London food

I don't recalled whether I blogged about it last time I had jellied eels, I meant to, but it probably didn't happen.

As you may know, I do live in London, and in the same way that Scottish people eat haggis, Londoners eat jellied eels, its their staple diet. For hundreds of years the only source of protein for dwellers of England's capital was the eels they fished out of the Thames. When other sources of protein came along Londoners stopped eating eels in quite the quantities they did, but some jellied eel shops still cling on.

There are places that have been selling the same thing for hundreds, possibly thousands of years, jellied eels, pie n mash, coffee or tea in a polystyrene cup. Its almost amazing that these are the only things on the menu, workers would eat the same thing every day, for sometimes their entire lives.

The again, this one time in Glasgow I did have a doner kebab every day for a month.

These are jellied eels, prepared as follows:- you get your eel from the Thames, cut it into 'rounds', boil it up so all the collogen-like stuff leaks out, then cooled so the jelly forms round it, the served into a bowl and consumed with chilli vinegar.

It tastes vile, amongst the jellie, the fatty skin and the grizzly meaty bit, there's a wee knot of bone, that I guess you're supposed to crunch up and eat too. I don't understand how people could have eaten this stuff to such a degree, but they did, and so I plough through the bowl.

There's more jelly than meat, more jelly than eel, so you're left with a bowl of jelly, are you supposed to drink it, or just leave it so the waitresses can recycle and use it in the next day's fare?

My dining companion had the companion dish, pie 'n' mash, topped up with 'liquor'. The pie tasted a bit like cardboard, the liquor, apparently made with cornflour and parsley tasted of polyfilla. The mash was okay.

Its the staple food of the Londoner, as vile as it is, its never going to die out, its always going to be available. Try it today, and again a year later, just in case.

Raising a heavy head

A few days ago, after a moan from the missus, I resolved to write some kind of feminist blog-post, or pimp some feminism story on Facebook, just anything to get me feminist brownie points. I was briefly going to write about fat, cos its a feminist issue, but then couldn't be bothered.

Until today, when I see from all over the internet that Size 16 Chloe Marshall has made it through to the Miss England Finals.

Sadly this is old news, everyone's linking to a BBC Newsbeat report from 2008, so its rising up the Most Popular Stories ranking.

As the internet goes crazy at the thought of a curvy bint in a bikini, greasy fingers double-clicking, flecks of spittle slowly oozing down chins, the BBC story becomes ever popular. But it was a long time ago. It was 2008. She didn't win, she came second, and then got signed up to a modelling agency specialising in curvy chicks, or 'BBW' as the fetish sites would call people of her size.

The BBC really ought to do something about this, like putting the date of articles in the most popular list, or some kind of timecap, anything to stop the past trending like this.

Chloe's got her own website and everything now, and its all professional like, with photies of Chloe with plenty of slap on. Alas the blog's not been updated since October and she only posted four times last year.

If you want to see her in person, she's judging the finals of Miss Natural Curves 2010 at the Civic Hall in Bedworth on Saturday 24th April 2010.

**UPDATE**
Oh Jesus Christ! Even topical news website The Daily Mash is punting this a new story in their piece MEN PUZZLED BY DEBATE OVER BOUNCY GIRLS

As the first size 16 contestant prepares for the Miss England beauty pageant, women said it was an important breakthrough while men said they could not imagine the circumstances in which this lovely big girl would be deemed unattractive.

Helen Archer, an official woman, said: "This is the culmination of years of determined struggle against a male dominated culture that enslaves women and demands they conform to a perfect ideal of sexual attractiveness."

But Nathan Muir, a completely normal person in every way from Hatfield, stressed: "What the hell are you talking about?

It was two years ago, get over it.

Forking off

Hmm, its last thing on a Friday, no one is going to read this post.

I'm just moving into a new flat, there's no internet there, no central heating yet and the cooker and washing machine aren't plumbed in yet. On the plus side, I've hooked up my two Peavey guitar amps to be my PC's speakers, rather than my usual effort of plugging in headphone and turning the volume up to max. There's a bit of a mains hum coming through, but its tolerable.

Anyhoo, this is like the first time I've been in a position to set up my own place, usually I've been in fully furnished and shared places, but right now I get to buy my own bookcases and cutlery and stuff.

The cutlery is important,very important. In all the places I've stayed since I left my parent's home twelve and a half years ago, the cutlery has been unsatisfying. Its been odds and sods, no matching sets, tarnished spoons, forks with crap prongs.

So, I went to Ikea to acquire the perfect cutlery for my flat, but it was a sad task. Lets take a look at what they have to offer:-

Three prongs? What the hell is wrong with the designer? How the blazes are we supposed to eat with a three pronged fork? Its like some the cave men would hack together before the died out. Did the usual four prong standard scare the dumb cro-magnon too much, could they not could high enough to spec the correct number of prongs? Maybe it was good enough for 1 Samuel 2:13, but times have changed since then.

Jebus! What's going on with the left and right prongs here? why are they so wide? Is this some kind of safety fork? Won't this just lead to foodstuffs falling off the fork? Or maybe I've got it wrong and its a knork that you're supposed to sharpen yourself?

And here, why do the prongs only go down a fraction of the length of the fun end? Was the designer scared thatthey might be used to plunge too deeply into food and again its some kind of safety feature?

What's wrong with Ikea forks, why can't they sell just a nice, normal, function fork that hasn't been designed by an imbecile?

Luckily Tescos has a neat range of cutlery, and saved the day.

Just Like Delia (part 2)

Another attempt at making something from Delia's cookbook in order to impress.



Should make a fine breakfast to snarf on the way to work tomorrow.

Just Like Delia Smith

Continuing my on-going series of blogposts about what I've made for dinner (apart from last night where I obviously didn't just have bread for dinner) today's dish was from Delia Smith's How to Cook Book One, also on this webpage here, Spaghetti with olive vegetable oil, garlic and chilli.

Its not so much that I'm running out of food, but, I just fancied using some spaghetti and didn't have anything else to go with it. Well, I had a few eggs, but Delia didn't have a carbonara recipe in the book I had. You don't really need a recipe for carbonara, just a few eggs and ham/bacon stirred into your spag, even the ham/bacon is optional (in my world).

Recipe
Spaghetti
Pickled chillis
Stolen garlic
Vegetable oil
Ground pepper
Salt

So, spaghetti cooked in a small saucepan. Pickled chillis drained and chopped up small. Small sliverish garlic clove stolen from from the flatmate who's shelf is above mine, sliced finely.

Drain the spaghetti in a colinder thing, and use the saucepan to boil up a little too much vegetable oil. Chuck in the chilli and the garlic. Remember something about pepper and salt, add some, stir it up a bit, turn the heat down, then turn the heat off. Add the spaghetti, shake it around a bit so everything's all covered, and serve.

Possibly too much pepper, but it was yum.

Just like sourdough

I thought I'd try my hand at making sourdough bread.

I took a voyage out into the internet to find out how and discovered this webpage, which gave a broadly easy to follow guide. There may be better websites for this sort of thing out there, but this page came top of the google rankings.

For the past few days I've been cultivating a 'sourdough starter'. This was just a load of flour and warm water in a mug, stirred every few hours. The idea is that it collects wild yeast and bacteria in the air, they like the warm watery flour and grow. Each day you're supposed to chuck away half of it and top it up with more flour and more warm water. So essentially the only thing that flourishes in there is yeast and good bacteria. It all gets killed of in the baking process anyhoo.

I used this strong white breadmaking flour I'd picked up on my last supermarket trip, and then just to be cheeky, on the second day I topped it up with broad wholemeal breadmaking flour, and a wee bit of Allinson's yeast as recommended by Andy Bonar from Q Without U and the Secondhand Marching Band.

Some hours before the bread is required, you pour half of the starter into a bowl and start calling it 'sponge'. You add more flour and warm water, and leave it for a couple of hours so it bubbles up as the yeast gets a good old final meal.

Then I added four teaspoons of icing sugar, two teaspoons of salt, a splash of vegetable oil and a load more of that white breadmaking flour. I started off stirring it all with my trusty wooden spoon and once it started to 'gel' I kneaded it by hand.

When it got too sticky I added more flour, and kept going.

After a while I got bored, so I put it back in the bowl, sprinkled some more flour on top and left it to 'proof' for about two hours.

Crikey, it grew, it like double din size, do I had another go at kneading it until it was wee again, then divided it into two pieces for for each of the former takeaway tins I was going to use to bake it in. More kneading followed and a bit more leaving the dough to proof. At this point I discovered that leaving it on top of my computer tower was nice and warm, I think the yeast likes it.

I grew tired of waiting, so after about half an hour I slung both tinned dough loafs into the over at around 170C and took them out again after exactly half an hour. They came out of the tins easily and tapping on the bottom gave a successful hollow sound.

This sort of thing is easy, it just takes a little time.

Just Like Sahmeepee

After last night's thrilling culinary odyssey, blast from the past commenter Sahmeepee left a recipe, ripped from the back of an Asda couscous packet. It sounded all right and I had most of the ingredients lurking at the back of my cupboard, so I thought I'd give it a go.

I've been getting a little obsessed with the recipe on the side of ASDA's couscous packet. You should try it.

Recipe
Vegetable oil
Onion
Ground ginger
Whole cumin seeds
Butter
Couscous
Vegetable stock
Dried fruit
Flaked almonds

Fry up a small onion in a medium-sized frying pan and add some ground ginger, cinnamon and a little cumin (tbh I like it without the cumin). Also add a bit of garlic. I use the stuff in a tube - about a toothbrush full of that should be A-OK.

I had no garlic so I used some anchovie paste, also my cinnamon was absent so I skipped that too.

When the onion has started to go clear, add 200g or so of couscous. Stir it up so that the oil (they used butter, but I never buy it) has coated the couscous and everything's all mixed up.

Mix up about 400ml of vegetable stock and add it to the pan, wait until it starts to simmer, and then turn the heat off. Stir in a small handful of raisins and leave the pan covered for 5-10 minutes. They put dried apricots and almonds in with the raisins, but my cupboards aren't so well-stocked.

I put in the small handful of raisins as suggested but it didn't look like enough, so I poured in a bit more and more and more. Possibly too much.

Looks okay, tastes fine.

Just Like Delia

Here, this is jalofi rice[sic] that I made myself and then photied using the macro function on my camera.

It looks nice, tastes adequate, nothing special.

Recipe
Cannellini beans
Ground corriander
Whole cumin
Vegtable oil
Salt
Pepper
Tesco long grain easy cook rice
Random tomatos
Random cheese

I used some dried cannellini beans soaked for two hours then boiled for an hour. Once they're done, put them to the side.

Then I boiled up some vegetable oil, and put in a cup of Tescos Easy-Cook Long Grain Rice, and fried it for a bit, stirring in some double concentrate tomato puree, ground corriander and whole cumin seeds. After about three minutes of stirring, I poured in a cup of boiling water, turned the heat to the lowest setting and put the cannellini beans on top.

Time passes.

I contemplated whether salt or pepper would be needed, its the sort of thing people who know about cooking would add, so I sprinkled and stirred.

Time passes

Its hard to be sure how long, as my computer keeps freezing and tasks that usually take minutes take half an hour. I revisited the rice twice to check if it was cooked, on the first visit I needed to pour in more water, on the second visit it was done.

There followed a gazing into the fridge, finding some ping pong ball sized tomatos, which were chopped up and stirred into the ricey goodness.

More time passed, maybe two minutes. Then I turned the heat off, spooned some of the jalofi rice into a bowl and gazed back into the fridge.

There was cheese, at first it looked okay, then I noticed a vein of blue mould where there should not have been. I hacked at it with a knife until the remaining cheese was mould-less, this I then chopped up into my serving of rice.

It looks alright, aye.