qantarse

in the depravity, venality and senility of my old age, i hope, if nothing else, that i resist the urge to write letters of complaint. i'd smugly settle down in leisured tunbridge wells, nursing my great fortune, if only it wasn't notoriously associated with the bigoted whingers of english conservatism--and, frankly, there's nothing worse than a bigoted whinger, regardless of the colour of their nanny's skin.

the closest i've come to writing such a letter was after arriving into london paddington several hours late from oxford, having witnessed reading station's entire staff body descend into apathy as one train after another terminated its service on their platforms. apparently someone was about to jump off a bridge further down the line, so the service was shutting down, and taking hopes and dreams of thousands of late-night commuters with it.

an hour of aimless traipsing from concrete space to concrete space passed, broken up by the acquisition of one dark chocolate bounty from a nearby vending manchine. a train, mysteriously absent from the departure board, quietly arrived, did not empty, and looked ready to continue its journey. panicking , i asked the closest fat controller where it was going--he didn't know, despite closing its doors and blowing his whistle. so on i jumped, and off i went, remarkably, somehow to london. no-one else did, and as far as i'm aware they're still in reading, possibly settled down with families and ponies and various repressed desires.

my only complaint, as far as i can tell looking back at the day, was that the people running the station appeared to have no idea what was happening, and responded, as all good service sector staff do in similar situations, with abstract intractible hostility. london bus drivers are the same, as are air stewards.

so i went to the desk, and i said "i'd like to make a complaint". the guy (let's call him jeff) responded "okay, great, here's a form; fill it in and post it to this address." i, smiling gracefully, "great", walked off... and immediately realised i couldn't be bothered anymore.

the bastards had won before they'd even known that defeat was a possibility.

and of course it was always going to be that way. the system is rigged! gerrymandered. only the most fearless persist; only the most bigoted insist.

*alighting, as the automated voice says--is that word used in any other context?

//////

so anyway. plane food. ramsey made a plain pun of it at heathrow's terminal five, which is all very well if you can afford to share it. if not, you just eat on the plane, plainly.

everyone knows it's--how else can i put this?--shit-shape. indeed, its shitness is one of the few stable truisms of food, placed securely up there upon shelf of truisms alongside the shitness of service station pasties, the shitness of subway, and the shitness of all german food ever**. some people, including myself, not-so-quietly delight in just how shit it is, while others cheerlessly shovel it down their throats, happy enough that the food is essentially free.

the stale bread, soggy vegetables, vague meat, dinky plastic cutlery and piss-water coffee need no introduction.


it's a prison picnic, in the sky, and no-one's having a good time.

but here's the thing: check-in online before your flight and request the asian vegetarian option. not only will your meal be brought out before everyone else's, sometimes even before drinks are served, but it will be a curry. and what, children, is the single saintly quality of curry that makes this all worthwhile? that's right--it's the one type of food that actually benefits from being kept warm for long periods of time! in fact, it actually gets better with time. it just gets nicer and nicer.

on qantas, you even get a banana.

no... fucking... way.

of course, the curry isn't very interesting. in this instance it was mostly just chickpeas and random other vegetables they found lying around on the floor. hell, anything could have been thrown in. the important thing is that it's flavoured, the ingredients are mostly what they say they are, and the texture is mostly what you'd expect from edible organic matter.

so, sitting like a king--a hindu or buddhist king. presumably--you spoon the delicious mush slowly into your mouth as everyone else around you fiddles anxiously with their inflight entertainment. it's a great feeling.

and what could go wrong?

the answer, if you haven't already guessed, is that on a long-haul flight the curries just keep... on... coming. not exactly an expert in asian vegetarian cuisine, the resident chef (let's call him... jeff) decided to stick with the winning formula and churn out exactly the same curry four times.

this, you see, was the third meal of the trip:

contrast and compare to the first picture above. it's exactly the same, isn't it? yep***.

you'd think they could at least have picked up something different in singapore. say, some noodles, or even a wagamamas. i would have settled for a bowl of oven chips .

did i complain? well, i considered it.

qantarse.

//////

**more later

***that's actually because it is the same--i only took one photo, and i'm passing it off as two different meals. hey, this isn't journalism.

shitttata

battling a bout of busilessness, i followed nigel slater's recent recipe for a "light supper".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/aug/30/nigel-slater-light-supper-recipes

he is a funny little man, delicate with words as he is with souffles.

Strange, isn't it, how we often want a little something to eat in the evening, so soon after passing round the Sunday roast? Sometime around seven, I find an excuse (any excuse) to wander into the kitchen in search of the second, occasionally third, meal of the day. My head is keen to object on the grounds of greed. My tummy thinks otherwise.

his... tummy?

i imagine he and his nameless, presumably bespectacled, partner padding around their brushed-steel open-plan kitchen, poking and prodding bags of organic oatmeal, pondering the density of squash, gathering handfuls of bitter dark leaves and just... inhaling, marvelling at it all. not that wouldn't want to do the same; but if i did, and i wrote about it for a living, i'd try to at least make it sound more, you know, difficult.

***

it was tuesday evening here, not sunday, and all i'd eaten was a bowl of cereal, rather than, say, a roasted salmon--but in my life every day is like the weekend, and most days rarely get past the morning, so i think it's excused. to make up the vibe, i poured myself a stiff, warm gin.

worst things first: i didn't know the swedish for cracked wheat, so i guessed, and brought something back from the supermarket that was probably wheat ("vete"...?) but was probably not cracked. whatever it was, i cooked it, and stirred with various things, and this happened:

note the congealed porridge effect. delicious. it was nice, and it would have been nicer if i hadn't made so much that it put the fear of god in me. nobody wanted any, and half of it is still sitting in the fridge, congealing further. i might fry it later.

fecund things second: i didn't have a grater, so was unable to grate any of the three things in the recipe that needed grating: courgette, lemon zest, and parmesan. instead i sliced and diced as finely as i could be bothered.

unfortunately sliced lemon zest is the not the same as grated lemon zest. bits of it get stuck in the teeth and they taste... well, really bad. this i learnt when i ate it, and it tasted fairly strongly of lemon zest--or, more accurately, of lemon pith.

er, turd things third: the only pan available was half of the required 20cm in diameter, and it wasn't remotely shallow. and so it turned out to be more of a pie than a frittata. or, i guess, a really dense souffle. and it had to be cooked for about twice as long as recommended.

but it was nice. real nice. and the important thing is that i proved to myself that even if i can't cook, i will, occasionally, try.

shittata.