Strange Pairings

Earlier in this blog I mentioned the combination of steak and blackcurrant sauce, until recently the strangest pairing I've ever come across. And no, it didn't work. It was in fact a waste of a good piece of meat, and for that matter of good berries. Last week on holiday in Santa Maria, Cape Verde I (again unwittingly) sampled something far weirder, or at least to my mind it was. 

Seeking some local foods rather than the largely 'international' fare served at our hotel I opted for wahoo (a meaty fish related to mackerel, though with a more delicate taste and firmer flesh) with banana. That more or less worked, but intriguingly it was served with - Brussels sprouts. The mini cabbages were well cooked, not soft, not hard, and may even have gone with the fish had it been unadorned. But - and this may not come as a huge surprise - sprouts and banana did not prove a winning combination. In a strange way, however, I was pleased to find something so unusual. But I still left all bar a few of the green things untouched. 

I cannot believe that sprouts are grown in Cape Verde, but stand to be corrected. And I cannot fathom why they should have been seen on menus there. As a former Portuguese colony that connection doesn't explain it either. And how did the chef think they would work? 

Equally out of place, but marvellous, were the strozzapreti eaten at a restaurant - Valeria's - recommended to us by fellow guests. It was so good we dined there three times. Why there should be what proved to be a superb if (because?) simple Italian restaurant in a stand of shops between hotel and town in this African backwater is hard to imagine. Strozzapreti (it means priest stranglers, so a good start as all right thinking people would agree - if not, check out how parts of the US Catholic church have been fighting changes to statute of limitations changes relating to child rape over recent years, and wonder why) are sort of gnochi/dumpling things. Badly made such foods are like lead, well made they are sublimely toothsome. These were terrific, and the creamy courgette and prawn sauce lubricated them to perfection. 

The one actually (I think) local dish that stood out during our stay was octupus and potato stew. It, like anything fishy, was helped down by the Cha de Fogo white wine from another of the Cape Verdean islands. I cannot understand why the airport duty free shop sold the usual inspid spirit brands, and loads of Aussie plonk, but not that, something the country should be very proud of. 

A Deer Friend

We are not on, but occasionally do, the 5 - 2 regime, reducing our calorie intake on two days in a week to just 600.

I first tried this in 2014 I think, having watched a programme (by the ever excellent Michael Mosley) that recommended it more for its anti-cancer etc properties than for any help it gives in reducing weight, though that has been of value too. That time I gave it a go when the Dear Leader and SC were away diving in Egypt. Foolishly I did the two days together, and on one of them decided it was a good idea to use up my calorie allowance in one giant bowl of coleslaw, munched through the day. A box set of party political broadcasts would bring more pleasure.

Since that time I've learned how to make the 600 calories more enjoyable and more filling, or capable of fooling our systems into believing we are fullish. Last night I made SC and myself (the Dear Leader away in the Galapagos Islands ostensibly diving, though probably scouting out another secret submarine base for her evil empire) a dinner that included a small sirloin steak of venison. It had to be cooked far longer than we would beef (nearing 10 minutes), but with a seared surface and a bit of pinkness left in the middle, and having been given five minutes resting time, it was delicious - and as the packaging claims each 100g steak is just 106 calories it allowed us to have various steamed veg (asparagus in particular being low calorie and gustatorily rewarding), and a starter of samphire (again, loads of flavour for stuff all calories) with chili, garlic and brown shrimps and a squeeze of lemon, with a banana for pud, and still fall within the 300 calories we had left for the meal.

That is, I have to admit, the first time I have ever cooked venison and really enjoyed it. Stews various have been ok, but never memorably good or even any sort of a match for beef. The seared steak was meaty and slightly gamey and very tasty however, and having something to chew and savour for a few minutes made the glum fact of our reduced intake fade into the background.

What I would love to try as regards deer meat is their kidneys, of which I have read great things. As an offal lover (perhaps that's why the Dear Leader is more than one ocean away) lamb kidneys are near the top of my ultimate breakfast wish list, and venison kidney is supposed to be superior to them. Having failed to source them from butchers previously my new plan is to win the lottery, buy a Scottish shooting estate, get a rifle licence, learn to shoot, stalk and kill a stag, let a minion do the gralloch, and then while the kidneys are still warm pop them in a buttered pan and have them minutes later on toast. If only every ambition were so simple.

Donald Trump and the Truth About Soup

The wise, lovable, thoughtful and humble Donald Trump, unknown to many commentators from the biased liberal pinko lefty America-hating political elite scumbags of the biased liberal pinko lefty America-hating political elite media, owes so much to soup. We can reveal the top 10 totally fictitious facts about Trump and his debt to potage.

1. He will, at some future date, publish his favourite Trump soup recipes, though the Trump time is currently not right to do so, quite understandably.
2. It is not known if Trump borscht features on his Trump list of favourite Trump soups, and it is of little Trump consequence if it does.
3. Many Trump experts, or more probably none at all, have wondered if his Trump trademark hairstyle is achieved with the aid of spray-on ultra-sticky Trump chicken soup, binding those central Trump whisps at the Trump molecular Trump level.
4. When tasked about why fewer and fewer Americans are enjoying Italian white bean soup he is thought by nobody at all to have explained it is down to not using Parmesan - he wants to make America grate again. Incidentally, given the effects of the soup, wouldn't it be fitting to call it Trump Soup? Or Trump Trump Trump Soup?
5. At Trump Tower you may be able to enjoy said Trump Trump Trump Soup in the Trump Restaurant using a Trump Spoon sitting at a Trump Table. Or not. 
6. There is no truth in the story that his latest Trump wife has borrowed whole sections of Elizabeth David's recipe for tomato soup and used them in her speeches supporting the great Trump man.
7. On an earlier post we noted Mr Trump is rumoured to have Trump promised to ban Potage de Crecy for being too French. His campaign managers have backtracked slightly on this, saying it may be renamed Freedom Carrot Soup. 
8. When asked about how he got his start as a brilliant Trump amateur Trump gourmet Trump chef, Trump said that it was only helped slightly by a Trump loan of 10,000 gallons of excellent Trump beef Trump stock from his Trump father. 
9. He has promised to end the nightmare of people being burned by hot soup on his first day as Trump President in the Trump White Trump House, though how this is to be Trump done is not yet clear.
10. In his Trump honour the celebrated Mexican Muslim chef Pancho ZB Ali has developed a soup that uses bitter gourd, duck bile, a lot of fat and angel hair, served topped with a foam that when pricked with a fork disappears magically. 

You've got to love him, haven't you?

Old but New

I was lucky enough to be paid for many years to travel to places most Brits will never get to. There was work involved, but far more interestingly there was contact with different cultures and cuisines. Far more interestingly.

My favourite memories of those times are of Indonesia, where I worked with the wonderful Agus Sutono (sadly I lost contact when my job change coincided with his rapid departure from the country during one of its regular anti-Chinese spells). The food was a revelation, from street fare to very posh places. Common to both was satay, probably the flavour that I most associate with the country. Last weekend, in need of a quickly made starter, the freezer yielded jumbo prawns, and a quick scan of the fridge prompted the idea of trying to replicate a simple satay sauce to go with them. It proved easy and delicious.

Defrosted prawns were fried in sesame oil, with the juice and zest of a lime added along with two tablespoons of unsweetened smooth peanut butter and a dash or two of soy sauce. The cooking took at most three minutes, as was generally the case with roadside places where we'd stop for a lunchtime bite. The flavour took me straight back to Jakarta, Medan and Surabaya. It was a hit with the Dear Leader too, may her enemies perish in intriguing ways.

I never cease to be amazed at how easily memory is triggered by taste, but was my enjoyment of those prawns greater because of it, or the same as DL and SC experienced? There is no objective measure of enjoyment, but I tend to think that having a backstory on a dish or a flavour adds to the pleasure - unless that backstory is of the Dear Leader and the French oysters variety, that with hindsight can only be seen as an attempt by filthy foreign powers to nip her nascent dictatorship in the bud.

Something New

It is always a pleasure to come across a new combination of ingredients, a new dish, that works, especially if it is simple. With a glut of broad beans from our allotment (no complaint there, just an observation) I was looking for a way to do something different with this vegetable that doesn't lend itself to all that many exotic uses. There are dips and hummuses (hummi?) that suit it well, but none met our needs on Friday. As so often the divine Hugh F-W offered a direction, if not the solution itself.

HFW suggests zapping the cooked older beans (once the grey and bitter skin has been removed) and mixing with a little garlic and a thrutch of ricotta. He may not have used the word thrutch. I had ricotta in the fridge, and am never without garlic, but as our beans are fresh and young making a puree of them didn't appeal, indeed it seemed just wrong, so I warmed six thinly sliced cloves of garlic (HFW suggested two) in a little butter and olive oil, added a heap of the jade gems, and stirred in half a container of ricotta (about 125g).

When the lot was well mixed and warmed through it was piled on a toasted flatbread and became the nearest thing we had to a main course that evening. All three of the ingredients (discounting the flatbread) married beautifully, the garlic was very present but not dominant, the texture moist and toothsome, and The Dear Leader (all hail our Dear Leader, ever vigilant guardian of the homeland) fulsome in her praise.

The combination was so good that to demonstrate it to the returning Sternest Critic I repeated the exercise and served the beans as an accompaniment to the customary fatted calf (thick steak) enjoyed when he is just back from university. He is not a big fan of the broad bean, but made short work of these.

Only one thing bothers me slightly about the dish, and that is the thought in the back of my mind that it is not a million miles from The Fast Show's cheesy peas.

Ten Facts About Soup and the EU Referendum

1. According to the Leave campaign, the EU soup lake now contains enough garlic consomme to fill 12,000,000,000 olympic sized swimming pools, and costs each British family (sorry, hard-working family) £4756 a year.
2. According to the Remain campaign, if we quit the EU our children will all be forcibly drowned in soup.
3. If we leave the EU the price of tomato soup will more than double overnight.
4. If we leave the EU we will be free to import cheap tomato soup from Peru, halving its price.
5. UKIP has pledged to make Brown Windsor Soup great again if we leave.
6. It was an accident during testing of the Euro-soup working party's proposed recipe that gave Nick Clegg his superhuman powers of shinniness.
7. The European Central Bank recently announced that the value of British stocks for soup would fall by at least 25 per cent in the event of Brexit.
8. Soup farmers reliant on EU subsidies predict leaving the EU will lead to envirnomental disaster, with soup fields left unpicked for generations to come.
9. France and Spain have both indicated that they will place an immediate ban on Cullen Skink in the event of Brexit.
10. Creme de Jacob Rees-Mogg or Veloute George Osborne. Can you spot the difference?

Ten Things They Don't Want You to Know About Soup

1. In the 1950s government instructions in case of nuclear attack included 'prepare some soup - soup makes everything feel better.'
2. The brief advertising career of Franz Kafka ended after he suggested the slogan 'Brotschka's soup - endless misery and pointless longing.'
3. In the 1930s engineer Dwayne Q. Snetterton devised a car engine that ran on chicken stock, clocking 2500mpg, but Big Oil murdered him and supressed his invention.
4. The Duke of Windsor believed he could cure his syphilis by dipping his gentleman's sausage in a bowl of piping hot cock-a-leekie. He was misinformed.
5. America lost the Vietnam War because their troops ran out of those little crackers they serve with soup for no obvious reason.
6. Shortly before Ronald Reagan was elected President the CIA is known to have carried out experiments on mind-altering soups. 
7. Sir Walter Raleigh brought the first soup back to England from the New World.
8. There is more potential energy in a litre of cabbage soup than a kilo of plutonium.
9. It is rumoured that Prince Charles has a man to blow on his soup for him.
10. It is rumoured that Prince Edward has a man to explain what soup is to him.

Ten Facts About Soup That Will Change Your Life

1. Jason Statham's favourite soup is Kalashnikov.
2. As an exercise before a university drama production Hugh Grant was asked to pretend to be a bowl of soup. It is feared nobody ever told him to stop.
3. Nigel Farage MEP is rumoured to be the secret architect of the groundbreaking European Directive on Tinned Soup (Safety in Transit Regulations - Interim Agreement 17.5 part 4(c)).  It has saved countless thousands of lives. 
4. During the reign of Henry VII a tax was imposed on ladles, but poor drafting meant that if used left-handed owners avoided the need to pay. A treasury team is still working on the re-draft.
5. After a five year programme of study researchers at an American University found that if spilt on exposed flesh boiling soup may cause burns.
6. For perfectly legitimate tax reasons David Cameron's father could only eat soup in Belize.
7. Only a few close friends of Boris Johnson are aware that his great-great-grandfather was a bowl of vegetable soup.
8. Elvis once had his private plane fly Heinz tomato soup, heated up by his chef in Graceland, to Las Vegas. It arrived cold, and he is thus credited with inventing gazpacho.
9. Tins of Scotch Broth more than four years past their sell-by-date are so explosive that they feature in the UN's list of items that may not be exported to North Korea.
10. It is estimated that House of Lords debates on soup cost UK taxpayers more than £12 million last year alone.

Ten Things You Should Know About Croutons

1. Edward VII's personal coat of arms included three croutons on a field of lobster bisque and a courtesan rampant.
2. Worldwide there are more than 500 deaths every year caused by poorly prepared croutons - if the poison sack is not carefully removed the residue is potentially fatal.
3. No two croutons are ever alike, thanks to their unique crystal structure.
4. Al Capone is once said to have killed a rival by bludgeoning him with a particularly large crouton.
5. If you are ever lost, and have a crouton on you, point it at the sun and the greasy side is due west.
6. During the Parliamentary expenses scandal three MPs were found to have claimed simultaneously for croutons in London and at their constituency addresses.
7. Crouton is derived from the Ancient Greek root Crotos, meaning soggy and pointless.
8. During the French Revolution loyalty to the King was secretly signalled by keeping a small crouton in ones ear.
9. A crouton was found by Howard Carter in King Tut's tomb, and it was still edible. But Carter was very hungry with all that digging.
10. It was once rumoured that the EU crouton mountain was so big and dense that Brussels reputedly feared creating a man-made black hole. But then some people will believe any rubbish they are told if it's brazen and bigoted enough. 

Ten More Things You Didn't Know About Soup

1. Donald John Eric Richard Kevin Trump has promised to ban Potage de Crecy 'for being too French.' You can find good in everyone.
2. According to a non-existant law not passed in 1143 it is legal to shoot a Welshman eating Cawl in Chester on Mayday, provided you use an 1143 bow - the arrow can be manufactured anytime up to noon.
3. Similarly in Berwick you may of an evening bludgeon a Scot eating Cullen Skink while playing the bagpipes and doing Scottish country dancing. This is not legal, but no jury in the land would convict you.
4. The extreme flatulence from eating a traditional Mayan soup made from chick peas, haricot beans, garlic, butter beans, string beans, chili and more garlic is said to kill one in seven European travellers who try it. But on the plus side, it gets two in seven American tourists.
5. It is a little known fact that there is actually no word for soup in English.
6. Hillary Clinton once mispoke about eating soup while under sniper fire in Bosnia. It was avocado dip in Atlanta at a formal ball, a mistake any of us could make.
7. Bill Clinton was telling the truth when he said 'I did not have soup with that woman.' It was sex.
8. The Chinese serve several soups during a banquet. At Mao's 50th birthday celebrations so many were presented to the guests that six foreign diplomats drowned trying to maintain protocol.
9. Stalin once tried to solve the USSR's food crisis by planting soup in the frozen tundra. It failed, but he invented Vichysoise.
10. In 1964 Elizabeth Taylor enjoyed a bowl of mushroom soup so much that she married it. The marriage lasted longer than any of her other 17.

Ten Things You Didn't Know About Soup

1. The Incas worshipped a god of soup.
2. Marie-Antoinette's famous dictum should rightly be translated as 'let them eat Bouillabaisse.'
3. The authentic Sicilian recipe for tomato soup includes no tomatoes.
4. Winston Churchill famously never once ate soup as an adult, saying life was too short to do so.
5. The greatest soup tragedy in history occurred in Belgium in 1834, when 17 people died eating particularly hot asparagus soup.
6. In Germany it is still illegal according to a 14th century law to put croutons in soup. This law is believed to have been brought in to protect the German dumpling industry.
7. As Dan Brown showed in his novel The Ninth Potage, the word soup is derived from an Aramaic term meaning endless dross, and that an ancient brotherhood dedicated to protecting the secret of the perfect broth is said to exist to this day in Penge.
8. The higher slopes of Everest are now littered with more than five million empty tins of beef bouillon, piled so high in certain places that they actually reach higher than the mountain peak itself.
9. For a bet the great sportsman CB Fry once ice skated for a week on a frozen plate of clam chowder. He won the bet, but lost his frost-bitten testicles in doing so.
10. Andy Warhol wished to sue Batchelors for infringement of his soup tin design until it was pointed out that he was being a self-regarding prat again.

New Miracle Diet (Honest)

I am, I confess, fascinated by the stream of often contradictory advice that nutritionists provide. Red meat is bad for you, but on the other hand red meat is good for you. Fat is the root of all evil, but perhaps fat is quite good for us. Coffee kills us, but coffee can be quite beneficial. It is I'm sure completely coincidental that the good for you side often comes from studies sponsored by those marketing an item. [Ha, a couple of years later and the experts who told us eggs are bad for us now say the opposite. Soft-boiled best, both eggs and (perhaps?) nutritional experts]

Elsewhere here I've put forward the very simple idea (and I don't pretend to be the first to do this) that diversity in what we consume is the likeliest way to eat healthily. Now I want to put forward the Pilkington Diet, not suggesting we all eat Pilkingtons, but expanding on the idea of range.

The government's 5-a-day regime (apparently the professional advice was 7, but they bottled it) is clearly short term. If we were to eat just a portion every day of the same five, say carrot, apple, rhubarb, lentils and lettuce, we would meet those guidelines, but it doesn't take a genius (thankfully) to see that it would be a very limited diet indeed, and we'd be missing out on lots of complicated things with big long names.

My solution is to use a number as arbitrary as the 10000 steps a day target about which my wife is obsessed. Why stop there? Let's make it two arbitrary numbers.

Arbitrary number the first: I aim to eat 30 different fruits, vegetables and nuts (30 combined, not of each) a week). Arbitrary number the second, I aim to eat 100 different f, v and n over the year.

In my book (unpublished, indeed unwritten) 'The Pilkington Diet - My Way to a Richer Lifestyle' (ambiguity of richer intended) I will set out the rules for combining the foods, and most importantly for establishing what a portion is. Here's an extract about portions: 'The amount of a portion varies according to numerous factors, but in most cases it can be taken as 2.7 tads, or in Imperial a smidge and a bit.' If I recall the official guidelines a portion is to do with spoonfuls of some sort. Heaped or level I can't remember.

Other than people with allergies foolish enough to ignore them, following the Pilkington Diet is unlikely to kill anybody, give them foul breath, or bore them rigid, except in counting and logging the different produce eaten.

Relais Routier as Touchstone

Much though I enjoy a wide variety of culinary cultures, like Brits many of my generation French remains the ne plus ultra. Of course French cooking covers another wide variety in itself: regional traditions; the haute cuisine of Escoffier and the like; cuisine bourgeoise; etc etc. But the sub-group to which I am drawn most is the cookery one finds (or at least used to find, my travels in France having been limited of late) in Relais Routier establishments.

The Relais Routier restaurant is a marvellously democratic institution. Along with the lorry drivers who form a significant percentage of their clientele you'll see lunch tables occupied by gendarmes, business travellers, maybe the local mayor being lashed up so he'll sign some permission or other; families en route to the coast, country or mountains. They're drawn to these places for several reasons, including that they offer great value for money; rapid turnover means the food is fresh; and the cooking is excellent (otherwise they fail and close). We counter these independent eateries with Little Chef. Worse, Little Chef after Heston Blumenthal stuck his mottie in.

I thought about Relais Routier yesterday because I cooked leeks vinaigrette, one of the great standbys of the RR buffet table. It's one of those dishes that needs no chefy spin. Good fresh leeks (in our case dug from the allotment an hour before they hit the pot) washed carefully of grit and dirt then boiled in salty water until tender; carefully drained, cooled (you can dip them in iced water to keep the green bits greener, but why bother when they get covered up anyway?), slit lengthwise and placed cut-side-up on a serving plate. Their surfaces are then given a liberal dose of chopped parsley followed by hard boiled egg grated over, and a very mustardy olive oil and red wine vinegar vinaigrette.

That buffet table would also include a regularly refilled dish of olives; cervelas or some similar charcuterie; lentil salad; tomato salad (made with tomatoes that taste of something more than water); potato salad; grated carrots squeezed until almost dry and mixed with herbs and salt; maybe salade nicoise. The list goes on, every entry on it both - relatively - cheap to make and delicious.

If a Man Is Tired of London PR....

I am on the mailing list of innumerable PR companies, the idea being there might, just occasionally, be something worth writing about to which they will alert me. The problem is, for every release of interest I have to wade through about 5000 that are a) badly written (ungrammatical, poor syntax, cliched...); b) utterly fatuous; c) tell me about another daft trend/food fashion in London.

A while back it was hot dogs served with champagne. The combination of fey, arch, look at my wad, and nauseating self-regard (aren't we so daring to break the boundaries? - no, no you're cocks who follow fashions as if they are the route to salvation, though that is actually the A47).

I love hot dogs, or good ones anyway. I love champagne. The two together, once in a while, are an interesting idea. But a restaurant - dozens apparently - based on the idea? You can feel the brainwaves washing over the place - 'Is anyone seeing me here eating hotdogs and drinking champagne?'

The best hot dogs (plural, they were big but good) I ever ate were in Buffalo New York, sold by an outfit called Ted's, part of a big chain I believe. We queued at the massive outdoor stall in our business suits, waiting behind construction workers, policemen, factory hands, it was like a foodie version of the Village People. Cooked over charcoal so they had a real hint of BBQ to them, served in a simple torpedo roll with masses of onions, sweet mustard and/or hot sauce, with crispily delicious onion rings as an unmissable side they were well worth the wait. Ted's is I think a third generation business, and will doubtless last for many more; those puerile hot dog and champagne bars in London are mostly closed by now I guess. Their owners and clientele will have moved on to the next big thing, or the next after that or the next after that. Sushi and chips? Pate de foie gras smoothies? (darling I've always loved them). Snake steaks with milk shakes and cup-cakes?

The most memorably badly written PR claptrap I was ever sent btw was from Fortnum's, or at least the apparently semi-literates then handling their PR. They informed me that, and I'll try to get their precise phrasing and punctuation right, however painful: 'The Scotch egg originated at Fortnum & Mason, in the 18th century which was specially created for their high end customers.' One for the scrapbook. Happily I have no hair to pull out.

Deposits in My Taste Bank

We breakfast like kings, though with a better conscience. Nearly every such meal includes a home-made smoothie to get a flying start on our intake of fruit and veg, and because is it thoroughly enjoyable. As I took the first sip of this morning's version I was transported back to the 1970s, or even the 1960s - time travel by food - as the flavour of Vimto coursed through my system.

I'm not sure what actually flavours Vimto (natural or otherwise), but I am reasonably certain it's not a combination of blueberries, banana, peach, plum, and grapes, with lime and satsuma juice, almond milk and yakult to render it more liquid. But those ingredients combined to a moment of adult Vimto awareness.

However grown up we feel, or our roles dictate we should feel, deposits made in ones childhood taste bank are central to our experience of the world of food, at whatever age. I will confess that the flavour of bubble gum, something I have not actually eaten/chewed for decades, is very important to my appreciation of one of life's greatest pleasures, beer - it is significant in Leffe, Chimay, any wheat beer, Traquair, and many others. 'Ah, bubble gum, we love bubble gum,' says my brain (which now I notice it, sounds a tad schizoid).

Similarly with wine. Many grapes and wines hold a hint of Bazooka Joe, but the one where it is/was front and centre is/was Beaujolais Nouveau. Whatever happened to wines en primeur? Whatever happened to the pleasure of Beaj Nouveau, once raced from France to England to minimise the delay between its readiness and our drinking? Some was as rough as a Mohicanned badger's arse, of course; but every year as we took our first sip of the stuff we'd note the bubble gum (and to be accurate, the bananas too) and as jolly advanced nine-year-olds whatever our true age, we'd smile.

(Not) by Bread Alone

There are other things in my life apart from food. Fishing for one - if anyone out there is interested in publishing a book on sea fishing by someone who can actually write (that's me btw), get in touch.

Music is another. Here there's a link with food, however (but then I guess the fishing is partly to do with eating the occasional catch), as my tastes in both are decidedly broad - I really hope that the 'People who bought this also bought...' bit on i-Tunes reflects my recent purchases of clarinet and piano music by Dame Elizabeth Maconchy and Fast Shadow by the Wu Tang Clan (because I love the movie Ghost Dog, but also because it's a terrific piece of music). Both ways - fans of hard rap or whatever it wishes to call itself shouldn't shut their minds to classical stuff, nor the other way around. And Gravel Pit is also highly recommended.

And while we're on music: to my tiny little mind there is only one answer as to what should replace God Save the Queen (atheist republican here who hates that dirge for its unmusicality apart from everything else). Let's begin the campaign to select (We Don't) Need This Fascist Groove Thang by Heaven 17 as the new national anthem. It makes a political statement about our attitude to extremism; while enjoying a great beat it is relatively slow, so easy for even footballers to sing; it is anti-pompous - every other bloody national anthem is po-faced and humourless; and I would love to see the great and the good having to mouth the word 'thang' at gatherings of the greedy. You saw it here first.

What Do You Cook?

At a social gathering some time back it came out that I am the family cook. Someone of the female persuassion very patronisingly thought that meant I'd mastered one or two dishes for when The Dear Leader was taken up with plans for world domination and didn't have time to fend for us. This person asked the stupid (in the circs) question: 'What do you cook?' Inevitably my reply was sarcastic, but a more considered one would have been that I cook from a repertoire learned over years, to which new things are occasionally added.

Yesterday's main meal was from the tried and tested list, stuffed cabbage Troo style (there should be a circumflex over the first 'o' btw, but I can't figure out how to do them on this). Slice a savoy or similar across as thinly as possible, plunge the greenery into boiling salted water for five minutes, drain, then layer cabbage, sausagemeat, cabbage, sausagemeat, cabbage in a buttered casserole with a good lid and cook at 140C - 150C for 120 - 150 minutes. Each layer of cabbage is seasoned; I add a clove or three of garlic; and the top is dotted with butter before cooking. But it is essentially simple (thank you the late great Jane Grigson).

Such dishes allow me, immodestly, to consider myself a cook (and specifically for that one, an austerity cook once again). In that case it is justified by the making of something really good (there are never any leftovers) for a small outlay (£2 for Sainsubury's Toulouse-style sausages, carefully skinned, 69p I think for the cabbage, pence for the butter and garlic. Cookerhooddomness is reniforced by the fact that I only make it once a year, or even every other year - contrary to that lady's thought, my repertoire consists of hundreds (thousands? I never counted) of dishes. It's something that satisfies in more ways that one - quite filling, but also (contrary to what might be expected of slow-cooked cabbage) enticing beforehand, the savoury sausagey smell filling the ground floor.

It's good, and healthy, to add new stuff to the list too. Midweek I made us something that definitely gets added to the roll of honour for repeating. It was essentially a salad, with rocket as the leaf, plus toms, spring onions, and yellow pepper to bulk it out. To make it more fillling and interesting I added little scallops fried in salty butter, and chunks cut from half a Galia melon. Dressed with lime juice and olive oil, and seasoned with the emphasis on pepper, it was delicious, the salty seafood and sweet melon a lovely match. Not exactly an austerity plateful, though the melon and rocket needed using up and the bag of frozen scallops set up back £4, cheaper than a burger meal for one. And, perhaps because it was so flavoursome, we needed nothing else afterwards.

Good Stuff

Much to SC's annoyance I make the same pronouncement at every Christmas lunch: I'd rather have the accompaniments than the meats, if it came down to a choice. Not that it did, this year we got outside much of a turkey crown and a double wing rib of beef (the latter supplied from the fine Aberdeen Angus cattle of Henry Rowntree). Both were excellent, but it was the stuffing and the bread sauce that will live long in the taste memory.

Whisper it softly, but the bread sauce was an improvement on the blessed Delia's, whose recipe I followed in the main. The quantity of onion and pepper in the steeping milk was doubled, however, left longer, and removed and binned before the breadcrumbs were added, not returned (until it's nearly time to serve) as she suggests. I always make it with nutmeg rather than cloves which are far too medicinal for me. It tasted wonderful, and was as white as the snow that one fears we may never see again.

The stuffing was equally simple: 2oz of breadcrumbs, a medium onion chopped very finely, six sage leaves ditto, the meat from two butcher's sausages, a handful of walnuts reduced to crunchy nibs for texture, seasoning, and an egg to bind it all together. Cooked at 160C for an hour in a dish as deep as it is wide the top was brown and the inside still moist.

To prove my point, at least partly, the turkey and beef made fine sandwiches and snacks for several days; the few bites of bread sauce and stuffing went before Boxing Day was done.