A day in the life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.