>> THE BAD COOK

As I mentioned last post, I’m easily distracted when I get back to work, so blogging kind of slips down below doing essential tasks like tidying my room or washing the floor. But HA! I’ve worked out a way to beat the system – by writing some posts now and scheduling them to appear later. Admittedly it’s taken me nearly two years on wordpress to work out how to do this, and even then only because my fiancee taught me how (the joys of marrying someone who works in comms), but all the same: take that, indiscipline! Be vanquished, ennui! Begone, apathy!

I’m choosing to stick it to the system by recommending that you all go out and buy Esther Walker‘s excellent book The Bad Cook on Kindle, for a whole range of reasons:

1. She is an excellent writer, both about life and cooking, and will make you laugh inappropriately on a regular basis if you like either of the above things.
2. She has long been trying to get a publishing contract, and will benefit from the inevitable encouragement that will come from lots of people reading her book and then sending her enthusiastic messages about how great it is (you probably will).
3. She is writing another book at present, and is also heavily pregnant, and so may also require plenty of the above encouragement (see point 2).
4. She and her husband Giles, who is the head food critic for The Times, are pretty much unfailingly polite in replying to messages and requests on Twitter – which is quite rare in these days, especially given that they’re both quite big names.
5. It’s full of good recipes (even though the first one in there is a stew which features rose veal and bone marrow – but don’t be put off).
6. £1.99 is nothing for a cookbook, especially not a good one.

If you’re not yet sold (or even if you are) then have a look at this recipe for Lemon Surprise Pudding, which I have no desire to eat but which nonetheless made me laugh out loud on multiple occasions, especially having met plenty of people who act this way in Oxford. Also, it’s full of wisdom if you like lemon surprise puddings.

You can buy the book on Amazon here – are you convinced yet?

 

>> GREEN CHILLI

Once again I’m on holiday, and so I’ve sorted out my priorities, and as well as having done some essential admin (on today’s list: sort out suits for groomsmen, or else as it stands I’m getting married in jeans and a T-shirt) have sat down to do some cooking again. Nothing overly ambitious, really, but it’s been cold for so long that I’m kind of sick of casseroles and stews, and anyway, I want to live in hope that this winter will come to an end. So I wandered round M&S in a bit of a haze, trying to work out what I wanted to cook, and then ended up at the tills with some pork mince, a bunch of fresh mint and some red chilis, and decided to make green chilli.

If you look back over the archives of this blog, you’ll see this pattern: I do basically nothing for long periods of time, then apologise and start blogging prolifically again for about a week, and then work kicks in and I’m silent for months. So I’m not going to make any promises about this being a new era – I have two weeks before I start commuting back to Worle again and then the friends who I see in person aren’t likely to see me, let alone the internet. However, this does mean that you get a new recipe from me while I’m here.

This is a Jamie recipe, which means that you could just go to the Channel 4 website and download it for free, but then you won’t get my rambling thoughts. Don’t say I’m not good to you.

Anyway green chilli is nothing like chilli con carne. Where chilli con carne has that unique British flavour of rich, tomatoey stew that’s been bubbled away at with dried oregano for ages until it’s both distinctly Italian and as English as Yorkshire pudding, green chilli basically doesn’t have much sauce to speak of at all. It’s fresh, clean, filling and tastes nothing like a stew, but it’s also spicy enough that it’s perfect for a lethally cold April day. We ate it with pitta breads and yoghurt and it was glorious, although I don’t recommend having it with rice as there’s not enough liquid to carry it. Oh, and fresh mint is essential, or else it will be horrible. Here’s how you do it:

You’ll need some pork mince (500g fed two and then enough leftovers for another day),
some red chilis,
a green pepper, chopped into chunks
a couple of onions, also chopped into chunks
about four large tomatoes, chopped into chunks
half a lime
some fresh mint
and three cloves of garlic

And then some natural yoghurt and pitta breads to serve it with, and lettuce if you have some.

Jamie uses sage, but I didn’t have any and it worked fine. Heat your mince in some oil in a deep pan on a high heat with some salt and pepper, stir it about until it browns a bit and then add your onions, garlic, green peppers and chilis.

Turn your heat down to medium, cook it all until it turns golden (or at least looks slightly less anaemic – pork mince never really looks ‘golden’) and the liquid from the pork is gone. Then throw in your chopped tomatoes and half a cup of water – remembering that the point of this ISN’T to make chilli con carne, and so don’t put too much in – and then cook it for another ten minutes. Chop up your mint, stir it in and then squeeze a lime over the top, and then serve with toasted pitta breads and yoghurt.

It was good enough to make a weary teacher sit down and start blogging again, so that’s saying something.

 

>> RICHARD HAWLEY

 

>> AFTER ALL (acoustic)

This purely and simply breaks me. There’s a purity and a power behind David Crowder’s voice that’s accentuated by the setting of this video.

This was a great song on the album, but this is something else altogether.

 

>> PLAYER ONE

This is a quick one, as I’m writing it before crawling off to bed – but I just read this in Douglas Coupland’s latest book “Player One” and it made me think. I don’t really buy all of it, but it’s definitely thought-provoking:

The crux seems to be that our lives stopped being stories. And if we are no longer to have lives that are stories, what will our lives have become? Yet seeing one’s life as a story seems like nostalgic residue from an era when energy was cheap and the story of the super-special, ultra-important individual with blogs and Google hits and a killer résumé was a conceit that the planet was still able to materially support. In the New Normal, we need to strip ourselves of notions of individual importance. Something new is arising that has neither interest in nor pity for souls trapped in twentieth century solipsism. Non-linear stories? Multiple endings? No loading times? It’s called life on earth. Life need not be a story, but it does need to be an adventure.

Do you agree? Coupland is a shrewd cultural observer, but it seems like a bleak view to take as a Christian. Or maybe it’s just that we need a new, more community-focussed way of viewing faith, too – I could get behind that, certainly.

I don’t know if I believe that my life is a story, but I still believe that it’s part of a bigger story, this movement of people that I reckon God has been working through for centuries. 

That said, given my background, I would do. So what do you think?

 

>> FRENCH ONION SOUP

I’m on half term this week, which is a strange thing. Despite being a week out of school, I still have 50 exercise books to mark, four medium-term plans to write, two days worth of lessons to do and an essay to finish. So much for a holiday. But anyway, I decided to give myself a whole three days off, and so have been off from Saturday until today before diving into the pile of stuff above tomorrow.

I’ve never been much good at taking holiday, because I never really know what to do with it – I either end up getting hopelessly bored, or watching a whole box set of something, or walking four miles to the nearest Caffe Nero every day just to give myself some routine, none of which are especially relaxing. But I’m getting better, anyway, as today I had a plan – I was going to go and buy some LEGO and build something. Brilliant. Engage my creativity, reclaim my childish joy, etc. 

 

Listen, don’t judge me here. I went to visit my four-year old nephew last weekend (actually, he’s not my nephew yet, not until July, but I don’t know if there’s a technical term for that – nephew-to-be, maybe) and we spent a whole afternoon playing with his LEGO and it was really relaxing. LEGO is used as a therapeutic tool, apparently, and it engages a different part of your brain. Anyway, I built a kind of LEGO lizard thing that even David Attenborough might have been impressed by. It’s a perfect way to switch off from the last term.

 

But then I went to the toy shop to try and buy some LEGO, and it turns out that it is super expensive. I mean, if I’d wanted to build a LEGO police station (and I did, believe me), I would have had to shell out at least £20, and that was too much for reclaiming my childhood, I’ll have you know. Somewhere at home I have a large treasure chest full of LEGO – actually a literal treasure chest, although it is red and made out of plastic – full of LEGO cowboys and bits of LEGO castles. So I could maybe get my parents to ship it down here, although by the time it arrives term will have started again and I’ll just end up using it to illustrate a lesson on Macbeth, or something.

 

The upshot is, I didn’t make a LEGO police station today. But I did decide to make French Onion Soup, which is maybe the second-best holiday activity out there, given that it requires lots of time and sweating of onions, and creates something that is warming and comforting at the end. I used Nigel Slater’s recipe, for which you’ll need a large saucepan that you can cover over:

 

3 large onions, sliced

A decent knob of butter

2 bay leaves

2 tbsp plain flour

250ml white wine

1 litre chicken stock

Salt and black pepper

Some bread and cheese

 

It’s simple. Basically, melt your butter on a medium heat, put your sliced onions in and then cover them, stirring occasionally and not letting them colour. They need to be sticky and soft, so give them about 30 mins.

 

Then add your flour, stir, add your wine about a minute later, then the chicken stock. Bring it to the boil, add salt and pepper to taste, and then let it simmer for another half an hour. Toast some bread with cheese on top and then eat. 

 

Not quite as good as LEGO, but pretty darn close.

 

>> THE UNIVERSAL

Blur’s “The Universal” remains my favourite song that they have ever written. I’m prone to singing enthusiastically along to it in the car, even though its about a bleak, post-apocalyptic future where there is no escape from the state. A little ironic for British Gas, but there you go.

It’s also fairly apt for a PGCE year, as

The days, they seem to flow through you -
Just let them go.