stopper. The ice cream is unbelievably good, even if I did commit the ultimate culinary sin by leaving my guests to wrestle with the dish with nothing but a clumsy soup spoon. How could I? We wrapped up at about 5 and I have been in a dreamy state ever since.

But that’s a biological thing. From kneading pasta dough and baking-blind a sweet pastry case while in my dressing gown, to melting down the stock for the sauces four hours later, putting this meal together felt robotic and mechanical - perhaps a sign of how it must feel to do this for a living. I knew what had to be done by when and there was lots of it, but although I took little enjoyment in each task I felt satisfaction when it had all been done. The actual cooking time was very short. As will be the duration of my life if I continue to eat like this. T h e r e w e r e 1 3 f u c k i n g e g g s a n d p i n t a n d a h a l f o f d o u b l e c r e a m i n t o d a y ‘ s l u n c h . . .

Heston & Gordon for tea

2006-11-14T23:19:00.000Z

I hadn’t watched television for something like 8 months until tonight. But it seems as if some strange food- and work-related triangle has transpired to put me in line to meet Blumenthal in the coming months. I therefore thought I should sit down to his an installment of his “Search for perfection” series being aired on BBC2 this days. Tonight it was the perfect steak and salad, which involved plenty of close ups of the best aged beef marbled with hard creamy ribbons of blue-cheese-scented fat. Large hunks of the stuff were being variously blowtorched, cooked for 24 hours at a temperature of 50 degrees, rested, seared and finally served with smoked salt, stilton-infused butter and a 250 year old mushroom sauce. I like Heston. He comes across as a nice bloke. And I sat there watching him while doing another thing I haven’t done for 8 months: eating a pasta bake. My head has disappeared up my arse regarding food since the weekend, just like most other things have lately. But the idea was to use some of the random veg I returned to find in the fridge, so I roasted a couple of sliced courgette with garlic and rosemary and tossed in some ad dente penne in three rough layers filled with handfuls of salty cheddar cheese and topped with thick slices of deep red tomatoes. Plenty of oil to loosen things up. The idea was for something for us to eat tonight that would also do the kids tomorrow if they are unable to eat the Wank I am going to be throwing out for a friend’s visit.

So after Heston I finished off some of the prep for tomorrow’s lunch, cooking up an egg custard infused with cinnamon and vanilla to accompany a freshly made apple and almond tart; and completing an aromatic veg stock in which to braise some diced celeriac that will sit next to a neat row of purple venison medallions and a rich game sauce.

Then came the next audiovisual feast in the form of a brand new series of Ramsay’s nightmares. It so happens that I have recently been watching the best of Ramsay’s “Boiling point” on YouTube, in which he looks like a real fucking nutbag. He is fatter in the face and vile, yet at times deeply witty. But this couldn’t be further from the square-jawed alpha hunk gleaming back at me from the box tonight. It was the usual set-piece, this time with a Spanish backdrop. And it struck me all the more how junk-choked and polluting television is.

The content was minimal, and mostly containing shots of Ramsay’s flaccid chest or laughable pseudo-psychological stunts to drive the chef’s message through (a bullfight this evening for the arrogant, daddy’s-money-wasting victim). And that was just when the show was actually on – for about 15 minutes of the hour we were being sold lies in the form of washing powders, rock-bottom party-snack packs and sinister insurance deals. Christmas is in full swing apparently, with even Jamie popping up in a giant Sainsburys hot-air balloon talking up a cranberry-stuffed chipolata. The selling-out is so blatant – who in the world could have thought of sponsoring Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares than a certain brand of gin that rhymes with boredoms?

He wouldn't get very far in the Highlands

2006-11-13T23:54:00.000Z

“Saturday mornings are always soup and cheese days in our house. The cheese is generally something British bought from the Saturday market trip…there will be bread of some sort or oatcakes and maybe a pear or a bunch of grapes afterwards. We eat it in the kitchen off pottery plates and bowls for no other reason than it feels right.”

Oh Fuck Off Nigel, please. For fuck’s sake man, what the fuck are you twittering on about now. Who’s “we” anyway? It conjures up shivery images of some faceless figure in a black polo neck hanging around Nige’s large London house in awe of its master and playing along to his delusions of culinary grandeur.

“Saturday is also my baking day,” he continues. “The day in which the kitchen wears a white shroud of flour and the smell of warm dough winds its way up to the attic. Sometimes there’s a wobbly, flour-dusted loaf of sourdough waiting [to take all 5 inches of my cock one lonely winter’s evening].”

So Saturday is Nigel’s baking day, is it? I mean, I am fully aware that he is not simply describing his day-to-day life, and that in fact he makes his comfortable London living from a full time media job that takes up a sizeable chunk of his home life. He may even spend many a happy hour testing and refining a recipe for us too downstairs in the basement with his Aga. But that only makes his rosy idyll column even more despicable. Would it really alienate the middle-England ladies and more effeminate types so badly if he threw in the occasional anecdote about how the photographer slipped on a wedge of “indecently oozing Wigmore” during one shoot and ended up in A&E with a pestle stuck in his ass; or about the time when the food-stylist who, on running out of varnish for the Christmas goose, ended up using some specialist lube that happened to be lying around the bathroom that weekend? Why does he have to tell us that the walnuts were organic?

My Saturday was spent recovering from a night of fine dining in George’s kitchen, which as it happens is conceptually identical to mine. He was trying out some ideas for the Wedding in a couple of weeks (which I can no longer bare to talk to anybody about), beginning with two takes on the “Inverskink” hot-soup+smoked-salmon combo. The first was served as a fine tomato consommé tasting of a thousand fruits yet the colour of light tea, but it was the creamed celeriac soup with a pile of fish and surrounded with a slick of parsley oil that took the crown. It will be superb when it comes off. Then we ate a huge octopus covered in olive oil, paprika and salt and eaten from a large wooden bowl with cocktail sticks. Finally we had two rounds of oaty-biscuit [a supremely rich and moist flapjack] desert, the first dealt as an oaty sandwich of cool white-chocolate mascarpone topped with a teaspoon of rose sorbet, and the second a triangle of biscuit topped with brown bread ice cream and surrounded by a warm rose coulis. In the end we opted for something in between. The boy can cook, and never is a song and dance made of it. The way food should be, provided you're sober enough to notice.

From there on, however, the weekend’s food intake was rough and sporadic, present as I was at a party that lasted until 11am the following day. Surrounded by drink and drugs and partially enacted teenage fantasies, I had a wild if at times extremely difficult night. The concept of sobriety is little understood up there, let alone that of abstinence. Having been asked the same question “why aren’t you drinking?” repeatedly by the same people all night, I started varying the answers -- one simply being “I am an alcoholic”. Down here in civilization that would be met with some surprise and probably a flustered change of subject, but up there it was more like: “Right. Was it the doctor’s advice or is it the Wife?” Says it all really, although being sober certainly opened my eyes to the wonder of ever better drugs than the usual class Cs.

And then home after no sleep to a burning cunt of a Thai green curry made by the Wife, which failed as did everything to bring me down to Earth or provoke much mental activity. Something about being back home go to me this weekend, and I don’t quite know what it was. But right now this place doesn’t feel right and I need a change. I even, despite being faced with a fridge full of vegetables and various cheese and general mid-week meals material, settled on a good Highland tattie and leek soup for tea, albeit one that was sweetened up by a couple of wrinkly old parsnips and wanked up with a mouldy lump of Cornish Yarg brought by George a couple of weeks back. And there was no pottery in sight, nor any signs of fruity discussion about whether the Yarg would have been better matched with a sweeter bread than the soggy thin slices of insipid brown rectangles spilling out of the bag before me.

Drying out

2006-11-09T23:45:00.000Z

A full complement of females in the house once again, a warm home-coming provided by a swanky curry. It is possible to cook properly as well as look after two children, but only just. And that rules out anything like, say, a Nine-T-Fve-You-Fucking-Hate or even a phonecall of an evening. I have hardly stopped moving: bending down, lifting, placing, cleaning, wiping, running up steps, chasing along pavements, responding, correcting, acknowledging, not to mention cooking for the little sweethearts. Yesterday I made them a shepherds’ pie of the highest quality, which although looked dry when I retrieved it from the fridge this afternoon, was soon melted into the richest, beefy meal by a minute or two in the microwave.

So, somewhere in between I had managed this morning to trim and score the four chicken thighs I’d picked up at the airport shop two days ago and marinate them in a sweet chilli, fennel and coriander mash; and this afternoon to sweat a few onions, a carrot, parsnip, some ginger garlic and some dried spices (mainly tumeric and coriander) in a heavy pan, which I deglazed with a good glug of pastis and topped up with half pint or so of my latest stock and some tomato puree. Half an hour alter, just before I left for the airport, I switched off the boiling brew and left it to impregnate the Home with a sense of welcome. And we eventually sat down before a neat pile of white rice surrounded with a thick, golden sauce (made from the strained brew made earlier with some full-fat yoghurt and a good inch of creamed coconut) and topped with some rocket and parsley and a crispy thigh and a sloppy slither of roasted red and green pepper on top. A nice, if not revolutionary, departure from the regular spicy stew + rice affair.

But little was said before she toddled on up to bed, exhausted and rough from her holiday and its rum binge -- a “binge” being a event that lies somewhere in between the modern-day accepted definition of “5 or more drinks for men and 4 or more for women per occasion” and the Highland interpretation: a prolonged period lasting up to several months during which the alcoholic turns everything in his or her life over to drinking so as to spend all day every day drinking heavily and working out how to get more drink; all meetings being off and the agony only ceasing when (in the young) the cash and tick run out or (as with the old) the body gives up, comes out in a rash of bright red sores and leaves the alcoholic fighting for his or her life for the following six weeks in a Free Presbyterian hospice cum drying-out clinic.

Clive James you bastard

2006-11-09T00:10:00.000Z

Keeping two children happy is a lot of work. There are no shortcuts. But food can be a handy device, both for fuelling the madness (done to great effect this afternoon with a perfect shepherds’ pie. Standing in my kitchen on a midweek afternoon, pouring a small pot of my fresh beef stock over a simple layer of fatty mince, onion and carrot, generally wiping dishes with butter wrappers and feeling slightly excited and deeply satisfied about the fact that most of the world, at least the part of it familiar to those of my generation throwing themselves into the fire for the pitiful return of pointless career progression, is hard at work. I feel very much alive during such moments, immersed in the effortless details of the task before me while also being acutely aware of my contentedness. And in the company of my daughter, desperate to much any morsel of the sweet shortbread dough we were making.

Gear enhances all of this. But it also fucks the brain up. Today’s shortbread is a case in point, fucking as I did the ratios to produce a rather rock-like disc which I am too embarrassed to let anybody see or taste. I will throw it and its packet of best butter away in the morning before the Wife returns.

Gear, in fact, is a case in point in itself. I knew I was going to run out this evening, so I made sure to chat to the neighbour in time for a 10-bag re-stock to tide me over until that precious day when I will stop so that I can be sure my decisions in life are not being affected by my grubby and increasingly boring addiction to cannabis. Each time it comes down to the last pipe or two the same thing happens. And my justification for not making today my quit-day was a radio monologue by that Australian cultural commentator Clive James in which he calmly described his addiction to extremity, whatever the fuck the substance actually is; the need for more of it, to abuse it until you ruin the relationship. It rang true, so true. And the simple line about how much creativity he suddenly lost once he had straightened-up struck a resonance within.

If only I could apply the same determination to other aspects of my life, including cooking for that matter. Why not try more things, experiment more instead of throwing out the same old roast-meat-and-carbs fat- and salt-fests? Like, for instance, the rose-petal jam George is making for the wedding? As for the short term, as in tonight’s tea, I could do with a lesson in frying squid. I picked up some creamy thick slices of a giant at the farmers’ today so marinated it in a sweet chilli and garlic mash, fried it in the grill oan and tossed it with some roasted tomatoes&peppers and a handful of lovely fresh rocket and flat-leafed parsley. And none of it from Tesco, as I have been going for the semi-rotten displays of veg from the languishing fruit&veg shops I come across.

Suicide meal

2006-11-07T23:40:00.000Z

Well, it could have been. For tonight I am on my own, bar a couple of divine little girls and the shapeless company provided by the vapours from a well-stoked pipe of sticky green. But the actuality couldn’t have been more different. Having dropped the Wife off at the airport this afternoon I could hardly not drop into the airport shop for a steak or something. It was calm in there, much quieter than the Saturday mayhem. I walked out with 6 searingly fresh sardines, a kipper, a loaf of three-seed bread and a bag of beef bones for £6.50. I couldn’t have been happier.

But I am not supposed to be fannying around in the kitchen at all, only to look round and find my daughters twitching [I’m starting to wonder if there isn’t something else to this] in their chairs as they frown awkwardly into the middle distance. The afternoon turned into a bit of both I suppose, given that I can hardly count my throwing together of a kids’ broccoli and pasta cheese bake as indulgence but did find time to set a beef stock in motion for general winter purposes. It was 10 by the time I sat down to the platter of crispy grilled fish, scored deeply and scattered with parsley, Maldon and lemon; a good glug of olive oil and some soft brown bread and butter. I haven’t had fresher sardines that I remember, it was an awesome feast, even if one that was bathed in the carnal aroma of boiling beef bones.

I love food like this. Normally I would have sourced a steak under such circumstances, but I felt after Sunday I needed to stay away from the artery stuff for a wee while. It was a blow-out perhaps, but not an uncivilised one. From the morsels of herring-in-oatmeal thrown out before the salmon and parsnip soup to the other-worldly quality of the fresh vanilla ice-cream -- a pint of double cream, 6 egg yolks, two vanilla pods and 100g caster sugar – it was smiles all round. And the menu couldn’t have been better matched to the limitless appetites around the table. We got through a fucking shed-load of meat, I did you not. And it was fucking good meat too, the salt marsh lamb carrying a flavour the likes of which I have never tasted in a ruminant.

But now, alas, it is time to start straining that vat of hot brown brew congealing behind me. I don’t have the time for it. I am stretched to the limit and will be standing here, moderately monged, carefully pressing root vegetables through a sieve for a meal the cooking and eating of which may take place months after I am dead. But at least it beats making a Monday stir-fry from them.

In prep for the Sunday feast

2006-11-05T00:40:00.000Z

My grandchildren, according to the most extensive scientific survey ever undertaken into man’s effect on the global marine ecosystem, will probably never get the chance to savour, in adulthood, the joys of a fresh oyster on a Christmas morning or a grilled fresh mackerel in the later summer sun; an not a firm wild salmon steak for love nor money. The fish are doomed, basically. Worse still, the report comes just two days after we learn from the world’s leading economist that we are burning up. Even if we do all that we can immediately to cut our greenhouse emissions, we’re still facing human displacement on a scale never seen before. Finally, today some clever clogs has worked out that the cost to the UK of tackling, whatever that means, climate change is precisely teh same as that involved in upgrading our nuclear deterrent and maintaining it for the next 30 years.

So, rather than let it all get on top of me I jumped in my ten year old petrol automobile and drove a round trip of 20 miles to pick up a bit of salmon. If I’m going to burn up I’m going to be doing it with a mouthful. In fact, I learned today while chatting to members of my extended family in the airport shop, that the luxurious oyster I had consumed at Mr Blumenthal’s a month or two back actually came from the same clear plastic tub of shells staring up at me from the oh-so-familiar fish counter. The salmon too, and it turns out that my suspicions at the time while savouring the alien sensation of a liquorice parcel of room-temp cooked salmon melting on my tongue were well-founded: he buys-in farmed fish, rather surprisingly. The owner, Steve, happens to be good mates with Heston and rates him as a “top bloke” (apparently he was there on Day 1, cutting the ribbons …). Ramsey, on the other hand, lost all his accounts on account of his 90-day credit requests.

Oh well, before I start to sound like a celebrity column. I have in store a meal of memory tomorrow, a meat-fest for three hungry blokes – a half leg of salt-marsh lamb and a well-hung forerib of beef. And cream, so much fucking cream. I made the dauphinoise this morning in a big rush in between a humanity-searching trip to the horrific out-of-town Tescoland and a brisk walk in the crisp November air. Two-fifths or thereabouts celeriac andwrapped up safely in the fridge, as they will be at the wedding in a few week’s time. They were road-tested by the youngest, who stuffed her face with the creamy layers until she could take no more. It is going to be cholesterol blow-out tomorrow, the meat clotted between a creamy smoked salmon skink starter and a rich custard desert.

So tonight it was fitting to eat more nimbly, although as ever it never really turned out like that once the butter, oil, bread and salt had been factored in. Herring fillets, virtually free, rolled in the usual flour-egg-oat layers and fried until a nutty brown in hot butter; and with it a pile of herby leaves rolled in a sweet wholegrain mustard dressing and a large wedge of lemon. A lovely, lovely meal as ever. But it seemed for some reason even more juicy, fresh and delicious than ever this evening. And my sterile glass of chilled, sparkling mineral water, for once, could not have made a better match.

The salmon of doubt

2006-11-03T23:29:00.000Z

Fucking dithering Highland bastards have left me feeling like a right cunt, having finally admitted that there will not, after all, be three prime wild salmon frozen and waiting for me and George to scale, fillet and roast and serve as the first of three themed courses to a table of 40 at my sister’s wedding in 4 weeks’ time. Two nights ago, the pair of us sat here arriving at a menu.

A budget of £150 EXCLUDING the salmon and venison. A five course meal at three pounds per head that will be 10 times better than the hotel-catering equivalent for 10 times the price. Yes, that means an overall improvement of a factor of 100. Of course, most of the reason for this absurd differential is that the cooks, namely me and George, come for free and that the proceeds don’t need t cover the family holidays of a fat absentee hotelier. You might think, therefore, that the people getting this deal of the century would go out of their way to make sure your every catering need is, well, catered for.

How wrong you could be. For one, we are dealing with the Highlands here – where arrangements are somewhat more laid back and empty promises rue the day. For two, it’s only their brother, so it doesn’t matter that much. “Oh don’t worry about the food; the salmon is in the freezer and the venison is running around somewhere with my name on it.” But they don’t care because they don’t cook. They don’t realize that it takes time to plan a sit-down meal for 40 on a budget of £150. They don’t realize that it is better to hear a flat “No” than it is to find out after 6 months of expectation that in fact none of the food you have been picturing prepped and later propped up by a few heat lamps probably never existed in the first place.

That plan had been hatched a few days ago, on Monday, when George turned up here laden with goodies from Cornwall to thrash out the menu and shopping list. It hadn’t got off to a great start anyway, as I was not very welcoming of his ideas for brown-bread ice cream or elaborate ways to cut dauphinoise. He has never made brown-bread ice cream, for example, and my trust in his ability to pull anything at all off is still suffering badly from out hellish kitchen-building experience here last month. But by the time we were tucking into a bowl of spicy pumpkin and coconut soup and a fat pasty served with nothing but a dollop of sweet, salty, vinegary ketchup we had arrived at a menu solution. It felt right to eat this food, as talking about how we were going to prepare the wedding feast had put me right off the idea.

The course in question was going to be a perfectly trimmed fillet of wild salmon from the river 100m across the road from where the guests will be sat. It was to be perched atop a soft pile of confit tomatoes, surrounded with a drizzle of parsley oil and topped with a twist of fresh herb salad. Difficult, but not impossible, to fuck up, and certainly a lot of time to prepare the fish. But by fuck, a simple way to blow people away and, moreover, to get as far away as possible from the sorry sitting-on-the-table-waiting plate of cold pate on toast or perhaps a small goats cheese and caramelized onion tart or whatever served next to a few bitter salad leaves and a boresamic reduction of some fucking sort or other. I know where I am with salmon.

But it was all in vain, as less than 24 hours later I was listening to the painful sound of family members I know, love and respect stumbling over pathetic excuses to the negative as to why the salmon was off. Feuds, delinquency and a total inability to view life from anyone else’s viewpoint but their own left us empty fucking handed.

But all is not lost, as it turns out that there is a small freezerful of the smoked variety. Now all we have to do is find a way to serve it hot. 7lb of best wild smoked salmon, and I can't quite bring myself to get excited about it. Fucking cunts. Fucking dithering Highland cunts man.

The bottle

2006-11-02T02:36:00.000Z

I should watch more television. I see Blumenthal and Hugh battling it out in their new-format food shows, the former apparently trying but totally missing the mark with ludicrous recipes that we will never, ever follow. Ditto Fearnly-Twitteringshalll, and his attempt to get a load of ready-meal munching zombies from an estate up north to experience the flavour of fresh vegetables and happy chickens and to marvel over the spherical sight of one of Hugh’s plump and ripening apples hanging in his small but eclectic orchard. Whatever he’s feeding himself he’d doing a good job if it, that’s for sure.

Spending my time semi-engaging with these people on screen would also have been the perfect fodder to help down my tea of “leftover pasta”, basically some spaghetti tossed in an eggy, creamy sauce with bacon and cabbage and parsley. The weather has turned for sure, the evenings sparkling with a light frost and the air cold and chemical. It si the weather for smoking, for sure. The temperature to sooth the plumes of smoke impacting on the back of your throat for cool comfort. The climate for a dram, a bottle of which I just bought. It may be hard to avoid temptation but I do not feel as though my home is complete, particularly at this time of year, without a dram. You never know when you are going to need it. You must always have it to hand.

Roasts

2006-10-29T23:37:00.000Z

A weekend of monumental roasts, marking the official if not experiential onset of winter. And the almost final part of my kitchen is in place – the shelf, oh the fucking shelf – and so far bearing the weight of my dried herbs and spices. The bitter irony of it, of course, is that in the 5 or 6 weeks since my condiments have been stowed in a deep plastic container on top of the chest of drawers in the living room, I have barely had to make the treacherous trip across Lego, banana and plastic shopping items to get them. Bar the odd dried chilli I just haven’t needed them. The same was true for the week I had no fucking kitchen at all. We ate very well, roasts mainly.

This weekend was no exception. My single trip outside this house since I left the Office via the Green Man on Friday evening was to the airport shop for some meat and fish. It is best this way at the moment. A weighty chuck of cod fillet and a juicy-looking rolled- shoulder of Gloucestershire Old Spot came back home with me and I set about clearing the latest items on what seems to be an everlasting household to-do list. Cleaning fridges, rationalizing sheds, taking stock of your dry-store, spend more time with the kids, have more sex with the Wife, …, you know, that sort of thing.

The day disappeared before long, but this meal wasn’t going to take much time. I wanted a rich tomato stew to go with the fish so I sweated off the usuals in my casserole and then melted down a frozen lump of fish stock. It smelled fucking awesome, some chilli and garlic in there too. And once that had started to boil I tipped in the remains of a carton of passata that had been sitting in the fridge for the last 10 days. A handful of olives and left to simmer for half an hour or so. Meanwhile I sliced and scored the cod and fried it skin-side down on a hot, all-metal pan to crisp up before throwing it in the oven to roast with a handful of sliced fennel and some butter; put some rice on; and steamed some spinach and chard. A quick scrub of the mussels and into the stew with them for five minutes. Parsley to serve. Amazing.

And tonight, some of the tastiest pork I have ever had. It must have been one fucking happy pig, that’s for sure. I propped up the dark-flesh joint with a pile of peeled coxes, thyme, sage, garlic, smoked bacon, and a thick slice of orange; and rubbed lots of coarsely ground sea salt deep into the sharp cuts in the rind. In to the oven for a good hour and 15 minutes, carefully building up gravy in the pan by occasionally deglazing with some balsamic, water, and/or red wine.

The result, passed just once into a very thin roux made with cornfour and finished off with small cubes of ice cold unsalted butter, was as good as a gravy will get. No, of course it didn’t have the breadth of flavour that a good stock would deliver. But the taste and consistency were up there with the best of them. And the meat had turned out to be cooked perfectly, slightly rare in the centre but crispy on top. It was the best pork I remember eating, and helped along with some slow-roasted Jerusalem artichokes and fennel (done in butter with a little brown sugar towards the end) and some braised kale.

We gorged our fat faces on the plentiful meat and gravy. It was to witness gluttony, but happiness too. We are maxed out in terms of sleeplessness and trying to keep up with Hyperlife.

And the best part of this has been the lack of any Sundays in this room. I stood there n front of the last remaining folders of newsprint and plastic scattered redundantly across the dirty lino floor of my local shop, and I thought to myself: “no, I have had enough of this routine”. The nights are fair drawing in now, Christmas is in the air, and I have a pot of cinnamon-, star-anise-, orange- and clove-infused veg stock sitting on my stove about to chill down over night in preparation for a pumpkin soup. I smell the spirits.

Living to excess

2006-10-27T22:47:00.000Z

I am smoking an inordinate quantity of extremely strong grass these days. A good pipe or two packed weekdays full of stinky sticky weed and effectively wiping out my brain as required of an evening. Sure you build a tolerance to it. But it’s not like drink, with which it was becoming impossible just before I stopped to actually get into any higher state than the hazy numbness and necessity of daily soaking. Green can, if you put a little effort in, transform your evening into one of soft edges and trippy detachment.

Food is plays a central role in this of course, and tonight was a case in point. The weather has definitely turned now, and I had walked an especially long walk home on account of the round trip I had to make to supply my weekend herbs. I was hungry. And we’ve had enough of the grilled meat + salad combos this week. No, this was a night for Carbs.

It turned out, in fact, that the Wife was in exactly the same mood, her day of battling with the razor sharp wits of a bright three year-old having left her in a similar state as would spending 10 hours sitting in a brightly lit, air-conditioned hallway with thirty three people of whom just five you have ever spoken to, so it seems. The fridge was looking decidedly bare on this chilly late October night, with little else but George’s diminished cheese and half a pot of decaying double cream amounting to about all that was fresh. So I mixed up a couple of eggs with the cream and some cheese, set a large pan of generously salted water on the stove, and sweated of a couple of small, finely chopped shallots, two cloves of garlic and a small amount of diced celery in my casserole. Later I tossed in some halved black olives and a few rinsed capers, and just before the spaghetti was cooked I tossed it all together retaining a good volume of the cooking water and mixed it briskly into a rich, creamy sauce with plenty of salt and pepper and a handful of chopped herbs from the garden – bits and pieces of sage, oregano and rosemary. A couple of dods of butter for good measure and onto hot deep plates, served with more cheese and freshly ground black pepper. Less than a pound a head, and filling a hole without any bullshit at all. And you can stuff all the Mars bars and Pringles in the world up your arse, munchies don’t get much better than that.

Chicken enthusiasm

2006-10-27T05:46:00.000Z

What did I just say about meat, salad & carbs? Came home in a great mood which quickly turned sour for some irrational reason I know not of. Possibly child-related, possibly home-improvement-induced, possibly Office-linked, possibly none of the above. Exclaimed to the Wife that my interest in cooking was directly proportional to my interest in being alive, and that I had no desire whatsoever to cook on this particular evening.

It wasn’t as if there was no food, I mean the fridge had some stuff in it – principally a vacpack of chicken thighs from the farmers’, some Tesco traffic-light peppers and some Tesco green beans. There were also bits and pieces of green stuff in my grimy salad bins.

Chicken is something I find hard to get excited about a the best of times. All you can do is use it as a vehicle for something you do like. In this case, on account of my lack of will to live and good intentions to hold some food over for the children, my options appeared few. So the thighs ended up being scored and rubbed with that prosaic mix of garlic and paprika, salt and oil and roasted on the top shelf for three quarters of an hour. Half way through I threw in the peppers halved into six pieces and mixed up a quick yoghurt & Dijon based dressing spiked with finely diced shallots and lemon juice.

A small handful of black olives went into the salad of cucumber, celery, a few leaves and some cooked and cooled green beans. And it was the best part really, the skin having not quite crisped up on account of my turning down the oven too early. I still haven’t properly mastered how to work that steely bitch, not really. Not if it came down to a matter of Life or Death.

It gets a bit boring after a while

2006-10-25T22:52:00.000Z

Only in Holland would you find such crude and soulless treatment of a fine cheese. For a cheese-making nation too, it is hard to forgive. Economy over knowledge; weight over value; don’t cut the fucking rinds off your parmesan block you cunts. Christ.

I discovered the massacre last night just as I was finishing off my mushroom risotto -- two thirds of the stripped block covered with a rash of blue mould. It was damp, the whole fucking thing had gotten good and wet thanks to that cheese-shop fucker.

But no matter. It washed off just fine, washed off by George in fact, my surprise visitor for the evening en route to fuck-knows-where. It was meant to be his cheese after all, a fact forgotten in all the commotion of kitchen building all those weeks ago. I tell you, it was hard to look him in the eye at first. His presence in this room, poring over the various errors to see how bad they had got in the interim, brought a flashback of the mild trauma I felt when -- after three consecutive days spent realizing the job was bigger and more complicated than I had ever anticipated -- he struck gold with a hole cutter and a water main. I will never forget that.

But I will always welcome a familiar face at my door, and I had dropped off at Tesco on the way home to bag a half shoulder of lamb and a bag of leaves to make a cheap and hearty main. I then arrived home to an empty house and opened the door to the immediate aroma of a bolognaise.

“Odd,” I thought to myself. And there indeed on top of my cooker was resting a large pan of smooth meat sauce. I tasted some, and it was fair enough. I wanted to throw out something a little more varied, and thought it the height of wastefulness or at least unreasonableness to freeze this ample pile of food when I have three hungry mouths to feed. But tonight wasn’t the night for it.

So I threw a large handful of porcini into a pan with hot water and left them to soak while I set about stuffing bits of garlic and rosemary between the fatty layers of meat; olive oil, salt, and into the oven it went on Burn for 15 minutes. And I threw a tasty little risotto together from it and the tub of cooking liquor from the hock last week to fill it out. It was a little overcooked, for sure. But a melting consistency and rich nutty taste.
And then the roasted shoulder, not nearly as crispy as I like it and served with an olive, spinach and watercress salad. Bread and butter; wine; water; you name it. Nothing. I felt awkward. I don’t know why. I think it was because I was up to the eyeballs and got paranoid. I wanted to get drunk. I don’t WANT to have to use gear every night; I want alcohol, and cigarettes. That’s what I want.

Talking of different, tonight we dined on a beef version of the Meat, Carbs & Leaves combo. It gets a bit boring after a while. This evening we dined on a tray of beautifully roasted new potatoes, sliced in half and rolled in plenty of olive oil and salt with some garlic and rosemary. And half way through I threw in the best part of a lemon cut into little wedges. I wanted something with a bit of taste to go with the meat, a slab of rump steak picked up by the Wife at the Farmers’ coated with pounded chilli and garlic and griddled perfectly for a couple of minutes each side. It was hot, mind. A dried red and fresh green [birdseye] did the trick. The salad helped all that though, tossed as the otherwise unmemorable leaves were in a yoghurty dressing. The tatties were so creamy and soft, while still maintaining a firm shape. But how many time do I need to do this?

Saved by a Swiss pie

2006-10-23T19:34:00.000Z

While casually standing there at my black Formica work-top, holding an infant in one arm and peeling a carrot with the other (much easier than you’d think), it suddenly dawned on me that my days of cooking are numbered. It is only a matter of time, maybe two years, maybe four, until we start to eat regularly every night as a family. And that means family food.

I always enjoyed my family meals as a kid, my mother’s cheese & onion pies and lasagnes; slicing mouthfuls of cold apple crumble for breakfast on a Monday morning and, my favourite, a rich-cheddar cauliflower cheese, two fat salty sausages and a spoonful of baked beans. But how much of any of it was any fun for her to make? I can only imagine that having to cook day-in day-out for three hungry mouths by a roughly reasonable hour would wear thin. She did well, rotating the favourites at just the right rate for each to hold its appeal. I, on the other hand, am facing the very real prospect of being told on a daily basis that my food is shit and nowhere near as good as so-and-so’s dad’s [the fucking pervert]. I wish I could be more like Hugh, finding the time to bake pies and pastries with his red-cheeked and healthy young children in his flour-dusted and stone-floored kitchen some, oh, mid-week afternoon when not in the, err, office.

I don’t want to dwell on that thought for now, though. We have just finished the rest of my bean stew – this time more soup-like thanks to my throwing in of almost all of the rest (minus a wee punnet for the freezer) of the cooking water into the casserole with the remains last night -- with a carrot and parsley salad (not so great really) and some soft three-seed bread smeared thickly with cool and salty butter.

But it was my apple tart, which I neglected to mention, which stole the show. Yesterday we enjoyed a good 80 degrees or so each of the warm pie with a dollop of sugared whipped cream. The pastry was so sweet and crumbly that it almost melted on the tongue, the coxes super-sweet but providing a refreshing tartness and the now-roasted whole-almond studs rounding it all off with butter and spice. It was a winner, although next time I would add another layer or two of apples to get the pastry balance a it better. And some home-made vanilla ice-cream wouldn’t be too offensive next door either. A simple classic etc.

We were then left with the other half of the Swiss pie. It would have been even tastier tomorrow -- the pasty having soaked up enough apple and sugar to turn slightly chewy, and the apple having had time to decompose every so little. But none of this was to be, at least not for me. In fact, I have already had the very last piece of this pie that I will ever take. It would appear, however, that the remaining semicircle went to a very good home – a home lived in by a friend of the Wife’s and recently vacated by said friend’s husband. So she took it round when she went over for the chat and they reheated it and felt much better, leaving a wedge for the Friend to enjoy later in front of the telly. It was a lovely pie.

Cooking with cowboy confidence

2006-10-22T23:01:00.000Z

Despite being charged with full responsibility for the care and well-being of a disturbed and at times horrific three-year old plus a speechless. legless nine-month old, today was a day devoted to producing lots of rustic, home-cooked food. It was pissing with rain all day and there was nothing else I wanted to do, other than murder my immediate family. A day of calm on most culinary fronts, other than those that were sporadically interupted by spikes of dangerous white noise followed by short but awkward readjustment periods. The eldest wearing me into the ground basically.

So I tried to get her involved in some way to redeem a qnother, rather panic-stricken, scene which took place earlier this morning whereby she lost out on her warm buttery croissant with spoonfuls of fresh strawberry jam on account of her inability to recognise House Society, or any other society for that matter. We began with some roughly chopped veg to flavour the cooking water for my ham hock, which was then to be used as a stock for the flageolet beans. There is something deeply gratifying about waking to a bowl of plump fattened beans that have been soaking all night in a clean white bowl and to a knuckle of pig alongside it that has been spending its long night similarly.

We boiled it up for a good hour and a half, strained it and flaked the deep purple flesh from the hot, sticky bones. It had taken on a sweet bacony flavour without any of the salt or nasty chemicals you associate with most twenty-first century swine; a tangerine, star-anise and three cloves bringing a sweet and comforting seasonal hint -- something to bring us all together, a thing which is in dire need of taking place soon around here.

Meanwhile I got to work on an apple pie. First, I wanted to recoup my losses from last week’s sorry pastry case for my even sorrier treacle tart (which to my annoyance the Café at work had bettered effortlessly this week). And I succeded, even though it could have been still more elastic, to bake a smooth, thick and crumbly case which I then filled with sliced coxes and topped with a warmed mix of golden syrup, lemon and butter infused with cinnamon bark and overlaid with a pastry lattice the diamond gaps of which were studded with whole blanched almonds – the ideal task for the delinquent mind.

By the time the Swiss Pie had been assembled and left to chill in the fridge it was time to get the beans on. So I sweated the sliced remains of a leek and a couple of shallots and some garlic in my casserole and rolled the plump olive-green pulses around in the hot oil for a bit before splashing in a good glug of pastis. A ladle or two of stock and then I left it for an hour or two to simmer. It was green and aromatic, fresh and musty, and it looked almost alien when I tossed in the bulbous purple meat and a tablespoon of dirty-yellow Dijon.

All that was left to do -- in between scattering pieces of variously hot/cold, old/new bread before the youngest while she did her Stephen Hawking impression in her high-chair, and ignoring her big sister’s minute-by-minute assaults against my authority -- was throw a creamy broccoli cheese together. The cabbage had been in the fridge for days and was becoming limp, so I sliced it and placed it in a buttered dish rubbed with raw garlic and poured over it a high-finesse gruyere sauce topped with more cheese and fresh breadcrumbs, which bubbled into an awesome gooey crust after its half-hour spell on the top shelf. In there below it, in my tardis-like-main oven, were the circular strudel and the remainder of last night’s sweet potatoes. This was to be a meal fit for all of us, the close family unit.

But it didn’t quite turn out that way. In fact, just before I placed the first bean of the heart-warming strew into my mouth, I thought I was going to burst into tears at the dinner table. The cacophony of two screaming children after days of similar had made irrelevant my long, slow food, half of which was made with them in mind, and brought me once again to the edge. We soldiered on, however, the meal doing all lit could to mask the indefinable madness that is being a parent of the young. And it did very well indeed, the cheesy greens matching in a coarse and unsophisticated manner the ham and beans. I would have gorged myself on it had the youngest not decided it was the best thing she had ever tasted, and it was satisfying to watch at least one of my dependents stuff themselves on my food with leaking gusto.

Nevertheless, the scene was hardly reflective of the high-res images of strangely familiar faces in the OFM around large wooden tables in some corner of continental Europe in their late autumn setting, nor indicative of the certainty and clarity of the Indie’s “Kitchen masterclass: Part 4, Puddings and Cakes”, jostling about in the foodie-revolution-PR of today’s Sundays. WAS IT? We are normal. Actually, I quit liked the latter.

Shanks for solitude

2006-10-16T22:30:00.000Z

Take a pair of shanks. Roll them in a fresh mash of garlic, rosemary and salt. Throw in a birdseye chilli for the craic, and leave in the fridge all day. Then get to work on taking your kitchen a nanometre closer to the End while having your head done-in by a screaming infant whose demands you are helpless to meet. A window sill goes from am innocuous reclaimed plank to a three hour project involving three power tools; a lick of paint still licking me 2 hours later. But at ten to six, just in time to pick the eldest up from nursery, I threw together what was to become a tender, tender shank supper and what would hopefully rescue the day from the pointlessness of incremental home improvement. A slow, warming stew. The flavour of this particular stew was spot-on, and I didn’t use any stock at all. I began by taking my trimmed, marinated shanks and placing them in a hot casserole with oil to brown up. Meanwhile I roughly chopped a leek, two large carrots, an onion and some celery and threw them in with the meat, along with a small handful of fennel seeds and some bay. After a few turns over a fierce heat I poured in a good couple of glasses of dry white wine, let it bubble down for a minute, added a bit of cold water, added a generous teaspoon of Dijon and threw the whole thing into the oven with the lid on and a leaving-the-house safety temperature of about 160 degrees. An hour and a half later, once the baths and bottles and piss and shit and videos and protests and other normal bedtime activities were complete, I threw a handful of thick-cut slices of tattie in, wetted it a bit with some more water, and slammed it back in for another hour. Which gave me time to knock up something unexpectedly special: a salad of finely sliced leeks, the rest of the firm and ripe cherry tomatoes grown in the poly tunnel behind the Shop, some well rinsed capers, olive oil and salt. I left it for a good half an hour there, in an attempt to soften the leeks. Then I tossed in a small bunch of roughly chopped herbs from the garden, all sorts really but mostly oregano. And although it sat somewhat uncomfortably next to our deep plates of perfectly cooked potatoes and shanks in a liquor that was beefed up by the birdseye to great effect. The fennel, chilli and fatty lamb flavour was awesome, and the fact that I hadn’t passed it to make a more sophisticated gravy only enhanced its simplicity. And the salad surprised with its unplaceable taste somewhere between onion and parsley, lemon and salt. Take a pair of shanks, I tell you.

Saturday's papers

2006-10-15T20:23:00.001Z

Childhood mate of Jamie Oliver and celebrity spoof pig farmer, once broadcast “pleasuring” a boar to harvest semen (or wait a minute, wasn't that Big Brother?), Jimmy Docherty has hit the nail on the head concerning our backward attitude to food. Well, almost: “Inverted snobbery” about good food, he writes in the Times, is preventing the masses -- who, like kids who are too cool for homework, are largely responsible for the supermarket shelves being lined with processed shite and rock-bottom prices in the first place -- from improving their diet.

“People need to realise that there’s nothing posh about caring about good food,” he adds. Okay, so he doesn’t quite make the subsequent and final connection by admitting that it’s his Creative & Media crew that is making people associate class and cash with eating well, but it’s a start.

He looks like a sound enough bloke to me. And his opinions don’t come fucking close to the iatrogenesis of that snuffling sap down in Dorset, the sight of who’s smug face adorning the front page prevented me from purchasing my usual Saturday. But what is it with him and that Australian sommelier of Jamie’s at his making-poverty-history restaurant? They’re like holograms crafted from the same Jamie brand: the agricultural one, the wine & spirits one. Bright, scruffy guys in their early thirties living the dream and selling that dream to us the panicking public lost as to our purpose or goals in life.

[Which reminds me: The people, the Scottish National Trust, who recently advertised for two new families to relocate to the inner Hebridean island of Tiree (population 15) to make it habitable, have been inundated. Tens of thousands of applications from all over, mostly the south east, many from deluded folk in the States in search of their ancestors, all trying to escape the same fucking things.]

And no wonder. This morning, for example, I made a trip I had intended to make all week – a trip to the timber merchant’s to pick up a piece of sill for my FUCKING kitchen. A simple job, for sure, a 1.2m standard piece of wood, thank you very much. And I suspected the place shut at 12 so I made a point of getting there before hand. In fact, it was 8 minutes-to by the time I pulled up at the closed gates. So I left the wain in the car and let myself though to the open shop door at the other side of the forecourt.

“Oh, glad I caught you before you disappeared,” I said, relieved after having already trying last week to do this very same thing and finally standing there in a shop where I knew I was going to find what I wanted. But I was wrong.

“We’re closed, “ said a thick-looking stump of a man in his early twenties. “I’m not serving you,” he added, after I pointed out that it was before 12 in the clock directly above his head. Anyway, I then started to swear at him. I think my bullshit-free attitude at the Office of late is rubbing off. I called him a fat cunt too, and the interaction ended with me screaming “pricks” out of the passenger window as I screeched off and him raising his finger and shouting words to the effect of “fuck you”.

But why did it have to come to this, I beg of you? Who won here? And half an hour later I had a similarly detached encounter with a human-like biped in a petrol station. But my trip ended with friendly faces in the Airport Shop, for which I pad thirty five quid. In return I got a bag of cod cheeks, some smoked haddock and prawns with which to make a killer fish pie to see us through the weekend and, the best part, a hunk of tuna loin which I am going to serve up to a vegetarian friend who has just started to get back into fish, chicken and turkey. A slab of ultra-rare loin then? Perhaps slightly forceful, hence the stodgey back-up. But the fucker nearly killed me. It took two hours, while I also make a fish stock (for some reason, and a veggie stock to cook some beans that are currently saturating in water).

I am literally falling asleep as I write this. High and knackered a the same time. I cannot go on with no sleep like this for days. Children crying all night, behaving in a disturbed manner by day. Mornay sauces splitting, curdling, whatever you want to call it. And the first hint at troubles to come with the wedding catering: a wild–west drink-fuelled diatribe, perpetrated by my Sister, has ceased the flow of free highland produce.

The grass is greener

2006-10-07T07:18:00.000Z

I want to get away from this feeling. The feeling that you can’t do certain things without certain other things in place. Such as an evening at home without a bag of grass. The feeling of dependence – not some trivial physical thing like withdrawal symptoms etc, but having to depend on others to get hold of the stuff. It’s this alone that will drive me to get off it. It sucks self-respect like nothing else on earth. It makes you feel like a fucking parasite. And this is what makes gear worse than drink, nothing else.

This weekend has now been ruined by it. Take Friday, last night. Having half-heartedly told myself the evening before, on running out of my last little bit, that I would seize the opportunity to take an unspecified break, I decided by mid-morning that I would “drop by” (it’s in the completely opposite direction to my usual walk home) the Place and pick up a ten-bag (despite having been expecting a delivery from my neighbour all week). I never hand around there, and there’s normally no need to. But for some reason, this time nobody was selling.

So I stood there with my can of red bull among the physically and mentally deformed, pretending that I had some higher purpose like studying the game of pool before me, all the while surrounded by plumes of sweet cannabis smoke. I watched one or two other desperates turn up; by Christ they looked sad. We all looked sad. We all knew we were in the same boat despite not making eye contact. Each of us sitting there with our courtesy half-pints or softs, the have-nots versus the haves. Although “haves” is not necessarily the best depiction, seeing as one guy had his mouth on the side of his face and the other had a limp. Another, who had sorted me out before and clearly knew who I was, didn’t even look at me.

What desolation some people must feel when realizing that all is not what it seems, the smiles and winks and nods. The Cash. And I hated myself as much as I did this pathetic scene of quasi-depravity, knowing that I was not going to be home in time to kiss my beautiful daughter goodnight even though I was going home empty-handed.

So I knocked on the neighbour’s door when I got back and he promised me he was going to sort it out that night, and in I got to my unsuspecting wife for a quiet night of frustration as I realised what I knew was going to be the case anyway, that the goods were never to be seen. But a tasty lamb kebab interrupted it. Lamb mince spiced with toasted cumin, fennel and coriander. Lots of chilli and into a pita with some rocket, tomatoes, onions and some garlic-infused yoghurt. It was one of the best kebabs I’ve eaten.

IT’S NOT NOT HAVING IT THAT FUCKING FUCKS ME OFF, IT’S LOOKING FORWARD TO GETTING FUCKING RIPPED AND THEN NOT BEING ABLE TO DO IT. UNLIKE DRINK, WHICH I COULD GET FROM ANYWHERE AT ANY TIME, GEAR FORCES YOU TO RELY ON THE MOST UNRELIABLE PEOPLE WHO HAVE EVER WALKED THE EARTH.

Then this morning, having had the neighbour assure me he would sort it out this evening, I started to crack. It had nothing to do with the lack of gear, ???, but in watching the wife tile the kitchen walls. She was intent on making a good job of the corner, which I knew nobody would ever see. The electrics had to be off and the light was getting dim. I nearly broke down. I don’t know what brought it to this. I was just shouting at her, not in a maniac screaming fashion, but in an unnerving and uncharted way. I did not feel like I was in control. It was witnessing her going through what I had gone through that tipped it.

Hearing her need to talk to someone to share the realisation that, in fact the job [the tiling] was going to take considerably longer than she had anticipated while standing back and looking at it, even with the previous day’s experience behind her. I didn’t want to hear it. That was it. I had gone through too much of this in the last three weeks. I didn’t care one flying fuck about the tiling in the corner that I was never going to see again. Really.

I saw the fear in her eyes though, when she saw the sate I was in. I felt like I was about to cry. It was then that I left the house for the Place under the pretences of some mineral water and to give us ten minutes’ recuperation. So I rolled up there feeling desperate but nonetheless better off for it. Except that when I got there it was dry again. Thick with smoke and fucking dry again.

So I came back resigned to the hopelessness of my situation and kidded myself that I would write-off the neighbour’s dues and start afresh: on my own. But it was a farce, of course. So I slowly cleaned, scored and stuffed two fat mackerel picked up at the airport shop with bay, garlic, lemon and salt. I just couldn’t see how I was going to be able to eat it straight. The fish were eventually baked and served with a fresh fennel, tomato and rocket salad. That rocket lasted 4 fucking meals and it only cost 80p. I enjoyed it as best I could. But the strangest thing about tonight is that my fruitless trip to the bar seems as if it was a dream. It doesn’t feel as if I was there at all.

A veal moment

2006-10-04T03:37:00.000Z

The stock is a good one. I was too fucked last night, too stoned, too tired, to work out how best to divide it among the plastic tubs. So I filtered it down slowly, at midnight straining it at least 4 times and gently extracting all the juices from the soggy matter left over. Anyway, you need a day or two to get to know your stock. This stuff is fucking gold man, I swear to you.

The butcher was going to cut down the beef that afternoon and so had no bones when I arrived. So I asked him if he still had veal bones and got a fiver’s worth, and then a bag of fresh pork bones that I spotted under his bench plus a couple of trotters. Anyway, it all went in the roasting tray and pot with the browned veg too, minus the trotters, and out came a golden light brown stock with a depth AND BREADTH that I hitherto not experienced. It was so fucking tasty you wouldn’t believe it. I got the volume/reduction ratio bang on.

But the best part was this morning. It was the first thing I did when I went downstairs to look in the fridge at the result. It was solid, jelly, with a thin rim of yellowy fat on top. I set it back, and looked forward to coming home tonight and slicing it up, melting it back down and pouring it into containers. And that’s exactly what I did, with, in fact, the whole family helping as it turned out. There was a strange fascination with it. The Eldest stuck labels onto the tubs for me while the wife marvelled at the weird structure and form of the stuff. And so I urged her to taste some, and the bairn too, who was clearly puzzled when the thing she had just watched her parents oohing and aaaahing about was not, in fact, something sweet and nice, but a deeply savoury and rudimentary veal stock.

Sadly I didn’t think while at the Shop yesterday to pick up a couple of slices of fillet of something to try out the liquor. So tomorrow at the farmers’ it will have to be. I think we’re going for the pepper steak. Cream sauce. Old-school done well.

Tonight we therefore had to make do with some filler, a tasty bowl of spaghetti tossed in an egg, cream and cheese solution and oily greek olives, finely diced shallot and garlic. Served with a cold and somewhat chewy runner bean salad. Fair enough like. And I need to buy some time back from the ether.

Transported to a dusty bar

2006-10-02T22:15:00.000Z

Chirst. I’m in danger of turning into a HFW myself here, spending as I have my new Monday off making stock. It was a pleasant day, in between abusing the youngest in some way or other, putting the plinth on the bottom of my UNICS and keeping watch over the bubbling cauldron. A kipper for breakfast and, eventually, three fillets of herring rolled in oatmeal with a light leafy salad dressed in mutarde de meaux and lots of butter and lemon.

The combination of the sweet rustic dressing and the buttery oats transported me to a quiet wooden tabled bar in the mid afternoon light with a glass of slightly cold ale. I ate most of it with my fingers, marvelling at the simplicity of the meal as I gently squeezed the toasted oat shell into the firm grey and purple flesh between my thumb and forefinger. It could have been 3000 years ago, somewhere in the Highlands. Minus the springy poly-tunnel lettuce of course. But no need. A meal in one, that. You might get a couple of sprigs of parsley in kitchen window from time to time.

In preparing the fish I also had to source an egg last minute, ending up next door at the Poles’. They were happy to show their neighbourly generosity and, once I’d faltered for 20 seconds pathetically over my attempt at saying “jajko”, proudly got all their eggs out for me to see. Two trays of them, dozens of eggs. Lots of plastic. Simple design. The lowest form of animal protein possible, the battery of the batteries: Tesco value eggs, by the 2 dozen by the looks of it. It was the colour of that coconut liqueur stuff you drink at Dutch weddings. Foul, so to speak.

Time is running out every day, there is never enough of it. But I am relishing it. I am thinking about drink a lot, this warm-up cold-spell triggering this that and the other. But I can keep on track here. The gear I need to address though. It is going exactly the same way as alcohol now. I get edgy when I am about to run out and then, after a morning of convincing myself that I will face enjoy the hardship of going without for a few days, get a batch in and smoke it harder and until I am fucked on it every night.

I mean, I am going a fiver’s worth of the best green you can buy most nights. A couple of full pipes, to myself. And I am getting immune to it, like I was with drink. Unable to actually reach that euphoric state that used to be the motivating factor, but unable not to have the necessaries to try every single night, and in reality spending all my home-life in a bubble.

But there is no doubt I am a better father and husband with it at the moment. I am telling myself it is because I am going through a bad patch with the drink, but it’s totally fucking separate. It’s the fuck I like, getting fucked. It doesn’t matter a fuck what it is. Or how I get there. It’s just getting away from it. I hope there is nothing in my current life that I am trying to blot out, like the nightmare of having young children or unconscious doubts about my marriage.

Living a lie in Dorset

2006-10-02T00:47:00.000Z

A shattering weekend of d i FUCKING y and children. Not sure exactly which one drives me over the edge, but to the edge I have been driven. No matter what people say about how hard kids can be before you have them, nothing prepares you for the situation whereby you need to get something finished, like fix the last couple of wall tiles to the tiny bit of wall the area of which was a far cry from what you have envisaged, and you need to pop out quickly to get another bag of adhesive and you are faced with that expression of “Right. Now, I’m not going to move an inch, instead standing here with my head cocked to one side and my eyes big and glancing upwards radiating with the enjoyment of watching you fucking disintegrate”.

But it’s not even that, nor the having to end every third situation by carrying her sideways into another room. It’s the dichotomy of standing there filled to the brim with rage for the relentless timing and pointlessness of it all, and being full of respect for and even in awe of this tiny creature before you so determined to make a stand – just for the hell of it. Willing to go without pretty much anything in exchange for her stubborn honour. It’s a wonderful madness.

So I left the Wife to tile proper while I took them in the car with the express intention of not stopping until they were flat out. It was Sunday after all, and I could sit anywhere with a modest view and read my paper in between bouts of torrential rain. That anywhere turned out to be one of the emergency entrances/exits of the runway at the airport, the very same spot in which I had a memorable moment with the eldest, a picnic and bottle of Chablis between the knees that splendid time. This time a pipe did the trick, for all of the ten minutes I got before the fucking baby started screaming again.

I had, in fact, come out here to try for some bones at the shop (tomorrow I am going to celebrate the fact that I do not work Wednesdays anymore by making the first of two great stocks). But it was closed, so tonight we ate again from the fridge for fuck-all. The chorizo had put me in the mood for a curry, not to mention the daily smell wafting from the horrific take-out place around the corner, and there’s not much better a way to use four chicken thighs (anything else might leave you in danger of tasting one). So I threw together a chilli stew, while tandem-cooking the bairn’s chicken broccoli and pesto pasta.

And the news of the weekend is that Hugh Fearnly Twitteringsville has joined the fucking Guardian, opening his weekly and presumably well remunerated column with an informal biog explaining why you shouldn’t hate him for being a professional food writer supposedly living the dream on his riverside cottage in Dorset. Not quite sure I got his thesis, but it was nevertheless interesting to have my stereotype challenged. Okay, so some of it I had got right -- the public school bit for example. The year above David Cameron at Eton, as it turns out, not that it makes much difference. He then did philosophy at Oxford, leading him naturally a jobs as a commis in the River Cafe.

I can just picture him there, the big loafing fop convinced of his own importance (what is it with that place and weird, power and cash crazy media types?) and using all his prep time to marvel obsessively at his own genius, so much so that he didn’t realise he was part of a team and that nobody gave a shit how plummy his tomatoes were. And so he was fired.

He reckons he didn’t fancy sticking it in the high-end restaurant scene, “having your head dunked in the stock-pot and being called a talentless c**t”. No, Hugh, just “c**t” I think you’ll find. And then he takes a flying trip up his own fat arse, taking off with the paragraph “I am aware that some people are now of the opinion that I have the perfect job. And I am aware that, on all the available evidence, their opinion seems well-founded.” Fucking hell. What wouldn’t you give for ten minutes in a room with him and a heavy utensil? I stopped reading. He’s a brand, and he will therefore bleed himself to death.

Kitchen clockwork

2006-09-24T21:11:00.000Z

Today I got the neighbours across and assembled a meal to christen the kitchen in style. A leg of best lamb slow roasted with garlic and olive oil, served in a little pile of moist brown slices over which I poured a fresh rosemary jus and topped with a fingerfull of wild flower and herb salad. The bottomless depths of flavour of the sauce hit everyone’s soul. The weather and scene outside were autumnal, yet the sun was hot and I wasn’t sure which way to go with the roast accessories.

But my eventual idea came good. So, with the little pile of tender lamb I threw out three bowls of veg: boiled tiny new tatties rolled in butter, leeks and parma ham; glazed carrot batons cooked in an aromatic vegetable broth; and a salad of runner beans and a sharp lemon-Dijon vinaigrette.

My virtual breakdown induced by the kitchen build was making me may close attention to what I was doing, and I went about the broth with rare precision and reliance on the subtleties of the flavours. It paid off, nobody able to stop putting the liquor into their mouths in some way or other. And the desert pushed it even further: a rude apple crumble spiked with oats and almonds, made with equal ratios of flour, sugar and butter despite the consistency being more gooey than usual and baked on a high heat for a good 40 minutes. It turned into a chewy cross between crumble and flapjack, a substance that almost disgusted you with its ability to make you gorge yourself on it until you were ill. It sat atop a deep layer of sweet but firm apples, and I served it with a spoon of good vanilla ice cream and a zigzag of concentrated blackberry&lime cordial reduction. The kitchen functions like clockwork.

Kitchen cowboys

2006-09-22T23:47:00.000Z

Picking up my Home Improvement Partner (who, in the course of the next four days, would go from being best my mate to a lost soul questioning its reason for existence) from the airport (on account of the shear mass of cordless power tools he had with him) meant that I had the chance to stop off at the Shop for some food to see us and the family through the next wee while in the absence of a kitchen.

Lots of positive, enthusiastic chat as we made trips to various trade outlets, B&Q in particular. Lots of sizing up, lots more talk. A big job for sure, but we’ll have it done by the end of tomorrow, leaving Wednesday for the carpentry. So we talked about it some more and then went on another tip to B&Q. And by the end of the day we had caught up and overdosed on coffee and it was time to eat some scraps of super-rare roast beef and a tray of loosely roasted root veg, followed by a plate of cheese and some thickly buttered crackers.
And then we set about joyfully assembling the poxy white Ikea carcasses, keeping track of the associated medley of shiny metal fittings, multi-sized screws and ill-fitting plastic caps. We were done in no time. Spirits were high, the sweet and nutty smoke of Golden Virginia filling the room, mixed with powdery dry plaster and chipboard dust. Homely. This was going to be a good couple of days.

The following morning, Day 2, feeling infinitely fresher than we would have been had we sat up screaming at each other in the midst of a 5am whisky frenzy as may well have happened back in the oh-so recent days when I was under the illusion that I could drink properly, began with some trips to one or two obscure trade outlets for some bits of plumbing and some shelving. We were gone for three hours, and within minutes of returning I was back on my way to B&Q for some electrical sockets, switches, backing boxes, ... It came together in the end and we rewarded ourselves with a slab of centre beef rib, almost black from ageing, stuffed with creamy white pearls of hard fat, cooked on a searing grill pan and served with a simply dressed salad of tomatoes fresh from the Wife’s all-day refuge at an allotment-loving friend’s house. Hot beef, the beefiest we had eaten; cold tomatoes, as ripe as they get. And afterwards the rest of the cheese served hot rolls and salty butter. Things were going well without the worktops.

---

It is now Wednesday, the last day allocated for this jolly fun exercise. Things have hardly moved for 24 hours now. Everything looks the same. And the sockets still have to be done before we even think about it. So once I’d got back from B&Q we set about working out how to proceed. Electricity is a dangerous entity. Several years of higher education in the physical sciences, being examined an a regular basis on your knowledge of the fundamental laws of nature and made to demonstrate your practical prowess in countless pointless desk-top experiments, is no preparation for the prospect of facing the ring-main of your own house armed with a so-called tester screwdriver and a roll of fucking insulating tape.

But you have to tell yourself that it is all imaginary, like the notion that rock climbing on a highly exposed cliff edge with a 30m drop is more dangerous than a 5m fall off a boulder; once you have gripped that bright red thick copper cable between your thumb and forefinger -- and it really takes you to grip that fucker, however long you spend flicking it slightly and as quickly as you can as if this will make a single iota of difference – you can get stuck into it with smug self confidence. And you might then get as far as successfully chipping and scraping out a spur or two for your appliances and changing a face plate.

But your euphoria will be short lived. Before you know it you will be deafened by the sound of steel-on-steel as you pound haplessly away at the diamond-like artex of your back-wall, the entire house shaking with each deadening blow and the primitive blunt implement making its way micrometer by bone-shuddering micrometer.

Day 4. It was obvious from the fucking outset that we were going to fuck the sink. It was a cunt of a job anyway, full as it was with its very tightly fitting pipes and edges, and we were essentially fucked before we even tooled up. The exchange of nervous jokes ensued, laughing about how we knew we were going to fuck it but that somehow by talking about it we would avert disaster – a bit like taking a bomb on every flight you go on based on the fact that it is infinitesimally unlikely that two bombs would be placed independently on the same plane.

So off we set cleverly marking our masking tape to allow for the ten-mill recess for the frame and to line it all up. And then the checking began, stopping and remeasuring every mark, pretending we knew what we were doing. Yes the sink is 93cm long, yes that means it will just fit into the units; aye, it’s still 93cm long. In the end we were just going through the motions, so confident we were that our numbers were correct. And then came the excitement of cutting the rectangular slab out of the single piece of worktop that it would take four weeks to replace, beginning with the fattest drill hole we could make at the four corners and a small adrenalin rush. Then the jigsaw, gnawing its way irreversibly through the gluey weetabix profile. And within a few minutes, out it popped and the moment arrived -- the moment we had both been dreading yet wanted to have over as soon as possible, a bit like the death of a parent.

We rushed the sink into its hole to end the suspense once and for all, and within three seconds we realized what had happened. An oversight of the largest proportions, the sink not in fact being a perfect rectangle after all but, rather, a rectangle with rounded edges. The process of acceptance was swift but proceeded in familiar stages: beginning with disbelief [that you could have done something so fucking stupid having just spent the whole day joking about doing precisely that], mutual embarrassment [as a result of there being nowhere to hide from the fact that you are both officially cowboys], self-delusion [that by focussing all your frustration you will somehow remedy the situation and redeem your personal worth], realisation [that your solution, despite being the best there was on offer and at the forefront of your abilities, isn’t actually good enough], disillusion [that you really shouldn’t be the ones doing this in the first place], and finally, introspection [why did it always have to happen this way?].

And then there was a slump. We were downed by it, leaning on the bastard like it was our heavyweight sparring partner. It was hard to pick up the tools afterwards because we were acutely aware that no matter what we did, no matter how hard we tried, we were utterly capable of doing something just as fuckwittish to the next job.

But on we went, screwing it all down, and we started to get back onto a roll come early evening as the prospect of running water and drainage loomed large. So I bathed the children and sat in front of the Jungle Book to the happy sound of “CUNTING FUCKING IKEA CUNTS” emanating from the laminated depths of a unit with two short legs haging out of it. And once bedtime had passed the momentum picked up again, and although it was getting on we knew we were heading for a couple of hours of firing on all cylinders to get the main structure finished and functional. A 45 degree wooden worktop support was a nice evening’s project for me, so I set about measuring the wood. A bubbling pot of tomato and porcini coking in beef fat in the background; the Wife due back shortly from her evening class to find the kids cleaned, dried and bedded down. My best mate talking optimistically about getting as far as hanging a couple of unit doors by bedtime.

But none of this picture of thirty-something bliss was to be. As I bumbled quasi-efficiently about measuring up my right-angle, HIP was attending to a routine job we had meant to do earlier but didn’t get round to: cutting a hole through the back of the units for the dishwasher outflow tube. I could see the twin copper pipe carrying mains and hot water to the rest of the house rattling a little as the serrated disk of his cordless wonderdrill nagged its way though the laminated cardboard, but I simultaneously dismissed my the nightmare thought that he was about to drill through the mains at this stage in the game. And then all I heard was the terrifying groan of “oh no”, followed rapidly by what I immediately recognized as the tinny sound of high-pressure-water-jet –spilling into brand new unit.

I spent perhaps a minute living between attempts to see the funny side of things and catching glimpses of the full implications were of what had just taken place. Everything had shattered at our feet in an instant. We stemmed the flow but I could see it in his eyes: he had been broken. The sink we were unfortunate with, as daft as cunts for sure. But we had channelled all our lost pride into cutting irregular polygons from black formica with scissors, and had been reasonably pleased with our repair job.

Bursting the cold water main, however, the one installed just the day before, while attending to the afterthought of some drainage pipe for the yet-to-be-purchased dishwasher – plumbed new depths of self loathing. And it had little to do with the fact that we were facing an evening without water, the night before I was due back in the Office having not washed for three days and stinking of what smelled like sweet bum-sweat.
Rather, it was the sinking although immediate realization that the job, as we had defined it, was over. And with silent self searching, and alcohol for those who were able, the self-ridicule began. It was so awful it had to be funny etc, but as we stood there in the sawdust and water we all knew the sparkle had gone. So we lived out the rest of the evening dining on an the somewhat unusual penne+sauce livened up by some toasted pine nuts and basil, and served with a truffle–dressed green salad and hot salty rosemary bread. Some ice cream and chocolate sauce to soothe the pain. And a night of solemn tool gathering and cleaning up. Laughing at ourselves in some desperate way. The trouble is that the worst was still to come.

It began that night with delusional exchanges about what HIP would do the following day before lugging his tools back to the airport. Making a jig for the doors to help us get the handles in the right places, for example, or even getting as far as hanging a couple, and maybe picking up a new chuck key for my drill while he was out at the shop getting stuff. Alas, I arrived home after a day of readjustment to an environment in which outbursts of FUCKING CUNTS PUT THE CUNTING HOLES IN THE WRONG FUCKING PLACE etc are not the normal teatime chat, to be told that there was one more minor disaster.

To say I wasn’t in the mood for the conversation would be to understate wildly the feelings going through my already tattered brain. But hear it out I did, and with it drained the last piece of optimism that was going to get me through the remainder of the project. He had marked, and then drilled, all the handles in the middle of the doors, rendering them useless and visually ridiculous. I almost broke down. I loathed him for his errors. I smoked a fat pipe and sat there in uncertain fear of whether my disturbed behaviour was real or put on for the benefit of a reaction. But I found myself feeling deep empathy for the man too as I pushed spoonfuls of beefy bolognaise into my disembodied mouth.

I mean, Jesus Christ. Not even the dubious celebration of going out with the bang of a burst main, just a drizzle of pathetic fuck-ups as the project peters out like the runny aftertracks of a monumental stool. Fuck. For we shared something this week. The project wracked us. And I have learned a lot in the last 5 days. For example, about how much I never want to entertain that baseless delusion that I would be just as happy in life humping blocks on a building site or planting trees in the highlands. It is utter shite. You can fucking shove it . In any case, the simmering irony behind all of this is that it turns out I don't actually need a kitchen to cook at all.

Graft

2006-09-18T20:48:00.000Z

I feel as if I have been beaten up. I have been worked hard. My hands are cut to ribbons and the areas that aren’t feel like sandpaper. I can barely move without aching pains, my lower knees red and bruised from kneeling on concrete. My quadriceps can only just power stance. But there is progress to show for it: a beautifully tiled floor. And a meal of yesterday’s roast beef.
I knew I would look like an idiot before my hard-grafting plasterer uncle if I started to piddle around preparing a full meal on the little work surface we had in the little time allowed. But all I had to do was slice a few tatties and throw them into a tray with some garlic, rosemary, oil, salt and pepper. Forty minutes later and out came the warming sight of caramelized edges and soft squidgey centres, thrown out on the table with a plateful of thinly sliced cold roast beef and a big bowl of salad dressed with the Dijon gloop I’d prepared yesterday. It was an appropriate and pleasant celebration of the day’s efforts. And then I handed over - with difficulty - a litre of my favourite and now redundant dram, thanked them for the pain, and waved goodbye.

Floorless

2006-09-16T20:44:00.000Z

I took great pleasure in ripping out the remaining bits of my kitchen and the plastic wood floor that surrounded it, without a hint of emotion. I found chipboard-like materials soft with bacteria, black and slimy behind the sink. It was fucking disgusting. We have been living daily with this risk for two and a half years. It is going to look very different in here soon, and then after a week or two I imagine we will carry on as before, taking our richer surroundings for granted and busying ourselves with new notions of stainless steel appliances, hoods and extractors, floating islands, spots, hooks and rails. And then we’ll move.

The stripped-down meal plan is working out. I mixed a mustard dressing this morning to go with tomorrow’s leaves, and prepared a large, dark, marbled joint of topside for its roasting. Then, with everything but the cooker still standing, I placed the joint into the oven for an hour and then took it out to rest while I rolled an autumnal vegetable mix in the pan juices and fat. There were parsnips in there, neeps, carrots, courgettes, mushrooms and garlic too. The meat was bursting with beefy flavour, red and juicy and topped with a crispy ribbon of hot yellow fat. Who needs a fucking kitchen?

My own food, I could just about handle

2006-09-14T05:43:00.000Z

I keep dreaming about the oddly macabre Fat Duck logo, which was everywhere from the thick black wax seal on the cloth-like envelop containing my copy of the menu, to the embossed paper doily for the complimentary chocolates accompanying my coffee. And about the food too, every fucking night I am back there with those dishes, close to them somehow. And the night before I went I had Gordon Ramsay in them too – me and Gordon, casually turning up at Heston’s place in our leather jackets one afternoon for a few beers after service, trying out some of his latest lab work and talking shop.

But waking life goes on. As it did when we crashed back to Earth on Sunday with a stir fry. My own food I could still handle, though, and I just tossed the rest of the bits of veg from Friday’s meal in the wok and fried it in the quarter cup of five-spice pork fat I’d retained. A few noodles and we knocked it back without comment.

Then it was Monday and the Duck helped me through a drab day in the Office before coming home to put myself back into my food with the last tub of thick chicken stock I had in the freezer. I put it to good use in a risotto along with white wine, soaked porcini and some truffle oil at the end. It was the best risotto I have made, that stock warming us from our toes to our heads. Some rocket-watercress leaf thing and rosemary bread.

Don’t forget your fucking good risotto you bastard. It was heavenly stuff, too much of it of course, but heavenly. You make some of the best stocks you have ever tasted and you know how to use then to great effect. So don’t fucking give up now you Cunt. And don’t forget also the perfect noodle stir fry you knocked together for two late at night while tired and overwhelmed by the meal that changed your life.

Starting to get into the idea of Heston’s flavour deconstruction, but find myself getting stuck at the first hurdle: time. As I walk into the Office in the morning I think of things I can do to avoid roasting the leg of lamb in my freezer in the usual, excellent way and serving it with predictable but nicely done veg and loads of it too. So I imagined taking a good cut out of the bastard and simmering it gently in fat for 10 hours before shredding it with two forks and filling a ravioli or something like that with it. This of course would be served next to the more conventionally prepared meat, perhaps with a mint jelly sliding around somewhere, and a block of carrots glazed to taste of a million carrots and some rosemary jus that bears no visual evidence of the green herb, sp to speak.

And then I realized that this is all fantasy: I do not have the time to do a mere tenth of this amount of cooking, even if I could. And I also have to try to keep tea together on these brief post-work evenings, last night for example making use of things the Wife had bought-in like plastic mackerel, watercress, peppers and soft brown buttered bread. Salads and what-not. No matter, though, as everything tasted the same anyway. Mackerel and watercress, and whisky winegums.

But perhaps things are starting to get back to NORMAL, with today’s trip to the farmer’s market bearing fruits de mer in the form of a 2kg bag of small sweet moules which I steamed in a tasty liquor of stock, cream and wine. Leftovers really, and soaked up with the rest of the three-seed bread. But fuck it was good. I paid closer attention than usual to the size of the dice with the shallots and garlic, and used half a tub of nondescript fish stock with properly reduced Sur Lie. Double cream and flat-leafed parsley at the end. Bread coated with creamy butter. Untouchable.

In preparation for the kitchen build this weekend, during which I will have nothing but my cooker in the room, I picked up a joint of beef large enough to kill a man, which I want to cook at 70 degrees for a few days, for the craic. And the stock is running out at last. Need to make some more. Will be the first thing that happens once I get my new kitchen built. Once.

The World's best restaurant

2006-09-11T21:52:00.000Z

From the moment I walked in I knew we were somewhere different. Wooden tables, well made, spaced considerately apart and partnered with simple sturdy chairs; set simply with thick cream napkins and solid cutlery with a thick water tumbler and a large spotless wine glass per setting; a short but complete menu that made perfect sense in its classic English setting. And this was just in the pub next door. Okay, so the pub was called the Hind’s Head and owned by Heston Alien-Blumenthal, but it set the scene perfectly for the afternoon that was about to unfold.

Blumenthal’s main gaff, The Fat Duck, is so unassuming in its small village location that I walked past it without noticing. Then I noticed some plumage, which turned out to come from a small brass plate next to a well-maintained door. During the same moment I also looked upward towards something that was catching my field of view and noticed the familiar webbed logo swinging back and fore from its metal boom. A Ferrari passed unmistaken behind me.

Bray, the village just off the M4 before you get to London, has the highest number of Michelin stars per resident of any other place in Britain, boasting as it does two of the UK’s three three-starred restaurants within three minutes walk of one another: The Duck and the Waterside, perched on the well-tended banks of the Thames. But the latter hasn’t had quite the same accolade as world’s best and world’s second best restaurant in the last two years to boot.

I knew about the snail porridge and bacon&egg ice cream before I walked through the door, but I hadn’t quite counted on just how much fun I was going to have for the next four hours. The show kicked off with a physics experiment, as you might expect from the dean of molecular gastronomy: a ball of egg white infused with tea, lime and vodka, cooked before your very eyes at -186 degrees in a flask of liquid nitrogen, which disappeared in a puff of nothingness when you popped it into your mouth.

“The tea cleanses the pallet,” stated the waiter with a cute French accent. “The lime wakes it up,” he went on, “and the vodka takes the fat out of your mouth.” He was right: Heston’s “nitro-green tea and lime mousse (2001)” had reset my senses in an instant.

Next, it was my brain.

A waiter placed a small plate on which sat two perfect squares of jelly: an orange one and a purple one.

“This is an orange and a beetroot jelly,” he said. “May I suggest that you eat the orange one first.” So I did, and within a second I looked up across the table to be met with the same slightly contorted expression that I must have been sporting, my mouth filled with the strongest, sweetest taste of beetroot I had ever tasted yet which my brain was telling me was orange. He had switched the flavours, and all we could do was chuckle at ourselves for having been caught out. It put me in the perfect mood; I had become receptive to the power of the unexpected.

There were still three amuse bouches to go before the main elements of the tasting menu arrived, the first a fresh oyster with passion fruit jelly and lavender which was like a slice of the North Atlantic that had been reduced, jellified and made to taste as if every molecule of sodium chloride within it was undergoing a reaction with my rapidly secreting saliva; the second a teaspoon sized quenelle of wholegrain mustard ice cream sited in the centre of a small dimple in a large white plate that was filled with a freshly poured pool of red cabbage gazpacho with 9 or 10 perfectly cut millimetre-cubed shallots; and the third an inclined plastic dome filled with chilled layers of a bright green pea puree, a meaty quail jelly and a smooth & thick langoustine cream topped with a tiny quenelle of fois gras parfait. I cut though the layers with my solid silver and subtly webbed teaspoon and felt the soft luxurious combo melt on my tongue. Its four or five little spoonfuls were all you needed, my God. The temperature of the dish also went against what you might expect from such flavours, drawing your attention to exactly how bizarre yet brilliant what you were eating was.

First up on the main sequence was Heston’s famous snail porridge, which for some reason I had convinced myself was really only going to be a nice risotto. It really wasn’t. It came as a bright green mound, parsely-based and flecked clearly with whitish grey oats. On top of this sat three small juicy snails, some dark red shredded Joselito ham and lots of shaved fennel. Taken together the flavours mixed well, and the volume of matter on my plate was just enough to afford me a full sample of the tastes and textures on offer by the time it had run out. I mopped up the thick green residue with the exceptional crusty brown bread that was being offered freely, spread thickly with the richest creamiest saltiest home-churned butter I have ever tasted.

Next was a dish with a nod if odd to tradition, comprising three pieces of roast fois gras with almond fluid gel, cherry and chamomile. The gel was extraordinary in texture and taste, utterly smooth and silky yet filling your mouth with a million freshly chewed almonds. As were the three tiny perfect orange-yellow cubes of almond jelly, which dissolved much slower than the fatty liver when taken together in your mouth and served to draw your attention to the genius of the combo. The cherry, impressed innocently in the almond gel, was the tastiest I have ever eaten.

The next course was the closest to the edge. Savoury ice creams do have their limits I reckon, and sardine on toast flavour is about it. As ever, the dish arrived in perfect form, an oval disc of mackerel ‘invertebrate’ sitting next to the sorbet which was anchored with some strips of marinated daikon and had protruding from it a thin wafer of toast. The toast helped. Together it all worked, but too much sorbet in a mouthful and it started to come apart at the fins.

Anyway, all that took place in the background as I tried to figure out exactly how they managed to serve me a cross-section of raw mackerel containing no bones. The waiter was enjoying my frustration and felt confident enough to offer me the meal if I could guess how it was done. But you are never going to think inside the box of a freak like Heston. So it turns out that the bastard fillets the fish whole, as one would normally do, and then glues the fucking things back together again using “food glue” before wrapping it in cling film and leaving it to set for a couple of hours. If we had gone for the wine option too this would have been served with a warm Rashiku Ginjo-Sake, Yamatogawa. Nice.

And so to the salmon. We were already feeling incredibly good, the food not filling us up nor leaving us wanting more, just making you feel content, the classy surroundings and friendly, knowledgeable staff a huge factor. It was at this point when I realised the experience was transcending the concept of food familiar to me, as I found I couldn’t decide whether or not I cared whether or not the salmon was wild or poached. Everything else was of such high quality that I would find it hard to believe he would have used anything less, yet the way in which the square had been cooked left me with fewer ways of telling. It appeared in a liquorice parcel topped with three coriander seeds, next to two asparagus spears, some pink grapefruit and a smearing of vanilla mayonnaise. It looked and tasted both raw and cooked at the same time, which is hardly surprising given that it had been dipped in molten liquorice jelly three times, sealed in a vacuum bag and then poached for 35 minutes at a temperature of 30 degrees. That’s basically the same as leaving it in the window at home on a hot day, and for the first time in your life makes you wonder if health and safety isn’t such a bad thing after all. I liked it; the Wife less so.

The last of the mains seemed to serve to reassure, or perhaps to show how effortless it is for HB to roll off a classic should he want to. What arrived was a flawless dish of poached pigeon breast wrapped in pancetta and very rare, a small triangular parcel of its confied and shredded leg and a foamy greenish pistachio sauce with cocoa and quatre epices. The precision was breathtaking, the seasoning and temperature exact, and the flavours proving a warming, comforting break from the previous course. It was the only dish where I missed the possibility of wine, which would have been a 1999 Barolo Costa Grimaldi. And then, after feeling in safe hands, the waitress placed a simple card in front of both of us titled “Mrs Agnes B Marshall 1855-1905: The Queen of ice cream”. Okay, so we were back in Bray.

Agnes turns out to have been a lovely lady who was arguably the first to have invented the edible ice cream cone. A great wee tale about the woman printed on luxurious semi-laminated paper, which we finished just in time for a platter containing two perfect little cornets -- made to the original recipe, of course, and tasting, of course, like the best ice cream you had ever eaten.

Then somewhere around here there was a little break for a pot of sherbet to be eaten off the tip of a dried and rather brittle vanilla pod, before the main desert arrived. Again, a perfect score for the pleasure of eating a mango and Douglas fir puree, the bavarois of lychee and mango topped with some lime zest and two pine nuts hitting every note right and the ultra-smooth blackcurrant sorbet with the intensity of undiluted Ribena. Fucking hell this guy is good.

And then it was time for breakfast. It sounds ridiculous now to say that this made sense at half past three in the afternoon after you have just eaten the best food in your life. But you need to bear in mind that just two minutes previously I had watched a table of three inhaling the contents of plastic squeezy bottles filled variously with cinnamon and vanilla before each mouthful of their a la carte desert. They looked like a shower of cunts to be honest. So when the miniature box of Fat Duck Cereals arrived I was in the mood for some fucking parsnip flakes with parsnip milk, okay? But even this was merely the warm up for the grand finale: the famed bacon and egg ice cream.

So the liquid nitrogen was wheeled out again along with a flambee unit and half a dozen eggs. After being asked how you would like your eggs done, he takes one out and cracks it against the side of the overflowing pan and mixes the creamy mixture around the sub-zero copper surfaces until finally spooning it in half and placing it on your plate: smoked bacon and egg ice cream, served with a golden cuboid of French toast held in place by a strong tomato confit and a quenelle of dark brown caramel butter, ludicrously sweet and topped with two intensely flavoured dried mushrooms. We chewed the remarkable concoction down with an eggcup of chilled tea jelly; it was something quite special - a full English, deconstructed, twisted and taken to its maximum, brilliantly paired with a glass of Buck’s fizz, no less, for those who aren’t alcoholic.

The breakfast not only served as a clever gag, it also fitted perfectly into the pace of the afternoon. Having been sat there for three hours during which I felt like I’d never been anywhere else ever, I was in need of early warning that it was getting close to check-out time. And despite having never drunk tea in my entire life, I wiped my eggy chin with the strongest desire in the world for a nice big cup of the stuff.

And so it came, in a thick plastic glass that enabled Heston to pull off one last trick: a tea jelly straight from the fridge over which was poured piping hot water to make every single mouthful, from start to finish, give you that feeling you get when you go to sip a cup of tea or coffee only to find that it is stone cold. For a millisecond, that is, after which you suddenly find yourself worrying that you might burn your lips on this the most comforting of brews in recent memory.

And then, served along side the tastiest coffee I’ve ever had on this island, I was presented with a fitting end to proceedings: a drink. I knew it was going to be potent because otherwise it wouldn’t have been called a whisky wine gum, but hesitated for all of one second before reaching out and popping the golden sugared dome into my mouth. It tasted of very little at first, but then I bit into it and unleashed a depth of peat that threw me instantly back to a fierce early-morning argument with my best mate about the benefits of mobile phones, or to some other maddened moment fuelled by a dark Island malt. This was most clearly a Laphroaig, and a good dram of it and not much else bar the gelatine sheets by the taste of it. My brain lit up like a fucking Christmas tree, my senses temporarily numbed by the deeply familiar, base excitement at the prospect of getting drunk. It was instant, my neurons triggering all over the place in opposite directions: comfort versus danger, success versus failure; old versus new, trapped versus free. Even Heston couldn’t have bargained for all that.

He is a fucker. It was flawless from start to finish. I was placed in an elevated state of consciousness that lasted all night and blocked my ability to sense hunger. All food we ate after this rattling of the senses just seemed like “matter”. Everything tastes the same now.

Anticipating the Duck

2006-09-08T07:04:00.000Z

Only about 12 hours to go. The idea is starting to set in now. I am excited. I predict that lunch will be a wonderful affair that will leave me in a heightened state of consciousness for the rest of the day. I hope it will open my eyes to the full power of food and suck my motivation for cooking from within. But I doubt it. In fact, the mere prospect of going to eat in the world’s finest restaurant managed to eek the last grain of energy from inside at the end of this hard week, half past seven at night and a homecoming of half-roasted belly pork and a pile of veg to prep.

So I set about making a sweet and sour sauce by frying onions, red&yellow peppers and garlic in pork fat with some chilli and lemon grass, orange rind and an apple. A good glug of white wine, some white wine vinegar and half a carton of sieved tomatoes. Simmer it all with the lid on, topping up with water, until everything is soft enough to press through a sieve and then again to leave a smooth red sauce. I then used the salty, five-spice flavoured fat to stir-fry some batons of carrot, courgette, sliced mushrooms and greens. Soy sauce at the end and then the rings came out to be filled with a disk of white rice, a loose pile of veg and a square of succulent pork topped with a golden puffy crust. It was all very good, sitting in a pool of crimson. The sharpness was just right to cut through the meat, but it was a bit light on the seasoning. I’d hardly tasted anything until right at the end, confident I had it under control all along. It looked sexier than it tasted, as it was basically some sweet and sour pork. There were nods of appreciation all round but it was basically a posh chinky. An afterthought of corn roasted whole in its sheath.

I then looked at the Duck home page to get into the mood and saw a tarte tatin with vanilla ice cream on there. I then got thinking about what he could be doing to his tarte tatin or custard to make it so much better than the one I make. I am pretty sure I could pull off the perfect combo, once or twice but not on demand perhaps. I don’t know. But I am hungry to find out. Come on Heston, impress me you siphon-loving weirdo.

Looming home improvement

2006-09-07T20:31:00.000Z

Sporadic, time-starved mid-week meals spent sitting around waiting for the conversation about kitchen improvement to come to an end. You know, the usual optimization exercise that springs into action with everything from the price per square metre of cheap floor tiles through the style of the door fittings to the optical properties of the strips of material that will adorn the sawn edges of the worktops. The recurring nature of the conversation is what wears you down. It can be days between bouts, perhaps a week or two.

Then it will rear its ugly self just at the end of the night after you’ve got home from a day’s work, washed up the day’s plastic, got dinner on the go, cleaned your children’s teeth, continued with dinner, kissed your children goodnight, put your children to bed, finished off the dinner, laid the table, served the dinner, sat at the table, opened the Fucking mineral water, ate your dinner, talked about anything but, finished your dinner, talked about anything but, remained normal, … This has been going on for two years.

But even when you aren’t actually talking about home improvement -- on account of other aspects of modern life such as trying not to murder your two young children, wife and then heading for a cruise operator in the West Highlands for a one-way sailing to St Kilda -- it’s still present in the background like the nagging knowledge that you don’t have any garlic or cling film left. And this is a project that I am supposed to be in my element in: redesigning what is effectively my dream kitchen. Perhaps I am too tired to take it on board.

My love of cooking goes down to survival levels when time gets too tight. Maybe this is what all the world is doing and the reason why nobody knows where chips come from anymore is because they have careers in which they believe.
I, meanwhile, am eyeing up a Soay sheep’s bouncing spring lamb on the steep green hills while on the edge of the world and eating little else but fulmars and fish; posing as an eccentric eco-tourist when approached. “Home improvement” would surely take on a whole different meaning in such a setting.