food

There’s never those boot scrapers outside of shops these days, on account of no horse shit – in general – I’m sure most adults would acknowledge there’s always horse shit. In places like Surrey, although, not necessarily Surrey – maybe one or more home counties – or, somewhere like a home county. But generally not in streets. In national parks, polo clubs and the like. Greener places than a Mekon’s arsehole. Some countries still have horses in streets. I like those boot scrapers. They’re good for getting bubble-gum off my boots. And mud.

The thing with a lot of chilis is that ratio of onion to meat is out. Too much onion and it lends too much sweetness, too little onion not enough sweetness. 100 years from now there is going to be a book of food ratios. Table after table of taste combinations, accompanied by little box plots of palate demographics, by nationality, and social status. The chili beef/onion ratios page will be something like the 40th page because it’s under C for chili. Memory drives with embedded web servers will input sales data from millions of restaurants world-wide, into a live recurrence relation, with a mind to predicting food trends, and subverting individual liberties. In the name of Jesus, or Heston Blumenthal, or something.

There are going to be word-processors that determine the effort and sincerity of the typist. Saying things like “thats great! Keep typing!” or “You’re a cunt. Stop typing. Abort! Abort!”. There is going to be a program that takes various nouns and mixes them up into various subject, object, verb, combinations with connective sequences, big on letters, and less so on meaning. Progress is like that. Word processors that call you a cunt and press-me word spunkers. It’s all ultimately meaningless isn’t it?

When you finish your words, and realise that Yeah? could be inserted between every paragraph, it is the title of the post.

Masterchef: The Professionals is brilliant.  I’m no foodie – but I do like good food, and appreciate good restaurants (in the sense that I don’t give a shit about the associated pomp – rather the food).  And Masterchef: The Professionals is all about the food.  Unlike many television shows all of the contestants are already reasonable chefs, and many of the contestants are not just competent; they border on brilliance.  If the up and coming chefs on the show are representative of David Cameron’s Broken Britain, it’s another reason he should go inflate himself with a bicycle pump every time he utters the platitude.   Many of the featured chefs are the future of the UK restaurant scene.

It’s the best food show on television at the moment.  Bar none.  It’s better than Top Chef.  There is zero excessive drama worked in by producers. So well done BBC.  Michel Roux Jnr is a bit scary though.  He reminds me of my old French teacher, who was ex-military, and had a stare that was odd.  But Michel Roux Jnr, and Gregg Wallace, are very good presenters for the show.  Because they know their onions (it’s a good one to note that BBC – front shows with people who know, in-depth, about the subject they’re presenting – seems obvious that one).  They’re also personable.

Great stuff – it’s on iPlayer, but if you can’t get iPlayer where you are you have my permission (as a license fee payer) to pirate it for the benefit of mankind.  It’s a shame it’s on 18:30 on BBC 2 because many people aren’t home to watch it on their actual telly-boxes.  Thanks to iPlayer that’s less of a problem than it was, but I think placing Masterchef: The Professionals in that slot is as bigger crime as the slot the first series of The Mighty Boosh had.

Watch for yourself here.

You know that when a television programme contains Britain in the title it’s attempting to cash-in on a collective sense of identity.  In most cases it’s a bit lazy.  In the case of Britain’s Really Disgusting Foods its symptomatic of the laziness, vacuity, and attempt to cash in on essentialist presumptions about food.   If I were to go down the essentialist route also I could sum-up the show up in a single sentence: The programme has cherry-picked the cheapest foods available to caterers in order to create a straw-man argument, cherry picked experts with vested interests against things like mechanically recovered meat, and created a cloud of brainless confusion aimed at a teenage audience on BBC 3.

The presenter, who’s mildly funny, like dandruff, starts the programmes by saying “I reckon there’s certain things that need answering once and for all, so I’ve composed an email to the meat hygiene service looking for some answers”.  He asks them if ears, eyes, eyelids, noses, brains, lips, nipples, bumholes (rather than anus – the programme is aimed at the youth, man, and they all say bumhole), tail,  testicles, penis, bones, and ballbag, are allowed in sausages.  Testicles appear twice.  Presumably for comedic purposes.  Ha ha.  Twenty minutes later we find out that none of those things are allowed in sausages.  There is, however, a loop hole that means that if you don’t call your meat products sausages they’re allowed 5% meat.  Which I’ll return to.

The programme goes on to discuss the cheapest chicken breasts available to caterers.  Which, surprisingly, or not, as the case may be, are injected with water, salt, and stabilisers.  Partly because they’re frozen.  According to the programme this is disgusting.  A great opportunity to inform the audience is missed  at every opportunity.  Salt, and the associated problems of over consumption are well known, but the chief point the programme makes about the chicken breasts is that they’re disgusting.   Without any qualification of the health ramifications of added salt – or that if consumed sensibly there’s really no problem.  But according to the programme they are disgusting simply because they’ve undergone processing.  Animal welfare can go fuck itself.  It’s not touched upon at all.

Then, at a food trade fair, to demonstrate how disgusting the cheapest, nastiest, cherry-picked faux-sausages are, they give a demonstration of how to make the cheapest, nastiest, faux-sausages. Raising the spectre of mechanically recovered meat.  In order to do this they get Richard Guy – the Real Meat Company founder, who has no conflict of interest at all, an entirely neutral contributor (like fuck)  to give a demonstration of mechanically recovered meat.  Holding up a chicken carcass that had the breast, leg, and other good bits of meat, removed.  Which is exactly what I use to make an excellent chicken soup, using the leftovers from a Sunday roast. He then goes on to explain how the meat – the straggly bits sinew etc. -  is removed in a factory to produce a paste.  They mention the use of ingredients like sodium metabisulfite, and they state, unequivocally, that it “isn’t there to make you live longer, be happier or anything else, it’s there to make a heap of disgusting meat stick together”.

Sodium metabisulfite is familiar to all home brewers.  It is used to sterilise equipment.  It is also a preservative.  It has been used to a very long time, and it has zero side-effects.  You piss it out.  It has absolutely nothing to do with sticking meat together.  It extends the shelf-life of products, and helps prevent food poisoning.  BBC 3 viewers should take what BBC 3 tells them with a pinch of salt.

Shortly after the that programme cuts to a chalk board with “The search for the Worlds Worst Sausage”  the apostrophe is missing from World presumably on purpose, for comedic purposes.  The problem with the board is that technically it’s false advertising.  The cheapest, nastiest, faux sausages they are making are not legally allowed to be called sausages.  No mention is made of the fat-content or salt content.  The two chief problems with the cheapest nastiest food you can cherry pick.  It’s referenced – they mention that fat goes in. But not how much or how much salt goes in.

The programme then consults a nutritionist, who tells us, with minimal elaboration, what we already know about the cheapest nastiest food you can cherry pick.  Nutritionally they’re not very good. Surprise surprise.

They later mention hydrogenated fats.  Hydrogenated fats are bad.  They state that hydrogenated fat “Increases risk of coronary heart disease/contains no nutritional value”.  They do increase the risk of coronary heart disease.  Similar to butter or other natural products that contain saturated fats.  However – they’re wrong about hydrogenated fats containing no nutritional value.  It’s the trans-fats which are a by-product of hydrogenated fats that have no nutritional value.  No mention is made of the problems with saturated fats.  Presumably because telling people their expensive supermarket best sausages can also be bad for their health doesn’t fit their straw-man argument.

They pick on the use of waxy starch in apple pie filling.   Which is no different from using cornflour to thicken things.  But that wouldn’t support the argument.

The programme’s attitude towards E-Numbers is similarly stupid.  At one point the host compares E-Numbers to excrement.  They mention that an E-Number colouring is derived from coal tar.  Like paracetamol used to be, and a whole host of other things utilising organic chemistry.  The idea that anything good can be derived from coal tar is ignored.  To support the argument that the E-number colouring in question is bad they mention that it’s banned in two countries.  I don’t know how many countries it is not banned in, but that doesn’t support the argument, so it’s omitted.

They talk about how marketing people give a false impression of food.  The next time I get a shag out of wearing Lynx deodorant I’ll celebrate by eating a trans-fat laden cake in a park where it’s always sunny and there’s no dog shit.  Marketing gives a misleading idea of what product is/does.  Well I never.  If the argument about misleading advertising were backed up by a coherent argument about unhealthy or disgusting food the programme may have had a point.  Instead it’s an opinion piece of the worst kind.

BBC 3 and Britain’s Most Disgusting Foods are shit.  It’s a broadly misleading programme, aimed at teenagers, that adds nothing to the argument about healthy food, and potentially increases the ignorance of its viewers.  The programme contains nothing about how much salt, saturated fat, and sugar it is healthy to consume.

Television.  Light entertainment.  Cooking.  One of the things I hate about celebrity chefs is that  for the purposes of entertainment they intervene in lives, and make recommendations about diets.    I’ll refer to such programmes as “intervention television”.  Of course, intervention television exists in many forms, notable examples are “I’m a cretin that subsists on chips – help me BBC 3”, “Fuck-a-doodle-do  I’m fat – come gawk at me like I’m a freak” on Channel 4, and “poor kids shouted at by 1950s pedo teachers” on Channel 5.  I’ll stick to food though, because celebrity chefs deliver petitions to Number 10 Downing Street, and, furthermore, they think they’re the shit (they are in a sense).

An episode of the F-Word particularly annoyed me.  Gordon Ramsay, in full on intervention mode, met some 20-something NORPs that live on takeaway curry, one of whom wants to run a marathon.  Gordon, in his infinite wisdom, recommended a curry recipe; the logic being that someone that lives on curry would want to cook it for themselves.  My problem is that if people can’t do basic food right, there’s fuck all point in teaching them things like making a curry.  As soon as the celebrity chef has gone the rice will be overcooked, the food will be under-seasoned, and worse the fuckers will force their new found gastronomic confidence on guests.

Often people who, basically, can’t cook, buy the latest Jamie Oliver or Gordon Ramsay cookbook.  It’s not that the recipes are bad, Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay are better chefs than the majority of people, it’s just that the pretentious fuckers buying their books often can’t cook a decent soup, let alone many of the recipes.  That’s why I think Marco Pierre White, and Delia Smith *, aside from being mental as rabid badgers, in their own way, are doing better things for British food than walking cocks like Jamie Oliver, and Gordon Ramsay. They are teaching delicious basics.  That’s what many people in the UK need.  Not over-complication and pretentious fuckwittery.  For example – basic soup.

Anyone can cook a decent, ubergruppenhealthy **, soup.  All of what follows is approximate, and flexible:

The core of the recipe: One sliced medium onion, two peeled chopped carrots (or more if you like carrots), a bay leaf,  a few handfuls of of chopped potatoes, a couple of sticks of chopped celery, a peeled whole clove of garlic (more if you want), and some skinned chicken.  Put it all in a big saucepan cover with water  (plus a couple of stock cubes – although some are cuboids strictly speaking) or stock, put in some dried black peppercorns to taste (five or six is fine).  Optional herbs include thyme,  parsley,  tarragon (be careful – it’s a dominating herb –  a small pinch at most) etc.  That’s a basic soup.  Optional other stuff includes chopped ham, mushrooms, cabbage, leftover vegetables, a small handful of pearl barley, a handful of rice,  – nettles even, swedes, turnips, celeriac etc. etc.  It’s simple.

Cover. Bring to the boil simmer for an hour or more, taste, season, remove any bones, skim any excess fat, and voilà – acceptable, very healthy, soup.  A cheap pack of 12 chicken thighs will be enough for about 8 people with large soup portions – more people can be served if there’s some bread.  Alternatively a left-over roast chicken carcass is just fine also but it will need to be simmered longer.  A kid with minimal supervision and a blunt butter knife can make soup.  You can experiment, and find the perfect combinations/ratios for you.  Don’t get me started about dumplings and suet dumplings. A well trained dog could probably make them.  Bit of white pepper in the dumplings – lovely.

Total cost less than £8 – the main cost is the meat.  Dried herbs are fine. If it’s left overs the total cost is less than £5.  Hate chicken?  Use cheap cuts of lamb (cheap is betters suited to simmering) or rabbit (drop the tarragon in both cases IMHO), simmer until the meat is tender, and flavours defuse.

Celebrity chefs are teaching people stuff they aren’t equipped to do well.  MPW and DS excluded. I’d rather have a decent soup or other healthy basic recipe than some faddish nightmare cooked badly from a recipe book.  Serious.   Marco Pierre White is right.

* Years ago, at some ill-defind point in the past, I watched Delia Smith in an altered state of mind, and it took me weeks to get over it. In fact just thinking about it makes a little nervous.
** Which is, after all, what Jamie Oliver, and Gordon Ramsay has in mind for us.  For us all to be ubergruppenhealthy.

Red onions are particularly good on pizza and other situations where they are fairly well exposed to cooking heat. I had red onions on my supper pizza. I also have a headache. The two events are unrelated. Although I did eat late. And prior to eating had a stomach that felt as if it was salivating over itself in anticipation of a meal. It’s probably playing havok with my digestion.

Compare the following programme segments:

Programme 1
Programme 2

Compare and provide commentary.  Your answer should be no longer than 2000 words.

[20] points.

Optional:

[10] points.  Publish the finished answer as a ‘blog’ entry.  The examining board can’t be arsed.

I pulled up to the house About seven or eight I eat dinner. At about 9pm, suitably fed, I get a brief attack of tiredness brought on by digestion. That annoys me.  Because if I have a brief nap I won’t sleep until tomorrow. Either – by way of thinking I won’t sleep and therefore don’t, or a nap refreshes me enough that I don’t need a night’s sleep. I haven’t worked out which. So, like, blogging is a fair dinkum way of stopping myself from napping.  The preceding 90 words are meaningless other than their dictionary definitions, the history of the alphabet, punctuation, non-random appliction, and zero proper nouns.  Take that world.

Three or four mugs worth of chopped tomatoes (or a couple of tins)
Any fish that is cheap, think coley or pollock or off-cuts of fish, deboned, deskinned
4 Sticks of celery diced
1 Onion chopped
1/4 Bottle Tabasco sauce (or to taste)
1 Clove of garlic, minced
Butter
Cooking oil
(Optional) Any other fish, deboned. deskinned
(Optional) chopped parsley

The aim is to have enough tomatoes to cover the cheap fish by a couple of centimetres in a medium pot, so adjust amounts accordingly.

Fry the onions in a bit of oil until they’re clear. Add the garlic and celery and fry gently for a minute or two. Add the tomatoes, Tabasco sauce, and cheap fish. Simmer gently until it thickens up a little. About half hour. Stir to check for sticking.

(Optionally) Add the other fish, and simmer until it is done. Most fish doesn’t take long so don’t obliterate it.

Add butter. A good lump or two will make the sauce coat better and offset the acidity and heat. Add optional parsley.

Stir gently so the fish is in reasonable sized chunks, taste, adjust seasoning, serve with rice or bread.

Any beans and/or pulses and/or legumes, prepared or tinned preprepared
Any olive oil
Any acidic dressing components such as lemon juice or vinegar
Any herbs that go with beans pulses or legumes, such as parsley or coriander, dried or fresh (the moisture will rehydrate dried herbs somewhat)
Minced garlic, half a clove per large hand-full of proto-farts
Salt
Pepper, whatever suits you
(optional) Pinch of ground cumin
(optional) Finely chopped onion or shallots to taste

Warm your beans, pulses, or legumes through in their juice, whichever way suits you, microwave is fine, drain the liquid off, toss in olive oil (to coat, don’t drown it) and garlic, add a dash of the acid, stir in herbs, add salt and pepper, stir, taste it, readjust the seasoning/acid, stir. Serve.

The English countryside has not been in full-on production mode for decades. Farmers have been bummed by supermarkets and international competition is intense. Wholesale prices had gotten so cheap. However, if I had a spare couple of hundred grand, I would be speculatively buying arable farming land. I strongly suspect farming is going to become profitable again. In line with world consumption of meat and livestock products. There are less barriers to buying farming land than many other land types provided the intended usage of the land is made explicit. There’s likely people who want to sell too. Do you know what percentage of grain in, for instance, the United States, goes to feed livestock? It’s more than half. Way more than half. Animals require a fuck-load of feeding. In the next decade more people than ever are going to be able to buy meat.

So, blah blah, meat – value of arable land already bottomed – hard up farmers: buy-outs, mega farms, profit, blah blah blah, mega profit during droughts elsewhere, England uniquely exploitable for profit. Etc.

A follow up to this previous post. This BBC News Online story is basically sound and feels like a BBC story should. Well done BBC News Online.

A follow up to this previous post where I called Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall a cock. I’ve changed my mind – he’s not a cock and not all foodies are cunts. He is annoying, but having read a bit of his stuff, he’s basically benign. I read a couple of his books. I’d still wipe my arse with the lifestyle sections of most newspapers. There are a lot of perfectly decent flies hanging around turds for profit.

To celebrate my new, less jaded, view of of foodies here’s an interesting talk with chef Marco Pierre White. A man that speaks a great deal of sense. He reminds me of Hannibal Lecter. Minus the cannibalism and murder.

1 medium chicken, gutted and cleaned out
3 teaspoons of jerk marinade (Grace Jerk marinade suits this one because it’s got a round flavour and isn’t too hot by itself, but given jerk is essentially about a kick in the tastebuds any jerk will do)
3 teaspoons of extra hot chilli powder (not the stuff for chilli con carne etc. but ground chilli – I use Rajah brand, because it’s the hotest chilli powder I’ve tasted)
2 small limes preferably unwaxed (smaller generally means more acidic)
A teaspoon of runny honey (if you get ‘forest’ honey use that because it’s better in this recipe, that said, in a blind taste test of the end result of this recipe I highly doubt I’d notice the difference)
2 scotch bonnet peppers
A teaspoon of coarsely ground black pepper
(optional) Papain

Flatten the chicken by cutting through its spine and cracking it apart. Gash it all over, fairly deeply but not so deeply it falls apart.

Cut the limes in half. Place the chicken in a bowl and cover it with squeezed lime juice. Keep the limes.

Wash the scotch bonnet peppers and remove the stems. Scrape a lime until you have roughly half a teaspoon of green peel.

Put the honey, lime peel, scotch bonnet peppers, black pepper, chilli powder, and jerk paste in a blender and blend until smooth.

Thoroughly cover the chicken with the paste and wrap the chicken tightly in cling film. Put it in a fridge for up to 48 hours.

After it’s marinated (or marinaded depending on your disposition) cook whichever way suits you best. If the chicken is tough as fuck, or a cock, consider adding papain to the paste for an enzyme based solution. Don’t ruin it though.

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.