Danger! Danger! Sunday night was spent watching, at long last, the 2009 film Crank 2: High Voltage, starring Jason Statham.
We are partial to a bit of Statham, or Stath. Having seen Crank and thought it preposterous but enjoyable, we seem to have been waiting for ages for this one, bumped repeatedly for various reasons, but last week, finally, a welcome LoveFilm arrival in the mails.
If you haven’t seen either, or can’t be bothered, the Cranks are like a reduction of the Statham Transporter franchise vehicle, a daft compote of overtly cartoonish video game capering about by an indestructible hit man who keeps on going with a grimace and a quip no matter how much shit he has to contend with.
It is a obvious metaphor for Stath’s career.
In Crank, Stath’s character Chev Chelios wakes up full of a slow-acting poison (potential slow acting joke gloss), meaning he has to keep boosting his adrenaline rate to stay alive. He does this with fights, drugs, chasing cars on a BMX, all sorts. He falls hundreds of feet out of a helicopter at the end, bounces off the road and survives, so powerful is his ‘Strawberry Tart’.
Crank 2: High Voltage begins where the first one leaves off, with an artificial heart Macguffin device, requiring frequent electrical charging, implanted in Chelios by Triad bosses because… oh, forget because. The film has a fight scene in an electricity substation, performed by stuntmen dressed up to look like giant Godzillabeast versions of Chelios and the bad guy, with little models of workmen watching it agog. Fantastic.
What with that and a worryingly plausible cameo from Geri Halliwell – I know, I KNOW – as Chelios’s mum, there was much that was disturbing about Crank 2. It’s preposterously preposterously violent. Yet there’s all this well-read comic strip framing, snappily-scripted asides… Massively enjoyable.
Stath/Chelios concludes the movie proper actually on fire, proffering a blazing middle finger direct to camera and snarling. It could only have been improved with him actually saying “Yeah yeah yeah YEAHHH!!!”, the final yeah turning into a manic blaahhh, tongue waggling in abandon, because he does not give two toasted fucks.
All that zap and fizz of electricity brought to mind one of my favourite fast food experiences, perhaps the only thing comparable to the deep fried, so bad for you it’s good for you, crispy insanity of the film, in fact, which was the KFC Zinger Tower Burger Meal.
We didn’t have KFC, not on a Sunday, good lord, no. We made do with massive beef sarnies. And I last had a Zinger Tower Burger in the KFC in Brixton about 5 years ago. My arteries have only just stopped clucking. Very tasty fried goodness though. It’s a spicy (“Zingy!”) chicken burger that just has to have a hash brown put on top of it, for some spurious reasons.
“Our Zinger experts are all in total agreement that if you’re going to add anything to this unique combination of savoury, spicy tastes, then it just has to be a hash brown. After all, you don’t want to add more spice.”
Tufnelesque. “But… this one’s got a hash brown in it.”
Yet Crank 2 DOES want to add more spice. Crank is a Double Zinger Tower Meal with Extra Spicy Hash Browns and Reggae Reggae Sauce on the fries. It has the same disdain for cardiac science. It is, like, well fackin’ tasty. And I understand that Crank 3 begins production this year. Yeah yeah yeah YEAHHH!!!
Exciting! Next to words, food is one of the most significant items on my list of Favourite Things. I don’t tend to post recipes here so much, but I do love a feed, and always like to share ideas for tasty goodness.
Read all about this delicious recipe for Lentil Bolognese (Len Spag Bol, if you will) at the Ranting Chef’s blog. You can also pick up a bunch of other interesting ideas for foods, meals, kitchen tools and the like.
If you’ve come to The Mortal Bath via the Ranting Chef, welcome! Hope you find something tasty here too.
“25 albums that changed your life” (5×5 Part 9):
The Jimi Hendrix Experience Live at Winterland
This was Number 9 (‘…number 9…number 9…’) on a chronologicalish list of ’25 albums that changed your life’. THAT was a thread some people were doing on Facebook “back in the day”.
If you get bored or disagree, substitute the word ‘arse’ for a word of your choice in the album title.
This piece has been kicking around for ages in search of a theme, if any theme other than the cosmic awesomeness of Jimi Hendrix is necessary. Then Jo Greenway at 10 minutes hate read my mind as usual and posted about the assault on the intellect that libraries have been undergoing in the UK, and it all came together.
The things we discover when we believe we are looking for something else entirely are often the most valuable.
This needs no further amplification. It is all about riffing (whatever “it” is, as Faith No More suggested), as far as I am concerned, and I am at my happiest digressing (no shit!). Riffing on what has gone before is essential for people to develop whatever happened, have fun with it, come up with something new.
Right, so, this Jimi Hendrix live album. Around the same sort of time that I was into Iron Maiden, Guns n Roses, etc, the medium of maximum profit for record companies was CDs. Lord how “they” miss it, as I type, attempting to convince digital natives, using electronic beads, that there is a better value proposition than free. I might as well note now that in typing CDs I had a sudden flash of future – possibly present day – readers of this rushing to a glossary, in the way that readers of Shakespeare have for at least three hundred years. There was a great joke about someone ‘of a certain age’ mentioning to a child that “Prince has released his new CD free with a newspaper,” to receive the response “Who did what with a what?”
CDs, anyway, had only been around a few years and were (as they remain) quite pricey. In the days prior to everything being available virtually immediately, if you didn’t want to buy something we had TV shows, radio, dial-a-song services, copied tapes and that was it. But what lovely it! Personal contact, whispered secrets, did-you-see?s, slow voices on waves of phase, hand-drawn packages passed from person to person in class, in the schoolyard, from siblings, teachers, mates.
In addition, there were the communal joys of the public library. I got into a fair number of bands through the library in Harrogate, where I grew up, and which at that time had a very well stocked record/CD library. Books as well, of course, but it was a great place to seek out new sounds, new civilisations. With my library card and at 80p per item, I got to take home and listen to (and tape at home, thus killing music) luminaries such as Pixies’ Surfer-Rosa-and-Come-On-Pilgrim, Pink Floyd, Prefab Sprout, Syd Barrett, The Kinks, Roxy Music, Led Zep… and this CD by The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Live at Winterland.
You do still get CDs and you do still get libraries, and they are often found together, but it is a matter of sadness, or, fuck knows what it is, nostalgia, bio-sentimentalism, sehnsucht, that the corporeality seems to be dwindling. This rush to GET RID of half the books in favour of computer terminals, no music and a fucking coffee bar, because that’s what will SAVE MONEY; stupid, needless cuts in the name of faith-based economics, one market under God… There is also the factor of a vogueish rush to have everything clickably instant and monetised into an app and flattened out into neat lines of 1s and 0s. Uncle Ray Kurzweil and all that immanentizing the e-schaton rag. Do we wish our physical lives away? Probably not really, not yet. I mean, I quite like many of the biological aspects of existence. Yeah, yeah, though, 2083, a merman I should turn to be, exploring strange new forms, all that, would be good. Don’t get me wrong! However, this keenness to digitise and mediate, spectacular and cosmically Arthur C Clarkeishly indistinguishable from magic though it is, is dependent on a food/air/power supply deal we have not yet fully worked out. Well, read yer Asimov.
Back in ‘consensual reality’ (that place with all the trees and birds)… As any geocacher might tell you, there’s something to be said for trove finding. Actually finding a magic lamp, or even just something hidden under a rock. Time and memory mix up the exact sequence of events through which I discovered James Marshall Hendrix. I thought it might have been through a CD from the library called The Marquee: 30 Legendary Years. This had Purple Haze on it, among other standards of the guitar rock canon. Bands I came to love, like T. Rex, Thin Lizzy, The Who… all the Ts… That is also perhaps an album that could be on a Top 25 list, but – alas! – it has Genesis’s Turn it on again on it, and I’ve never understood their work. Too artsy, too intellectual.
Also, according to AllMusic, the Marquee CD came out in 1993, which is too late for the timeline in my head. Considering this crucial and vexed issue further, I am pretty much sure that First Contact with Jimi was made through the BBC Arena documentary on Heavy Metal, which first broadcast in 1989. Thanks to the super Real Gone blog and the other super blog Heavy rock – the playlist I have been able to confirm this. And thanks to Sir Tim Berners-Lee. The internet has replaced virtually all of this wearying, hand-tooled, questing on foot, Well-at-the-World’s-End-styled organic education. Bah, now I’m conflicted. It’s a double-edged thing. Not a sword, Ralph! Some sort of tool, certainly. I mean, now that knowledge is more selective and not a cultural imposition from state broadcasters… but, there’s my issue with why old-school libraries are ace and the modern experience is a little… sterile. My school has a tiny, understocked reading room and a huge ‘ILC’, which makes my English teacher heart thud a little forlornly. Half the interweb is blocked off for ‘safe searching’ reasons, which seems kind of counter the point somehow. And, consider my Year 10s. Actually, I could just start a blog called that, writing about the culture gap between a late-30-something teacher and his Year 10 (~15 years old) class. We were doing The Clown Punk, a poem by Simon Armitage about… well, here, read this:
The Clown Punk
Driving home through the shonky side of town,
three times out of ten you’ll see the town clown,
like a basket of washing that got up
and walked, towing a dog on a rope. But
don’t laugh: every pixel of that man’s skin
is shot through with indelible ink:
as he steps out at the traffic lights,
think what he’ll look like in thirty years’ time –
the deflated face and shrunken scalp
still daubed with the sad tattoos of high punk.
You kids in the back seat who wince and scream
when he slathers his daft mush on the windscreen,
remember the clown punk with his dyed brain,
then picture windscreen wipers, and let it rain.
Nice work, Armitage. Keep that brain undyed, and the inside of your head shaved. As part of My Year 10′s learning process I played them ‘God Save The Queen’, The Sex Pistols tune. You know, Jubilee, topical, relevant… There may have been some interest from about three of the class, but the rest were of the opinion that it was “just a noise”, “He’s just saying four words over and over,” “annoying…” Well, you know, yeah. To be expected in some ways, I suppose, but still, I was kind of appalled. They sounded like MY folks. This is generation ‘like’, or at least the children of it, and on many occasions it seems that anything troubling or challenging enough to require more analysis beyond closing off a tab is not worth the effort.
[/half term hols rant> Maybe it's just me, and there were always only about three people interested in granddad music. When I was growing up, as well as Arena, TV shows like The Rock n Roll Years provided a vital supplement to my education. Cultural context, innit? TRNRY was a seminal (spunky and original!) series, featuring historical clip montages, accompanied by music. A crucial detail from the Wikipedia entry on it: "no presenters or voice-overs". Definitely not one of the interminable sort of "100 Greatest Minutes of Rentaquote No-marks Being Facetious About Things They Didn't Really See At The Time And Don't Really Get". Rock n Roll Years provided an in-depth education about (pop) culture, which proved of great benefit in getting an A in my General Studies A-Level. Seriously, there was a question along the lines of "This image is the cover of which David Bowie album?" they'd removed the name, obviously, but still, get in!
Dragging ourselves back into the Arena, I don't think it was a case of watching the documentary and the scales falling from my eyes, because I'd got hold of a few Hendrix records, and had been sent a few Band of Gypsies tracks on an extensive compilation mailed in a sock by a repatriated American best mate from primary school. Yet, it definitely had a big effect. It was all the meta-context, if that's the right term. Seeing this exotic footage of Greenwich Village cafes, the British support cast - not only the Experience, but manager Chas Chandler, Alan Price, foils Clapton/Cream and The Who, etc... imagining the Beatles turning up to the hotly-ticketed gig and watching open mouthed as the Experience zip through a cheeky cover of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band the day after it came out...
…these little scenes captured on grainy film, like flashes off a gold plate on the side of a deep space probe, remnants of an age of exploration. I found it compelling and fascinating.
At that time, 1988-89ish, rock music was shoring itself up culturally against the encroaching tides of dance music, the continued growth of hip hop, etc. The advent of CDs was carrying all the young dudes’ youths back into their living rooms, remastered, digitally convenient, but also reaching a new audience of heritage seekers like me, whose parents had grown up with it. I’m sure there are hundreds of words to be written about cultural legitimation/confirmation processes.
I do still find it fascinating, despite the attempted ruination of a lot of rock culcha by what I like to call the Uncut Mojo tendency, with all the connotations of belligerent academic white maleness that title might summon. It was a vital, LSD-binge exploration time for some, of course, but a money’s too tight, time down t’pits for others. A country struggling to loose the tie and hat legacy of wartime austerity and do something for and with itself, yet constrained (as now) by all the spare money being pushed up the noses of pop stars. Although now pop stars are all old grey whistle clean, it goes into trust funds, and it seems like no one is trying to kiss this guy.
Just watch the whole Arena documentary, because we can… the minute or so from 15.30 fried my little brains. I was fascinated by the history of the “baby boomers”, born as the second world war ended and by the 1960s ready for excitement, colour, music, clothes. So alien. In later years, other associations come into play. There is the closing theme to the decade, Hendrix’s version of ‘All Along the Watchtower’, which needs to be seen with the wrecking ball clip from perhaps the ultimate ‘escape from the 1960s’ theatrical masque Withnail and I.
That would be followed most appropriately by the National Anthem. Jimi Hendrix playing the Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock is a performance about which millions of words have been written and muttered, none of which add anything.
However, I’ll take you back to the CD in hand, to the inappropriately sequenced end of track 2/start of track 3, ‘a kind of instrumental jam thing’, Sunshine of Your Love, by some real groovy cats, the Cream. Hendrix introduces the band again by detailing the equipment they’ve managed to destroy, with the fuzzy inexactitude of the has-to-be-just-a-teeny-bit baked, before uttering what is my favourite ever count-off, “And Mitch over here is on his third pair of arms… Fucking hell, I don’t give a damn,” and off they go.
In the absence of the Live at Winterland versh, here’s one off the Old Grey Whistle Test, noted for Hendrix’s comment as they abandon ‘Hey Joe’ that they are going to “stop playing this rubbish”… That and Sergeant Pepper and guitar music gone bonkers is what made me love Jimi Hendrix. Good new stuff is created when people have fun with old stuff.
And I would have maybe never come to it if wasn’t for our local library. Hands off the bibliotheques, you heathens, you’re getting in the way of some convoluted journeys of discovery.
Casino Royale (CR), the first James Bond novel, was published in 1953. Here, from the lavish ianfleming.com website, is the original Jonathan Cape jacket blurb:
The dry riffle of the cards and the soft whirr of the roulette wheel, the sharp call of the croupiers and the feverish mutter of a crowded casino hide the thick voice at Bond’s ear which says, ‘I will count up to ten.’
Anyone who has ever gambled will find this tense and sometimes horrifying story of espionage and high gambling irresistible. So will readers who have never entered a casino. Connoisseurs of realistic fiction will particularly note the careful documentation of the Secret Service background, the chilling portrait of Le Chiffre, the authentic menace of SMERSH, and the sensual appeal of the girl in ‘soie sauvage’.
These bumphtious references to conoisseurs and raw silk barely begin to gently stroke the surface of the sensual appeal of the Bond books. Post-war gastronauts, label Mabels and petrolheads would also find much worthy of note within the pages of this landmark novel.* Bond’s reputation as a bon viveur is a significant aspect of the series as a whole, and it’s in CR that many of his predilections and prejudices first surface. He is, to put it bluntly, an aggressive snob in matters of what to eat, drink, drive, smoke, hump.
The cover of the Pan paperback captures the green baize excitement, the essential appeal of Bond, with the cashier’s cheque for an astronomical sum in francs panting continental exoticism, never mind the p’tite wink from the graphics department with the handwritten ‘soixante neuf’…
This consumption with relish of what must have been mostly unattainable pleasures for rationing book Britain appears throughout the Bond canon. Let us take the infamous Vesper cocktail, the ‘vodka martini, shaken, not stirred’ immortalised in the flicks. This bland order does no justice to the thing of alcoholic wonder, ordered with colonial vigour, in the book:
“Just a moment. Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?”
“Certainly, monsieur.” The barman seemed pleased with the idea.
Booze pedants will point out that Gordon’s has diluted its recipe since, and so on, that shaking ruins the drink, but Fleming is creating a man who is the measure of all things, knows what he wants and dam’ well gets it. Bond is comfortable adding an absurd proviso regarding grain over potato vodka, lessening the poncery with a ribald crack in the local lingo. He later names the drink after a girl, showing his romantic, perhaps even a sentimental side.
We shall return to Bond’s prodigious consumption in Thunderball, although it is worth noting now that as well as this cirrhotic excess, the gambling and the gorging, Bond smokes around 60 cigarettes a day. However, while there is a lot of this airplane magazine catalogue of ‘cool’ GQ How-To-Guide stuff in the books, Bond’s absurd intake highlights what JCG at Ten Minutes Hate refers to as ‘a… sometimes out-of-control human being.’ Bond is, without doubt, a vehicle for communicating Fleming’s fashionable tastes in the name of excitement and escapism, but he is also a complex character, a haunted one in many ways.
This makes perfect sense given Fleming’s intriguing life story (soon to be filmed again by super Duncan Jones, it says here at ScreenJabber) and the historical context of the book, released a few years after World War II with its own well-rehearsed litany of horrors. Bond is a soldier who, in the absence of a Great Cause, is really just a blunt instrument, a man apparently with a death wish being used to visit it on others, something deliberately worked with by Fleming throughout the novels.
As the first entry in the series, CR establishes some reasons for why this might be. There is the Freudian field day (Field Day is a good name for a Bond girl) start of the infamous series of “Bond babes”, with the dark, quixotic French waft of mystery that is Vesper Lynd. The lemony twist to the tale (such as it is) is of course that Bond’s sentimental attachment to Vesper nearly emasculates him, actually and figuratively. Again, this fallible Bond is far more brutal, and brutalised, than any of the films prior to the Craig reboots, or arguably Pierce Brosnan with a beard in North Korea, managed. The chilling carpet beater scene is convincing and terse.
It also introduces a first ‘new enemy’ for Bond, early Cold War political uncertainty represented in the wonky Cyrillic letter Щ carved into the back of his hand by a heavily-accented Soviet agent. (Check out the excellent Commander Bond website for some far more detailed research and exegesis.) This scene makes explicit Bond’s helplessness in the wider game of history, and the long coda to the novel, with Bond and Lynd’s doomed relationship playing out through convalescence, elaborate meals, empty sex and finally betrayal, is doubtless a metaphor for British involvement in wartime and post-war Europe in some way. The book begins and ends nihilistically; it is a damaged world, full of damaged people, including the protagonist. As Fleming perhaps saw it, life is about the way the cards fall, and how you play them… and the house usually wins.
It is a satisfyingly dark book. Bond has only some of the insouciance and confidence one associates with him, the Secret Agent Man, the suave and apparently indestructible force of justice. His uncertainties and flaws in CR are what make him such a compelling character for the rest of the series. That and the exciting drinks, card games and violence. As a scene setter, and as a standalone work, CR is indeed in many ways irresistible.
Just coming to the end of Easter holidays, blessèd two week interlude in the teaching calendar. This year we combined as many possible permutations of ‘Easter’ as we could, from traditional Return of the King of Kings/actual monarch religious celebration, as the Queen came to York to do the Maundy money ceremony – not “Mornday”, newsreaders of Britain – to the more commercial and sugary frenzy, as other people contributed chocolate eggs to us and we were happy to avail ourselves. Vernal equinox, spring fruits, Ēostre worship, all that.
Part of the snacky goodness, one of our favourite new distractions, is Man vs Food, a TV prog currently being repeated on ‘Dave’ channel and Food Network UK (both on Freeview). If you’re unfamiliar with the show, it details how this cheeky chappy, Adam Richman…
…took it upon himself to attempt a series of eating trials across the USA. It’s a paean to ‘over the top’ American cuisine: a dish called ‘Suicide Wings’, super, eye-wateringly hot chilli chicken pieces; a 16oz shake + Pound of Meat sandwich; four-burgers-with-nachos-and-cheese-sauce in a bun the size of a tractor tyre; 74 oz of steaks and sides… you know, ludicrous food.
To punctuate the face-stuffing, the charming Richman also makes time to look at more sedate delicacies, amuse-bouches such as awesome-seeming Baltimore crabcakes, astonishingly made from only crab, from the sadly-now-defunct Obrycki’s Crab House and Seafood Restaurant. (T’internet chat suggests that Baltimore still has 50 other crab restaurants superior to Obrycki’s, which is good to know, unless you’re a crab of course, or perhaps especially if you’re a crab…) It’s funny to see simpler fare such as this, and the likes of traditional Square pizza (with the sauce over the mozzarella) in Brooklyn, juxtaposed with gargantuan steaks that look like the tongue of a blue whale, jostling on plates with cartwheels of caramelized onions, wheelbarrows of coleslaw, actual pounds of fries topped with jalapeños and cheese…
It would be easy to get horrified by all this, of course. One might see it as confirmation of the sniffy European cliché of America being the home of gastromorons. I mean, just to conform to the type of Anglo-aesthete baffled by the flavorclash, I can understand people, especially Brits, who balk at the idea of ‘gravy and biscuits’… it all looks so claggy, so overdone, so smothered in plastic cheese and stupid sauces and devoid of actual food…
[Quick semantic sideplate: in the UK, biscuits = cookies, although they are crunchier than Millie's Cookies style cookies, and are often served with tea; gravy is the thinnish, brown savoury liquid served as an accompaniment to Sunday roast meat dishes, or any potato/pastry-related meal, or with chipshop chips. American readers, help me, is 'biscuits and gravy' essentially some sort of savoury scone with a really thick savoury sauce accompaniment? Or is it a bit sweeter? And which way round should it be referred to, 'gravy and biscuits', or 'biscuits and gravy'? I ask because I recall referring to "peas and rice" once and being gently corrected. These things are important... Image sauced from Mama's Southern Cooking website]
Such thoughts ignore the often delicious flavour combinations, the kind of mix of over-the-top inventiveness and actual simplicity in taste and execution, evidenced by Richman. Although perhaps to be expected from such a famous melting pot of a country, the tendency to see all American scran as meat in fondue is like assuming that all British people boil pizza. And whose fault is it anyway? As well as Native American, Mexican, Asian influences, there is clearly a European heritage underpinning a lot of American food, particularly north European, with its tendency to serve up heaving helpings, platters of gloop-slathered slabs of beast, clogged bowls of extraneous carbs. J, who’s half Dutch, argues that this is just an American twist on what is essentially healthy food: potatoes, salads, proteins, albeit in solid portions. I would counter that a country whose national dishes include bitterballen (deep fried breaded balls of meat… which J says are served with “Mmmm, mustard – and beer”…) cannot really start throwing its weight about with health-related commentary.
It’s not just the (Pennsylvania) Dutch… I lived in Germany when I was younger, and they loves – loves – their meat and potatoes there; it is no coincidence that one of the UK’s national heroes is a porky priest called Friar Tuck. We could range across the Old Continent. More recently, I have a vivid memory of a pal ordering something in Estonia that sounded appealing on the menu and was served as a plate – tureen, really – of thick, whitish sauce, swimming with chunks of what we assured ourselves was pork. In the same eatery, I’d ordered a steak tartare as a starter. I’d wanted to try steak tartare since reading celebrity vet James Herriot’s rapturous description of it when I was a kid. When it arrived at the table, it was the size of half a rugby ball. Tasty, but that’s a lot of raw cow.
It is such European feats of largesse I am reminded of when watching Richman attempting to negotiate dishes that, served in measures perhaps about an eighth of the size, would be stupendously tasty, but which take on something of the ordeal when couched in terms of who’s-he-trying-to-fool ‘non-competitive eating’. The ‘finish it in an hour’ stipulation is usually what does for Richman, and is perhaps part of a perception of wilful gluttony that has rankled with various TV critics, much more than the preposterous foodstuffs being tackled. Maybe a continuing idea of “America” as an affront to good taste and restraint, a culture devoted to encouraging immediate over-consumption, with a concurrent lack of taste… which view has been in place in certain portions globally pretty much since the USA set itself up. Richman’s enthusiasm and generous humour, also a great American tradition from where I’m standing, undercut the indulgence. He is always pretty clear that what is being prepared is exceptional. When he dines, there is a conspicuous absence of elephantine fatties with drink-carrier hats in the room.
Adam Richman’s love of playfully daft food, and his fellow countryfolk, is clear. He and they can be seen frequently near collapse laughing at the absurdity of it all. Richman is more often than not thwarted by his own inability to complete the challenges he undertakes. I mean, one could read that as a kind of subtle politico-gustatory metaphoric commentary, if one were so inclined.
Do you know what, I thought I’d be able to say something about Richman’s fellow traveller, TV chef Guy Fieri, but I think I’m a bit full. Fieri, appropriately, has a thing for spicy food, and an entertaining way of saying ‘coomin’ instead of ‘cyumin’. His series, ‘Drive-Ins, Diners and Dives’, is still all about the comfort food, but less of the gargantuan dimensions and more of a focus on ingredients with a view to construction… No, I was right – can I get a soda water please?
That’s better. Anyway, it makes perfect dinner-time viewing. Yesterday evening we had a delicious Friday treat: Indian food from the Shahi Tandoori on Nunnery Lane (Shahi Vegetable Bhuna, Saag Aloo, Pakora Vegetable, Prawn Madras, Pilau Rice, Vegetable Pilau, plus free poppadums and dips. Deee-licious! Top takeaway troughing, and lots of leftovers for lunch today too). That frugal superhaunch seemed a fitting counterpoint to the eagle-stuffed dolphin and 10-gallon hat full of root beer that Richman was attempting. And in the battle between man and food… food won.
I thought I’d better justify both aspects of my profile description on Twitter (my new Owen Pauline favourite waste of time) by a) doing some writing and b) doing some evangelising about quinoa.
Quinoa! The correct pronunciation is ‘keen-wa’, or ‘kee-no-uh’ but I quite like saying it as ‘kwin-ower’ as well, for giggles… it’s a bit of a running gag at work, with various different people correcting whoever is struggling to pronounce it, should it happen to be mentioned. Up to three people saying ‘KEEN-wa’ simultaneously and a startled colleague going ‘Alright..!’ [The spelling and pronunciation of lots of words in English, given their derivation from other languages and subsequent mangling, is hilarious, frankly - little comedy timebombs waiting to go ough - but that's a whole nother post.]
So, quinoa! Quinoa! Quinoa. Quiiiiinoa. [Stephen Fry voice] Chenopodium quinoa… As well as sounding plausibly like the first name of a member of a Hollywood acting dynasty, Quinoa ‘s a not-technically-a-grain grain-like ‘pseudocereal’ superfood – oh yes! – and a super food.
It is all fibrous goodness – carbohydrate AND protein (12-18%, it says here,) and contains the eight ‘essential amino acids’ which is very handy if you’re vegetarian or just looking for alternative strong protein sources.
Sidebar: it is related to Pitseed Goosefoot and Fat Hen, both of which are superb names heavily redolent of dub reggae titles such as Bushweed Corntrash… so while writing I have been humming ‘Pitseed Goosefoot’ to the Upsetters tune Bushweed Corntrash, a search for which got me here:
… hands up who loves the interweb? Thanks.)
QUINOA, QUINOA, QUINOA! How do I love thee? It’s cooked like buckwheat, pasta or rice, about 12 minutes of simmering, and can be eaten in all the same ways: as a side, or in stuffing, veggie burgers etc… I tend to use it in salads, mainly as an alternative to couscous or bulgur wheat in tabbouleh, so cooked up, rinsed and then caressed with the addition of finely chopped red onion/spring onions, parsley, mint, lime/lemon juice, tomato, celery, cucumber… whatever you like, really.
It’s also very tasty on its own, lightly seasoned, or with one thing through it – so for example, if it’s going in a box for work, a handful of frozen peas mixed thru with a dash of oil will do nicely by lunchtime.
QuinoaQuinoaQuinoa is available in supermarkets as well as health food boutiques, etc, and hopefully will start to come in bigger bags than the pitifully small ones currently on general offer if the UK agriculturalists fiddling with it continue in the vein described on the Veggie Soc site linked to earlier. Meanwhile, you can buy in bulk from the (maybe a bit oxymoronic) Ethical Superstore, who have bigger bags as well. Sorry, postie.
There, I’m hungry just writing about it.
ALL PRAISE the miracle seed QUINOA.
‘Real life versions of Q’ (the fictional boffin from the James Bond films) are being offered government money (i.e. really my money) to develop technology to fight groups like al-Qaeda (the possibly fictional terror franchise), according to this bafflingly serious article from the BBC.
But no, stop the giggling! It’s really real! There is a Home Office unit called, Bondishly, INSTINCT! They have a strategy for it and everything… called CONTEST.
I love the idea (described on the Home Office site) of ‘horizon scanning for technical threats’. It dredges up the image of INSTINCT blokes in lab coats swivelling the periscope on the SS CONTEST, looking for ruthless acronyms sailing into view with devices the like of which we cannot begin to fear adequately.
Really, really though. ‘CONTEST’. Who sits thinking up this rubbish?
Presumably people who describe terror threats as a ‘very real danger’, such as blogger Mark Dowe, whose oaty tones outlined the
‘very real danger that such terrorists will gain access to unconventional weapons – chemical, biological and nuclear’
['Outlined' because now Mr Dowe has a very real private setting on his site, possibly to prevent people gaining access to quotable material. Setting aside an examination of the term 'unconventional weapons,' which might be extended to include items such as depleted uranium, say, or passenger jets used as missiles by actual real terrorists, this phrase highlights one of the most alarming tropes in 'the war on terror': the use of rhetorical amplification.
People in public positions (ex-Prime Minister Blair, for example) often say things are 'very real', usually in the sense of there being a 'very real danger', or 'very real threat', or a 'very real chance' of something appalling happening, where what they in fact mean often is 'not at all real'.
What can 'very real' be supposed to suggest? Some things we imagine are real are not real? Fair enough, perhaps. But some things are real, some things are, like, megareal? Pffft. There are, of course, 'terrorists', people who act as though blowing up themselves or other people is a valid way of making a point... armed ideologues are always dangerous. It doesn't make them any more dangerous to suggest they are a very real danger. Stop trying to make it sound worse than it is! If something is already shit, making it sound shitter is not going to help, and in fact the more you insist it is somehow more awful than awful, the less inclined people will be to believe you. Ask a shepherd. Doubleplusungood Alert, is it? I see.
Then there's the serious expression people always get on when they use the phrase, which only compounds the insult. As if they have access to a better version of reality than everyone else, and they can convince you of their unique capacity to sort it all out simply by the subtle and sincere use of intensifiers.
"No, this is VERY real. You thought the Nazis were real? The IRA? ETA? Just playing at reality compared to these guys. They're so real, they're like a kiss on the lips from Slavoj Žižek... with tongues."
How real do you want this? VERY REAL, PLEASE.
Still, you really can't be too careful. In the spirit of innovation, I’m developing a new anti-terror device. Based on a brown paper bag, it’s basically a brown paper bag. Every time you feel full of terror, you breath into it and it makes the fear dissipate.
I am currently brainstorming names for this device, but I believe it has already made a significant contribution to the fight against all those wishing to terrorise me with their fat-fingered throttling of the English language.
Then perhaps when we've all calmed down and put the rocket-propelled nets in the cupboard with the swingball, we can address the very real threat of bombdogs.
As noted in an earlier post ‘Fat Duck and Little Chef’, gastroboffin (and direct descendant of Dr Bunsen Honeydew) Heston Blumenthal was roped in to boost the ailing fortunes of the Little Chef chain of eateries. Now The Good Food Guide has acknowledged his effort by including the Popham branch in the 2010 edition.
Awarded a magnificent two out of 10 (for Good Food, which is a relief given the context), the apparently popular Popham site gained plaudits from punters according to this BBC article.
Having just returned from a smashing holiday weekend on the Kent coast, and having broken our fast at one of the 180 Little Chef emporia spotted about the UK on the way back, I am pleased to relate that, as in my previous report, most of the rest of the UK can still enjoy white bread toast and fried produce prepared au plaque en fonte, and precious little else for your free lolly.
We also had the novelty of the chef (approximately 15 years old) bring the food which the waitress/manageress (maybe thrice her lackey’s age) had had to go and help to prepare… The lady in charge was actually really sweet and funny, muttering something (half to herself) after I had paid and collected the three free lollies, about ‘going to see what the kids were doing’ as she stalked off towards the kitchen.
Meanwhile, ‘The Sound of the Lay-by’ drifts inexorably towards York and Kettering West, where it is noted that a minimum of 35 local jobs may be created. Imagine that as a business plan, employing people in your restaurants so there was more than one person to do everything. Astounding.
If Little Chef keep this dizzying recruitment process up, we may just be able to do something about this dangfarn unemployment rise after all!
(That link is a pdf, btw… go here if you want it explained in Grauniad speak why we’ll all be marathon dancing by Christmas).
Recently I had cause to be on the road again. Work (for a transcription company, the exact nature of which is ‘creating transcripts and minutes of events or meetings that people want transcribed’, the exact purpose or benefit of which remains unclear, but there we are, typing) has at least a personal benefit in that I get to spend time on trains and planes zipping about Britain and occasionally other European destinations. This makes me happy.
The work at the other end is often merely a means, although it is often actually quite interesting. Last week, at an event organised by a government body, it was a bit of a talking shop and, to be fair, slightly interesting. However, much more fun was to be had from our bed and breakfast (I use the plural here because there were six writers in attendance, from London, in the north east, which doesn’t seem to be an optimum use of funds for a government body, but there we were, typing).
We had been put up in the Travelodge in ———-, (this should be read throughout in the breezily confident tone of an 18th Century diarist, btw) and they were the usual sorts of Travelodgings that even Spartans might have made rumblings of discontent about. I did what I always do when checking in, which is to ask where and when breakfast is to be. The man at the desk indicated the Little Chef across the car park from reception, next to the petrol station. ‘It opens at 07.00,’ he added, helpfully.
Putting aside our disappointment at not being able to re-use the Alan Partridge ‘big plate’ joke in the restaurant/buffet, m’colleagues and I rubbed our hands. I think they had the same sort of memories I did. Growing up, on car holidays round Britain, my sister and I used to sing with delight (this is not sarcasm, we did, actually, sing with delight) when a Little Chef sign was spotted. (The tune was ‘here we go,’ which is the chorus of ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’, for those not familiar with it, and for which Little Chef has a conveniently rhythmic number of syllables).
With hindsight, this glee at the sign of the Little Chef was perhaps because we did not actually stop at them very often. Supposed to be modelled on diners dotted across the USA, serving the nation since 1958, Little Chefs have become a byword for greasy shit on a plate, the archetypal bad English food emporium, the kind of place where Bill Hicks would have howled ‘You don’t boil pizza!’ before – enraged American tourist – blasting the hapless waiter with a handgun. When John Major was Prime Minister, he made a great show of stopping off in one (or a Happy Eater, I forget) to have a fry-up, to show he was down with the proles and all things British, and not elitist. The proles, obviously, were all in Burger King, tapping on their temples.
More recently, there has been an attempted rehabilitation of Little Chef by television – as is the mode – where Heston Blumenthal, celebrity Big Chef, food scientist – and direct male line descendant of Doctor Bunsen Honeydew off the Muppet Show – was called in by the new owners of the chain to inject a little vim into a roulade of pastiche, or something, and pep up the Little Chef menu using his experimental know how.
Heston Blumenthal
For readers unfamiliar with Heston Blumenthal, the Bunsen Honeydew reference is actually more helpful than facetious (although it is, also, fairly facetious). Heston runs a restaurant called The Fat Duck, where he has pioneered the art of wilfully over-complicated gastronomy: Bacon and Egg Ice Cream, for example, Snail Porridge, or, splendidly, the ‘Sound of the Sea,’ which the Daily Mail (you can tell, for all their couldn’t-make-it-up demeanour, they actually love this sort of thing) described thus:
“The seafood dish is presented on a glass-topped wooden box containing sand and seashells and consists of what looks like sand but is in fact a mixture of tapioca, fried breadcrumbs, crushed fried baby eels, cod liver oil and langoustine oil topped with abalone, razor clams, shrimps and oysters and three kinds of edible seaweed. The final touch – the culmination of Blumenthal’s experiments exploring the relationship between sound and the experience of eating – will be the iPod so that diners can listen to the sound of the sea while they eat.”
Doesn’t that sound amazing though? Predictably, for such a bleeding edge confectioner, the programme ended in semi-triumph. Heston had visited his first Little Chef to discover that they didn’t even have pans any more. Everything is cooked in a factory somewhere and reheated on-site, on a vast griddle, presumably to claw back costs on inconveniences such as kitchen porters, second chefs, cleaners, etc. He gamely gave it a go, but when a restaurant chain lacks such basics as actual cooking implements, it seemed unlikely that a man known for firing eggs from a mortar at decelerating jet engines to achieve the optimum omelette consistency would be able to offer anything other than a whimsical ‘vorsprung durch technik’ wry thumb over the shoulder at The Way We Were. Or perhaps at least an impressive but inedible A-team-styled improvisation with petrol pumps, griddle scrapers and soil.
He didn’t really do the egg, mortar and jet recipe, but it’s the sort of thing he might, and a very appealing image. However he has, against some odds, re-tooled the menu at a Little Chef in Popham near Basingstoke, with moderate success and an option to expand his re-tooling should it prove profitable – although for some reason I keep imagining the dish “Burnished Turd, on a bed of False Expectations with a Jus of Over Ambition”. Anyway. It was with all of the foregoing in mind that we sat down to break our fasts on a misty morning in the north east of England.
M’Colleague Simon agreed to take part in a tribute to Heston, the Fat Duck and Little Chef. He had ‘Pancake Breakfast’, which seems slightly disingenuous given the actual absence of pans (a still scarcely believable fact, confirmed by the waitress), and I had the ‘American Style Breakfast’, which had pancakes bolstered by scrambled egg and bacon. We both got a jug of maple syrup to provide flavour to the food and coffees.
We decided that the ultimate complement to our meal would be to recreate a Heston Experience, in a tableau we could call ‘The Sound of the Griddle’.
Simon is listening to ‘9 to 5’ by Dolly Parton.
Mark is listening to ‘Don’t fear the reaper’ by Blue Oyster Cult.
Gratifyingly, there was the consolation of lollipops, traditionally only presented to those emptying their plates. The Little Chef website promises “Bring your healthy appetite and we’ll make sure you leave ready for your journey,” which, on consideration, is not an idle boast.
