Tales of The Unexpected

No, not the one with the women doing the swirly dancing. Just a situation where you plan a weekend of carefree researching of Victorian child murders (erm, not for fun, but because you have an interview for a masters and you are trying to be all clever and set yourself apart from all the other desperate history nerds. Honestly.) And then you find out that you have to move out of your house. Into a new rented house. With pets. Which is virtually impossible.What I actually wanted to do at this point was curl up in the foetal position and cry. But I had people coming over for Curry Night (note the use of capitals) and naan dough was in the Kenwood Chef, just lingering.

Having people over for dinner is pretty much guaranteed to create a kitchen anxiety attack of epic proportions, even without a homelessness crisis looming. My key advice on this is as follows:

1. Don't call it a Dinner Party. This conjours up visions of A) Actual Linen Napkins and B) Abigails Party. (I KNOW that was a drinks party, but still)

2. Call it Supper. It sounds way more sophistamicated to say to people 'Why don't you come round for a little supper?'. Also, their expectations will be much lower.

3. Cook something that looks impressive but that can be slow cooked. In this case, curry is a perfect option. Unless you are some sort of authentico-twat like me who wants to make naan bread. Which you probably aren't.

4. Give everyone drinks. All of the time. Take their coat, give them a drink. Give them a new drink about twenty minutes later. And so on, throughout the evening. This will cleverly conceal the fact that you are in the kitchen shouting frantically at the curry 'Why won't you just FUCKING THICKEN YOU ABSOLUTE BASTARD' etc.


A few years ago I had the fortunate experience of becoming friends with a tiny, terrifying woman of Bengali origin, who is so East London it is untrue. I mean actual East London, not all the twats who came in ten years ago, with their fixies and fashion dogs and multi-directional hairdos, spending their weekends going to art shows where the only exhibit is one scuffed trainer on a plinth. Shads, AKA the Pocket Rocket, is five foot nothing of scathing put downs, good advice, and amazing recipes. The daal and saag are all her own work, but I did the curry and naan myself. When I asked her, about two years ago, if she had a good naan recipe, she looked at me like I was certifiably mad and said 'Faaaakin 'ell! Use Sharwoods bruv!'.

I perservered and found a recipe in one of my seventies cookbooks which I have tweaked a bit. Granted, it seems like a total ballache but shop naans have  a cotton wool quality I'm not crazy about. The veg sides that Shads has come up with are so delicious that I would happily eat them without any meat, which as a confirmed carnivore is quite a statement. Serve all of the below with some poppadoms, chutney, lime pickle, raita and a winning smile to conceal your inner turmoil and panic caused by MAKING naan.

Curry Night Recipes

Chicken Curry

Serves 6 greedy people


Ingredients
2 Peppers (I used green but any colour will do)
2 green chillies
12 skinned and boned chicken thighs (your butcher will do this, under duress, making a massive fuss, but secretly loving the fact he has to do some butchery)
Thumb sized piece of ginger, peeled
2 tins of tomatoes
2 white onions
4 cloves of garlic
2 tsp cumin
2 tsp ground coriander
2 tsp turmeric
1 tbsp hot curry powder
1 packet of creamed coconut
Oil  (sorry to be so non-specific but you will need...a bit)

Method 

1. Cut each chicken thigh into about three pieces. Check for bone shards, depending on how grumpy your butcher is about cutting things up (he may have left it in there to spite you)

2. Brown meat off in a little oil.

3. Cut peppers up into bite sized chunks.

4. Add onions, garlic, ginger and chilli to a food processor, and whizz. If you don't have one, chop laboriously by hand and think about BUYING a food processor.

5. Add vegetable smush and pepper pieces to chicken and continue browning.

6. Now add spices.

7. And tomatoes.

8. Then add the creamed coconut, you will have to chop this. This is awful as it feels like you are cutting up a candle but I promise it will melt down.

9. Cook in a slow cooker for about 6 hours, or a normal saucepan for about 3.

10. Eat it with all the other stuff you have laboriously prepared and secretly wonder who you are trying to impress with this. 

 

 Dahl By Shahida (In her words)

Ingredients

Orange/Yellow lentils- 200 g  - Wash first

1 - onion - chop up

2 dry bay leaf

4 green chillies - whole or cut in half

3- garlic clove mashed up with the equivalent amount of ginger

1/2 tea spoon of turmeric

1 tsp of salt (add more salt if you need it) black pepper for taste

****************************************************************************

You will also need

6 cloves of garlic finely chopped or mashed up

6-8 red birds eye chilli

4 table spoon of oil any oil would do but not smelly oil like olive oil

Coriander (Fresh, chopped)

Method

So in a pot add your washed lentils, chopped onions, bayleaf, salt, 4 green chillies, salt, mashed up 3 garlic and ginger and blast it on boil, with an inch of water above the lentils..... then turn the heat down a bit and cover for 20 mins, stir now and again until the lentils are soft, and most of the water is gone.

Taste to see if you're happy with the salt, if not add more. Then add some water ...depending on how runny you want your lentil dish and boil for another 15 mins

Next in a frying pan ......this is quite dangerous!!! ...heat the oil add the

6 cloves of garlic finely chopped or mashed up

6-8 red birds eye chilli, until it is brown.

Turn off all the heat fully and add this into the main lentil pot ...... it's gonna sizzle to the max bruv so be careful!! And cover.

Garnish with chopped coriander ... Boom !!!

Saag Aloo also by Shahida

Ingredients

Garlic 2 cloves - finely chopped

1 large onion - chop

1 green chillies - finely chopped

3 potatoes  - bite size or whatever size you want not too big though

Oil

1/2 tea spoon Turmeric

1/2 - 1  tea spoon Curry powder

1/2 teaspoon Chilli powder (optional)

Spinach - chopped up

Salt - 1./2- 1 teaspoon depending on how salty you like ur dish

Coriander - fresh

Method

Okay so blitz your garlic / onion green chillies in a food processor (even East London rude girls like a Kenwood - just buy one!!! - HH)

1 - Heat some oil in a frying pan, add your mixture

2 - add salt and turmeric, and fry until its brown

3 - add the potato and fry for 5- 10 mins

4. Add  1/2 - 1  tea spoon Curry powder and 1/2 teaspoon chilli powder (optional)

5. Stir for a bit then add the spinach stir and cover, let it all shrink, stir every so often for the next 10-15 mins on low heat.

6. Once the potato is soft enough, blast the heat and add some coriander.

7. Add some water if it is too dry or blast the heat up if it is too runny.

Naan Bread (Not by Shahida as only mentals MAKE naan)

Ingredients


150 ml warmed milk
2 tsp yeast
2 tsp sugar
1 beaten egg
2 tsp black onion seeds
450g strong white bread flour
1 tsp salt
2.5 tbsp oil
160ml natural yoghurt

Method

1. Add the yeast and sugar to the warmed milk and leave until it goes all frothy and starts moving about and looks repulsive.

2. In a jug mix the egg, yoghurt and oil

3. Now mix the yeasty stuff and other wet stuff with the dry ingredients and knead for about ten minutes. I use my Kenwood Chef because I am lazy but you could do it by hand. In fact Paul Hollywood says you can't make bread with a machine anyway as you can't feel when it is right. But A) I dont know when it is right because I am not a professional baker and B) Should you trust a man who looks like a human husky? I think not.

4. Now leave for about two hours, in a covered bowl, until it doubles in size.

5. Preheat your oven to as hot as it will go.

6. Place your heaviest oven tray in there.

7. Grease up the surface you will be using with lots of vegetable oil. Also grease yourself up.  Mainly your hands but also probably go a bit further up the arms. To the elbows. Or further. Think male stripper at a hen-do in the Circus Tavern circa 1987.

8. Divide the dough into six pieces (on the greasy surface) and shape into balls. (Hur hur. Balls)

9. Now take one ball and attempt to shape it, on the greasy surface, into a naan shape. Open the oven and try to throw the naan shape onto the hot tray. This will not work and you will probably end up with a phallic looking naan bread. It is done when the bread is browned and looking a bit bubbly, like a naan. But penis shaped. Probably.

10. Repeat five more times whilst being bored out of your tiny mind and envisaging being homeless with your dog.

11. Reheat when ready to eat for about five mins in a 200C oven with garlic and coriander butter smeared all over them (I like to use the lurpak garlic butter and smush chopped coriander into it).


12. Eat it. All of it. Whilst furtively looking at Rightmove.

Victoria Josephine Fox

Moving to Essex was hard. I was six, nearly seven, and went to primary school, ever the optimist, expecting to be knocked down by a stampede of kids who literally could not wait to be the new girl's friend. It didn't happen. I was weird, and kids have a special way of sniffing out weird. Not only was I about a foot taller than all of them, I insisted on having boyishly short hair to keep my bonkers Irish barnet under control, and I read Dickens. A seven year old. Reading Dickens. If I had children at that school, I would assume some sort of Let The Right One In scenario, and keep them away from that new kid completely. Not only that, but the first five years of my life in Australia had been followed with a year of hanging out with my bumpkin cousins from Suffolk. Take the Melbourne accent, combine it with the Newmarket one, and you have the deeply unappealing amalgamation of Antipodean Questioning Intonation where everything is uncertain (It's a nice day? I have some Barbies? I like chips? ) , and sentences like 'asssss an 'orrible chickun, ut boites' (Apparently I once said that but I refuse to believe it). In short, it's a combination that makes you sound like you were just beamed in from Planet Stupid.

 Then I went to First Holy Communion Class and it all started to look up. I was the only kid there who didn't go to the Catholic primary, so I assumed the worst, and prepared to be ignored, or kicked in, or both. The terrifying nun (all nuns are terrifying, The Sound Of Music is full of shit) looked me up and down and said 'Oh yes, you aren't from St Francis are you? You can sit with Victoria'. Thus I ended up next to this kid that was an exemplar of what would happen if you allowed your Irish hair to grow; a halo of wild growth and a fringe that stuck out in front like the peak of a cap. We were issued with blue folders and some pictures of Jesus to colour in. Because nothing says religious devotion like keeping within the lines. Victoria was silently regarding me with large blue eyes. As soon as the nuns back was turned, she did the sort of mucousy sniff a Victorian street urchin would do, said 'Awlrite?' leaned across, and with a green crayola, drew a massive penis on my newly issued folder. It was of course, love at first sight.

Vic didn't mind that I was weird, because she was weird too. There was the hair for a start. And her insistence that she could breakdance, and that everyone must watch her displays, even though she just looked like someone had flipped a stag beetle onto its back in some Vaseline. And the fact that she played the flute. And had a wrestler for a Dad. In fact, she won all the prizes for weird.

Incidentally I'm not writing about her in this mournful past tense because she is DEAD or anything like that. She is alive and well and living in Jakarta, which I have barely forgiven her for (how DARE she have a life. Abroad.). Our friendship is now nudging the thirty year point so I like to think I know her well enough to do a recipe for her (she won't read it as Victoria lives in some sort of self imposed cultural black hole and has only just worked out what the internet is). Vic likes traditional food, and when she loves a food stuff has the deeply unappealing habit of referring to it as 'smeary'. As in 'That jacket potato was really smeary'. Possibly from the idea that the food stuff is so good you end up with it smeared round your face? I actually have no idea.

I have chosen rice pudding as when Vic first got her own place, my mother would send her food parcels. Like she was a war-torn country, as opposed to a twenty year old who had just got a mortgage (she was actually really broke and living on crisps and wine so in retrospect Mam may have saved her life, or at least prevented scurvy). Rice pudding was always the favourite. So Vickie, if you have worked out what blogs are in the year 2038, and you find this, hopefully this is really....smeary?

Last day of secondary school. What a pair of bellends.

Rice Pudding for Foxy

Ingredients

100g pudding rice
75g sugar
1 tsp vanilla bean paste (or extract if you prefer)
900ml of milk
150ml double cream
20g butter
Whole nutmeg

Method

1. Preheat oven to 140C

2. Melt the butter, then tip in the rice and sugar. Stir on a low heat until well coated.

3. Add the milk and cream. Then the vanilla bean paste. To be honest this is just a culinary conceit, I really only buy it because I like to sniff the jar, extract is a good alternative.

4. Bring the mixture up to a simmer, then add to an oven proof dish. Probably one deeper than the one I used, so you don't get spaffy looking stuff all over the floor of the oven.

5. Grate nutmeg over the top, to taste. For me, this is about half of a nutmeg but that is more because I like my house to smell nutmeg-y and am then struck with remorse when I realise my pudding tastes like candles. So go easy on it. 

6. Bake for about an hour and a half, whilst your husband repeatedly nods off in front of The Bridge, then wakes up yelling 'Where is my pudding?'. In actual fact, I had to cook for more like an hour and forty, but my oven is v.bad, so check from an hour in. Test a little from the edge if you are unsure. Obviously the rice needs to be cooked, but texture is a personal preference, some people like it more liquid-y, I prefer it to be claggy. Mmmm. Claggy.

7. Eat greedily, and if you wish, smearily.

Smeary.

The Clapham Road Trip

I am an idiot where animals are concerned. I once owned a rescue cat that was so mentally disturbed that it rolled about in its own faeces, bit me every time I came anywhere near it, and lived exclusively in a two inch square gap under a desk. But I wasn't bothered. I loved Humbug. So much so that when my then boyfriend delivered the 'Its me or the cat' ultimatum I just shrugged and said 'OK' (he was a crap boyfriend anyway but I LOVED that cat.)

So when I met, and in very quick succession, moved in with my what is now my husband, it felt like the natural thing to do to get a pet. His Mum very kindly offered to get us a cat (all that we were allowed in our rented house) so we made our way to the RSPCA and did the responsible thing, adoption. What followed was a two month reign of terror at the hands of the tabby Bert The C**t.  The story is for another time, but he richly deserved that moniker and was eventually taken back by the RSPCA who were probably fearing a court case.

But was I beaten? Put off cat ownership for life? Nope. Like I said, I am an idiot. Where I worked at the time there was an online noticeboard. When a girl who I really didn't know posted that a feral cat had come into her house whilst on holiday, and given birth to two mangy looking kittens, which were now free to a good home, I thought 'Yeah, perfect'. Idiot. My husband was understandably much less excited than me. He thought we should just take one, or better still, none. But I whined and nagged, and dragged the welfare of my six year old step-daughter into it: 'Think how good it would be for her to have TWO pets' and he eventually agreed. So one summers morning one of my best friends and I set out in her rickety car to make the road trip to Clapham. It was fairly uneventful, we did some coffee stops, wittered on, and sung along to the radio. We also saw a tramp drop his trousers and crud into a drain on Clapham High Street, but you know, rough with the smooth. When we eventually found the house I started to have second thoughts. The woman had nine cats. NINE. Not including the recent new mother and two kittens. The place stank of cats piss and crusty cat food was smeared over everything. I was dry heaving and scratching myself. When the kittens were picked up to be put into the basket they snarled furiously and wrapped themselves round her hand like a really bitey boxing glove. Still, I didnt leave. Once in the car, Kaff exhaled deeply and said 'Soooooooo'. There was a lot loaded into that 'so', namely, that she thought I was clearly mental. But we went home anyway, with the two feral kittens screaming furiously for the whole hour and a half.

My husband had picked the child up that morning and she was completely beside herself with excitement. We placed the basket on the floor and she hugged herself and looked up at me, and whispered 'Oh I LOVE them. SO much. SO much'. I was feeling pretty smug, but then my husband opened the basket door. They slowly sauntered out, looked us both up and down, looked around our non-cat-piss-smelling kitchen and gave each other a look that said 'Fuck this shit' and promptly ran behind the washing machine. The kid looked with disbelieving eyes at her father, then me, then Aunty Kaff, and exclaimed 'Why do they hate me???' and promptly burst into tears.

Nothing was going to bring the two furry terrorists out of that gap. But I felt like such a terrible failure as a step-parent that when six o'clock came the next morning I was downstairs in pyjamas, laying on my belly, talking to two tiny felines with a tin of tuna in my hand, pleading with them to come out. When you think about it, this is an excellent metaphor for the exercise in masochism that is feline ownership, you wheedling and begging for their attention or cooperation, whilst they look at you with thinly veiled disgust.

Eventually, after a few days they came out and began to rule the house like the megalomaniacs that cats are. These days they mostly lie about in a stupor, shout furiously for food, and if I am really lucky, regurgitate an entire birds skull at my feet. But I've got a dog now, so I don't mind.

The point is, what I cooked for dinner that night was L's favourite, a bolognese. It might not have cured her broken heartedness completely but it probably came close. Here is the recipe and that.

This is a pretty simple recipe. It works well as a bolognese, and is also really excellent as the meat sauce in lasagne. A few words on ingredients. I get passata from one of those out of town bargain shops. A litre is about 60p, it is Italian and delicious. Ditto dried herbs. Mince always comes from the butcher. It won't cost you any more, but it will taste of meat, not plastic and fluorescent lights. There will be more on butchers in a later post, I know they are quite daunting for some people, but I promise it is worth cultivating a relationship with one, and not just so you can feel smug and middle class about it. Veg - play fast and loose with this one. You definitely need onion, carrot and celery. Apparently this is called mire-poix but I have a horror of using continental terms in cookery, it just makes me think of TV chefs. Like when one of them is doing a Spanish recipe, and everything is in mangled cockney, until they look at the camera and say 'Now add the cho-weee-thooooo' in a theatrical Spanish accent, and I involuntarily retch. So I just call it vegetable smush. Today I also added in other bits that needed to be used soon - courgette, mushrooms, peppers. They are all good in this, just increase your liquid content by a bit.

It won't win any prizes for its looks, but it makes up for that in taste.

                                                   

Ragu For Liv

Ingredients

 500g mince (I would probably go with half beef, half pork, but all beef is nice too)
1 jar of passata (large)
2 x white onions
2 x carrots
2 or three sticks of celery
1 tbsp dried oregano
1 tbsp fresh rosemary, chopped fine
Beef stock cube
2 x cloves of garlic
Worcestershire sauce
Red wine
White pepper
Salt
Milk
Sugar
Red lentils (or not, if you have a horror of hippie food like my husband)

 Method

1. Brown the mince in a pan.

2. Chuck all the veg and garlic into a food processor. If you dont have one, try a blender. Or chop it by hand into a very fine dice. But this will be a ball-ache. If using a processor, you dont want a puree but you do want it pretty small. Use the pulse function if you like, to keep an eye on it.

3. Add the veg to the mince, and fry gently for a few minutes to soften it slightly. Now in with the herbs, a splash of worcester sauce to taste, your stock cube, and salt and pepper. Chuck in a good splosh of red wine.

4. Now throw in a handful of red lentils if using. I like these as they break down in the sauce, make your meat go further and boost the protein content. Plus they are delicious.

5. Now add the passata, and give a good mix. If you think it looks a bit thick, chuck in some water. I like to make my ragu thinner to start with and cook it right down so the flavour intensifies, but if you are pushed for time, don't bother.

6. Cook for at least half an hour. If I am making a big batch on a Sunday afternoon I will leave it there for hours. It is almost impossible to overcook, it just gets more delicious and makes your house smell amazing.

7. After it has been on for about fifteen/twenty minutes splosh in some milk - I would say probably no more than 100ml. This sounds like the work of a diseased mind, and I can't remember where I read about it, but I promise it works and the end result is so much better for it.

8. Once done eat with some spaghetti and grated parmesan, and rue the day you ever got cats.


 

The Obvious Child

My go-to happy song is ‘The Obvious Child’ by Paul Simon. It can fix any bad or sad day. This is pretty weird when you think about it, as joyous drumming aside, the lyrics are a minefield of melancholic nostalgia. Doubly weird when you consider this song has held this place in my heart since I was a sixteen year old goth (and really, what sixteen year old goth likes PAUL SIMON?) This traces back to the day I had called my mother from a college payphone, incoherent with sobbing and demanded to be picked up RIGHT NOW. Assuming pregnancy, or drugs, or Satanism, or maybe all three, she screeched to a halt outside about ten minutes later, by which point I was mute with sadness. Oddly I don’t actually remember the cause of the devastation, but it was probably a boy, back then it was ALWAYS a boy. Mam’s Paul Simon tape was blaring from the emphysemic stereo of her battered Peugeot, and after a few minutes of heartbroken silence, that song came on. So she did what any right thinking mother would do, sang along to it throatily, whilst jigging about in the seat, waggling her eyebrows about for comic effect. She even did the deep ‘BAAA-BAAA’ backing vocal bits. A minute and a half of that and I was helpless with laughter and suddenly things didn’t seem that bad after all.

 Sometimes I need a foodstuff that performs the same function as The Obvious Child. The usual things like cake, or chicken soup, or a mound of mashed potato oozing butter, does not cut it however. What I want when I am struck with sadness or malaise or stress is Soda Bread. Obviously this is an unorthodox choice, but childhood memories are again responsible. Every Saturday morning Mam would go on an inexplicably long shopping trip for food. Granted, we were a large family, but I suspect the length was more to do with a week of being pawed at and shouted at by five children and various animals had taken her dangerously close to the edge. Five days of that and Sainsbury’s on a Saturday morning will feel like a spa trip. Whilst the younger children were eating mud or watching Postman Pat or forcing cake into their eye, I would go and seek out my Pa, who would be perusing the papers. Inevitably, he would after a time, cut himself a piece of soda bread, butter it, do the same for me, do a theatrical wink and say ‘Don’t tell your mother’. For years, this baffled me, until I realised that the butter to bread ratio was exactly equal, and instantaneous cardiac arrest was a very real possibility.


Pa always used to tell me that no one made soda bread as beautifully as my granny. Even as a child of six, I was incredulous at this, as Gran’s cooking was absolutely fucking atrocious. A formidable woman, Granny had a fondness for small dogs, oversized jewelry, painting her fingernails red, and claiming that any famous person she loved was Irish (including Dean Martin, that most of Italian of men, henceforth forever known in our house as Mario Murphy). What she didn’t like was cooking. Her specialty was what she called ‘Knock-Up’. This involved smushing the contents of the fridge (meat, veg, everything) into a loaf tin and baking it. It was approximately as horrific as it sounds. The memory of her boiled bacon and cabbage, cooked ALL DAY until both substances began to disintegrate into the greying water, could turn me vegetarian even now. And the cakes! She used to make fairy cakes filled with angelica that I once broke a tooth on (a milk tooth, but still). Looking back on it, she was by this point, in her seventies, not in the best health, and probably could no longer be arsed. So maybe her soda bread WAS amazing, but I just never got to taste it.

Soda bread in the shops is always a let down, even that posh one by the Irish chef Paul O’Thingummy that they do in Waitrose. So here is a recipe to make it yourself, which I heartily recommend doing. Not only is it delicious, but it is also so embarrassingly easy I feel like a fraud for posting it here. Stir stuff together, put it in the oven. That’s it. None of that poncing about with proving, Irish peasants clearly had no truck with yeast. Quite right too.

                                                              This is not a pretty bread, lets call it 'rustic' yeah?

Granny’s Soda Bread  

Ingredients
250g strong white bread flour
250g wholemeal bread flour
1 tsp bicarb
1 tsp salt
500ml buttermilk
80g porridge oats
25g butter  

Method

 1. Preheat the oven to 200C/fan 180C

 2. Stir all the dry stuff together with a spoon or palette knife

 3. Chop the butter up and do that ‘rubbing together’ thing with your fingers to incorporate it into the dry stuff and make you feel like a 1930’s housewife.

4. Pour in the buttermilk. Try not to be alarmed about how much it smells like sick, and under no circumstances drink any of it. You have been warned.

5. Mix everything with a palette or regular knife, but gently. Soda bread is really stroppy, and is to be handled with care.

6. Now attempt to shape this into a neat round loaf of about 20cm across. This will not be easy and you will get very bread-y fingers.

7. Put the loaf onto an oven tray which you have either lightly floured, or put one of those silicon-y sheet thingies on.

8. Cut a deep cross into the loaf, much deeper than you think is right. This, according to my ancestors, was to ‘let the devil out’. Beelzebub hanging about in unbaked bread was a genuine problem back then.

9. Bake for about 40 minutes but keep checking it from about half an hour in. My oven is very slow and very erratic on temperatures, yours might be normal. It is done when the bottom sounds hollow when you tap it.

10. Once cooled, eat with lots of butter, and don’t tell your Mam.