FAKE EWES (YOU SEE WHAT I DID THERE)

 It's from the Sunday Sport so I assume it's fictional

but personally I'd just like to meet a man who can eat a whole sheep in 63 minutes.   His resemblance to Rishi is neither here nor there.

A FEAST ISN'T ALWAYS ENOUGH

 

I’ve been slightly worried about the fish man down at the market.  The last few times I asked him for oysters he didn’t have any and he said he was having trouble getting them.  Well, the oyster shortage is over, at least for now, and on Saturday I bought a dozen and they were very fine.

Photo by Caroline Gannon.

 

They were £1,50 each, which was what I expected to pay, but it did cross my mind that 18 quid for two starters was a bit steep; though when you think you can expect to pay several quid for a single oyster in a restaurant, it seems a lot more reasonable. Bibendum is currently charging £4.50 for a Maldon oyster (which is what I believe my fish man sells) and they’re charging £8.50 for a Gillardeau.

 

All of which, naturally, reminded me of Brillat-Savarin and his oyster anecdote.  In the transaltion I have in front of me this reads. 

‘In 1798 I was at Versailles as a commissary of the Directory, and frequently met M. Laperte, greffier of the count of the department. He was very fond of oysters, and used to complain that he had never had enough.

‘I resolved to procure him this satisfaction, and invited him to dine with me on the next day.

‘He came. I kept company with him to the tenth dozen, after which I let him go on alone. He managed to eat thirty-two dozen within an hour for the person who opened them was not very skilful.

      ‘In the interim, I was idle, and as that is always a painful state at the table, I stopped him at the moment when he was in full swing. "Mon cher," said I, "you will not to-day eat as many oysters as you meant—let us dine." We did so, and he acted as if he had fasted for a week.’

      I’ve often had ‘enough’ oysters but I’ve always thought I could manage a couple  more, though perhaps not another 32 dozen.

 

Thirty two dozen is 384 – that’s a lot of oysters, and quite an expense even at £1.50 each, let alone at Gillardeau rates. I don’t know how much money a commissary of the Directory earned in 1798, or whether he had a generous expense account, but the final bill would surely have stung.

 

I was also taken by that line ‘the person who opened them was not very skilful’ which reminded me of the food writer Christopher Hurst, who I used to meet one in a while though I haven’t seen him for years.  When he was writing for the Independent I think it was, he got roped in to an oyster-opening contest, at Bibendum.  It may have been for charity.  He was strictly an amateur and he found himself up against the professionals. I’m pretty sure Tom Parker Bowles was one of them – he seemed a nice lad.

Of course the pros trounced poor Christopher, and I do remember Christopher looking ashen and humiliated afterwards, and saying the whole thing was jolly unfair. Which it was.  I imagine he’s got over it by now, though on the night it looked like something he might never get over at all.

NO TONIC FOR THE TROOPS

 

So the great Rodney Graham, conceptual artist, which in this case included being a 

photographer, filmmaker, sculptor, musician and much more besides, has become the 

late, great Rodney Graham.  He was 73.

 

You may remember him from such art films as Lobbing Potatoes at a Gong in which he sits on a chair and throws (or lobs) potatoesat a gong some distance away.  This was apparently inspired by Nick Mason of Pink Floyd.

 

Some of the potatoes hit the gong, some inevitably missed, and the ones that hit were supposedly distilled into vodka.

 

But I do wonder how, after the lobbing, anybody could look at all the potatoes on the floor and tell which had hit and which hadn’t.  Maybe there was a system. Or maybe that was the joke.

 

Anyway, the end result looked like this:

 

Now, some people might say that’s an awful lot of trouble to go to for a bottle of vodka. But then some people just don’t understand art.

 

 

 

 

THE LAST MAN WITHOUT A YOUTUBE CHANNEL

 And yes, since you ask, I have been doing some cooking. 

(The vast majority of these pics are by Caroline Gannon)

 First, a proper recipe, from Times Easy Dinners, Chicken Traybake with Balsamic Roast Potatoes.  Not much to go wrong but I'll use more balsamic when/if I do it again.

Before: 

After:

After that I busked it recipe-wise, Bream:

Then Rabbit - very local, shot just up the hill (though not by me):

 

And then risotto with the leftovers:

And when all else fails Steak Tartare:

It was all perfectly decent if not totally fantastic. But you know, we can’t all be Fergus Henderson, much as we’d like to be.

MORE SANDWICH MADNESS

 Heston Blumenthal is back, apparently.

 

Personally I hadn’t noticed that he’d been away but it seems he has.  And in his absence he’s been working on himself and he is, as he told us repeatedly in an interview in the Times last weekend, much improved.

 

 ‘I am more energized, more imaginative.  I have more clarity in my belief, a richer more fulfilled life.’

 

It doesn’t end there.  He continues, ‘I can’t think of a better therapist on the planet than me because I ask questions.’

 

And finally he goes all Donald Trump. ‘My body heals and repairs itself at an unusually high rate. I have broken so many bones, but the rate at which they fix is unbelievable.’

 

And the end result of all this hard work and self-knowledge?  Heston has come up with a Prawn Cocktail Salad Sandwich.  I won't insult you by giving the recipe.  It looks like this:

 

Is there no end to the man’s talent? Simple answer: yes.

THE EEL AND I

 A year or three back, the inamorata and I went to a restaurant in London’s Chinatown, and 

ate salted eel.

 

It was really good, and as the days went by we thought about it and decided it was one of the best things we’d ever eaten. So a few weeks later we decided to go back to the same restaurant and have the eel again. But either the restaurant had gone or we were looking in entirely the wrong place, or our minds had been so clouded by the joy of the eel that we’d become totally disoriented, but whatever the reason, searching then and later, we failed to find the restaurant.  At times I wondered if I’d dreamt the whole thing. 

 

And you might say we could have looked through our bank and credit card records but we’d paid cash and we hadn’t kept a copy of the bill because we didn’t think there was any reason to - we thought we knew exactly where the the place.  We gave up on our search for the restaurant though we didn’t give up on salted eel.

 

On recent summer meanders through Chinatown, the whole area has looked like a tourist refugee camp, with long queues to get into many of the restaurant.  And OMG have you seen the prices?  25 quid seems about standard for half a Peking duck.  They’re having a larf aren’t they?

 

So it was that we ended up recently in a Chinatown restaurant called Lido, where there was reasonably priced salted eel on the menu, and there was also salted squid so we had that too, along with some noodles.

 

The eel and the squid, and indeed the noodles, were all very good.  Was this the salted eel of my dreams?  No, but then I suppose it couldn’t have been.  That’s how it is with dream food.

 

 

SARAH AND GEOFF AND HELENA - UNCANNY

Lucas, that is:

and me:

then of course Helena Bonham Carter:

EATING LIKE A KING (NOT CHAS 3, OBVIOUSLY)

 It was Stephen King’s birthday on September 24^th– he was 75.

 

This is the trim and attractive (and possibly lean and hungry) picture he has on his website, taken by Shane Leonard.  Not a bad looking 75 year old:

 

The story goes that back in the 80s King porked up and was his doctor told him to lose weight.  Like any decent novelist he decided to turn his experience into a novel, in this case Thinner, written under the pseudonym Richard Bachman.

 

The plot as I understand it (I mean I haven’t read the book, though I do have some vague memories of seeing the film on TV) involves a fat lawyer who runs over and kills an old Romany woman. He gets away with it because of his connections but the woman’s father puts a a curse on him and he starts to lose weight regardless of how much he eats. This is a still from the film:

If you could patent that curse you’d have yourself a helluva start up

 

Anyway, I only knew it was Mr. K’s birthday because the blessed Anne Billson posted on Facebook these two fine images she took of Mr. K reacting to a fish paste sandwich at Brown’s hotel. (Thanks Anne).

 

 

He might have been happier with some of this:

CONTINUITY

 It was the weekend of the Queen’s funeral and I was in Felixstowe eating fish and chips in a pub.

I wish the pub had been called the Prince of Wales, but it wasn't. I’m not eating two platefuls – the other belongs to the photographer – Caroline Gannon. You probably worked that out.

 

Previously, between the Platinum Jubilee and the funeral I ate this Coronation Chicken sandwich, in Dedham.  It was good, if slightly over-toasted.

On the weekend of the Jubilee itself I was, partly, in a pub in Hoddesdon with winsome men of a certain age (though younger than me – Simon Poulter and Dr. Pete Gomes), and if the picture is to be believed I made do with a glass of lager.  Photo again by Caroline Gannon.

And today, as the memory fades, the local Co-op has started selling mince pies.  It’ll soon be Christmas.  Life, and the monarchy, goes on. 

TROUBLE WITH THE FOOD GODS

 Following up from the previous post, I’ve been thinking about mushrooms.  

I actually think about mushrooms pretty regularly.  Mushrooms are (very 

often) on the ground to begin with, so the five second rule obviously 

doesn’t apply there.  On the other hand, not all mushrooms are to be 

snatched up and eaten.

My friend Nick who used to be a hospital administrator, tells the story of a family – mother, father, two children - who came to the hospital complaining of stomach pains.  They’d been out foraging and had eaten some dodgy mushrooms. They were admitted to hospital – AND ALL FOUR OF THEM NEEDED LIVER TRANSPLANTS!!

 

This has made Nick, and me too, very wary about eating mushrooms in the wild.  I have a couple of books that supposedly help you identify them, and I’ve even played around with an app, but I remain unconfident about my identification abilities.  This, of course, has nothing to do with them being on the ground.

 

Above is one of the more melancholy photographs I’ve ever taken – at the seaside in Walton on the Naze.  This sad ice cream was just lying there on the stepped parapet at the seafront.  You know there must be a backstory, very possibly one involving some unhappy and disappointed child who dropped it.  Unless maybe the child was peevish and discarded the ice cream while having a tantrum. Also, I admit, the ice cream isn’t quite on the ground, but it’s definitely heading that way.

 

And just so you know that the food gods are there to punish you if you start feeling the slightest confident, yesterday afternoon, I knocked a tub of cream out of the fridge and onto the floor.

 

I know there’s no use crying over split milk, but couldn’t an exception possibly be made for split cream?

THE FIVE SECOND RULE (NOT)

If you walk about ten minutes due south from where I live you come to a 

small public orchard, or anyway a small group of apple trees, planted I 

suppose in the interests of saving the planet. And there, at this time of 

year, on the ground are hundreds of apples that have fallen off the trees.  

I’ve been known to gather up a few of these wormy old fruits to put in my 

compost bin, and I’ve picked a fair number of apples off the trees and 

eaten them.  They’re crisp and a bit sour, and just the kind I like, though I 

couldn’t tell you the breed.

This reminded me of a recent walk I did, I did not very far from home, around some potato fields, where a good many discarded or rejected potatoes by the potato harvester machine, and could be snatched up from the ground, and they were, by me and my walking companions. Not the potatoes in this picture, obviously.

 

And OK, you may say, ‘Well of course there are edible things on the ground where you live, in a very slightly rural bit of Essex.’

 

And this is true enough, but a couple of weeks ago I was in London, in Spitalfields.some and there were ‘windfall’ potatoes to be had right there on the ground.  I imagine they’d fallen off the back of a lorry but they looked perfectly edible (apart from the odd one that had been run over) though I admit I didn’t swoop down on them.

And then, because I go around taking pictures of these things,  I remembered this perfectly good looking piece of bread, close to the rear tyre of a pickup truck in Los  Angeles. They have everything in that city!  But again I didn’t forage it.

STEW

Want to see what my stew and Yorkshire pudding looks like?

Well, what harm could it do?

JARDIN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS, AND BARGAINS

 No doubt, like me, you’ve been reading about the efforts to get young people in Japan to drink more alcohol.  And no, I have no idea what the guys the picture below are drinking. Milk?  Ouzo?

 

Well ere’s my plan – reduce the price!

 

My local supermarket had a couple of bottles of Adnams Jardín Mexicano Gin on sale, ‘reduced to clear,’ down from £32.95 to £17.79. Of course I would never have bought it at 33 quid but at £17.95 I thought it was worth a punt.

 

The label says, inscrutably, that it’s an ‘Avocado and botanical gin’ and that singular through me for a while. Just the one botanical?  But the Adnams website explains that it’s made with juniper and angelica, so far much as expected, but then, ‘There are also warming notes of cinnamon from Cassia Bark, a punchy woodiness from the Mexican herb, Epazote and a smoky hint of Chipotle Chilli in the background. The addition of Coriander leaf and Mexican Oregano (which is related to Verbena) and Lime Peel created the underlying citrus freshness, much like that found in Mexican salsa.’ 

 

A first taste test suggest they may be exaggerating its specialness - though I think I detected some hotness - but it tastes fine and hey, it’s alcohol and it’s cheap (ish).