Epic. In the last 1.5 days we have seen the following shows:
Shappi Khorsandi (charming and enjoyable rather than belly laughs)
Quasimodo (intense, 15 minutes too long, and quite funny in retrospect even though it wasn't meant to be)
Daniel Kitson (oh. my. god. life changing. kill for a ticket. laughed 157 times and wept 8 times, the last time in a slightly uncontrolled manner. I never weep in anything, not Bambi, not the Neighbours wedding, nothing.)
Susan Calman in conversation with others from the festival (funny, charming, relaxing after Kitson)
Dig for Victory (hmmm. There's always one. Some nice ideas, executed as if for their mates after the pub, D- for effort)
Bo Burnham (dumbfoundingly brilliant, slightly uncomfortable, don't want to mention how young he is but it's part of the package. When he went off on the Hamlet soliloquy I actually didn't want him to stop.)
Idiots of Ants (that's more like it! Clever, fun, and they had put a lot of effort into it)
At this point we rolled over and collapsed and bailed on the midnight-2am Best of the Fest. Among all this, who would have thought that we would have time to fit in some ****ing amazing cocktails at Bramble (at 5pm..whooop...we are so not in our mid-to-late 30s, man) and an unbelievably good meal at Wedgewood.
Firstly, Bramble. After a few minutes in this underground drinkers heaven, it is very easy to forget that it's actually daylight outside. If you live in Edinburgh this is probably not usually a problem, as it very rarely does have daylight outside. My Ginger T, pictured here in a teacup-stemmed glass hybrid, was meticulously assembled by this lovely gentleman, let's call him Scotty because we can't actually remember his name, from the following ingredients:
Hendrick's Gin
Battersea Quinine Cordial
Freshly squeezed lemon juice
Ginger syrup (home made!)
Hibiscus jam
egg white
Scotty was very interesting on the subject of bitters. At Bramble they have 60 different types of bitters, most of which they make themselves by stewing fruits or other flavours with ridiculously strong (illegal?) alcohol. he gave us some peach, celery and other bitters before we started to see double and retreated to the snug area at the back for a quick power kip.
After the next show, on to Wedgewood. My lovely Edinburgh-based doctor friends, and foodies extraordinaire, Jim and Sarah, had given it a formidable trailer. Run by a couple - her front of house and him in the kitchen - it probably seats 30-40 people, every one of whom looks very happy to be there. Ms Front of House is terrifyingly good at her job, at the tender age of about what appeared to be 18. Legend tells of a night where the Royal Mile had a power cut and she arranged free flowing drinks and taxis to take all of her punters to an alternative restaurant not affected by the outage.
Wedgewood is pretty keen on good ingredients. They forage for salads, mushrooms, etc, and we had a lovely salad of things that hadn't grown in Poly Tunnels. Aaaaaah the food. A menu to die for, the four of us had to coordinate choices so that we could all eat off each others plate (imagine a tasting menu but achieved through lack of table manners). Here is a low quality photo gallery of our meal, including:
Sole with broccoli puree, goats cheese and chorizo. the goats cheese sounds like a suboptimal addition to sole but worked very well - very chalky in texture and there was only the tiniest bit of it.
Veal with fondant potatoes.
Rhubarb trifle, including perhaps the richest ever home made custard.
I could really live in Edinburgh, apparently, my friends say, it is this sunny all year round....
It seemed like such a good idea at the time. We all had to meet in West London and that's where I live. So, I suggested that we meet at my place where we have a big kitchen table around which to have our creative discussions. And we'll meet at lunchtime so I will rustle up something to eat. Brilliant. Simple. PANIC!
Firstly, I am not known for my tidiness. I am blind to kibble (as defined by Philip Dick in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep). Since MB has been up a European mountain my Floordrobe has been growing faster than dividing bacteria in a warm, damp, protein flooded petri dish. I hadn't actually realised how much he has been clearing up after me. So, firstly a most unusual bout of cleaning and tidying to bring my abode to the standards of Normal People Who Actually Keep A Tidy House.
Secondly, what to cook for lunch? Something that doesn't interfere with a meeting but doesn't involve sinking to frozen, pre prepared or ordering in? Something that screams 'highly professional and intelligent person who didn't even need to think about how to address the nutritional needs of those at the meeting? So I went super easy:
ingredients:
sweet potatoes
mushrooms
marsala
spring onions
blue cheese
salad
1. put a little olive oil and marsala in a pan, add chopped mushrooms and chopped spring onions. cook. add blue cheese.
2. serve over roast sweet potatoes with salad.
Top tip for cooking mushrooms: they need water, not oil. A little olive oil helps the flavour but mushrooms will suck up as much oil as you give them, but if you just flick a little water or wine on frying mushrooms then they will break through to a nice cooking thing. I am having some difficulty explaining this concept but try it and you will see.
Call me pedantic but I really do care about the best method of cutting a lime. There is a right way and there is definitely a wrong way. South East Asians know how to cut limes. Next time you are at a Thai restaurant, check it out.
It is all about the geometry of the lime (limometry?). The little parcels of juice run like muscle fibres through the fruit. The casings for these parcels are pretty tough and trying to pop them by hand is a high-effort way to extract the juice. Think about it, you wouldn't crack an egg by squeezing it in one hand? So, if you cut across these fibres then the juice just flows out. In pictures:
the wrong way to cut a lime - segments
the right way to cut a lime - across the lime avoiding the core, so you decapitate the little fibres insid
e.
This morning, an early morning drive to Heathrow where MB (my beloved) is off to do some kind of crazy mountain climbing thing in Switzerland. So on the way back I decided to kick off my Pink Ticket week by stopping at the High Road Brasserie for an indulgent lone breakfast with the newspaper.
Can we quickly divert into a rant about the floor at this Brasserie. It is deeply deeply groovy, the kind of cool that you resent, because others who are less cool will notice and copy it, and soon it will be prolific, and it will become overblown like leather banquettes, and it will be listed in the 'Going Down' section of the colour supplement, when all it really was was a thing of beauty. By the way I am pleased with my prolific use of Oxford Commas in that sentence.
Anyway I ordered a smoked salmon bagel and when it arrived it was a composition of sheer delight. Smoked salmon, creme fraiche, lemon, capers, the nice bits from the middle of a red onion and a toasted bagel. Apologies for only remembering halfway through that I was writing a food blog, but here is a photo of the plate
for your enjoyment. Yum.
I have just watched the entire first series of Rev., the amazing BBC series, in one sitting. It was completely entrancing, charming, incredibly funny, thought provoking, moving and to my atheist mind the most compelling argument for a religious life that I have ever seen.
Tom Hollander is Adam, the adorable, intelligent, devoted, flawed and often daft vicar of a run down East End church. He navigates the community side of religious life in a very Unholier than thou way, showing more than once that profanity is so much more impactful when spoken by someone wearing a dog collar.
His realistic relationship with the amazing vicar's wife and solicitor Alex (actress Olivia Colman) leaves us realising that forgiveness is surely the most important part of a relationship. In the final episode, Adam minesweeps his way through a Vicars and Tarts party and starts to flirt with.. and then dance at ..the attractive local headmistress. Hundreds of people around the country must have watched her deal with her drunk vicar husband and thought 'yes, that IS the way to deal with my other half acting like a total prat'.
I would like to see Dawkins/Hitchens review the series... and PLEASE BBC can we have a series 2.
Dr Evil has been sent to distract you from your new healthy eating regime. He is here to wave a little package of evil supersugarstimulus in front of you. Resistance is useless, as Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz would say.
I made this HobOreoNobFudgeApricot cheesecake to feed 7 friends on Wednesday night. There was a slab left over which everyone refused to take home. I am hoping that is because of Temptation, not Disgust.
the topping:
500g cream cheese
500ml double cream
a dollop of marscapone
2 tablespoons sugar
a half measure of gelatine, made up in warm water
grated lemon zest from 2 lemons
some chopped up bits of fudge
the base:
a pack of oreo cookies
half a pack of hob nobs
50g butter
on top
Apricots, sliced in half and grilled with a dab of sugar/butter mixture on top so they caramelise (or not, in my case).
to prepare:
1. whip the cream. mix with the cream cheese, marscapone, sugar, lemon zest. It should be a bit sloppy. Prepare the gelatine according to the instructions on the packet and mix. Chp up the fudge pieces and scatter and stir in.
2. prepare a springform tin by putting cling film over the base, with enough left at the sides so you can slide the cheesecake off when needed.
3. put the oreos and hobnobs (to non UK residents these are oat based biscuits available at any retailer. ginger biscuits also good for this) in a bag and hammer with a bottle or rolling pin until broken into small pieces. Or, put in a blender.
4. Melt the butter and pour over the biscuit crumbs, mix and then press into the base of the tin over the cling film
5. pour in the cheese mixture and chill. Add Apricots before serving.
6. eat, one small slice at a time. If you eat too much of this I promise that you will feel really ill.
Cheesecake is the ultimate modular recipe, the fruit on top could be anything - rhubarb, gooseberry, peaches, blackberries, anything. My preference is to have something tart rather than supersweet to contrast with the richness of the cream and the base. You can also put anything in the cheesecake mixture itself. If cooking for children why not be ridiculous and put in Heroes or a layer of jelly.
At my friend Blairsie's party this week (she just did the Tour de Force and raised over £5k well done!!!) I saw my old friend Gus and met his brilliant new girlfriend Julia. Julia and I prepared a cocktail of vodka, lemon juice, ginger beer and chopped up pieces of rocket (arugula) which tasted really quite good. Here is the worst ever photo of the drink, and a surprised looking Gus.
Sorry to lower the tone a bit, but seriously, look at this photo and tell me they don't....
Ask a French person what an egg means to them, they will say breakfast. Ask an American, they will say cholesterol. Ask an Englishman and he will say constipation, that's how the myth goes.
A brief post on the difference between the perfect scrambled egg and the perfect fried egg. Eggs have chemistry. Egg whites are mainly protein (mostly albumin) and of course water. The albumin protein can be teased into different structures by any cook, for example a towering mass of foam or a slightly bouncy solid. Egg yolks provide us with a chemical gadget for making emulsions. Lecithin will hold the chemical hands of water- and fat-based substances to perform a culinary marriage. Think custards, zabaglione, hollandaise and the rest.
So - on making scrambled eggs this weekend I was remembering a top tip given to me 20 years ago by someone who was a breakfast chef at Claridge's. He said:
- for perfect scrambled eggs, add NO MILK. add the eggs to the pan and cook the eggs as slowly as you possibly can.
- for a perfect omelette, whist two eggs in a bowl with a spoon of water, again NO MILK. Heat a pan to as high a heat as it can stand, add some oil and butter when it is hot, swirl round the pan and immediately thrown in the eggs, muddling at first and leaving to settle. The whole process of cooking should take under a minute.
This incredibly simple trick does, I admit, provide the best possible eggs. The scrambloids (family name) taste like they have a mound of butter in them when they don't, which is also a nice trick. Enjoy!
Firstly, Bramble. After a few minutes in this underground drinkers heaven, it is very easy to forget that it's actually daylight outside. If you live in Edinburgh this is probably not usually a problem, as it very rarely does have daylight outside. My Ginger T, pictured here in a teacup-stemmed glass hybrid, was meticulously assembled by this lovely gentleman, let's call him Scotty because we can't actually remember his name, from the following ingredients:
Scotty was very interesting on the subject of bitters. At Bramble they have 60 different types of bitters, most of which they make themselves by stewing fruits or other flavours with ridiculously strong (illegal?) alcohol. he gave us some peach, celery and other bitters before we started to see double and retreated to the snug area at the back for a quick power kip. 
