29/08/07

I came back today a little knackered having ridden around all day on M____’s bike - I dropped off my car this morning with my Dad to give it the once over before having it MOTed. It was on then to a day servicing one of the old wagons with Colin. I had been enjoying this kind of work as a break from the old routine up until not long ago, but it is really beginning to drag now having become a routine itself and with my increasing realisation I am doing a job which wastes my intellect and in many ways doesn’t play on my strengths at all. And which, of course, pays abysmally. At almost thirty I’m still unfamiliar with the world, and even my own country, and should really be having far more experiences. A little extra cash would also go a long way. I am starting to feel the need to move on again.

Immediately I cut up an apple into a bowl, spooned on some soya yoghurt and crashed on the sofa. Of course, I turned on the TV! I ate up quickly, enjoying every spoonful, and then of course convinced myself that I could watch just the start of Ready Steady Cook just to get a few more ideas.

Unusually, there was a guest with a few allergies, to wheat and cow’s milk, as well as having a strong disliking for tomato sauce, and so I watched a little longer. She, the woman from the Clothes Show, had brought along a bag containing prawns, spring onions, coconut cream and a mango. I sat glued to the TV for those twenty minutes and managed to take little in. The show is entertaining, but often time passes in a whirl of interviews and very rushed explanations of what is being made and how and so at times only an already proficient chef could really take it all in.

Anyway, the first section finished I got up, a little disgusted with myself for having wasted so much time (perhaps more so than usual having read the introduction of Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything at work in which he states that the average human life consists of something like 650,000 hours, something which when written like that seems so short*) and went into the kitchen. When I had first got back I had realised that I hadn’t taken out any meat from the freezer and so I had taken out a pork chop. Of course it wasn’t defrosted, and wouldn’t be defrosted for a long time yet. And I don’t like nuking food from frozen. So, with my new exclusion diet it was a case of opening and slamming doors all over the kitchen in search of inspiration. I found some gluten-free, dairy-free pesto I’d got on the reduced trolley at Asdas the other day and so took that out, finely chopped some peppers (the remainder of a green I had had for lunch, half an orange and half a red), albeit on a chopping board I had bashed some chicken into at lunch time and left out rather than the one I had set out, and started lightly frying them in a saucepan with some finely chopped broccoli. I had some spinach on standby to throw in and give it all a little substance, though I was wondering how it would affect the taste. I then realised that pesto contains pine nuts (actually cashews in the recipe list!), and that my exclusion diet forbids them. I was rationalising this to myself semi-consciously (more or less as subconsciously as a hunter with a duck on his head is submerged, if that makes it any clearer), telling myself that I could right it down and explain it as that I had already started cooking before realising that the jar contained nuts, put I pulled myself back with a reflection of a passage of a book I had been reading the night before.

Last Xmas M______ bought me a Polish book that could be translated as We Children of Zoo Station. It is a non-fiction account of the lives of a number of young people but particularly a young girl who in her early teens wound up selling herself at Zoo Station on the Berlin underground to fund her addiction to Heroin. I have been reading it on and off, as my priorities waxed and waned as they always do, ever since. Yesterday I was reading it aloud, as I often do when reading Polish, trying to improve my pronunciation, when M_____ rang from upstairs having gone to bed. She told me the telly was on too loud and she couldn’t sleep. It was me, declaiming the drugs experiences of a young girl, in Polish. This particular passage concerned Christiana when just before her fifteenth birthday she wound up in a Scientology detox unit and when, having gone cold turkey for a few days and starting to see off the worst of the effects (which she knew well having gone cold turkey twice before, both times seeing it out apparently until the end of the physical dependence), she found herself a punter in an unfamiliar part of town, and scored some heroin. Having put some heroin on her dying cat’s food, and the needle hovering over her arm, she realised what she was doing. This was one of the points I lost the plot, my Polish not quite up to the question of whether she had actually managed to stop herself in time or merely thought about the significance of the act, unable to summon the will power when she had the ability to defeat any bad feelings; and this is a book where the reader is so powerfully empathising with the protagonist, angry with her, crying out to influence her though they know they can’t. She did go on to inject, and once again on entering the unit. I had cried at her thoughout the book, and yet I continue to eat foods I know to be bad for me, from flapjacks to chocolate, to coffee, and even to smoke. And now, on the exclusion diet I could defeat all excuses for me to do so, by demolishing, more or less, the doubt that surrounds the types of food which are bad for me. For a while I was unrepentant, determined to use the Pesto sauce, to have something differant from the roast veg I have been having, but then I pulled myself back. I added some paprika and basil leaves to the sauce, throwing some vegetable pasta into the veg stock left from where I steamed some broccoli, beans and carrots at lunchtime, seasoned, and then thickened it up with rice flour. The reason I used riceflour, incidentally, was because on Ready Steady Cook they had been talking about arrowroot, which is something I have picked up on the programme in the last week or so. One chef had used it because of the woman with an allergy towards wheat, and this they emphasised a couple of times, you can use arrowroot if you have an allergy to wheat and cannot use cornflour. That sent me out to my cupboards and got me thinking, since I had always used cornflour assuming it be flour from corn, but then there is buckwheat which has nothing in common with wheat, and cornflour could conceivably be from wheat could it not. I checked the box: “ingredients: cornflour. Allergy information: contains sulfites[].” I was rather puzzled by this. Now I’m sure it must be ok. Aside from my exclusion diet of course. Indeed, I just saw the sheet for the reintroduction phase of the diet and can see “Corn: test cornflour or corn on the cob.” but it is so easy to get so confused over things like this, becoming suspect of all kinds of foods.

In any case, the news flash. I served up the dish with a little canned tuna - organic, dolphin-friendly. It tasted great and I really enjoyed it. I can now barely move. It was a massive rush of high GI food for the system perhaps, but it did restore my faith on being able to make something edible, even enjoyable, from the least promising ingredients on the most restrictive diet. It also restored my faith in my own cooking, which has been seriously knocked of late. Most importantly perhaps, there were none of these g/f d/f concoctions of imitation foods. No dairy-free soya-based parmasan.

*This was a fact which once led me, in Venice, into an almost classically Aspergic argument with an ex of mine. Something I really should write about elsewhere.

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