I was involved in a nightmare scenario

 in a supermarket.

I was already in an emergency-style hurry  to get to a kitchen where I would demonstrate cooking in front of an audience. I am not going to name the event for reasons that will become clear.

I was late for my turn in the kitchen because I was in the supermarket running around the aisles looking for a substitute for fresh dill (there isn't one!). An urgent message asked me to find a lot of 'firm, white fish - not frozen'. I ran to the fish counter and hopped from foot to foot while the lady in front of me tried to choose between the fish that I wanted and some other fish, I psyched her into buying the other fish, then I asked the Fish Wife if she had more like the one I wanted - loads more!

Fish Wife emptied her entire stock of the necessary fish into large bags, which I grabbed and dashed pell-mell to the checkout. The conveyor-belt tills were full of everybody and their weeekend shop. I went to the self-service till - the place you're supposed to go if you just have a bit of tea and a cake to pay for.

I plumped the first bag of fish onto the scanning bed where it flopped over and - to my horror - all the fish flowed out - rapidly onto the floor. I applied the three-second rule and tried to scoop them up quickly but they kept swimming away and spreading way beyond the till area. It took far longer than three seconds to round them up into my large shopper where they basked alongside my baguette and a bag of flour.

I hope nobody filmed this.

this episode was somehow reminscent of a dream that I recounted here a few years ago.  

My Top Secret Job has sprung a leak.

It has become known that I sometimes work as a cook.

People have been telling me all about their favourite recipes.  *


This is a regular occurrence and I'm often astonished by the number of youngsters who speak wistfully of tinned fruit and semolina 

Yesterday a man in his twenties explained his favourite pudding:

rice pudding with a layer of tinned mandarins underneath and baked meringue  on top

and then his favourite sandwich

white buttered bread filled with sliced shiny green apples and sliced Mars Bar


*The TSJ has nothing to do with food

Best shot

KermesZ a l'Est on Taste the World stage making mitraillettes

shopping list

a big bag of big potatoes

20kg beef dripping

2 X deep fat dryers

a can of sunflower oil

lots of diced lamb

20 X eggs yolks

a lot of garlic

2 X jars of 'unsweeted' mustard

salt and pepper

many big baguettes


method

make audience chop potatoes

double fry in sizzling dripping

band prepare lamb kebabs shake maraccas and hoot horns

horn player uses electric wand to make mayonnaise while playing mouth organ

loud noise must be produced for duration of project

to serve

Wipe a cooked kebab through a 10cm slice of  baguette that has been
liberally spread with garlic mayonnaise - you now have a lubricated meat
sandwich

cram sandwich with chips and more mayonnaise

you can be a little quieter now while you share the eating with a friend



KermesZ a l'Est also do this sort of thing

The main point of Italy is the food

 In another life, about a century ago, I took the position of Cook for a Contessa in a Palazzo just outside Verona. A lady called Itsi Maraschino drove me around the neighbourhood pointing out where I must buy food; for vegetables I was to go to a massive barn where farmers dropped off crates of freshly picked produce - rows of aubergine and courgette varieties, vegetables that I'd never heard of, ten different sorts of artichokes - and all that was before I discovered the lettuce barn - or the cheeses.

Last week (while in Rome... ) we visited the Colosseum and then we were too hungry to read a map properly so we kept getting lost and all the while looking for THE place to eat - finally we fell into a cafe run by a Chinese family who served frozen pizza with a comedy sideshow.

Today we got in the car and drove to Frascati, a town apparently full of good restaurants but so full of cars and traffic jams that we drove on past, winding our way up a hill towards another town.

On the roadside we spotted a 'hostelerie' that looked probably-closed. We stopped and it seemed almost definitely closed-for-the-winter but we walked round to a side door that appeared to be the private house section, we were going to creep away but I was so hungry that I became brave and opened the door expecting to surprise a family eating fish fingers in front of their television.

Lo! the door opened to a proper restaurant dining room with a blazing fire and other diners and a kitchen where cooking was happening and a table for us where we were served artichokes and ham and polenta that was crisp outside and soft inside with orange zest, then torteloni with truffles and cheesy cream then an astonishing salad of white crunchy stems dressed with garlic and anchovy.

Home tomorrow!

Two months ago I watched this great film

about how Cambodia in the '60s was the funkiest kingdom on the planet, how it was so groovy and loved pop music and sex and fun until the Khmer Rouge arrived and killed nearly everyone.

The country is damaged but recovering, 'Not Easy Rock n Roll' is the story of a roaring-woman who is becoming a star.








On Saturday this roaring-woman appeared on my kitchen-on-stage at WOMAD and showed me how to slice a box of ginger as-thin-as-eyelashes so that we could cook Angry Chicken together.

I haven't quite got over it yet.

the WOMAD festival is on

and once again I am working on the Taste the World stage*.

Yesterday it rained and rained but in our tent we visited India and Bhangra-danced the sun back, then to Columbia for sunny-day crab gratin. Finally to the bluesy desert-ty atmosphere of Tinariwen who I am in love with:

1: they are unbelievably handsome

2: they wear beautiful long robes and intense jewel-coloured scarves wrapped in the manner of Lawrence of Arabia.

3: they made an astonishingly good stew, this is how you make it

ask a Halal butcher to chop 10 lamb shoulders into big boney pieces

fry the meat hothothot till golden all over then add water to just cover the meat

add salt

after 3 hours of slow simmer take the meat from the lamb and shred, you will have one kilo (dry weight) of basmati rice just cooked, combine the lamb meat and some of the cooking liquid with the rice. It will be a mush - that's fine

Add pepper and either 500g of rancid goats butter or 250g of fresh butter plus 500g of grated strong mountain cheese like Comte.

everyone eat from the same pot and drink the remaining cooking liquid because it will make you strong.

* I explain my role in this here, if you click the WOMAD tag underneath here, all my previous posts to do with this event come up

I'm a fishperson

and I just thought that I really liked Kate Bush.

ONE DAY SHE CAME FOR SUPPER AND THIS PHOTOGRAPH WAS TAKEN !!

it was back in the '80s - in the days when I used to cook at popstar recording studios - those days when popstars traipsed in and out of my kitchen day in day out: that bloke off Police, a Beatle, Joni Mitchell, all of them - I'd just put supper on the table then sit down and eat with everyone like we all went to school together.

Until Katebush Day

A fan finds it hard to believe the object of fandom actually exists - or that's how it affected me - it was like having a unicorn in the house.

I was also dazzled by that whiterthanwhite top which stayed unblemished the entire day - and I know biscuits were involved in the recording studio. Look at me, I'm wearing a brown jumper because I know that if I wear anything smooth or light-coloured something stain-ey will jump on it within 5 seconds.

As you can see it was in the good old days of cigarettes - that's Kate's brother Paddy in the front - I'm trying really hard not to set his hair alight.

Body Cakes

Yesterday I made  Body Cakes (Kroppkakor) with a Swedish musician called Linnea Olsen.

here is the recipe

cook and mash floury potatoes then grate in an almost  equal weight raw potatoes of a firmer character, add eggs and season then leave to sit while you sauté minced shallots in butter.  Add chanterelles to the soft but not coloured shallots in the pan then a glass of white wine, when the wet has simmered away add salt, pepper, finely chopped parsley and ground allspice.

get flour on your hands and make a tennis ball out of the potato dough, poke a hole in the middle and put in a spoonful of the chanterelle mixture, pinch the potato back over it.

Have a pot of simmering water handy and lower the body cakes into the water when they bounce to the surface they are cooked.

Serve the cake on a lake of thin cream with a 'click' of butter on top and a spoonful of sugared raw lingonberries

Recipes have flooded in

for my annual WOMAD event - the one where musicians come and cook for an audience. 

The musicians send me their recipes and I take Bristol apart in my quest for food things like rotting fish sauce, raw lingonberries and meat of the buffalo. I also search out hardware such as 'one large cauldron', 'a spit and fire' and 'baking stones'. 

Today I am filling my car with meat, this is one of the recipes for today with notes from the band:

Lecsó for 25 persons

12 slices of Hungarian lard

6kg Hungarian yellow paprika

12 Hungarian strong paprika

8-10 Onion

10 garlic

30-40 pieces of tomato

1kg Hungarian sausage

For the vegetarian part we just take out the lard and sausage and need sunflower oil. We will bring the cauldron and the bread too, as we won’t have time to cook any! Are we allowed to bring also Hungarian plum brandy! It’s not really the same without it, it’s really part of the tradition!

First Catch Your Bison

A water bison is what yer wash yer face in  Roger McGough

This year's Taste The World was the usual voyage of discovery; new friends, new music, new food. 

When a Canadian band requested bison meat I was a bit stumped, there doesn't seem to be enough room to raise bison in the UK but we discovered a bison-owning lady near Sedgefield who will post bison meat to you should you ever need some.  Bison meat is very lean, the Canadian boys' secret for BB perfection was to add beer to the bison burger mix - it was excellent.

Occasionally an artist has the sort of agent that will say 'oh yes my musician loves cooking he'd love to cook on stage,' I am sent a popular regional recipe and the musician has no idea what he has been signed up to. The Poulet Directeur General recipe was one of those; a very handsome Blick Bassey arrived at the kitchen stage on Sunday morning, told the audience that, as he has 7 sisters at home and no men are allowed anywhere near the kitchen, he had no idea how to make this dish. Therefore I must cook and Blick must play his guitar.

That turned out surprisingly well and there were lots of great moments during the event. The highlight of the weekend was a band called Nuba Nour, they belong to a tribe of Nubian people who lost their land to the Aswan Dam project and are effectively permanently homeless. There's a better video of them here  They cooked a fantastic lamb and okra recipe full of secret ingredients but gum mastic was essential to getting the texture right, during the cooking there was a lot of dancing going on, I managed to get this little clip.

Cheesy Bison Cakes

Minced Bison
20 kilos of Gruyére
2 kilos of salted cod
Pink biscuits from Reims
3 kilos smoked sausage
1 kilo 'good quality flower'
'30 graines de djansan'

Some of the items still on my shopping list. I'm having problems with that last one which is for a Cameroonian dish called Poulet Directeur Général - please let me know if you know what this spice might be.

This, of course, is all in aid of the annual gourmetfest or 'Taste the World', part of the WOMAD festival and I shall be reporting back on it next week.

Meanwhile I have fallen in love with these boys, they live in Switzerland where they have a chili farm and will be making a chili fondue with me on Friday.

Pat-a-cake, Pat-a-cake Baker's Man

I am off do another batch of cooking work soon. In order to hone my skills I recently visited a Master Baker for some expert tuition in the art of cake decoration. I have carefully noted the key requirements of tasteful decoration and will be applying them to my next job.

Tea - Mongolian Style

Find a large brick of tea and crumble part of it into a pot of boiling water, add toasted millet.

Keep the tea at a steady simmer and place slices of cold mutton fat, some cheese that is like unsalted Feta and a cheese that is like a very hard Parmesan in the drinking vessels.

Play some songs.

After half an hour of boiling add salted rancid butter and mares milk - a bit at a time until it tastes right then pour into the tea bowls.


This is the scene when the cooking is nearly finished, a drinking tune is being played and strong alcohol is being passed around the audience they must flick three drops from the cup into the sky before drinking the rest in one go.

Tstsegmaa tests the mutton dumplings and Chinggel is putting the finishing touches to the tea.

Camping Queen

I'm hoping that I’ll have time to borrow a human this weekend.


Getting home from the Azores three weeks later than planned meant that I’ve had to cram the start of a new building project and catching up with five-weeks worth of office stuff into three and a half days before heading off to work at WOMAD for the weekend.


I love everything about WOMAD festivals except the camping, tents make my face go funny and I can never sleep in the things, however, if I want to do this job I have no choice and I love this job. Miss Whiplash lent me her little red tent for easy popability and I arrived early to pop it up in what seemed to be an advantageous place - near some rather posh-looking tents. I then went off to go and do some preparation for the weekend and came back a few hours later to see that the posh-looking tents have been assigned – I checked the tags on the tents to either side of mine.




I checked them out on Youtube, I don't think it'll be so bad - here’s one of them



BBC Radio 3 will be broadcasting some of the music from WOMAD.

Oven Shopping

The Brick-o-matic is all very well but a kitchen needs an oven and I'm keeping an eye out for something suitable. Yesterday I saw this one. I like the towel rail detail and the little warming box at the foot of the burning part (presumably it's for reviving/steaming cold mice). However that oven won't fit anything much bigger than a single cat*, I need at least a double-catter, maybe even a triple so I'll keep looking ...


*I'm not planning to actually cook any cats, but I have noticed that cats are an excellent unit of measurement

Baking A Labonne

When we moved into this house I threw out the mimsy fireplace that was blocking our magnificent chimney hole. Since my recent kitchen destruction I've been experimenting with different configurations for cooking in this space.

Please note the Labonne Patented Brick-o-matic Adjustable Height Grilling System, once I've finished my trials I'll be putting it on the market and hoping that you will all support me and purchase several - the ideal wedding gift!

Slugs and Snails

This week I have been cooking in the depths of rural England, back to the house where little girls danced with whales, here are some of the week’s high- and low-points

1. The place is now full of little boys - the meals were appropriately themed; last night’s supper was worms in a compost heap followed by mud pie with extra dirt.

2. This is a no-electronic-games-allowed household, most of the boys were outside, happily running around thwacking things, but I discovered a sad-faced child called Oscar in the pantry, he was fingering something he called a DS. He agreed to wash his hands and help me make pizzas.

3. Oscar wants to be an actor and shows great promise, after flinging something to the floor during supper, his mother insisted that there would be no mud pie until he picked it up, he left the room roaring
I am now going to kill myself

4. I stayed on the premises this time, I dislike 'living-in’, but it’s a long commute and The Director is away stalking vampires.

My bags were taken to a converted barn adjacent to the main house; a vast split level space with fat oak floorboards and stone gable ends - it is wonderfully empty, a bed one end, a sink the other and a huge old tub somewhere in the middle. It is the old hay loft and harness rooms and is over a mill race - in daylight the sound of the stream rushing under the building is charming. At night I realised that the big empty space of my apartment is a supersonic amplifier, it was like being trapped in a giant’s bathroom with a broken flush - I have not slept a wink for four nights.

5. There is no internet or phone signal at the house so I found a big empty pub with wifi. I went there this morning at 9 am and sat down at the only table with an electric socket, then some people came in; two couples and a teenage boy, none of them appeared to have a neck and they were clearly all very closely related. They walked past the empty tables and came to sit with me - they weren’t being at all friendly, finally one of the men said
We always sit here

6. While I was preparing supper tonight Oscar lurked nearby, finally he asked me
What do you really do for a living?



Photo by Mark Peterson

The Last Straw

Bracing myself for an afternoon at the Crazy White House I decided to go and see some Art; first to an exhibition of William Eggleston's photos, which inspired me to go mad iphotographing with my iphone. Spotting an Indian sweet shop I went in for some Egglestonesque pics, the owners were charming and talked to me about sweet-making. When I moved in for some close up shots I noticed that there was a jet black human hair embedded in one of the knobbley orange balls I'd been planning to buy.

I erased the hair image from my head with a visit to the Wellcome Collection which has some brilliantly weird stuff - and a great café.


Arrived at CWH feeling mellow and happy. Then the children came home and it was all shattered. Having recently been in a household with normal, happy, only slightly fighty, children, the awfulness of the CWH children is like having the world turned up to horror-movie screaming pitch. I’ve been wearing earplugs but still I hear them ordering the staff around and see them helping themselves to fistfuls of crap from the easily accessible sweetie drawer*.

When they do get brought to table for supper they are plugged into one of their many electronic games and the nannies bring other toys to distract them from the fact that they are eating. Two adults spoonfeed the children, I ask the five-year old why he won’t feed himself
I don’t want to look at the food

This is the nightly ritual, the adults plead and wheedle but the children rarely eat much. They get down from the table and are given more chocolate, the boy starts taunting the dog, his mother says

Don’t do that he doesn’t like it

No stop it look he’s trying to get away from you


This goes on for quite a long time, eventually the dog yelps and the child starts crying - I am so angry that I snap and tell him

And if I see you do that again I will bite off all your fingers

CWH Lady looks a bit shocked and I realise that I am questioning my previously held belief that Murder is Wrong so I say that I am sick and I really won’t be able to come in any more


*why do parents do this? It might be 'Natural’ and 'Organic’ but it’s still fat and sugar.

Dances With Whales

Last week's cooking job came with in-house entertainment, it was half term, no electronic games in the house and the television was curiously only able to receive a signal for a couple of hours each day, so the children had to work out what to do for themselves, after a bit of bored flopping around someone has an idea

Let’s put on a show!

they disappear excitedly to start rehearsals, only to return after an hour, the project has been abandoned due to artistic differences.

The two girls then decide that they will do 'Dancing On Ice’

One child strips down to her underwear and the other ran off to get her swimsuit and goggles on, they explain;
in Dancing on Ice you have to have bare arms and bare legs

They wafted around the kitchen, describing their sequinned outfits, one child dancing with a stuffed whale while the other, embracing a column of air, told me about her handsome partner

He has long brown hair and a blue hair band

then she stopped dancing and asked her friend

Do we have to be in love with our partner?

The girl with the whale continued dancing and replied dreamily

I’m in love with mine

The Week In Review

Last Thursday
Email from Chanel Lady telling me that I was not chosen to cook for them this summer – Hoorah!

Email from Desperate Lady needing an emergency cook next week - Hoorah!

Friday
Decree Absolute at The Crazy White House
CWH Lady and I had a brief and unsuitable relationship, like one of those Britney Goes To Las Vegas ones. Once I’d announced that 'we could no longer go on with this madness', the last weeks of our affair became a peculiar tentative marriage of convenience, I needed her money and she couldn’t imagine surviving without a cook. I tried to be honest and constructive about why we were not meant to be but ended up saying a lot of ‘It’s not you it’s me’ kind of things like:
The British are so innately slovenly, I could never achieve your high South African standards*

there were so many things that I couldn’t even begin to say to her.

Smell is so important, yet I repeatedly fail to acknowledge this: Household odours are very distinctive; a mix of foodstuffs, heating source and cleaning products combined with children, laundry (often dirty) and pets; this household’s particular mixture set me on edge the minute I walked over the threshold.


Saturday
My husband comes to London and submits to weekend of eating, visiting curio shops and art galleries, concedes that cinemas seem more comfortable here and that it’s fun to look at art and other people and sundry weird stuff, says he will think about making second visit later in year.


Monday
Baby Sister and I meet up, I am initially drunk merely with freedom from CWH Lady, but then we go to Italian restaurant and try the Prosecco...

In the evening I make another attempt to appreciate Chekov, Three Sisters at the Lyric, Hammersmith. Am I the only person who finds this man an utter bore? The reviews called the production Lively, Modern and Bold, I saw irritating people moaning around a table and left at the interval.

Tuesday
Visit my cousin, we go for beans on toast at nearby café, he is blind and I suddenly become acutely aware of roadworks, wonky pavements full of deep puddles, stupidly placed bollards and dog shit.

Wednesday
Turn up equipped with supper for Desperate Lady (new client), she just wants nice food on the table. Her house has an Aga and a woodstove and smells of rice pudding, it makes me ache with pleasure.

I made an Easy Chocolate Mousse
Bring 300ml double cream to boil, take away from heat and add 200 grms of broken-up dark chocolate (70% cocoa), beat together until all chocolate melted.

Transfer mix to a bowl set over another bowl of iced water and add a further 300ml of double cream, whip up into soft peaks

at this point, personally I would stop and eat this now, but if you want to make a mousse out of it beat up 2 large egg whites in a separate bowl until you have stiff peaks, pour in 100 gm sugar gradually, beating all the while until you have soft meringue, fold this into the chocolate mix and eat as soon as you need to.

* that is quite true, I routinely have to clear a festering beast or toxic substance, such as lead shot, off the work surface before I can roll out my pastry, it is very easy to leave an upper class British kitchen in better condition than I found it.