Goat Cheese Story

In 1987, a new thing arrived on the shelves of Asda in Preston. Goat's cheese. We had seen this on the Food and Drink programme, and because my mum had a new job, It was time for us to ascend to the ranks of the middle class. So we bought some.

One lunch time, it was presented, surrounded by a golden crescent of Jacob's Cream Crackers, on an English Rose plate. We crowded round the table, and the dog sat just as expectantly by my Mum's side. We gave it a smell and were not amused. There were looks of uncertainty. But my Dad showed us the way and bravely, with forced relish, ate a piece. We all followed, and could hardly believe that people put this stuff in their mouths. There were a few swears.

Now we had a block of the stuff, staring us down, humming and steaming. Fortunately, we had the answer. We threw a chunk to the dog, who yelped excitedly, ran over, and gave it a fulsome, anticipatory sniff.

He paused, confused, and then rolled in it, legs in the air, tongue hanging out. That said it all.

Spaghetti Story

SPAGHETTI STORY

When I was at university, a young guy in my shared flat told us his method for gauging how much spaghetti you needed. He said ‘about your willy’s thickness.’ He then proceeded to pull out a remarkably slender handful.

Naturally, those of us cooking along grabbed ever-larger handfuls until, by the end, the three of us had used about six packets of spaghetti and were eating it for a year.

He tried adding more spaghetti to his handful afterwards, saying he had underestimated, but we lived with him, had seen him in his undies, and knew he hadn’t.

‘Heinz’ Beans recipe

So they’re inspired by Heinz Beans, which I do think are phenomenal in themselves. Nothing compares to those - they are genuinely even now cooked in the can, and when you buy cheaper ones you can’t believe you’re eating them.

But these are my own version I call Meinz Beanz. I wouldn’t give up actual Heinz beans because they are amazing. But these are close enough, but a bit fruitier, for when you want something a bit more special.

Why would you make your own version of something that is perfectly good in a can? As Mrs Doyle once said, maybe I LIKE the misery….

And these are different, even if close enough to merit the title.

You’ll want to fall in.

Meinz Beanz

2 cans of cannellini beans with liquid.

2 tbsp of tomato purée I tsp of garlic or onion powder

Half a box of passata (or increase amount of tomato purée and add some water)

A tablespoon of very red unsmoked paprika

A teaspoon of smoked paprika (or both with smoked if you prefer)

Salt to taste

Brown sugar to taste - you’d be surprised how much you need of salt and sugar to make them taste like Heinz (or maybe not), but fuckit this ain’t a health farm and life is miserable enough.

Mix all the ingredients except the salt in a cast iron pot (what the Americans call a dutch oven, and middle class people call a Le Creuset, even if, like me, yours is a cheap knockoff from Tesco).

Now either put them in the oven for an hour with the lid on at around 180 degrees.

Or add about half a cup of water, bring to the boil on the hob, then reduce to the lowest heat with a bubble every, say, 30 seconds, and leave the lid off.

Simmer very gently for an hour - you may have to add a bit of water as it goes, so keep an eye on it, especially around the half way mark.

Add the salt at the end to avoid the beans going hard. (But probably not the end of the world if you add it earlier).

I made them with home made oven chips - potatoes with the skins on, cut into long chunks, rolled in a good slug of olive oil, and cooked at 200 degrees in the oven for an hour, turning once.

Enjoy! It’s not diet food but it does feel oddly wholesome, and you’ll feel like a proper self-satisfied hipster tw*t. And who doesn’t want that?

Bon Ape Tit.

Fabulously plebeian. Or should I say, plebean?

Sopa de Lockdown (Spanish White Bean, Smoked Paprika, and Garlic soup)

So I know every week I say 'this is the most delicious soup I've ever eaten' - but I think I'm currently on a soup roll. (Soup with a roll?) This is a Spanish-influenced white bean soup with smoked paprika. And so much garlic, even the cats will avoid you. In fact, I'm thinking of calling it 'Lockdown Soup' because it has so much garlic, it can only be eaten when social distancing. It’s finished with half a hard boiled egg (currently hard to get and may as well be rationed), cayenne, and chopped parsley. As with all Spanish stuff, the extra virgin Olive oil is an essential ingredient, as is quite a salty stock.

This is also the easiest soup I’ve ever made. You literally combine the ingredients and boil.

Recipe (sort of)

Serves 4 normal people or two of me

• A can of white beans in brine - cannellini or butter beans, including brine. Its important you get the properly cooked ones in brine, and not the healthy rock hard ones in water that you get in little class supermarkets. They are for the kind of people who eat Quinoa, so anything they eat you probably want to avoid.

• An onion, chopped

• A bogload of smoked paprika (I used sweet)

• So much garlic that your chances of heart disease are dramatically lowered in one sitting, not to mention your likelhood of being attacked by vampires, or indeed, approached by anyone who would consider kissing you. If you want an exact measurement, I would say somewhere between a fucktonne and gobs and gobs. Or about 5 large cloves.

• A veritable ocean of extra virgin olive oil

• A small amount of passata or tomato puree - hold back here, you want the flavour to be paprika, olive oil, and not tomato. But it helps for sweetness. You could use one fresh tomato, seeds removed for a slightly fruitier, more acidic flavour.

• Salty vegetable stock - I used Marigold because ain't nobody got time to make fresh

• Cayenne pepper

• Black pepper
  

This is pretty rustic, with robust flavours that will kick you right up the pendejo. Therefore, there's no need to sweat the onions first - not doing so keeps their sharpness and kick. Just chop the onion, combine all the ingredients, and top up with stock, and a good amount of olive oil. Bring to the boil and then simmer for around 30 minutes, until the onion is soft.

Top with half a hard-boiled egg, extra olive oil, and parsley. If you're vegan, omit the egg, and add some finely chopped cucumber, as you would with gazpacho, instead.

You will not believe how amazing this is - and despite its slight heat, and richness, seems perfect for summer. Probably because I remember eating this kind of thing in Seville, in-between buckets of Cruzcampo and Havana Club y Coca Cola.

Still life in Forster Memorial Park

Drinking Diesel in Berlin

I developed a taste for the ‘Diesel’ in Berlin about 20 years ago. It’s beer and coke. I heard somewhere that it comes from the teens hanging around the American Sector after the War - mixing the exciting drink of the glamorous American exotic - everything had to have Coca Cola - with standard German beer. The myth is great, whether or not it’s true.

Ideally, it should be made with Weissbier for my taste, but I couldn’t get any in the current Coronaviral climate, so I did it with Birra Moretti. I know: is this what we’ve come to? Will this misery of self-denial ever end?

Anyway, it was still a little bit of fizzy, ditchwater coloured, heaven.

I’ve learned not to ask for one in the U.K. as bartenders get confused, bemused, or even sometimes offended. Some people call a mixture of beer and cider a Diesel - that is incorrect. The technical term for that is ‘Snakebite,’ as can be confirmed by all eighties goths, and testified to by their multicoloured projectile vomit in Northern Working Men’s Club cobweb-encrusted discos.

Snakebite will certainly not be served by most bartenders these days, because it will fuck you up faster than Crystal Meth.

Anyway, I had my first real Diesel when absolutely shitfaced at 3am at a pavement bar in Prenzlauerberg. At the time, I had decided I wanted it with diet cola because I was on an alcohol-only diet. The barmaid thought this was insane, which indeed it was, and ignored me.

I later had Diesels in around 2000, on a return visit to Berlin. They became a late-evening/ early morning drink of choice in Tacheles, a massive squatted former department store with an expansive courtyard strewn with junk sculptures, including an old spitfire, on Oranienbergerstrasse. (Now closed, demolished, replaced with chichi designer shops.) We used to go up to the bars and strange parties of unclear provenance, and artists’ studios, based in the largely windowless old departments upstairs. I will always remember the striking poise of the DJ: a 6 foot tall, wafer-thin, white German girl with long chestnut hair that covered half of her face. She wore a set of headphones bigger than her head, and was playing a barnstorming Motown set while everyone sat around on reclaimed leather sofas and smoked weed. Her body gyrated to Detroit rhythms like a twanged rubber band.

At 3am, we would move on to Diesels so we didn’t fall over. And then, we would go down to the balcony at the first floor, just above the courtyard, and watch the sea of rats that would swarm up from the undergrowth to get the remains of currywursts, frites and cocktails from underneath the empty chairs and tables.

This was both deeply uncanny, and somehow impressive and enouraging. Prost, my rodent friends. I always have sympathy with vermin.

By the time we returned to Tacheles later in 2009, not long before it was closed, the rats had been joined by thousands of American tourists - you know, the young people with identical hair who dance with their hands in the air because it’s what they’ve seen on TV shows about going to nightclubs.

I preferred the rats.

But their forebears did bring 50% of the Diesel with them.

Empowered by Cannellini Beans: Lemon and Spring Greens Minestrone

I’m a huge fan of canned beans. Yes, even baked beans - although I have a recipe for home-made Heinz-style beans which is even better. But the fact you can just crack open a can, use the brine to thicken and flavour, in the place of stock, and create something , well, creative, I find that… yes… empowering. YES: canned beans are an empowering. You heard it here first.

This is good for that time in Spring when it’s too cold to sit out, but you want something that reminds you of summer. That is the most cookbook bollocks I have ever written. Sorry. I sound like Nigella; like I’ve just done 4 lines of coke and motor-boated a raspberry pavlova before moaning unwholesomely, covered in cream. I bet she does that, like, all the time.

But it has all the flavours of spring - green, herby, lemony, creamy (but vegan). The beans create acreamy, silky, buttery consistency almost as unctuous as Nigella. The lemon is powerfully fragrant, especially with the mint.

Oh, and it was born because I wanted to use up the fresh herbs, half a lemon, and a rubbery white cabbage before they were past it. I’m sure you could sub pretty much everything in it and still have something very good. But it needs beans, green herbs, and lemon.

Italian Spring Minestrone with Lemon and Cannelini Beans

• A bunch of spring onions chopped

• Half a small white cabbage chopped

• A handful of another green leaf vegetable (I used cavolo nero)

• 2-3 of pieces of lemon peel, sliced in very thin slivers

• Can of cannellini beans in brine (not water, if possible)

• Big cloves of fresh garlic

• Fresh mint, parsley, big handful of each - or whatever leafy green herbs you have

• Vegetable stock

• Black pepper

Fry the spring onions, lemon peel and cabbage, and garlic in olive oil until slightly softened. Add half the herbs. Add the can of cannellini beans, including liquid. Add stock. Simmer until it goes creamy and soft (about 20 mins). Serve with black pepper, more lemon zest, the rest of the herbs, and a squeeze of lemon.

I think you deserve a shot of limoncello after that, don’t you? Which you will already have in the freezer, naturally. And perhaps a few lines of coke. Go with Nigella.

Phlebotamist's Beans: An African bean speciality

I was recently at the hospital again, getting yet another blood test. I don’t cope well with these. Despite having them all too regularly, I still faint every time. I have learned to warn whoever is sticking me that day, and on the day in question, the phlebotomist was talking to me to try to stop me fainting. She asked me what I had for lunch. I told her nothing, and there was an ominous silence before the lecture began.

Anyway, we started to talk about favourite foods, and after a while, she gave me this recipe for beans from her homeland (somewhere in Nigeria - I asked her to repeat the place three times, still couldn’t understand, and my white guilt precluded me asking a fourth). So I went home and made it straight away.

• Can of Black eye beans

• An onion, chopped

• Fish flakes (I substituted anchovy as didn’t have any)

• Garlic and ginger

• Some fresh tomato

• Fresh spinach

• Large chunks of plantain

• Chilli

• Berber spice

• Chopped Fresh spinach.

• Squeeze of lemon

So, I added the berbere spice, somewhat off-piste. I’m sure this is not at all authentic (what with Ethiopia not being, well, Nigeria), but I really love the flavour, and she did mention some spices but I coudn’t remember them. But you could leave them out, I’m sure.

The ‘method’ is fairly self-explanatory. Fry the onions, garlic and ginger, with the fish flakes or anchovies, and the chilli. Add the tomato, cook for a while, and then add the can of beans, including liquid, and some spices, with some additional stock.

Fifteen minutes before the end, add the chopped plantain, stir, and then five minutes before the end, put the chopped spinach on top, and cover.

Garnish with raw onions, coriander, chilli flakes

Comforting but healthy, vegan if you leave out the fish flakes, and perfect with some rice.

I made it again recently, and it was even better when I didn’t have holes in my arm from the three attempts Daisy made to hit a vein before success.

Despite my usual striving towards authenticty, I’m not willing to let go of the Berbere spice I use for it, which I got from a market in Palermo. I’m not even sure how authentic my spice mix is (although generally Italy is a good place to get Eritrean and Ethiopian food; because, you know, colonisation), but it has a sort of warm, rich, almost caramel taste and consistency. It’s a good job I like it because I bought half a kilo. Getting it back through customs in my suitcase felt like a bit of an invitation to a strip search.

Meanwhile, I got the world’s most massive can of black eyed beans ever from the really excellent new Turkish supermarket in Catford. ‘Catford Metro’. Where I also got a vast, somewhat priapic plantain like something out of a Jeff Stryker video. I felt oddly ashamed buying it.

How to be human again

Someone was arguing in ‘The New Republic’ against the idea that everyone should be USING this time. They noted that everyone is saying we’re so lucky to have all this ‘new’ time.

But it’s not ‘new’ time - it was always there; we just haven’t been able to take it. Or, often, have chosen, however passively, not to.

I was talking to a friend about how one of the things we’re all having to rediscover, good and bad, is what it means to be a human being. Outside of the bonkers urban rat race. You eat. You sleep. You go outside sometimes. You talk to friends. You plant things if you can. You forage for food and hope you can get it - but are largely at the whims of what is in the market. (And imagine how much worse that could be - and may become.) You look after the kids and the elderly. You can’t travel much, but anyway why would you. Sometimes you’re bored. But you’re surprisingly less bored than you would think, and the days go fairly quickly. It’s an arresting contrast for a ‘metropolitan professional.’

At the other side is the revelation of the worst part of human existence. No job now? Sorry, time to starve. No friends or family? Sorry, you’re alone. No kids? Sorry. No outside space or room to plant? Sorry. Nowhere to live? Sorry.

When you bring it all together, doesn’t it really just make an argument for a fundamental rethinking of society which looks after those who need it, but starts to reduce - slightly, and in the right places - to the essentials. Not the bare essentials - no arguments for primitivism or survivalism here. But a recentring on care, community, localism, relationships. And fewer fucking spreadsheets.

Wake up call - the people in supermarkets and hospitals need to be at work, because they have real jobs. Those of us who do spreadsheets for a living: sorry, 80% of us (only 80%, mind, but it includes me), are pointless. So why do we have to do it? Can we work less, and play and care more?

I’m sick of producing - and am lucky to have been able to come to this conclusion in the preceding 6 months.

Still wish I could go to the pub or the pictures though.

Samuel Beckett lives

Sometimes Apple autocorrect turns your texts into a vignette from a late Samuel Beckett play.

It was meant to be a U.

East Street Aubergines

Stopped by East Street Market to buy some amazing fruit and veg. Always lively. There was a gentleman shouting and waving around a huge, shiny, purple-black aubergine at crotch height on Walworth road. Turned out it wasn’t an aubergine.

Behold I have created life

I have only  grown something from seed once in my entire life. At 8, there was a school growing competition (yes that’s the way to teach it, everything is a competition). So I tried to grow a sunflower, and my friend who had a small garden and a gardening-mad father grew one too and won. Ours was on a north facing windowsill and died after growing about 4 inches. My mum told me it would happen because we weren’t the kind of people who could grow things. My friend’s one was 8 feet tall... (He was also two years older, and much taller, and reaching an early puberty, so make of the symbolism what you will.) 

Anyway I have always believed that I am uniquely incapable of growing anything. But I have actually managed to sprout some runner beans and chives. I feel so genuinely proud. It is, as they say, sort of magical. When the leaves unfurled this morning and they started to look like real plants, and the colour is that bright yellow green that just *glows* with life, it really is the most cheering thing imaginable. They may die when I plant them. But just knowing that even I can actually grow seedlings - and am not uniquely a bringer of death, as I sort of believed - is wonderful. 

Dreaming of a White Christmas

One of my favourite films is White Christmas. Up there with All That Heaven Allows. It looks INCREDIBLE. Cinematography, design, an amazing film. And it’s several films - only one of which, the last 15 minutes, has much to do with Christmas. Look at the incredible mise-en-scene and painterly colours of the initial military scenes. They look like old masters.

But it’s also an absolutely bizarre film. The hagiography of the Sarge, the alpha male, the doting, soft but stern, patriarch, who seems emotionally unstable even from the first time you meet him (his eyes are glistening with tears by minute 3) and later is a total wreck. It’s all so extreme, it’s almost absurd. The incredible deference, desperate love, tenderness, and awe for daddy, the fallen, wounded hero.

What strength of feeling, what a massive cultural faultline, must that have been to produce a film like that? With singing and dancing. And the birth of a new saviour? A secular saviour to go with the Christmas cards and sleigh bells and snow.

Note that this film came out a year after America elected war hero Eisenhower. Just saying....

The birth of our saviour

Plymouth Gin

Get Plymouth gin! It blows your tits off. Interesting fact - it’s higher proof, which means it combusts at a higher temperature. Therefore it was the only gin allowed on ships by the British Navy because it was less likely to blow your ship to kingdom come. So to clarify: if you drink it, it’ll blow your tits off, but if you store it on your ship, it won’t. I’ll get me coat.

‘Ahmed’ - digital portrait

Digital portrait process done in Procreate. The video replay in Procreate is so helpful - it actually helps me remember how I approached things when they were successful. Or where I went wrong… A great learning tool!

Instalife

Just in case anyone was in doubt about my gorgeous instagrammable life, here are my decorative pomegranates, recently purchased vintage Festival of Britain programmes, and a rather pretty little drinks coaster from Slovenia.

PS Don’t look at the dust. Or my actual life.

PPS has to check there wasn’t a reflection of me possibly in the nude on the table. You’re safe.

It’s a great substitute for existential meaning or purpose.

Belgrade

A little 6 year old boy with the most astounding blue eyes, quite well dressed, appears at our table and starts demanding money. Cheeky little fucker; I keep saying no and he shouts YES, with a grin, and soon, increasing aggression. 

Impressive negotiation skills. 

In the end, he gives me the finger with both hands, makes an ‘urnh!’ sound, and walks away. He is the coolest person I’ve ever met.

He also used the wrong fingers.

Food of the gods

At the Chinese cafe in Catford, they have a little Buddhist shrine in the bottom left hand corner of the bar, away from the eyes of the always-angry people arguing for free sweet and sour sauce. Deep red, beautifully set out in a small cabinet, it has smouldering sticks of incense and a plate of food offerings.

Today it’s Jammie Dodgers. Food of the gods indeed.

The Catford Constitutional Club

I’m very sad indeed to note the forthcoming closure of the Catford Constitutional Club. Frankly it’s hard not to like a place set up and managed by a roll-up smoking rabid socialist from Huddersfield in an old ruined Conservative club. Shabby chic, it wasn’t quite, because shabby doesn’t quite do it justice. It was utterly fucked, but fucked in a different way than the rest of Catford. Sadly it was so fucked that it turned out to be a death trap, hence the closure. But for a while, we had our very own Budapest-style ruin pub.

We moved to Catford because of its precursor, The Catford Bridge Tavern, (now rather antiseptic but with a ridiculously hot manager). There’s more here now, but it was certainly the trailblazer, and the CCC never felt like it was trying quite so hard to be cool as the Ninth Life. Ninth life is a great venue, and a community hub, with a bar. But the CCC managed to be a pub first and foremost - and yet all of those things too. We’ll miss this place. Godspeed ye.

A wild and crazy night at the CCC…. RIP.

The Bog

I’m on a commuter train. The hemispherical sliding automated toilet door is malfunctioning and slides open and shut on a 15 second cycle. A Malaysian student goes in, starts to undo her trousers, then the door - which she has been watching malfunction in the same way for a good ten minutes - opens again. She seems stunned. She tries the door lock again. Eventually she gives up. Then someone else tries. 

It becomes a bizarre ritual where people watch a door automatically closing and then opening every 15 seconds, go into the cubicle, start undoing their trousers, and then stand astonished as it continues to open and close. Meanwhile we all sit staring at the door and trying to pretend it isn’t happening.

Whenever people get on the train, they look around accusingly that someone has left open the toilet door. Everyone shouts ‘it doesn’t close’ but they have earphones in, so carry on oblivious. They close it. It reopens. They try again. 

Eventually they give up, and when anyone else gets on and repeats the cycle, we roll our eyes and shout ‘It doesn’t close.’

I wish the guy next to me would stop sighing so pneumatically; his garlic breath is far worse than the odour from the toilet.

Meanwhile here comes another Malaysian student.