bratworst

a long weekend in berlin was organised on a whim with the explicit aim of seeing very little sun and eating very little food, and... in this sense it was sort of successful. after around 28 hours of nonchalant starvation we found some tasty mexican somewhere on oranienstrasse to digest slowly and rhythmically in darkness, but...

there isn't really a but.

obviously no-one needs to be reminded that english food has a global reputation for being really, really a-bit poor. derided throughout europe, abandoned in its former colonies, and ignored everywhere else, it's starchy, bland, and profoundly unhealthy. but then this is what our malnutritioned forebearers wanted, apparently: suet pudding to keep them warm at night, huge boiled oysters to keep their weighed down on windy days, and... sausages. lots of sausages.

the germans also love sausages. the difference, however--and i'm going out on a limb here--is that they're a lot worse at them.

assured by some australian ex-pats that german food was nice "youjusthavetoknowheretolook" (there is probably a german compound word for precisely that concept), we went to a fine, traditonal establishment by the name of max und moritz in kreuzberg.

catering to tourists but also, presumably, to german wishfulthinkers, the menu celebrates meat in all its offal glory i.e. with cartoons and grammar holds fully unbarred. torn between the "real old german dish steeped in a 'long time' red wine", "cheesy cream noodle-dumpling omelette", and "salted and lightly pickled pork-foot", i went for the "special sausages from westphalia", on the fairly safe assumption that whatever was special about them would at least be worth ... well, writing about.

it looks nice, doesn't it. look at the greens! and, yes, there is almost as much mustard as gravy--and everyone knows mustard is a squeezy gift from the gods. this was sweet and mild mustard similar to what you'd find all over a hot dog, but a little bit less orange.

and it was nice. easily the nicest meal i've ever had in germany*.

in the event, of course, the sausages were a non-event. juicy in the manner of a saveloy, haggis or fermenting corpse, they were also dry. but they did at least taste of pork--which is more than can be said of the notably less-special german bratwurst, which tastes of oily, bloody bath water. from the kind of bath a pig might be given right before it's horrifically decapitated.

the potatoes were boiled. yep, boiled potatoes. the beans were also boiled. yep, boiled beans. sort of like school dinner. but the sauce! who'd have thought it was all about the sauce. you know the urban myth about how mcdonald's cheeseburgers are technically classified as a dessert because of the amount of sugar in the bun--well, yeah, it seems they muddled up the courses here too.

it took me about ten minutes to realise why i was eating it so quickly. if i'd been presented with a black forest gateau i would surely have eaten it at the same speed. i'd have eaten a cheeseburger a bit quicker, but only because i can fit it in my mouth in one go. everyone likes a pudding, especially when it has sausages in it. and i did like this. i just ... you know, couldn't possibly finish it. nor ever consider eating it again. nor, more importantly, ever eat out in germany with enthusiasm again.

and that's about it. i don't really have a point. for a change.

drat... worst? ah fuck.

*true story

roast of the town

nothing much to say here. here's a roast. one hell of a roast.

let's toast the roast which boasted the most. to the roast!

i'd say it was the best roast i've ever had. possibly.

not sure if i should ever really dare making that kind of statement. mm, well, i just did.

from here: http://www.thegrazinggoat.co.uk/home.html, in poncy marylebone.

home is where the heart is

homelessness breeds contempt for the finer things in life. i haven't cooked in years. my repertoire of boring pasta dishes and tuna sandwiches has contracted if anything, and i've become so complacently reliant on eating out and filling up on fast food that i've come close to entirely forgetting the deep spiritual satisfaction that comes from cooking for yourself.

perhaps i should write "oneself" as that would clarify how obnoxiously privileged i just sounded. truth be told i've been homeless partly to stay afloat and partly because i'm too much of a dick to cope with living with anyone other than my parents occasoinally, and anyone else who'll have me for thanklessly brief periods of time.

and if i sound like a spoilt shit, well… yeah. go figure.

also, "deep spiritual satisfaction"--am i kidding? well, it always takes me by surprise. even a crispy little piece of cheese on toast made well makes me glow from the inside out. this is a bit like the genteel middle classes rediscovering the joys of allotment farming, or owning a house-pig, and it definitely tends towards the behaviour of oafs like the prince of wales lecturing town planners on the demerits of cheap, affordable housing--ie, a deadly mix of privileged ignorance and high-minded arrogance.

but so fucking what. i think, on a more prosaic level, it just happens to be a treat for me. especially when i have someone to cook with.

this was breakfast, australian vegetarian style:

in case you weren't aware, australians make the best breakfasts. no competition. they also make the best lunch and possibly even the best dinner, but i wouldnt want to overstate the case, what with them generally being smug know-it-all bastards.

it's all about avocado, really, cheif amongst their bounty of delicious almost-local vegetables. avocado sliced over vegemite on toast is the tastiest simple breakfast i've ever had.

i fucked up the eggs a bit. can you see? school dinner style. ew.

and these are some trout, on offer at waitrose for around 50p each, cooked with butter and lemon:

cool. i'm boring myself.

scurrylous

home time. a time of reflection, privacy and nostalgia. and what could be more nostalgic than the same food that i spent most of my life eating, served up on the same plates and eaten with the same cutlery. no, i'm not being disrespectful.

my mother, like the best mothers, has spent much of her life balancing making ends meet wit the needs and demands of four disrespectful little shits. my older sister "went" vegetarian at an early age, i followed some time after, and my younger sister chose to eat, well, nothing, ever, mixed with salt. consequently there were dinners comprised of different dinners, served up at different times and with different levels of attention. my father eats anything, fortunately, besides seafood and blood pudding, so his would take the least attention, followed by my mother's own, if it even existed, and then ours, in their individual fussy glory.

i wouldn't do it. would you? i guess it has something to do with hormones. oh, and love.

the highlight of my childhood, i think, would have to be a communal breakfast, which we went through various phases of being forced to attend, at some time between 7am and 7.30am, with a rack of toast, some kind of jam and probably marmite, and of course a collection of mostly-empty boxes of cereal, served with one-sixth of a pint of milk. it was from boxed cereal that i learnt what disneyland paris was, how much i wanted to win a holiday to the seychelles, and how important 100% of your RDA of niacin was (though i never learnt what niacin actually was--and now i look at the word it does look suspiciously like a deadly poison).

anyway, the milk. these were the days of daily milk deliveries. i think these still take place, though i'm so removed from (a) real life and (b) mornings, specifically, that i haven't observed any in recent years. we would pour the daily pint into a measuring jug, and we know exactly how much we were allowed by the notation of the side of the jug. i'm guessing it was a bit less than 100mls each, what with there being six of us. nowadays i'd probably take twice that amount, probably as a result of general debauchery.

so what does this have to do with my life today? not much, besides the universally acknowledged facts that i am a social animal, i'm lithe, i have a wide appreciation of tasteless but nutricious grains, and i have a serious middle child complex. these things are all true, and related to my excellent upbringing.

and, as fate would have it, i'm at home with my parents, with the rest of the litter spread to the winds across the south and north of england. within half an hour of my arrival home this was on the table. i didn't even know it was coming! cauliflower curry, deliciously spiced, served with yoghurt and naan bread.

(hi-res--dig it.)

in essence, this post is dedicated to my mother. sorry for the bad language, and thank you for the food.

scurrylous.

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.