Offally tasty
I’m not fond of fussy folk. I have no time for those that
get on vegetarians cases yet will only eat selected, sanitised cuts of meat. A
favourite of mine, and MM’s, has been ox heart brochettes. Serve these up
anonymously and the squeamish will scoff them with relish. Tell them they’re
heart and they turn a funny shade of green and shake their heads. “There there
dear. Shall I get you some nice chicken nuggets? Or a burger, perhaps? Would
that be better? You can pretend they’re not reconstituted from the scrapings
off the abattoir floor.”
The ox heart brochettes are really simple. Alternate small
cubes of smoked bacon and ox heart on thin wire skewers, salt and pepper, lemon
juice while they’re cooking, harissa hot sauce to serve, with rice or salad.
The new ones I tried yesterday are kidney. Marinade in lemon
juice and zest, garlic, cayenne pepper, and salt, then skewer and bung under a
hot grill until you get a nice crisp char on the outside. They’re soft and
velvety on the inside, and go very will with basmati rice and some hot chilli
sauce. Now no-one makes steak and kidney pies or puddings at home any more,
probably because we’ve reached saturation point of spoilt little brats who’ll
only eat pizza, chips, or pizza and chips (or similarly restricted diets), so
you can buy kidneys for next to nothing.
Waitrose and Morrisons buck the supermarket trend. While the
butchers always the best bet, Waitrose have counters that sell things like
pig’s and ox cheeks, and Morrisons is the only supermarket I’ve found that
stocks ox heart, conveniently already cut up into just the right size cubes.
A free press starts moving towards Pravda
Who will decide what can and can’t be said? Who watches the
watchmen? First Levenson’s billion-page tripe-fest that had nothing to say
about online publishing (and that’s where we’ll be going for genuine reporting
soon, to independent, underground, online publications, because the mainstream
press will be gagged and, sadly, Private Eye will be no more), or anything at
all really. What it didn’t say was that hacking phones is a crime and a police
matter and once again the police had failed, dismally, in dealing with it
properly, and that any decent place to live needs a free, outspoken, and
uninhibited press as a check and balance against the already powerful becoming
untouchable.
Even so, despite the shambolic progress so far, there’s an
unusual answer to the question:
“Who shall we have helping make the decisions?”
In:
“I know, that mush who sued Pilger for revealing that he trained
allies of Pol Pot in Cambodia .
Mr Top Secret. Even his birthday’s classified. What’s his name? Eh? That can’t
be classified too, can it?”
We’re teetering on the brink of a Ministry of Truth,
1984-style government-run information monopoly. If our Home Secretary gets her
way and starts controlling Internet use, we’ll be almost there.
An open letter…
…in the Times, tearing Cameron and Osborne new ones. Love
the final paragraph, too. The odious Hilary Benn was on the radio recently,
conveniently glossing over the facts that his lot had done exactly what this
lot would’ve wanted them to, and got us into this mess. It’s here:
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