My Favourite Apple Pie Recipe...

that reveals a truth about the universe...

Recipe To Create Universe

65 tbsp dark energy
30 tbsp dark matter
4 tbsp free hydrogen and helium
1/2 tbsp stars
1/3 tbsp ghostly neutrinos
0.03 tbsp heavy elements

Coffee & Some Danish.

Over recentweeks, I have become the weeniest bit obsessed with coffee.  Personally, I blame the time ofyear.  Gazing, bleary-eyed into mymorning mug, the darkness of the winter is reflected perfectly in the slowblack sloe black pitch of my early cuppa Joe (incidentally did you know that itIS a ‘cuppa’ Joe and not a ‘cup of’ Joe as the GIs stationed in Britain adoptedour slangy way of saying ‘cuppa’ tea and used it for their coffee).  It seems perverse given theassociations of speed that we give to a shot of caffeine but I think thatslowness and coffee are made for each other.  I had a wonderful lesson in the benefits of slowcoffee-making given to me a couple of months ago by Elliot Wallis fromMonkshood Coffee. 

This is notthe only reason for my coffee compulsion. I was recently bought the box set of first series of The Killing.  If you haven’t seen it then you mustbecause it is a brilliant Danish drama about a murder investigation.  It was made a bit famous because of thelead detective’s love of knitwear. However, the series really should be made famous for it’s infatuationwith the Arabica bean because if there’s one thing that they do a lot of in TheKilling,it’s drink coffee.  If you thoughtwe love coffee what with all our Costa this and Starbucks that then you need tohave a word with yourself.  TheDanes drink coffee like we stand in queues, except they do it better.  Hardly anyone in The Killing has any alcohol, thereare only a couple of times in the 24 hour-long episodes where we see peopledrinking booze but coffee is consumed all the time. It is the blood that pumpsthrough the arteries of Copenhagen and is used as a plot driver, a prop for theaction and a metaphor all at once. One of the lead characters is a politician who drinks coffee withglorious delight as he fires half of his cabinet, each sacking punctuatedanother ruthless sip.  Each tablein The Killing, whether corporate or family, has another shiny devicefor warming coffee, or blending coffee or enjoying coffee in some new andwondrous way.

I apologise here and now to anyonewho comes into contact with me over the next few weeks because this coffeefixation is not going anywhere.  Ihave just received season two of The Killing and am currently wading through series one of the Danish political drama, Borgen.  Then after that there’s a new series called The Bridge and after thatthere’ll be time for Borgen 2.  Then Borgen 3. Right now I talk about not much else and I am aware how boring it hasbecome.  I am truly, truly sorry.  Tak.

The Best Soup In The World

Everyone is going mad for chicken soup at the moment so I thought I'd share my fave.  This is a recipe I wrote for a friend's cookbook.

For the stock:

A free-range chicken

2 onions

2 sticks celery

2 carrots

Black peppercorns

Salt

For the soup:

Fish sauce

Lemons

Chilli flakes

1 tin of coconut milk

A bunch of coriander

Some spinach leaves

Dried noodles

This is absolutely my favourite meal in the world.  This would be my desert island dish and is the one that I dream about most.  It is, in short, the most kick-ass bowl of food you’ll ever make.

I use a whole chicken for the stock simply because you get a wonderful, rich flavour that you just don’t get from a stock made from a roasted carcass.  It might sound a bit extravagant but it is totally worth it.  You can siphon off and freeze some to make a risotto with so you’ll get at least two meals out of this.

So, first things first and make the stock.  Put your chicken in a big pan with a tight fitting lid, chop the onions, carrots and celery into quarters and add them to the chicken.  Then cover the whole lot with water.  Season with salt and add a few pinches of black peppercorns.  Bring to the boil then simmer with the lid on for about an hour and a half.  Remove from the heat, take out the chicken and set aside then strain the stock and discard the flavouring vegetables.

When you make the soup remember that you’re trying to get a balance of the four S’s; sweet (coconut milk), sour (lemons), salty (fish sauce) and spicy (chilli).  The balance is totally down to your taste so my advice is loosely follow the recipe but keep tasting it and adapt it to your own preference.

So, return the stock to a medium heat and to it add about a teaspoon and a half of chilli flakes, the juice of three lemons (or more or less if you like), about ten shakes of fish sauce and a tin of coconut milk.  Give it about 15 minutes, taste and adjust these flavours to your taste.  When you’re happy, chop up the coriander leaves and add to the soup then give it a blitz with a hand blender.  After you’ve done this, rehydrate the noodles as per the instructions on the packet and take all the meat off the chicken.  Then serve by placing some noodles in a deep bowl, then on top of these put some raw spinach leaves (the heat of the soup will wilt them just so), place some shredded chicken on the spinach and ladle over some of the soup.  Serve with a spoon and some chopsticks and enjoy the best bowl of soup you’ll ever have.  

Drinkie..? Nibbles..? Pig..?

Just before Christmas I went to a party and bought a pig.  I would like to make it clear that this wasn't a 'buying a pig' party.  I merely happened to get chatting to someone who had a pig to sell and if there's one thing I am always in the market for it's a bit of livestock.  

Last year we had a sheep that we lovingly called Minty before we lovingly took him to a slaughterhouse, lovingly paid someone else to kill and butcher him before we lovingly ate every delicious bit of him, lovingly.  I have been banned from naming the pig (although secretly I call him Ian).  I'm already dreaming of making my own cured ham, sausages, black pudding and brawn.

Ian

This is my favourite picture of Minty.  Isn't he lovely..?

Brain Food: GCHQ

I received an email from my contact at GCHQ a few days ago.  He (I think he's a he) gave me such sensitive and highly secret information that he begged me to keep his identity anonymous.  I agreed to his demand but before I share this information with you let me take you back to the beginning.  It all began innocently enough while I was listening to the radio one rainy September afternoon.  The programme was a documentary that went inside GCHQ, Britain’s ultra secret listening station.  You can listen to it here.

About three minutes in to the piece we first hear mention of ‘The Street’.  This would appear to be the main thoroughfare of the building and provides an opportunity for workers to take a break from listening to super secret things and meet up with co-workers and moan about Val in accounts or chat about the sexy new worker down the hall (for security reasons, GCHQ have asked me to point out that I don’t actually know if there is a Val in accounts or anyone sexy who works there).  Listening to it I was struck by the phrase that the guide utters at about 6’15, where she provides some tantalising detail about the amenities on offer at GCHQ.  She says that workers can visit “different coffee shops, restaurants etc”.  Imagine that.  Not just normal coffee shops but “different” coffee shops and not just one restaurant but “restaurants etc”.  I had to know more.  The people who work at GCHQ are the best of the best of the best so what is it that fuels them?  What the hell do they eat?  What is their favourite food?  Is fish on the menu or do they only eat Government sanctioned, super-secret food created in laboratories by robots?  The GCHQ website doesn’t help much either.  It adds the most meagre flesh to the bones.

I knew that if I wanted answers to my questions I would have to go undercover, deep undercover, maybe even more deeply undercover than Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop 2.  I knew that I needed an informer, a mole, a human being so sneaky and low-down that they would provide me with the information I needed, no questions asked.  I needed a Deep Mouth and he wasn’t hard to find.  From his email I was able to ascertain that there is a main restaurant, a continental café, a deli bar, coffee shops (number unspecified) and numerous vending machines and tuck shops.  I also discovered that the main restaurant served “anything and everything” and had “a range of homemade soups, trattoria, a 'global theatre', chef's classics, salads and jacket potatoes, homemade hot and cold desserts, and of course, vegetarian choices”.  And then he dropped the bomb (once again I would like to point out that this is a metaphor) when he mentioned that the breakfast menu served in the restaurant included “standard fare that you would find in most good hotels”.  It was there that the email ended.

I was in shock for days afterwards, my head swimming with thoughts of brainy people enjoying “global theatres”, adult tuck shops and breakfasting to the level of a good hotel.  I needed more information so chanced my arm and got in touch with Deep Mouth one more time.  What he told me nearly blew my mind so brace yourself because once you know what I am about to tell you, you will never be able to unknow it.

Far from being Peruvian mime or Italian puppetry, Global Theatre is “a range of natural healthy options cooked fresh to order while you watch. They tend to include food with olive oil, no dressings or seasonings. Typical dishes include; salmon, chicken, plain pasta and salads”.  But what of the GCHQ worker’s favourite food?  Well, “this appears to be pepperoni pizzas, fish & chips, burgers, chicken tikka masala, steak and kidney pie and curries. Full English breakfast is very popular (especially on a Friday morning) and porridge is always up there with the biggest sellers”.  

So there we go.  The elite brains of GCHQ like having plain pasta cooked while they watch, fish (but only in batter) and most require a fry-up on a Friday morning.  On Thursday nights, the bars and pubs of Cheltenham must be full of very clever people getting squiffy and not being allowed to say anything much at all.  That, in itself, is very, very impressive.

Fire & Knives: Some Salt With A Deadly Weapon

Here is a multimedia version of an article I wrote for the excellent Fire & Knives magazine.  

Warning: Some of the videos in this blog show scenes of violent death by food.  Definitely 18s only.  You have been warned.

When I was eight years old I saw a woman kill her husband with a frozen leg of lamb.  Once the woman had dispatched her fella she cooked the lamb and, in a scene reminiscent of an episode of Tales Of The Unexpected, served it up for the unsuspecting, scene-of-crime police officers.  It was, of course, from an episode of Tales Of The Unexpected called ‘Lamb To The Slaughter’.  It was a sight that had such an effect on my young mind that even now I find it difficult to watch a lady of a certain age rummage in the deep freeze.

As crazy, foodie murder weapons go, I wasn’t sure that I’d see the like of a frozen leg of lamb again.  Oh sure, there have been plenty of movies that have placed kitchen tools in the hands of the desperate psychopath, but killing with food itself is a much rarer delight.  Take True Romance’s Alabama, played by Patricia Arquette.  Alabama is a hooker with a heart and, dare one say, plenty of spunk as well.  In one memorable scene she stabs a brutal gangster with a cork-screw.  Not just the waiters’ friend but the prostitute-getting-her-head-kicked-ins’ friend too. 

Once the tool of molecular gastronomists, the meat thermometer is now as ubiqitious as stacked Cuban heels in Tom Cruise’s closet.  So it was only a matter of time before an inventive filmmaker used one to bump someone off.  Step forward Robert Rodriguez and his B-movie, The Machete.  A henchman gets a meat thermometer stabbed in his neck and later, when a bomb explodes, it pops out to indicate he’s ready to eat.  Heston would be so proud.

To find some food used to do some damage we have to turn to the ever-creative Jackie Chan and his 1987 cracker, Jackie Chan's Project A2 (it’s the sequel to Jackie Chan’s Project A in case you’re wondering).  Being chased through a village by a gang of ne’er-do-wells, JC sees a huge basket of small red chillis. He stuffs handfuls of the chillis in his mouth, chews them and spits the seeds into his hands.  The pepper fumes on his karate chops blind his assailants allowing The Chan to throw them from rooftops into handily positioned baskets below.  However, with a body count of zero, I’m afraid that as inventive as this is it is no match for a frozen hunk of meat.

For similar reasons we must also ignore the ‘wafer thin mint’ that ends Mr. Creosote’s days in The Meaning Of Life.  It’s true that he dies by overeating to the point of explosion but I’m afraid no court in the land would convict the waiter of murder.  Manslaughter maybe but murder?  No.

We get a full-on food assisted murder, or FAM, in the 2009 movie, Law Abiding Citizen. In one scene Gerard Butler’s character Clyde uses the T-bone of a Porterhouse steak to stab his cellmate to death.  The murder whilst perfectly effective and marvelously bloody is completely without flair.  I mean, if you’re going to go to the trouble of killing someone with a morcel of deliciousness then I really must insist on a cheeky one-liner.

And so we find ourselves in the company of Clive Owen in the film Shoot ‘Em Up.  He’s a man who loves killing people, and his weapon of choice?  Nature’s humble carrot.  He kills one enemy by shoving one through his eyeball and another by ramming a carrot down his throat so hard that it comes out the back of his head.  Each kill is wonderfully gory and accompanied by a sizzling one-liner like “what’s up doc?” or “eat your vegetables”.  In Clive’s hands the carrot becomes a more than worthy deadly successor to the frozen leg of lamb. 

Now, if we can just find someone to do a murder with a potato we’ll have ourselves the makings of a lethal Lancashire Hotpot.

Always On My Mind (And When I Say Mind I Mean Stomach)

'You know Pauline, I'm not hungry.  I just feel tired.  I just want to rest.'  These words spoken at about 7am on August 16, 1977 were the last that Elvis Presley would utter to another human's face.  A few hours later he was found dead on his bathroom floor, a victim of both the gargantuan cocktail of drugs that had become part of his daily routine and his one true love, food.

Elvis's love of food ultimately destroyed him and left him virtually bedridden at the end of his life.  He would spend his time flat on his back watching the TVs at the foot of his bed and eating the food he loved best.  If you try and picture it you can imagine what a challenge that would be to most people.  Lying flat and eating poses certain logistical and safety problems.  Elvis though, an ingenious man when it came to satisfying his hungers, created the TV glasses.  These were glasses with a mirror inside positioned at an angle of 45 degrees, which allowed him to watch the TV with his head flat on the bed.

The last chapter of one of my favourite cookbooks, 'Eating The Elvis Presley Way' by David Adler, chronicles Elvis's last day from the point of view of the kitchen at Gracelands.  Here's what the King's ate just before he died.  It was one of his favourites and as is typical of the kind of food Elvis loved.  It is enormous, unhealthy and betrays an almost childish love for flavour.  I should point out that the recipe below is a modest version of the dish as Elvis's cook was so worried about his health.

                                                     Elvis's Last Supper

2 scoops Peach ice-cream (Sealtest was the preferred brand)
2 scoops of your favourite flavour (the actual second flavour is lost in the mists of time)
6-8 chocolate chip cookies (Chips Ahoy brand)

Mix together the two flavours of ice-cream until soft then use the cookies to dip.