food

The food sections of broadsheet newspapers are annoying. The featured reciples are cooked by no-one but the authors, such people play boules and feel smug about it, and other such habits. And, worst of all, have witty, yet somehow tasteful, jumpers for informal situations. They are supernaturally smug toss-pots. The other bits of the food section are made up of critics - who think they’re interesting - and a smorgasbord, a panoply, of wanky narrative so refined it would make Lawrence Llewelyn-Bowen swoon.

Give me recipes that are good but don’t require fucking around. When I say fucking around I mean by my standards of fucking around. Not some jumped up chef or foodie who hunts down fucking apples from farms that are, naturally (what else would they be?), rustic and genial. Or bits where it says the timing of something is essential. If I want to cook or buy things where the timing is essential I’ll go to a bit more effort than following a recipe from some broadsheet which is essentially toilet roll with print. Like buy a cook-book or get some training.

So. Down with the old media! Surf the net! Never click adverts! Stick it to Hugh Fernley-Wittingstall. Come on! The man’s a cock. Except buy the Guardian on Saturdays, because Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science column is in it. Also buy it when Charlie Brooker, (sometimes) Polly Toynbee, or Jon Ronson have articles.

Alternatively, just be grown up, and buy loads of newspapers all of the time and don’t read the annoying bits.

Leave the food bit and life-style section on the train. A foodie may pick it up, cook a recipe from it and choke on a bone, with hilarious consequences. Like they immediately cough up the bone, trip on a roller-skate, do all their own stunts and appear in Phantom of The Opera. Then get killed by a amorous moose while searching for maple fucking syrup.

I would never poach a quail egg. Quail eggs are OK. Nothing special. Small eggs. You eat them and think “hmm. That’s OK”. I won’t eat hem unless someone else is buying them and someone else is cooking it. This isn’t an issue of snobbery. I feel the same way about black pudding. And beer. And newspapers. You don’t have to prepare beer unless you are opening a can or pouring it yourself. That’s preparation of a sort.

You can prepare newspapers by finding discarded newspapers on the train, scrunching the pages into loose balls, and putting them in a big pile in your back garden. Then joyfully spunk methanol all over them (from a spare lens cleaning kit), and set fire to them. Shouting “I’m burning the media, man – and I didn’t even pay for it”. (I have no respect for people who burn flags because, often, they’ve bought the flag. It’s mental). Then read the websites of the newspapers you have burnt without ever, ever, clicking on the advertising links.

Even if they’ve got a potentially good deal on a camera advertised or a featured book written by the sub-editor’s wife’s nephew. Then, much later, when the awful realisation dawns on you that you’ve made a Jeremy Clarkson/K Foundation-like statement (I suspect they’re one and the same). Hang your head in shame and drink Ribena. To wash down a fish-finger sandwich. And have a good hard think.

I’m sitting, alone, in a cold room, in underpants, eating a microwave curry.   A fairly posh one, lamb something or-other with apricots and a hot sauce.  With whole seeds.  The first problem only applies to this curry and cannot be generalised to all curries:  Apricots.   Apricots are foul.  They add nothing to the world.  Apricots could dissapear and people would move on pretty quickly.  Elton John would not play at their funeral.  Conspiracy theories would not be fomented.  The second problem applies to all supermarket curries and can be generalised:  Too much sauce.  There are very few curries that benefit from too much sauce.  Dansak benefits from an excess of sauce.

What I end up doing with a lot of supermarket curries is eating a third of the sauce with the meat and/or vegetables and tossing the rest in the bin.  Which is wasteful.  I think supermarkets put loads of sauce in their curries not because they think the public wants sauce but because it means less meat and/or vegetables.   It’s akin to serving steak and chips with a big pile of chips and a piddly little steak next to it.   Or a single asparagus in a bucket of sauce.  The ratio is fucked.  I feel like I’m being punished for being a lazy bastard, for not cooking, by supermarkets that have adverts that make projectile vomiting look pleasant.  Less sauce please: Asda, Morrision’s, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Marks and Spencer and Waitrose.  Don’t be cunts.