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.