First, catch your hare

Heston’s Blueprint recipe

Whatever you’re cooking, it must be rarer, and harder to procure, than rockinghorse poo. If it’s chicken, then:

Take one chicken, it must be able to trace its bloodline back to the first chicken Adam and Eve shared with apple sauce (because pork wasn’t invented then, they weren’t allowed to eat it even if it was, and apples, well, they’re kind of saucy in a biblical context, aren’t they?).

If it’s spuds:

Peel and boil ten large [insert name of potatoes here, where said potatoes are unobtainable, having been extinct since 1635], all within one billionth of an ounce of each other in weight and within one billionth of a millimetre of each other in girth.

Then there’s the kit and adjustments to your existing kit:

Take the thermostat out of your oven, so that it can reach one quadzillion degrees Kelvin, and insert an incredibly accurate thermometer up the chicken’s arse. Meanwhile oil your pizza paddle with extra virgin treble distilled olive oil.

There’s two cooking methods:

Crank everything up to one degree below Chernobyl meltdown temperature, and run past the flames with the frying pan of mackerel with cherries and chilli chocolate.

Or:

After marinating for six years, put the pork belly into an oven on gas mark 0.000001 for another six years, turning biannually and basting every six months.

But it works. Better chips, better roasties and a better roast chicken (so far) using the principles diluted with a bit of can’t be arsed with all that. So, it’s unicorn steaks and the industrial flamethrower and pterodactyl wings held within six feet of a sputtering candle from now on.

But not tonight. It was potato and chickpea curries and basmati rice tonight. Too late for all that Heston stuff.

One law for the rich…

…there is, they say, no justice, there’s just us. The European taxpayer subsidises the European farmer. In laymen’s terms, by the yard. The more land you own, the more subsidy you get, while your spokesmen get the violins out at every opportunity. For example…

…Iain Duncan Smith, the minister who is currently axing the benefits that used to go to the poor, lives on the family estate, which has attracted €1,500,000 over the last ten years.

That’s equitable isn’t it?

Er, no. No it isn’t.