Sloe Food

I finally found some sloes in October off a footpath somewhere in West Sussex. But if anybody knows a good sloe footpath in London, let me know. Anyway, here’s what I did with them.

Wash them then prick all over with a pin or a hawthorn if you’re feeling authentic. Put them in a biggish jar, add some brown sugar (about 2oz for a pint of sloes) then fill it up with gin, seal and shake – every day for as long as you can (3 months minimum).

When they're ready, get some muslin (John Lewis, if you’re asking), strain off the berries and bottle up the filtered juice. Leave for 6-12 months before drinking.



Now, squeeze the pips out of the gin-soaked berries, then melt some chocolate in a glass bowl over a pan of hot water. Add the de-pipped berries, stir into the melted chococlate then place lumps on a piece of greaseproof paper to cool. Dust with cocoa.

And there you have it. Some delayed gratification and instant pleasure in the form of sloe gin and juicy sloe chocolates.

Four days in Praha

Surprisingly successful swede soup

I had two swede in my veg box and I was trying to ignore them. Then everything around them disappeared and I was forced into a corner. Frankly I was at a loss. Swede to me does not hold very good memories. Bright orange cubes mixed with tinned carrot and sweetcorn in a kind of inedible vegetable medley to accompany a gristly cottage pie was about as good as it got. We’ve never had swede at home as far as I can remember so it’s always been connected with the unappetising smell of the school kitchen.

But I found an old turnip recipe that I thought sounded good and added a couple of things to come up with this. And it turned out to be a truly cathartic experience, an epiphany in the kitchen if you will.

So grab your swede (two small or one big to feed 5 or 6), wash peel and chop it into smallish chunks (NOT perfect cubes). Peel and chunky chop a couple of nice carrots too and put them aside with the swede.

Finely chop an onion or a couple of shallots and smash and slice two garlic cloves. Heat up some olive oil with a knob of butter and sweat off the onions over a lowish heat, adding the garlic after a couple of minutes. Then add your misshapen swede and raise the heat a bit. Brown for about 5 minutes. Meanwhile get some stock ready – chicken’s good but veg is better for vegetarians I believe. 2 pints of strong stuff. Add the stock and the carrots, then let it simmer away for around 15 minutes. Then – and here’s where the magic starts – add half a cup of rice – risotto rice is best so arborio or carnaroli or whatever you favour. Let that simmer for 15, add salt and pepper, then at the end grate in a load of parmesan before serving up with chunky white toast and more parmesan on top if you like that sort of thing.

Musée d’Orsay

I’ve been meaning to go for ages, I mercifully missed the crowds, and it didn’t disappoint.

A beautiful building with some stop-you-in-your-tracks stuff that wakes you up and slows you down.

Bouillon Chartier, 7 rue Faubourg Montmartre

Effortless fine dining in Paris is one of the Great French Myths. It’s up there with ubiquitous stripy jumpers, berets and the romantic notion that Provence is Paradise.

In truth, packed McDonalds and heaving Starbucks are easier to come by than truly decent places to eat in the capital.

But when it’s good, it’s bloody brilliant.

At Chartier, they don’t care if you’re a tourist, a local, eating alone or in a group of 10, rich or poor, friendly or terse, articulate or completely gibbering insane. I went on a recommendation, as I hope you will, and I was eating alone. Despite the many empty tables (it was getting on 3pm), they sat me opposite another guy also on his own. Not to everyone’s taste perhaps, not really to my taste, but here it just seemed like the right thing to do.

Now the place itself is marvellous. It opened as a workers’ canteen in 1896 and shows no sign of really changing. The entrance is just off the busy rue faubourg montmartre in a little courtyard. The food is brasserie basic and pretty unremarkable but a half-bottle of decent house red at 2 euros 60 actually made me laugh out loud.

It may have become a sort-of tourist trap but the waiters, most of whom must have been there since it opened, don’t seem to have noticed. It wouldn’t want to change for the world, and the day it’s a Starbucks is a black day for us all.

Churchill Chutney

This was a bit of a George’s Marvellous Medicine. In fact, if I wasn’t so damn humble, I’d call it Nathaniel’s Marvellous Chutney. So treat it like that, and if you notice something on the shelf that you think might be nice, whack it in. Just don’t go too mental, and keep the base the same.

The apples are picked from a Cambridge orchard across the road from my girlfriend’s house, but if you haven’t got the time to drive out there, bramleys or other crisp varieties will do just fine.

Roughly chop four or five onions then peel and chop your apples – about 10 for 4 or 5 jam jars’ worth. Put them in a big pan with a knob of butter, half a pint of vinegar, two cups of brown sugar, a couple of glugs of pineapple juice and cider (I used Scrumpy Jack from the offy at the end of the road, but if you have something posher, hark at you) and a pack of stoned, roughly chopped dates – maybe a few raisins. Spicewise, some cinnamon, ground coriander and allspice, but again you might want to perfect your own blend.

Keep it simmering for 2 to three hours, stirring to stop it sticking to the bottom of the pan. It’ll turn dark as it makes the house smell beautiful, and you know it’s ready when you run a spoon across the bottom of the pan and the liquid doesn’t immediately fill the tracks.

Fill up some sterilised jam jars and mature ‘til Christmas.

An autumn risotto

Hallowe’en food. For when the air turns colder and you’re kicking along crisp brown leaves with every step.

The key ingredient for this is some kind of gourd. I used an onion squash because that’s what came in my veg box but anything’ll do – butternut, pumpkin, whatever takes your fancy. Peel it and scoop the seeds out. Slice it inch-thick, then whack in the oven on 150 degrees with some olive oil, salt and pepper, and some sage if you’ve got some.

The risotto: Dice up an onion, a head of celery and smash and chop a clove of garlic. Add them to some heated olive oil in a frying pan and cook over a low heat for about 6 or 7 minutes. Then turn up the heat slightly and add your rice – I use Arborio but feel free to experiment with other risotto rices – about two cups for two people. Move the rice around in the pan until all the grains have gone glassy – they'll look a bit like albino pomegranate seeds. Then splash in a good glug of super dry vermouth – Martini, Noilly Prat or own brand whatever. The pan will sizzle and steam, and the smell at this point is why you’re making the risotto. When it’s settled it should simmer very gently. Stir occasionally until the liquid’s mostly gone then start adding stock – about a pint for two people, but stirred in in cupfuls and allowed to soak and simmer like the vermouth did. From when the rice goes in to when you take it off the heat it’ll take about 18 minutes for the rice to cook perfectly – good to remember if you’re not sure. A couple of minutes from the end, take the squash from the oven and chuck some bits in with the risotto. Grate in plenty of parmesan (cheddar works fine if that's all you have) and maybe a knob of butter if you're feeling particularly decadent.

Splurge onto plates and top with more chunks of roasted squash. Serve with a hunk of bread to wipe your plate at the end.

Gallipoli, 102 Upper Street.

Now you can say what you like about Upper Street. Nouveau Gastro BoBo semi-skimmed chic it may be in parts, but there remain some very genuine spots, and this beautiful Turkish restaurant is one of them.

The service was friendly and my they work hard. The vegetarian meze that kicked off the meal were phenomenal. There were spicy tomato salsas laced with fresh coriander and walnuts, marinated aubergine and potato, fresh hot falafels, crisp pastry parcels bursting with feta and plenty of Turkish bread to dunk in the array of yoghurts topped with broad beans and good olive oil, homemade houmous, tzatziki and more.

After such a spread, I often find the main course quite bland, but perhaps that’s the idea. The thing is, the small bowls liberally dotted around the table (we were a big group) work so well as finger-dipping, reaching-over, pass-me-the-one-with-the-walnuts, social food, that when the mains come – juicy, well-cooked meat served with rice, salad, or maybe more yoghurt and tomato sauce – they’re bound to be a bit of an anticlimax. There were a lot of unfinished chunks of meat on people’s plates at the end - more a compliment to the starters than an insult to the mains.

Dessert was interesting, a bittersweet crème caramel wobbling between two apricots stuffed with cream and almonds, topped with pistachios. The centrepiece was forgettable but the apricots were fantastic. Just about room for a weak latte – didn’t try the Turkish coffee but I had a taste of the apple tea which tasted like hot sweetened apple juice but again, perhaps that's the point.

Now the bill. We had wine, and a set menu of three courses, with coffees. Including service, it came to less than 20 quid a head. Nothing pretentious about that. A genuine gem.

Down South (sloes at last)

Searching for Sloes, Hampstead Heath

Pissaladière

In winter, when it’s dark with a biting wind, Provence can be a pretty bleak place.

Especially if you’re teaching and living in a concrete lycée full of adolescent stoners. But there are things that’ll always make you smile, and this sort of French onion pizza I discovered at the bakery opposite the school did just that.

Finely slice three onions (they should technically be all white but I throw a red one in for racial equality). Fry them with a big knob of butter on a very low heat. They’ll take about half an hour, during which they’ll sweat, lose their sharpness, go limp, then gradually release their sugars and turn caramel brown. That’s when you can take them off the heat.

I used puff pastry, which is probably wrong but it’s easy and the sides puff up a treat (secret’s in the name). Puff pastry is made in a magical elf world, and it’s the only place where it’s possible, so don’t try making it at home. You’ll need about half a ready-made sheet. Lay it on some greaseproof paper on a baking tray and prick it all over, leaving a centimetre border where it will, as promised, ‘puff up nicely’.

Splurge on your onions and lay some anchovies in a pretty if a little pretentious criss-cross diamond pattern. If you really hate anchovies, leave them out (obviously) but their sharp salty taste works very well with the sweet gooey onions. Chuck on a handful of olives (more if you’ve chickened out on the anchovies), then bake in a pre-heated oven at 200 degrees until golden and ‘puffed up nicely’.

The best brunch I’ve ever had

I wasn’t going to put this up, but it rather snuck up on me. It couldn’t be easier, tastier, or make the house smell any better.

Slice some good mushrooms fairly thickly. Melt a knob of butter in a pan (not too hot) with a smashed up clove of garlic. When the butter’s all melted and the garlic’s just turning light brown, take the garlic out, whack up the heat and add the mushrooms. Toast some ciabatta or thick white bread. The mushrooms will take about 5 mins, and I griddled some courgette strips in a splash of olive oil while they were on. Top the bread with the crispy garlic butter mushrooms and their juice, and eat with the courgettes. I partnered it with a rather fine elderflower cordial (don’t know what year) which I must say went very well.

être et avoir, at home on DVD

The premise of this French documentary is simple and the execution masterful. Filmmaker Nicolas Philibert follows life at a rural French primary school for a year. He focuses on one teacher, M. Lopez, and a handful of kids, following them home to see their families struggle with their homework, giving us brief glimpses into their difficult extra-curricular existence. School is a safe haven for them and M. Lopez a surrogate father, instilling discipline and patiently educating each young tyke until they’re ready to fly the nest and move on to secondary school.

The pace trundles rather than zooms, much like the pace of life in the film. But unlike other French auteurs, Philibert doesn’t patronise, baffle or bore the audience. It’s always entertaining, often hilarious and never boring. There’s no sanctimonious voiceover, he lets the characters tell their own story. After a year following these fascinating subjects, he’s managed to construct a coherent and extremely watchable window into their lives.

And maybe it’s too much living in the city, but this came as a welcome break from the frantic pace and worries of life. It has a quiet power and refreshing calm that makes you forget everything else, if only for an hour and a half.

Spiced-up chicken with sweet potato wedges and sour cream

Chop a sweet potato into wedges and put them in a hottish oven with some olive oil.
Score the chicken breasts in a criss-cross pattern on either side so they’re bumpy and floppy.
Prepare your marinade. Squeeze half a lime into a bowl and add "plenty of paprika, cautious with cayenne" (Mahatma Ghandi, 1947). Add a bit of cumin, some coriander, a shake of turmeric and a small handful of black mustard seeds. Smash a couple of cloves of garlic, chop them finely and chuck them in. Salt and pepper. Then cover your breasts (chicken) in the marinade. Leave them for however long, then fry or griddle them in a bit of quite hot olive oil. They’ll go dark orangey-red, black at the edges, and plump out nicely.
I added some courgettes, sliced into ribbons, to the sweet potatoes near the end (the pots probably take about 40 minutes, courgettes about 10), and we had the whole thing with a tomato and cucumber salad. A handful of fresh coriander on the chicken’s nice if you’ve got some. And a squeeze of fresh lime.

Mags' flapjacks

Melt half a block of butter with 2 heaped tablespoons of golden syrup.
Chuck in some oats – enough to make it sort of a sticky consistency. Probably around 8oz, if you're counting.


Add whatever else you fancy, muesli, dates, perhaps the odd nut.
A handful of demerara sugar - for the crunch.
Splurge and spread onto a well greased baking tin.
OK, I'll be honest, I thought I could improve my mother's age-old, time-tested recipe. I added a bit of Alpen, some cinnamon and allspice and I sprinkled some oats on top before it went in the oven. Sue me. Just don't tell my ma.
Cook in the middle of moderate oven, around 150/Gas mark 3, for half an hour or so.
Leave in the tin to cool.

St Stephen's Green, Dublin. September 13th 2006.

Little Miss Sunshine, Curzon cinema, Soho

"Life is just one beauty contest after another". Continually trying to impress, continually being judged.

Well, in America at least. And Little Miss Sunshine works well as a parody of the nation's stereotypes. There’s the father obsessed with life’s ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ who tours a lecture of his ‘9 steps to success’. There’s the heroin-snorting nymphomaniac Grandpa, who although maybe not a stereotype himself, serves his satirical purpose. "Fuck as many women as you can kid" he tells his grandson "before it’s too late". The grandson in question is the angst-ridden, Nietszche-reading spoilt brat, who comes to his senses in perhaps the film’s most poignant scene, when his uncle (a suicidal, gay Proust scholar) convinces him that suffering is the most enjoyable part of life. Or, as the teenager translates it, "do what you enjoy, and fuck the rest". And of course there are countless pre-teen beauty queens, the apotheosis of everything that is hateful about America.

As a comedy, the film works less well. It’s too busy, too ‘wacky’. There’s no need for the farcical plot twists and turns, the constant buffoonery and slapstick episodes. It works best when relying on sharp, understated dialogue and the performances of the incredible cast (a ‘Who’s Who’ of indie actors we’ve got used to seeing in the mainstream). The young girl, too, is remarkable.

The message of the film is simple: Fuck Beauty Contests. And it’s pretty much drilled into us by the end. But it’s an important point and an enjoyable denunciation of an American obsession.

Snakes On A Plane, Orange Wednesday @ vue cinema, Finchley Road

It’s an awful film, and I loved it. No plot to speak of, of course - the title’s about as exhaustive a synopsis as you’re going to get. But it’s no straight-to-DVD, it has its place in cinema history.

First off, all the hype about the title and Sam Jackson saying he’s gonna execute every last motherfucking snake on this motherfucking motherfucker of a plane.

Also it does for ophidiophobes what arachnophobia did for arachnophobes. Scares the motherfucking shit out of them.

Queens Park, September 2006

Download wrap – Friday, Layer Cake, Little Black Book

I’m working nights at the moment, so my days pass in a dreamy daze, and the bleary-eyed void is neatly filled with the odd downloaded film watched in bed with my headphones on followed by a walk in the rain around Queen’s Park.

This week, I have been mostly watching:

Friday (the film, not the day) – Presumably they issued cinemagoers with blunts and a lighter before entering the cinema. I made the mistake of watching this sober and didn’t understand a thing.

Little Black Book - Dire.

Layer Cake – Pointless.

Successful little trio then.

The Life of Galileo, The National Theatre

The National Theatre really should be more pretentious than it is. I mean, it’s the ‘National’ for Christ’s sake. And yet somehow, it’s accessible, affordable and universal in its appeal. The last two plays I’ve seen there – Measure for Measure and The Life of Galileo – have been fantastic. Engaging, enjoyable productions, and neither ticket cost more than a tenner. While the prestige may guarantee the appearance of the middle-class bourgeois elite (who won’t be disappointed), the theatre is equally accessible to the student, the McWorker, the yardie or the Hoody. Please, don’t let the name fool you.

Galileo starts with the man himself explaining the theories of Copernicus to a young boy. There’s not a hint of ham in Simon Russell Beale’s performance, no affected accent or melodramatic delivery, and as he speaks to the boy, he speaks to us. And we listen. You do not need to know about Galileo, or indeed Copernicus, to enjoy the play. You do not need to know what sunspots are, or Galileo’s theories on motion or weights. The themes are crystal clear, the sticky predicaments and ethical dilemmas problematised so clearly and in such a way that when we are confused, it is because we are meant to be confused. Because confusion provokes thought about some of the most important questions humans have had, and have yet, to answer.

The danger of rhetoric, of hot air, the blind belief that stuff written down in book form, or spoken by powerful men is more ‘true’ than that which can be clearly seen, heard, felt and tested, resonates strongly with today’s political climate. This is an intelligent, insightful and timely adaptation by one of Britain’s finest playwrights. And most importantly, it’s very watchable.

Galileo is a bit like Fox Mulder. He’s after the truth, and he doesn’t care how stupid it sounds. There’s a moment, when he’s talking to a cleric on the cusp of joining his band of merry truthseekers, when they get on to the subject of the truth. "The truth?" Galileo says. "The truth?". There was a pause, and I very nearly shouted "YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH" but fortunately pulled out just in time. But that’s very much it. David Hare (with a little help from Bertolt Brecht) has written a wonderfully enjoyable 16th century episode of the X-files.

Miami Vice, Vue cinema, Portsmouth.

"Probability", Colin Farrell tells us, "is like gravity."

Just one of the many fascinating and completely baffling insights that pepper the ‘script’ of Michael Mann’s cinematic adaptation of his ’70s TV series. I put script in inverted commas for a reason. It is completely irrelevant in this film, they might as well have been speaking Swahili. The hispanic baddies whisper everything in a drug-dealer drawl that’s either inaudible, incomprehensible, or both ("Zay recover our low" = "They recovered our load"). Jamie Foxxxx speaks in abbreviations (‘OpSec’ = Operational Security, ‘Counter-Intell’ etc. etc.) while Colin Farrell just shouts things or stays quiet looking moody and perplexed. ‘Perploody’ as Jamie might say.

The film is ridiculous. The outfits are ridiculous, the plot is ridiculous, the guns, girls and the dance moves are ridiculous. The fact that the weird quiet guy from Vera Drake turns up as a Miami crimelord is ridiculous. And yet.

It looks fantastic (if a little ridiculous). It’s pacy, gripping and frankly very sexy. Miami sizzles and titillates under Mann’s inventive direction, bullets bang and whizz, drug barons menace, white supremacists get caps in their asses. It’s a summer popcorn blockbuster that shouldn’t leave you feeling short-changed. Foxx and Farrell aren’t as tight as Gibson as Glover, nor as funny as Smith and Lawrence, but Mann achieves what he sets out to do. No credits, just action – sex, drugs and death – from start to finish.

A big-budget, blockbusting brainless treat.

The Squid And The Whale, Prince Charles Cinema

Going to the cinema on my own is one of my guilty pleasures. But it’s got to be the right film, and it’s got to be the right cinema. For me, they don’t come much better than the Prince Charles.
Tucked off Leicester Square, it shows a selection of recent and not so recent films, from mainstream romantic comedies to obscure Asian horror flicks. And on Friday, everything’s a pound. So there I was, on my own near the back, with my popcorn and Haagen-Dazs.
The film was first class. Some nice Brooklyn Jewish angst and profound tragicomedy, neatly written with fantastic performances all round. Yes, well done everyone on that one.

Rock ‘n’ Roll, Tom Stoppard, Duke Of York Theatre

At the interval, you could divide the audience in two. Clever people feeling smug and the rest feeling slightly baffled.

Foolishly I was expecting something a tad lighter. But, as I’ve since been told, this is ‘Stoppard’. And ‘Stoppard’ can be like this, launching a competition to see how few of the audience can get the joke. If just one guy at the front with really thick glasses and seventeen letters after his name laughs, then Tom’s done his job.

It also felt like ‘Stoppard’ was trying to be a bit trendy. The loud music that punctuates the play sometimes worked very well but at other times came across as a bit try-hard. You know when your uncle – or, worse, your dad - that may have been quite cool in the seventies but really isn’t now tries to dance or sing along to Pink Floyd because they think they have the right. And it just doesn’t work. You can’t be a grown-up and do that. You just can’t pull it off.

There are some great things about the play, not least that it combines smart-arse clever with fascinating clever, well-acted clever and entertaining clever. But if I had paid 60 quid for a ticket because I loved 'Shakespeare in Love’ then didn’t get any of the jokes, I probably would have cried. It’s not for the masses, but it’s worth the pain. Just read up before you go.