A different kind of shopper

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 foie gras conversation

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.

Corporate Christmas Nightmare, Part I

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.

Living a lie in Dorset

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.

Why can't we do it like the Swiss?

We have got food all wrong in this country. We have available to us the best and worst food from all over the world, yet no matter; it is all fucked at the point of delivery. Take my three days in Geneva. First up was a steak near the airport, in l’aviation. It looks like little more than a large café overlooking the runway from across the road, and it hadn’t changed a bit in the 6 years since I was last in it, barely able to talk to my sober dinner partners and future wife owing to the Bombay Saphire frenzy I’d had at home that afternoon. The place was rammed, brightly lit, noisy and smelling comfortingly of cigarette smoke – something you forget about in this handicapped and deeply impoverished land. And it was a Wednesday night.

Our party of four hungry blokes waited between two tables as the waiter, the same waiter, worked out the previous guests’ bill on the white paper table cloth before tearing it and his scribbles up and clearing it in a couple of sweeps. We were seated, without reservation nor the feeling of being pains in the arse, within a few minutes and asked which of the house wines we would be having with our meat. It had to be Gamay, as it always was, made from the grapes a few hundred metres away and always lightly chilled to help you get through the salty, fatty feast. No menus nor ordering are required other than how well you want your meat cooked. And unlike back home, rare really does mean rare and well-done means slightly pink.

Then the familiar formula kicked into action: four plates of salad vert with a thick and purple garlic dressing, immediately followed by a basket of fresh sliced bread with thick brown floury crusts. And then the killer – a thick strip of Argentinian steak hard and crispy on the outside and soft on the in, a pile of thin French fries doused in so much salt it looked like Christmas, and a yellow blanket of slightly foamy sauce the recipe for which is one of the few to have completely stumped me. It can only be a garlic-powder base and lots of butter or oil whisked in. And salt.

It is an outrageous assault of the senses and as unrefined as it gets, but it fucking works. Half-way through and your mouth feels as is it is shrinking from dehydration, your brain telling you quite clearly that this is killer food. And then it gets worse: the second round of chips and sauce, never forgotten no matter how busy they are. The contents of a platter of hot crisp fries only just tossed in salt and a dirty oven-proof dish of that thick garlic sauce being mercilessly spooned onto your plate, none of which you want but which you are powerless over yet again. A coffee to finish, a brandy for some, and all for £20 a head.

The next night was a Lebanese kebab, an assiette of highly seasoned chicken and beef with salad, falafel, lamb kebab, garlic & chilli sauce and plenty of warm round pitas that were replenished automatically. A cold can of Heineken for some. Service so good that the previous occupiers of the table were asked to leave to make way for us, seeing as they had been finished for some time. And, being Swiss, they got it. Smiles and winks from the waiter and swift, bullshit-free, precision service. THIS WAS A KEBAB.

And finally the other great Genevan institution: le trattoria. Like l’aviation, this Italian place does have a menu which many people do indeed refer to. But again, it is irrelevant. The order is never any different. It always has to be the same thing: penne silciliana, an outrageous pasta bake that comes once again with its own second helpings. This is a winner, and it surprised me how tasty it actually was in the cold light of day. They basically get some good quality precooked penne, mix it with a concentrated tomato sauce loaded with garlic, oil and soggy aubergine, and fill a cast iron dish with the stuff. Great handfuls of creamy proper buffalo mozzarella are shaken over the top and in it is fired into the pizza oven for ten minutes. It comes out steaming and golden, and is immediately spooned out to fill large white oval plates. A heavenly concoction that I spent several occasions trying unsuccessfully to replicate.

And it was with us in no time, as we sat there as a party of ten in the smoky bustle of prime-time Friday night with the vino rosso flowing and bread baskets keeping our hands occupied. The place was functioning like a well-oiled machine; nothing was going wrong. The sweaty waiters were tireless in their attention to orders and gestures, responding quickly and happily despite being rushed off their feet. These people are professionals who would appear to love their jobs.

I sat there after the generous second helpings had also been put away, enjoying the best coffee I have tasted since I last left these shores, thinking about the UK equivalent we went to a few weeks back -- the Kenco espresso and lack of any option other than pizza owing to their inability to serve properly cooked pasta. It was depressing to compare the two. It all made sense there. It was 11 by the time we left and the place was still going. Some had tiramisu, some calvados coffees. But all were delivered as desired and at the end of the evening with what looked like plenty of carafes we were each just £20 lighter, again.

Why wouldn’t this formula translate here? The lard arses would jump at it surely? And it wasn’t just the evening meals. Short bursts of good espresso broke the days up in to manageable pieces, with a proper meal eaten over the course of an hour’s lunch break followed by a round of coffees and some good conversation. It’s not as if people there work any less, they just realise the importance of such relaxation and interaction.

It is so much more civilised than the solitary desk-crouching we call lunch here, a tuna sandwich from the shop around the corner or a salad from upstairs being privately sucked up as if by a small disabled rodent. The whole sorry affair being over in a matter of minutes. A worthless exercise but one that is hard to break.

Tonight it felt good to cook again, although it was done mostly with a phone wedged against one ear. Lamb chops with a garlic and caper crust and a pile of roasted root vegetables. I stuffed the salty paste into scores in the fat and fried them fat-side down on the griddle pan before turning them over. The veg, parsnip, carrot, leeks, mushroom and garlic were roasted with rosemary and the pan deglazed with red wine - which went on to make a dressing for the autumn veg spruced up with some spinach, watercress and rocket.

The Scotch Pie

Sitting in the warm glow of an open fire, full of smoked salmon, cream and cheese. Alone but for the occasional bubbling of a bucket filled with fermenting fruit, a glass of ice cold Highland Fresh and a highly processed slice of carrot cake. Yesterday’s potentially murderous 600 mile drive turned out to be surprisingly pleasurable, which I can only attribute to the skilful avoidance of Welcome Breaks and Motos. A flask of strong coffee, a litre of water and a healthy supply of Haribo chews for the Eldest. That is not to say that I resisted the temptation of roadside grease.

The Motor Grill in Ballenuig is an institution. It is as much part of my trips back here as sitting on the midge-infested river bank at sunset having a fly rollie or, on this occasion, a fat hooter from the huge bag of grass I didn’t forget to pack. The precise form of delivery has varied over the years, but I seem to be converging on the ultimate in guilty pleasure: a scotch pie, chips and beans.

A scotch pie, for anyone left wanting, is a puck-sized case of oil-based pastry filled with minced lamb fat, gristle and salt. It came in a large microwave-friendly plate saying “horrific” in every known language, and I immediately set about seasoning it accordingly. First the vinegar: heavy on the beans and a splash on the chips to help stick a few tens of thousands of crystals of cheap salt; followed by ketchup and/or brown sauce for the pie. You barely need to rest your knife on the rim of one of these fuckers for it to start sinking into the sloppy crust, a dirty oozing arsehole-like vent in the top giving you a sneak preview of the insipid grey matter within, which starts to spill out the sides helped along by a glistening coating of grease and oil.

You don’t eat a scotch pie, it performs a combination of evaporation and dissolution on the tongue leaving nothing but a clammy thick layer of fat in the back of your throat. The acidic tones of the tomato- and brown-sauce helps sooth the pain, as does the mug of warm milky powdery coffee and two slices of economy white toast spread with value marg. It would have to be finished off with an Embassy Red for it to classify as a true Highland Classic. But having wolfed it down in a matter of minutes I felt like a king; it felt like I was going home.

Not that this is what I have been eating since arriving. This morning I was handed two fat vacpacks of best smoked salmon and asked if I was cooking, so I made some pasta with a mornay-like sauce of egg yolks and cream, shallots and wine based, tossed with the firm pink fish and spinach from the garden. Some nutmeg and pepper to finish, and served with a salad of garden leaves with a simple lemon dressing and a hot loaf of rosemary and olive-oil encrusted bread. There is a salmon with my name on it in the freezer too, just packed up whole and untouched in a carrier bag and stuffed any which way but loose into a drawer, Highland style. And there is a hunk of best pork from a pig called Gladstone. Cooking a few meals in return for not having to deal with my children seems a fair deal to me.

The drink is bubbling away beside me, chemical bonds being formed that will one day cause someone to sit fully clothed in the shower wishing they hadn’t moved up here, that their life had gone differently; or perhaps providing the perfect accompaniment to a simple summer lunch of bread, salads and cheese that will never be eaten outside either on account of the midges, the hurricane or the fact that the dour culinary culture of this heathen land has branded such eating practises “for pricks”.