Bankrupcy banquet

I got up in the morning thinking I had a free day with M_____ working all day. I put on my buckwheat porride as usual. It doesn’t bother me at all now. I’ve got my technique down to make it how I like it, leaving the buckwheat to simmer in the rice milk for at least fifteen minutes, and then turning off the heat for a good five or ten (while I have a shower, say). Meanwhile, I got on to read the Czech version of what I have now found is indeed translated into English (as how could it not be), “H.”: Autobiography of a Child Prostitute and Heroin Addict by Christiane F. I read a little to myself, and then a little more out loud, practising my pronunciation and frustrating myself in the process – Czech is a very difficult language to read out aloud since I find that I constantly anticipate the endings of words incorrectly and end up stuttering more than usual; in combination with the inherent difficulty of the pronunciaion for English speakers it sounds very bad indeed. Czech shot up my priority lists from this, as I’m sure it will as quickly fall down.

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The Potato Blight

Actually I am being very facetious with my title. As my last post made clear, it cannot be certain what is causing my current malaise. What is clear is that I can’t concentrate, and that I am having a lot of reveries sat in front of a piece of paper trying to write a continuation of Nat’s story. My legs are restless too and I’m very antsy. 

As far as reveries go, I have been having discussions with students about being sexist, telling them (within earshot of certain people, as usual), that they will miss out on a hell of a lot in life if they exclude women, that yes (launching into one of my semi-manic comic monologues) women can take an utterly ordinary, insignificant event and turn it into a three or four hour conversation topic and do our heads in, but that on the flip side they can have far wider-ranging conversation; I have been cooking, filling in for the kitchen staff at work; I have been describing in one of the morning meetings a student’s problems with a subscription to an erotic website, jokily describing the website in such a way as makes clear my own familiarity with porn sites, but also arguing strongly that there should be no moral qualms about encouraging such a student to buy erotic magazines… And much more. 

Nothing remotely out of the ordinary, except that I could not simply shake my head and be rid of them. They were persistent and intrusive, which they have not been for a long while. 

There was not, as I wrote earlier, much potato in the curry I made. It was just hot. As far as testing goes it was really not ideal. Far too ambiguous. Perhaps I will have to stretch this one out beyond the few days I’ll be eating this curry. 

It is good though, after putting so much into the diet to see such a positive result, which presumeably will continue into tomorrow. I will have to watch too that it does, since it could be that today’s gym session was the problem. I shall have to watch out for the impact of demanding cardiovascular exercise on my symptoms. There may be some effect, and possibly a negative effect arising from the demand on the system made by toxins and the like. Mainly, though, I think there must be a problem with either starch or hot foods. (I did not in the end serve much rice at all with the curry either at lunch or dinner.) Nor did I eat more fruit than I have been on the diet. Indeed, less than most days with an apple after my millet porridge in the morning, and another after my dinner. 

Yes, these positive results will be a positive thing for me, I’m sure, after all the impatience with the constant demands of my time of my cooking and food shopping, even if I have to stick it all out a little longer. 

*** 

I should describe the reintroduction stage Here is the schedule: 

Tap Water       -  1-2 pints a day.Potatoes          -  Have 2 x 4oz portionsMilk                   -  1 pint a dayYeast                -  3 brewers yeast tablets or 2 teaspoons of fresh bakers yeast in water or fresh yeast spread on rice cakes. 

[Reverie of looking tired in a morning meeting and being told that I should go to bed earlier. Me responding that I did go to bed early, but that doesn’t much help when you don’t fall asleep until seven hours later. Describing my exclusion diet and how I had reintroduced yeast the night before, smashed up a cupboard, gone out for a walk and come upon some guys kicking a hedgehog around, and that I kicked hell out of them; then describing my condition and a similar situation to the girls in the kitchen; then, again, in a morning meeting.] 

Tea                    -  Drink at least 6 cups.Rye                    -  Test 5 Ryvita or 2 slices of Rye bread (check the bread is not a mixture of wheat and rye). Only test rye as bread if the yeast was negative.Beef                  -   2 x 3oz portions. 

[Popped to the toilet and to make some fruit tea. Reverie first of doing my usual rant against homeopathy, talking about water having not only to have a memory, but also be a discerning memory, to be essentially sentient [reverie about flow forms, something the people at work go mad about, and dismissing them, saying I can appreciate the beauty of water but rarely feel the need to verbalise it, etc etc., a whole other rant here] saying how is water supposed to diagnose the person it commes into contact with, and remember the specific molecules it was adjacent to at one point in its history, and discard all others, such as, for example, fish piss and, say, even homeopathic remedies for other individuals which have subsequently been passed out as urine and diluted several times in the water treatment works, something which should, if homeopathy’s logic is to be pursued, make it stronger… talking to the mother of one student I believe could be helped by a G/F C/F diet having shared my lunch with him for a couple of months (this because another student expressed an interest in my lunch today), describing to her the improvement in his condition. Oh, and the first, telling the managers at work that one of their light switches was arcing, being put down by one of them “yes, thank you, when we need you’re electrical advice we’ll ask for it” before challenging them…] 

Butter         -  Test at least 2oz during the day.Onions      -  Have 2 x 1oz portions.Eggs          -  Have 2 during the day.Oats           -  Test as porridge oats, have two servings.Coffee       -   Test coffee beans and instant coffee - have at least 6 cups.Chocolate -  Plain or cocoa.Barley        -  Can be tested as pearl barley, 2 x 2oz portions (cooked weight) or barley flakes.Citrus Fruit  - Have at least 2 fruits or 2 glasses of fruit juice.White Wine - Have two glasses.Corn             - Test cornflour or corn on the cob.Yoghurt        - Ordinary yoghurt made with cow’s milk, test 2 small cartons.Wheat          -  Test as 5 slices of bread if yeast is okay, or wheat breakfast cereals or pasta.Saccharin   -  Test as saccharin tablets.Shellfish     -  Have 2 x 2oz portions.Nuts            -   Any kind, have 2 x 1oz portions.Preservatives  - Try fruit squashes, tinned foods, sausages, smoked fish etc. 

I have a couple of reservations, including that white wine is a strange choice being as it contains both yeast and alcohol, and would like to reintroduce a few extra things, including, as of today, also spicy foods on their own, mushrooms, sugar and vodka. On the whole though, I am glad I can see the end of this thing in sight, and that I soon might come to a time when just excluding gluten and dairy, say, may seem like a doddle, and it will be much easier mentally because of the consistency that should come from having conducted an exclusion diet and narrowed things down. We’ll see.

On Playing Catch-up*

I went upstairs for a flourescent piss a little while back - the vitamin B6 is starting to come through having taken my usual Solgar supplement this morning, and shows up as a very bright yellow - and caught a glimpse of a scar above my left eyebrow in the mirror beside me. I got this a couple of days back when I managed to splash some oil into my face while tossing a few cubes of butternut squash into the baking tray in the oven. A goodly portion got into my eye, or at the very least just around it as well, all at around 220 or more degrees - the oven was set to max.

I don’t know why, but this set me to thinking about a programme I caught the other day, and which, unusually for me, I have now seen at least a couple of times. The Restaurant is one of countless programme about chefs and restaurants at the moment, but is peculiarly good. Raymond Blanc has selected a number of people, mostly couples, who have long dreamed of setting up a restaurant together. He has given each a restaurant, but each week, sets a challenge and closes another one down. This is one of those reality programmes it is actually interesting to watch as it shows not only the stresses of opening and managing a restaurant, but also the tensions between these various couples, or indeed the strengths of their relationships - one pair of twins seem particularly close.

Last week he set a challenge to a number of couples who, I think, were selected for their poor performance in their previous contests. They were to run a historically themed evening with dishes made of local seasonal produce.

Each challenge has seemed so far to completely phase one or other of the chefs, or one or other of the front house staff. This time it was the turn of one of the chefs, who admitted he had no idea at all of what was seasonal, and even had the gall to defend himself in front of the star chamber of Blanc and his steely cold triumvirate of inspectors, by claiming that there wasn’t really any seasonal veg at that time of year.

Blanc, he said, had grown up with locally-grown seasonal vegetables and produce all around him. His father grew veg. He saw it all around him,. He had grown up with it. He grew up, too, in a culture of food.

In Britain, this is rarely the case. There was very little seasonal variation in the food I ate as a kid, and certainly no sense in growing up in a food culture. Mum learnt a few recipes on a cookery course one time, and has pretty much stuck to those ever since, broadening out to cook rice and ready made sauces in the last few years, with tortilla too from a packet from time to time.

My attempts at cooking are very much attempts to catch up, picking up what I can from books and TV programmes and occasionally attempting something which may be a little beyond me. Trying to get up to speed, I might occasionally make some basic mistake, like in splashing myself with oil the other day trying to rush everthing.

Judging by this spate of television programmes, there must be a whole lot of people out there who feel the same. Our food culture and connection to the produce and native food of our land is in a depressingly poor state and it is understandable if we make these desperate attempts to move forward.

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. More

Exclusion diet, day in the life

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.

Sprouts and veg

I’m very much playing catch up with my experiences over the past few weeks having been busy moving house and the like. One new development has been my attempts to grow sprouts. More

Correcting your mistakes/I love mustard

I’m not a big one for watching TV, but there are some shows I have a weakness for, and I must say that though I usually abhor any phenomenon that crops up, proves popular and becomes foil for coked-up commissioning editors to proliferate - like antiques shows, DIY shows and property shows - I am glad that cooking programmes have proven to have an enduring apeal. I watch Ready Steady Cook and can really wind down to it, something that is rare for me.

I was watching one such on Saturday while taking a break from Checkmate, a story I have had in mind for a good few years and which could form part of a collection, Labour in Vain which could predate Family Fortunes and introduce some of the characters, notably Hippie.

There was a chef on the programme, an ozzie fella I’ve seen before. I can’t remember too well what he was cooking, exept that I think it may have involved salsa verde, something I have seen in more than one such programme recently, and that he said something which struck me as very true.

“A lot of cooking is about learning to correct your mistakes.”

Me and M____ made a Goulash the other day from a recipe her mum sent her by text message. Quite aside from this it was also an example of too many cooks. It didn’t go well. We cooked it in our new pressure cooker and followed the recipe, but of course, it was nothing like her mother’s (she is an excellent cook). Indeed, it was pretty tasteless.

Still, we’d put decent beef in it and however appetising it was it seemed a shame to throw it away. So the other day I fried a few onions with finely chopped red pepper, mustard powder and paprika, with white wine vinegar and a little soy sauce, and added them to the goulash, heating it and reducing it a little to add the flavour. It worked!

I’ve still got plenty to learn, but there are days I can pull something off and still enjoy my food, and eat right too. And when it does, I really feel good. In fact, since recently I have gone running a couple of times before work, I am reminded of John Irving’s Garp, who writes, runs and cooks because when one isn’t going well another is. I’m getting to feel that way.

Oh, and I have discovered how much I love mustard, hence the second title of the post, to offset that negative post a while back about how I love cheese.

I haven’t posted for a while with moving to the new house and having no internet etc. I’ve had my ups and downs. I started having some really angry reveries, particularly after eating some sugary cereals, and couldn’t be around people after trying to reintroduce some yeast-free soda bread, but over the last few days I’ve been feeling great - caffein-free and alcohol-free for a good while now, and following the diet, with very little fruit. Dietician next week, and crossed fingers he won’t be another useless nincompoop!

I love cheese!

M_____’s working all day and so there’s not so much pressure of time. A friend rang a couple of hours ago seeing if I wanted to go out tonight. I don’t, really, I went out yesterday, haven’t written anything much aside from this damn blog for weeks, I’m going away for a week to camp in rain-drenched Britain with two of the most passive students, and tomorrow will be more shopping for the house. Still, I’ve quite a bit of time today otherwise, and certainly relative to the last few weeks it’s a bit of breathing space. Now, I hate shopping and resent any time spent doing it, and so I forever try to buy a big shop and plan for several dishes. The only problem with that is that whenever I cook something I cook for several days, which means that even if I wanted to - and most often I imagine I would not - I could not cook all of these dishes before the veg I buy goes off. Consequently while I’m still living with my parents they nag me constantly, and all my plans go to waste. I still end up with as much surplus veg as I do when I don’t plan anything at all and just grab whatever comes to mind when I go shopping - this is the story of my life, that attempts at organisation fail. In any case, I ended up with lots of tomatoes this time, having used up whatever veg I had left for various planned-for meals in a Chinese stir fry which went reasonably well yesterday (aside from the fact that as usual, I added too much corn-flour into the marinate and it all looked rather muddy). Consequently I decided to try and make something that M____’s mum makes all the time, that is, what she calls Lecho. This is essentially a sauce made from tomatoes and peppers reduced in their own juice with onions, cumin, and often salami, an egg added at the last moment and stirred in, and served with bread or potatoes. I chose to serve it with quinoa - I have decided recently that I have been eating far too much in terms of carbs, and need to monitor this, especially in terms of potatoes. Mum had gone into town or Mardy Hell or somewhere shopping and promised to pick up some salami. This was several hours before I began to cook but she had not yet appeared - she has done so now and says it was an absolute nightmare. Still, by this time not wanting to settle down to eat something so thin and short on protein and substance, I figured I would try the other item that has been sitting unused in my fridge since I bought it a few weeks ago, that is, Tofu. Now, as a rule I don’t use much soya. It is an immensely overesteemed product, nutritionally speaking, but reading the label and seeing that it recommended it not only for stir frys but also for soups, I took it out, prepared it as per instructions, and added it to the bubbling lecho.

What I was left with after perhaps an hour of chopping while listening to Gary Steyngard’s Absurdistan on my MP3 player, was perhaps nutritionally acceptable, but no feast for the palate.

I used to enjoy cooking and serving up my food, as I did almost every day for the students at work. Even the most demanding students enjoyed my food. It was rich and satisfying. Once or twice I didn’t quite pull it off but it was never bad. Now I have to relearn everything I learned at university pouring over recipe books and trying out different things. nd often I really don’t pull it off. The ingredients I have to work with just don’t seem so inspiring. That and I’m left drinking sparkling water at the pub.

The trouble is I can resign myself to having to work harder than most people, to having to make everything from scratch. I just wonder whether I’ll be consigned with food to an analogue of what I disgussed yesterday, to not making the grade despite all my efforts. Not making the grade of my own palette, and not making the grade in terms of cooking for others and satisfying them, which is a read pleasure - I like being the host.

Maybe those days only a year and a half ago, when I had not yet explored my own problems so much, when I was cooking with expensive organic produce for myself and others, grating blocks of cheese into the mash of a shepherd’s pie with organic baked beans or risotto made with home-made chicken stock, were the peak in terms of my relationship with food.

I hope not. I’ll keep on trying, but it is hard to motivate yourself. Especially when that need to cook for several days means you have to get through a backlog of unappetising schlop.