Cook off

Look at those two. Just look. Do you know who they are? If you live in the UK and have a television licence then you bloody well should because they're never off the telly. Every time I switch on do I have to put up with those two buffoons leering out of the screen. I have to get out of bed every other week at 4am to go to work. Yesterday I flicked on the telly at 4:10am to check the news headlines on Ceefax (yeah, get me, I'm not what you'd call an 'early adopter') and these two berks were bloody on. At 4:10am! Groo.To make matters worse the whole thing was being signed. Now, I love the fact that programmes get signed for the deaf to enjoy stuff too, but if I was deaf and I knew the BBC were signing the Hairy Bikers' own particular brand of garbage I think I'd be writing a stiff letter to Points of View. Or the Daily Mail at least.

They're not even proper hairy bikers. Hairy bikers I've encountered in the past would eat raw dog and drink petrol.

I mean, what are they for? Does anyone actually make the stuff they churn out? No, they don't. Well, I don't. I can make a meal out of a bag of pilau rice, some sausages, a tin of Sainsbury's mushy peas and a three day-old Warburton's You think I'm joking don't you? If Si and Dave (I hate myself for knowing their names. And I hate them for the incredibly matey way they've shortened their names) show me how to make tasty meals out of some out-of-date bacon, a tin of ravioli, a jar of red cabbage and some lasagne sheets then I'm all eyes and ears.

Talking of cookery shows it gave me great pleasure to see that Something for the Weekend's coming to an end. Well, sort of pleasure; it's a show I love to hate (as those who follow me on Twitter will know, no Sunday morning is complete without me spraffing off on #SFTW). That oaf Tim Lovejoy really grates with me. He's always quacking on about the 'manly' pursuits he's been up to that week. These pursuits usually involve snowboarding or drinking cocktails. He should have been with me at work yesterday morning  -we'll see what sort of man he is if he had to pull a tonne of frozen julienne (!) carrots off the back of a trailer with an incredibly slippery floor at 5:15am. And don't even get me started on his co-prezzener, Louise Redknapp. She is to TV-presenting (or "presentin'" as she would say) what Joseph Stalin was to human rights.

Anyway, what I did enjoy on telly over the last week was the Depeche Mode documentary, or, if you will, 'rockumentary' (ho ho!), 101. What a great snapshot of the late 80s that was - lawyers with ponytails, brick mobile phones, demi waves, Dave Gahan before he found out how incredibly moreish The H is and snow washed denim. It begs the questions a) was Andy Fletcher the Bez of DM and b) whatever happened to Alan Wilder?

Oh, have this, it's Friday (I have a cousin who is a dead ringer for Martin Gore, yes, really and there's a lovely shot near the end of this of a middle-aged woman blowing up a beach ball. Bizarrely):

"I make proper trifle with proper custard, not out of a packet"

Warning: This is a rare post about which contains stuff about, ugh, 'feelings'. Those of a nervous disposition should look away now.

Been thinking about my parents a lot over the last few days. Not only because I've spent some time in the place where my mum's ashes were scattered - it's a lovely place and I would have gone anyway, while there I saw an infamous figure/cretin in British life walking along the beach - but also because I noticed in a bookshop a film tie-in edition of Nigel Slater's rather excellent book, Toast. I don't normally go in for Top 10 Favourite whatever, but if I did one on books that would definitely be in there. It's a book about how Slater's formative years were shaped by the food he ate. Coming from a family of gluttons* I found loads of common ground with him in it. Apart from the fact that his mother was a terrible cook (it's called toast because the one abiding memory he has of her is scraping burnt toast) mine was absolutely fantastic. I think one thing people do when a family member dies is to talk about whoever it is whose gone and talk over the good times and good things. Most of our reminiscences came from the food Mum prepared. The thought that we'd never taste her macaroni cheese (pretty mundane but her macaroni cheese was gorgeous, great 'comfort food'), chocolate fudge cake, fruit scones, Yorkshire puddings, shortcrust pastry, ginger parkin, steak and kidney pie or trifle again made us shiver (well, just me on the trifle front as those two divvies don't like it). There was also the disasters but funny disasters, like when Dad, who didn't get a sophisticated palate until later in life, insisted that he'd only eat spaghetti bolognese with veg. Plates of spag bog with a healthy serving of boiled savoy cabbage on the side was duly delivered to the table. She'd also sneak carrot into lasagne and had this fetish for putting sultanas in curries. Years later, when I'd discovered curry houses, I pointed out to her that I'd never eaten in an Indian restaurant that served savoury sultanas, she laughed and told me that that's how she was taught to make curry...by an English chef.
You'd also never see her weigh anything - unless she was cooking for a competition, where strict rules applied - her skill was immense. I wish I could 'knock up a few scones' if someone gave us short notice that they were visiting or cook something delish for an ill or needy friend. Memories are all I have, like Slater.

On a slightly different subject, came back to find the great Danny Baker has fucking cancer. I say 'fucking cancer' because that's what I call it after hearing Wilko Johnson call it that on an interview recently when talking about his deceased wife. Cancer's a murderer which takes good people before their time; like Mum, three grandparents, an aunt, an uncle and several family friends. I wish Danny well and nothing but best wishes. If you can spare a few pence for a cancer charity, please do.

*There's a great photo of Mum's twin brothers at a Christmas party in the fifties. Though facing the camera neither of them are looking at it, but follow their eyeline and they only have eyes for an enormous trifle on the table.

You lying get!

Inspired by a thread on the Word magazine website about things you believed as a child, I thought I'd compose a list of stuff that I believed as child because I was told it was true by other people, usually my mother or eldest sister.

• Celery leaves are poisonous and are not to be consumed under any circumstances. I never questioned why celery was sold with the leaves still attached if that was the case. And something in the back of my mind told me to not to eat celery leaves until I saw Nigella put them into a pot roast chicken last week. Mind you, perhaps that's Nigella trying to get rid of us and create her own super race of North London-dwelling gastronomes. My sister tried to pull the same trick with the last bit of tea or coffee in a mug but I never bought that one. What do you take me for? She still leaves the last bit of tea or coffee in a mug, which didn't sit right with me when I bought her an expensive coffee last week and she left a quarter of it.
• That Brian Clough lived in a big white house set on a hillside near the train line between Newark and Nottingham. My mother used to tell me this when we went on shopping trips to Nottingham. It wasn't until I was in my twenties and after Mr Clough had been found sleeping in a ditch 'near his home in Derby' (the same home he'd lived in for years) that I realised she lied. When I questioned her about it she said that it "broke the journey up to point out landmarks, even if they weren't real."
• That drinking pop directly from a can caused your tongue to get trapped in the hole and they'd have to cut your tongue off. I never thought that if this did happen (and to date I've never heard of it happening), then they'd just cut the can off.
• Swallowing chewing gum or bubble gum makes it wrap around your intestines and slowly kill you. I think what she was trying to say here is that she hated gum and didn't want me to have it.
• That the clown who used to roll the credits on at the end of Camberwick Green was actually my dad. I never questioned why Dad went to work, completely altered his appearance and dressed as a clown. This was given more weight when I once watched Camberwick Green with some cousins and, at the end, they pointed to the screen and shouted "There's Uncle Roy!" So someone else was telling them that Dad worked for Gordon Murray productions on a part-time basis.
• The Daddies Sauce bottle used to feature a neck band with a photo of a generic smiling dad that used to say underneath it "My favourite!" I was led to believe that was our Uncle Phil, as were most of the cousins in my large extended maternal family.

The DMS

This post was going to be a complete slagging of The Delicious Miss Dahl, which I watched for the first time last night. I gather the poor lass has got a big enough kicking for it as it is (look what happens when you let Jamie Oliver run his own production company), so I'll just leave you with a few random thoughts:

• Ruined rhubarb by putting it in Eton Mess
• Shepherd's pie made with those awful puy lentils?
• Poetry readings?
• Incredibly stodgy-looking blinis
• I hate smoked salmon so she wouldn't be dishing that up to me in the hope it would bring me onside
• Notice she didn't cook on the immaculate Aga - that's because everything would take days to cook and she's only got half an hour
• Dicking around in a second hand bookshop
• Dicking around in a railway station
• I still would though - and look at who she married, there's clearly no accounting for taste

Anyway, I heard this song on the radio today. I remember it getting loads of play in our house when we were kids because Mum had it on a country compilation album called, you guessed it, Country Life. I reckon she loved it because she knew all the words. Hearing it today, for the first time in years, made me realise that it's clearly about al fresco shagging. I hope she didn't love it so much because it brought back happy memories of her callow youth. Still, it's a great song.

Searching for freedom from TV 'chefs'

I'm losing my patience with TV cookery shows. Come on, who actually makes any of that stuff they do on those shows? No me neither. The thing is these shows are everywhere, even supposedly primetime viewing. Let's look at what's on this week: Saturday Kitchen, Something for the Weekend, Come Dine With Me, The F Word, River Cottage, The Restaurant. They're just the ones off the top of my head. In recent weeks we've also had Jamie's American Adventure (pity he didn't get stay there), Britain's Best Dish, Cook's Challenge yada yada yada.
The thing is, who actually makes their own pasta? When Mr Heinz is quite prepared to make it for me and put it in a tin then I don't see why I should, I've got better things to do than dick around with one of those turny-handled pasta machines all afternoon.
The crunch came for me on Saturday morning when, I was getting ready to go out, there was this long lost relation of Jeremy Clarkson's (Valentine Warner?) on Saturday Kitchen doing something with a duck and an ingredient called puy lentils. The lentils ended up looking like puke. Green puke. Has anyone reading this ever eaten puy lentils?
I was in Waitrose a few weeks ago and overheard some fortysomething women banging on about how they'd like to be on the Chef's Table on Saturday Kitchen, like it was some kind of dream destination. And James Martin's 'a bit of alright, isn't he?'. That's the real reason they want to get on Saturday Kitchen, I fancy. They also like to make out they're some kind of experts 'there's so many flavours going off in there, it's great. The pan-fried* haddock really compliments those seared brussel sprouts.' Shut up.
Anyway, the only TV 'chef' I have any time for is Nigel Slater. He champions food that's not very good for you but tasty, and it's all 'oh, chuck however much you like in there'. And he writes great non-cookery books.

What I have enjoyed on the telly this week was something on Saturday night about the Berlin Wall. Post war Germany fascinates me from the 1970s in West Germany to the shitness of the old GDR. There were non-party people on this documentary who actually still mourned the passing of the GDR and still believed in its ideals. I suppose Communism is a good idea in principle, but anyone whose ever read Animal Farm knows it can never work.
What I also find interesting about the GDR is the Stasi, the secret police. This documentary told us that they were far worse, and in much greater in numbers, than the Gestapo ever was. They scared their own people so much they'd even managed to recruit an early 80s anti-Communist activist to spy on his mates. A brilliant documentary.

*A term I hate, by the way. How else does one fry something other than in a pan?