A great moment on Test Match Special…
…today. Or maybe not, if you’re the sort of anal retard who
dislikes boys’ club humour:
“There’s a search
party out for Vaughan and Tufnell. They went off to lunch. Together. A
dangerous combination.”
Has anyone got any Veras? Lurrverrly.
That’s apropos of nothing, I’m just listening to the Shamen,
Boss Drum, is all. BLISS describes us as book-bound. In the same way, I
suppose, as someone built-up to enormous proportions is described as
muscle-bound. The allusion is that of too much bursting out of the skin
containing it. Over-stuffed, in upholstery analogy. So I’m in trouble. An
online penny-book five minutes has seen the delivery of the Tinneswood
Brigadier books (four of them, anyway, all not much more than pamphlets, really).
An Oxfam penny copy of Cloud Atlas arrived today, too. Pristine, lovingly wrapped in
tissue paper and stuffed into a plastic heat-sealed envelope. A penny? How can
they feed the world going on like that?
The Mind charity shop also coughed up a copy of Heston
Blumenthal’s Perfection. Two quid. We’re in turf-war territory on the kitchen
bookshelves, BLISS and I. When I’m not looking, they fill up with all these
health-food books. 100 Superfood Recipies. Healing Foods. That sort of stuff.
Sitting next to my Floyd on Fire, Street Food and Ramsey’s Indian Adventure. I
like to read recipe books while eating, and while I seldom cook with anything
as formal as a schedule of weights, measures, ingredients and oven temperatures
open if front of me, the ideas they provide are useful and I like flicking
through them and thinking “I’ll have to give that a go, looks nice…”
So, Blumenthal offers eight recipes (two of them puddings,
so six really) in over 300 pages. That’s the way I like things. Plenty to get
stuck into before the boring old weights and measures strike. The introduction
is promising. On page one it refers to Anthony Bourdain’s A Cook’s Tour[1],
essential reading. The recipes are, considering the name Blumenthal conjures up
a Damien Hirst-style idea of a kitchen churning out bacon and egg ice cream and
black pudding with blackberries, real feet of clay stuff. Death row food (last
meals are generally bacon, eggs, burgers and fries) and chef’s grub (they tend
to like offal, cheaper cuts, ribs and wings). They are: Roast chicken and roast
potatoes (I’ll not be brining chickens and going to the ends of the earth,
poultry-wise, but the roast spuds…interesting), pizza (we have that a lot and I
like experimenting to try to get the best results possible), bangers and mash
(I’ll photograph the stovetop hubcap thing I picked up (also from the charity
shop) for the sausages, and getting mash just right is important), spaghetti
Bolognese, and fish and chips (I’ve tried the Blumenthal chips before: blanch
in boiling water, refrigerate, low temperature oil, refrigerate again, high
temperature oil, serve, and they were superb, albeit troublesome, and I’m sure
the end result depends more on the spuds you begin with than anything else).[2]
Flicking through the book, the chicken and spuds look okay,
once cooked, but the photo of Blumenthal in goggles and gauntlets lowering his
chicken into an industrial-sized pot connected to enough propane to fuel an
asphalting team for a few weeks screams “too much trouble”.
The pizza looks superb, but I’ll not be pressure-cooking
then oven-drying the tomatoes, no matter how much umami that promises to
introduce. I have, however, recently used the slow cooker to good effect making
tomato sauce from scratch, using fresh tomatoes.
Bangers and mash (as it always does) looks inviting. I don’t
know whether BLISS would wait for the three-hour mash extravaganza, or the
pressure cookered onion gravy. The steak, as you would expect, depends entirely
on the quality of the meat you buy.
There’s a heading. “A load of bologs” it says. The finished
photo shows the spaghetti neatly folded to make a long oblong, turned under
itself, topped with the sauce and then parmesan shavings (I presume). It looks
spectacular, but I know BLISS would question the sanity of going to such
lengths when it’s going to be destroyed and devoured.
The fish and chips is the most inviting. The batter looks
light and airy and crisp, and the chips have those ragged, crunchy edges you
only get after a lot of messing about. I’ve used sparkling water to make batter
in the past, and there a photo of a soda siphon being shot into a bowl of
flour. Last time I saw one of those was probably the last time I was at a boot
fair, ten or so years ago.
[1] Two
things stick in the mind (naturally, I’ve read it): (1) Don’t, ever, order a
well-done steak. Cooks have meat lockers, where they keep the cuts, chops,
steaks and fish that they’ll be cooking. At the back of these mini-fridges are
what will be thrown away at the end of the shift, due to old age and
inedibility. Unless some idiot comes in and asks for a well done steak, which
rescues the item from the rubbish bin and puts it back on the positive side of
the balance sheet. (2) Don’t, ever, go for the ‘blackboard specials’ or the
sheet of paper clipped to the menu, headed ‘today’s specials’. That’s how they
get shot of produce on the turn that the well-done guys won’t get rid of.
[2] Chips
are a subjective thing, too. I like either monster crunchy, otherwise I like
soggy. I don’t like those freshly cooked chippie chips that burn your tongue.
I’m happier with some that’ve sat around for a while. BLISS and I differ about
chips. I like mine, and hers. She’s often not too keen on mine.
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