Potted cheese slacker
I bought all the ingredients for Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s potted cheese, I went home, I felt hungry, I ate the cheese with oatcakes and chutney, I put the booze on my shelf ready to drink around the time of my 30th birthday next weekend, I watched the second part of last year’s Criminal Justice on DVD, I shouted at it and tore at my hair, I had a bath, I went to bed, I felt no worse off for not having mixed up the cheese with a few other things before I put it on the oatcakes.
And so my rebellion against HF-W’s recipes continues.
I know my promises are looking pretty much empty these days but I will make the leek terrine tonight, or else I’m in danger of slacking off the project beyond all excusableness.
Conclusions:
- There you are, innocently thinking there’s no oatcake better than a Nairn’s oatcake, and then Duchy Originals Oaten Biscuits for Cheese come along and pull the rug from under your feet.
Sunday
Today was a day of great expectations.
I recruited my most fashion-savvy-yet-honest homosexual chum and off we skipped, arms linked fabulously, to buy lots of Measure stuff. Here follows a breakdown of successes and failures succeeded by a heinous photo of me looking like I’m taking a crap in the woods.
Gold cuff This was achieved with Adam’s help, as French Connection had one I thought relatively nice, and he gets 50% off thanks to designing for Nicole Farhi, which is part of the same group. He thought the cuff was revolting initially but came around in the end. However he put the kiboshes on a gypsy-ish necklace I wanted to buy on account of its having some turquoise bits hanging off it. He said I looked like a middle-aged administrator in it. So?
Turquoise jewellery However I did find a fairly nice pair of heart-shaped turquoise (-coloured) earrings that look like something you might find on a narrowboat, only I found them in Accessorize. As I find some of my dearest friends on narrowboats, this has positive associations for me. When I say find, I mean they are there getting on with their lives, not that I scour narrowboats for new friends, which I don’t have the spare time to do.
A dress with a “rush of gold sparkle” Adam and I decided they meant one with a subtle gold glitter or thread spun through it, and I tried on several such garments in H&M (Adam’s conclusion: “That sleeve doesn’t do much for you, darling-heart.”) However I’ve sworn off high-street clothes wherever possible thanks to Nin and Phoebe’s reality check, so we headed to Beyond Retro where I found a dress so lovely that Ad and I decided to reinterpret the rules – it has a gold ruffle and cuffs rather than a “rush of sparkle” but hey, it looked nice. It even – dare I say this – had a faint air of the Pamela Ewing about it. I’m going to wear it for my 30th, and if I don’t get compared to Pamela every ten minutes I’ll have a tizzy fit.
’90s Madonna No conical bra-tops on the high street as yet but I allowed myself to buy Immaculate Collection on vinyl even though strictly that’s ’80s Madonna. I think it was released in 1990, just scraping into being Measure approved. Kind of. I just wanted the record really.
Mienna boots I was quite up for these but the moment Adam clapped eyes on them he declared them the most repugnant thing he’d seen in a long while, stamped his desert boot on the floor and banned me from even trying them on. Since I was fully expecting to look more overfed heiress than Twiggy chic in them, I went along with his judgement and with an enormous sigh of relief saved myself £140 into the bargain. How the Guardian gets off putting “only” in front of £140 during a sentence about boots is anybody’s guess anyway.
Gap crombie Good job Ads was with me or I wouldn’t have known what a crombie was. I mean, I knew it was a coat but I couldn’t have been sure exactly what style. We found the coat in question and it’s a nice garment, thick and warm and relatively well cut. The problem is it made me look like Little Miss Whatever High Street. Very boring. Not inordinately flattering to my shape, although not ugly either. A darker grey tends to suit me better, while this one is a pale felty-marl-pebbly shade. All in all it looked fine but I couldn’t bring myself to spend £98 on it. It really would have been a waste of cash I can’t afford to spend. I would shell out that amount pretty happily if I put it on and thought “yehhh” rather than “erhhmmmm”.
Barrettes As Adam pointed out, I think Katie Grand and chums are thinking of a different breed of barrettes from those found lurking on the lower racks of Boots’ haircare section/Accessorize. A very poor selection to be seen, all of which would have made me look rather First Violin, even with messy locks. I kept my money in my purse and decided to wait for them to hit Topshop instead.
I decided I ought to check out what’s going on in the head of this Katie Grand and bought a copy of Love, the magazine she edits, which WHSmith was doing a great job of hiding in some irrelevant place in the shop. I would have got it from a newsagent but I needed to pay by card. I read it later that night in the bath and got a bit spluttery about it. What is Pixie Geldof doing being treated like style royalty? Tavi on the other hand – what a girl. Apparently I’m not allowed to write good things about her without her permission and I’ve never read her blog properly but on the strength of that interview alone – top marks.
GQ Style I looked around but could only find GQ Plain. I didn’t like it much – I read it in the bath later too. It’s exactly the same as Vogue but with more erotic photos of men and slightly more openly misogynistic copy.
Aztecs at the British Museum I went along on my own having been dropped off by Ads with tears in my eyes. It was an interesting exhibition in the main and the turquoise mosaic masks were really incredible, but overall too much grey stone and too much writing on plaques obscured by crowds. One thing stood out: in the era of Moctezuma the Nahuatl word for gold meant “excrement of the gods”. I’ll remember this next time I need to refer to my new Godshit cuff. For £12 a think the British Museum could have pumped some interesting smells into the exhibition, or put a few fairground rides in, even if only slow, small ones. The shop was a bit lame too, apart from a range of sequinned decorations I had my eye on – the mask and the peacock were ace but I can’t see them in the online shop – can you?
That evening I rejected making potted mackerel in favour of hot buttered rolls with ready-smoked mackerel. The decision was a result of missing the Sunday supermarkets and being at the back of the queue when the Lord was doling out motivation to pot fish. I was at the back of all the most important queues, I tell you.
I swapped my Dallas boxset with Adam and Thomas’ DVDs of Absolutely Fabulous series 1 and 2, Ring of Bright Water and last year’s Criminal Justice, the first episode of which I watched that evening with my mackerelly rolls. Never have I seen such a frustrating, tense, brilliant thing. I was clutching on to this giant cushion thing I have all the way through. I have to stop writing about it though or I’ll go on for even more years.
Today’s outfit: I put it on for ten minutes to get the snap. I wore something totally different into town. There’s no need to ask why. An abomination:
Bare
Mare
Conclusions:
- French Connection has some pretty nice jewellery.
- No one has nice barrettes yet.
- GQ is kind of lame.
- Love is a bit better.
- Vintage dresses are much better.
- I wish I’d spotted Jonathan Ross at the BM. Adam called having just seen him go in wearing a pair of rubber waders. Drat.
- What’s with H&M sizing anyway? A size 12 dress fitted me perfectly yet a different size 16 clung to me like a terrible black contraceptive device.
- Faith boots are controversial.
- I will pot cheese, fair enough, I will. Manana.
Saturday
After polishing off several good-morning! glasses of Baileys, a latte and a fry-up with my dearest friend Liv and scouring the paper for this week’s life, I headed home to recreate as best I could the Space rooms in my own flat. I did a relatively good job of getting the vibe right (read with emphasis on the word “relatively” and set your standards low) but I have insufficient space in my flat to get enough distance between lens and scene to take a picture that might demonstrate this success. Trust.
The only element I properly slacked off was arranging my books in colour order, which I think looks beautiful and I definitely want to do – I just couldn’t quite bring myself to take all my books off the shelves and put them back in a different order. I might do it later in the week. I will. I will.
Here are some rather sparse-looking photos to demonstrate my attempts:
Study
Skive
Living
Dead
Horrid wardrobe, that.
Breakfast
Feckless
Boudoir
Abattoir
The other thing I did was dress up in a hideous outfit and strike an equally frightening pose, photographing the tragedy with the aid of my camera’s self-timer.
Feel free to listen to the appropriate soundtrack as you view the image (http://open.spotify.com/track/5CoHWtIo2xRgBqVtm4OgcF):
Dare
Don't you dare
Got the pose backwards as usual but I don’t think this is the main concern really, is it.
I was supposed to cook potted crab/lobster for dinner but I couldn’t get these things fresh and I’m not keen on the tinned versions. As I result I settled for toasted bagels with butter.
Then, in an overwhelming show of dullard decision making, I opted to stay in on a Saturday night instead of going out with my chums. It’s my 30th birthday next weekend so I anticipate big luvz then and decided I was allowed to forgo sociability in order to epilate my armpits (genuinely painful) and watch the last episode of Dallas in my boxset (genuinely upsetting to say goodbye to this era of my life).
Conclusions:
- I think I’ve said all I need to about potting food.
- My suspicions about this week’s nude fashion were correct.
Success/failure
This week has involved a certain degree of underachievement on the Guardian-worthiness front, which is often something of a relief to me as it reminds me I’m still aliiiive, not just an empty vessel into which the Guardian is poured each week. I wouldn’t want to take things too far and become a tabbouleh-eating version of Frankenstein’s monster, wheeling around the aisles of Whole Foods taking out young mums with my shoulder pads and scattering jewels in my eucalyptus-scented wake. Actually, now I get to talking about it that might be exactly what I want to become.
Tomorrow I will buy the Guardian and get back into the routine in a more disciplined fashion for the foreseeable future. In the meantime please find below a summary of the latter half of this week’s various successes and failures.
Success 1: Yotam Ottolenghi’s ricotta tart.
It’s another pie but it tasted damn, damn fine. It was possibly my favourite recipe of the whole experiment thus far. I cheated with pre-rolled pastry – an innovation of whose existence I was woefully unaware until I finally discovered a whole section of Sainsbury’s next to the butter where all the pastry has been kept for all these years. Ready-made pastry gets my full approval but the pre-rolled stuff is a bit silly – it broke off in unsatisfying strips like when you got new plasticine as a kid in those stuck-together sticks, and they are annoyingly difficult to squidge. I always squidge pastry into shape in the end anyway, even if I roll it first.
Back to the point: this is a great tart and you ought to bake it.
As usual my cooking equipment is limited to one rectangular baking tin in which I cook damn near everything.
Ricotta tart
Ricotta blart
I’m afraid it looks slightly unsavoury as the tin was too big and therefore the sundried tomato paste too scant to give good coverage.
Success 2: Friday’s outfit/pose
I’m not saying I look great today – in fact I feel a bit of a doofus in all my bulky swathes of black. But you gotta admit I got it a bit closer to the original template than I usually manage.
PS I discovered it’s OK to republish photos as long as it’s for the purposes of review, comment or criticism, which I believe is what I’m doing here.
Fur
Errr...
Failure 1: Dan Lepard’s tapenade dinner rolls
They look delicious (without the anchovy, obviously) but I just couldn’t fit these into my life this week. I know they’re called dinner rolls but they don’t quite fit with my notion of dinner. I suppose I could’ve had them with some nice soup or stew or meat and a salad, or cheese, or anything really. In any case I didn’t bake them, sorry. I went out for fish and chips instead. Confession over.
Failure 2: pretty much the whole Measure
I wasn’t too sure what any of it meant this week, beyond the words ‘eucalyptus’, ‘Madonna and Janet Jackson’, ‘Plum Sykes’ and ‘scrunchies’.
I did a bit of research on the internet and discovered that most of it required little action to be taken.
I missed Streetcar at the Donmar, Small Island doesn’t appear to be on yet and my eyebrows won’t easily look like Ruth Wilson’s.
The homes mentioned in the decor porn paragraph turn out to be very lovely and very unrealistic, hence use of the word ‘porn’. I clicked on, I clicked off, I got on with something more relevant. Go figure.
Baptiste Giabiconi turns out to be a very handsome fellow indeed but I’ll leave him to Karl.
Andrew Castle is a newsreader and I don’t have a telly.
This week’s grand fail, however, was my attempt to drink a peppermint tea martini at the May Fair Hotel.
This isn’t just a joke you know – this is my life – and I really do these things. Last night I arranged to meet two good friends, Adam and Katy, outside the Royal Academy, and we walked along to the bar together. I’d never been before and I’m probably never going back. There was no peppermint tea martini on the menu – I suspect this was a fashion week special – and the place was heaving with the types of people I have a dangerous tendency to secretly think of as ‘them’. I am not ‘them’, that’s why I never have rich boyfriends or PR jobs. I don’t like their loud voices, their hair or their jackets, and I don’t very much like their conversations either. We left and went round to a cheapish boozer around the corner for a mulled cider and a packet of salt and vinegar crisps.
Success 3: by failing so much, I saved a lot of money
This week I managed to get away with spending a whole little of money. I went out for fish and chips, I topped up my oyster and phone, and I bought a few dinner ingredients ( no more than £50-worth) and some stuff that smelt of eucalyptus and wasn’t tested on animals. So if tomorrow’s magazine demands that I buy rivers of pearls and lakes of caviar, all my pocket money will be lying in wait.
Conclusions:
- The further I veer from the Guardian ideal, the cheaper life is.
- The further I veer from the Guardian ideal, the more friends I see.
- Tomorrow morning I will buy the Guardian and copy everything it says again.
Potted rabbit
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s potted rabbit became Guardian Girl’s chicken casserole last night. There are two reasons for this: Sainsbury’s had no rabbit that I could detect, and I had no time to cook my dinner for two hours, shred it up and wait for it to cool before eating it – I stayed late at work and got home at 8pm.
Hugh says that these recipes are not difficult but require plenty of time, during which he suggests also listening to the radio and enjoying hanging around the kitchen. I guess this puts these recipes firmly in weekend territory. The thing is that weekend territory is already dotted with little flags saying things like “do your laundry”, “see some mates”, “get out of the flat” and no doubt in other households, “take the kids swimming” and “take the dog for a proper walk”.
I still have to question who his recipes are aimed at beyond people who live in the River Cottage and I guess jobless folks who also happen to have the money and inclination to press rabbits into pots. It’s a question of priorities as much as time.
For the purposes of consistent documentation, here’s my photo of a very tasty chicken casserole. The addition of a packet of lardons and some mustard comes highly recommended – there’s still much to learn from Hugh’s recipes even though it’s frequently tricky to go all the way.
Potted rabbit
Not a rabbit
Conclusions:
- So little time, so much to do, so many unpotted lagomorphs in the world. On my deathbed I’ll be rueing the times I let them all hop away, foolishly choosing to pursue a career instead.
Preserved duck or goose legs
A very short entry on this one as I could find neither of these things in my local vicinity. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Tesco Metro did have duck breasts though, so I bought a packet of those and some chicken drumsticks, marinated them in the list of ingredients and roasted them for the suggested few hours until the meat was falling off the bone and tasted garlicky, herby and buttery in equal pleasures.
I served them up on a plate to my bezzer mate Liv preceded by fresh bread and shop-bought pâté. It was the sort of thing you eat in a inn hundreds of years ago wearing a cloak.
There wasn’t much point in taking a photo, or in coming to any conclusions, or perhaps in writing any of this.
Game terrine
I cooked this one for the ladeez, Liv, Nin and Phoebe, and we ate it in front of X-Factor accompanied by the red wine and brandy that didn’t make it into the terrine. I do love the way brandy makes you feel like Father Christmas.
I couldn’t find game so what this really ended up as was a very large squashed-up sausage with lumps of chicken, pork and beef suspended in it, wrapped in two packets of bacon. Some people will be thinking that sounds like heaven, others will be leaning more towards burning in hell. It was actually pretty nice. Very tasty. We ate it with the onion chutney left over from the red pepper dip I made the other evening and some salad.
I didn’t leave it to cool or press it.
I guess it’s what you might call meatloaf is it?
Game terrine
Lame terrine
Conclusion:
- A successful new addition to my top cooking formulas: wrap stuff in paper and bake it, wrap stuff in pastry and bake it, suspend stuff in sausagemeat and bake it.
Thai red lentil soup
This soup was 100% delicious. It didn’t take that long to make, tasted of a million wonderful flavours, didn’t explode all over the kitchen. I managed to find all the ingredients except the deep-fried shallots, and I’d already psychologically prepared myself for that eventuality. It also tasted delicious reheated for breakfast – yes, breakfast – this morning. I’m having it for lunch too, then I’m showering in it later and falling asleep in a tub of it. Tomorrow I’m wearing it instead of clothes.
I thought that might be one of those jokes where it becomes funny if you push it further, but it turns out it was one of the ones that isn’t funny.
Pics:
Thai red lentil soup
MY red lentil soup (it's not Terry's)
I think I gotta get 9/10 for food styling today even though the rear bowl of soup is all splattered in a most distasteful way and my photography’s still at 0/10.
Conclusions:
- This soup is worth making.
- Go to the ‘foreignerz’ aisle of the supermarket and get your coconut milk there – it costs a third of the price of the tins in the ‘white people cooking thai for friends this evening’ aisle.
- While the lentils are boiling, watch the Dallas ‘Red File’ two-parter. Oh my Christ, this was the best telly I’ve ever seen! I’m still indebted to the Guardian for teaching me about Dallas box-sets. I watch an episode most evenings. I now refuse to embark on any romantic relations unless they promise to be just like Bobby n Pamela’s. I love Pamela. I shout at the screen and shake my fists at JR, and sometimes after an especially great episode I say to my cat: “Cripes, George, what a corker, eh?” , Wallace and Gromit style. I love Miss Ellie and Jock, that old tyke! I think about them all when I’m not watching. I even kinda like Lucy these days, and Cliff’s all right too. It makes me wonder what other TV programmes might secretly be good. And how I’m going to survive when I get to the end of the first boxset.
A pepper or two
Last night Adam and Thomas came over for dinner and I cooked ALL of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s aubergine/pepper/chilli suggestions in a sort of nightshade-family feast. Most of them were a bit disappointing.
The baked aubergine/yoghurt/coriander dip with pitta was probably the best bit, and it’s translated into lunch the next day better than the pepper/tomato/scrambled egg dish, which was nice, but is a bit squeam-making to eat cold. The deepfried chillies were downright dangerous as one of them exploded in the pan, flying through the air and splattering my entire kitchen (if you could call it a kitchen, and if you could call it ‘entire’) with burning olive oil. Good job there were no newborns around. The battered aubergine and pepper slices were pretty much disastrous – soggy and mostly tasteless – but then I’ve never been much good at this type of battery. The stuffed pepper with beef and dill was bland in itself but very nice combined with the ultra-tasty pine nut, spinach and goats cheese one.
All in all aubergines and peppers aren’t my favourite veggies anyway and I remain unconvinced. I’m looking forward to trying the red lentil and coconut soup tomorrow for a bit of flavour.
Oufitwise I feel pretty OK in what I’m wearing today but the photo tells a different story (Captain Pugwash and the Gender Reassignment Therapy).
The return of my lovely silk FARHI by Nicole Farhi still fails to show it in a positive light. One day you’ll see its greatness.
This isn’t a good angle for me really. I’m crossing my fingers that the Guardian does a CCTV-inspired, shot-from-above fashion story soon. I’m getting sick of the sight of my underchin.
In style
On stile
My new day’s resolution for tomorrow is to really get some dynamism into the pose. Watch this space.
In other news, I’ve been umming and ahhing a lot over one of the Measure entries this week – the Shaun Leane jewellery. I checked out astleyclarke.com and I really love the collection – except the one piece I could vaguely afford, which is the cherry blossom pendant. The rest of it is all vintage-looking and beautiful and reminds me of a Flower Fairies drawing, which I’ve always had a residual young-girl love for, but that single cheaper pendant looks more Keepers. I’ve decided not to part with my cash. Keepers always seemed to cause bad blood anyway. (If you picked up on them, please excuse the feminine hygiene implications of that sentence – it wasn’t what I meant.)
Dip/stick
Today’s photo is a self-portrait because I couldn’t leave the house in what I was wearing. Would you take me seriously if you bumped into me around the office wearing this?
If I’d only had a coral Margaret Howell blouse, some drawstring moleskin trousers and perhaps a tiny pair of hips, I’d be looking chic today. Oh, and a pair of clear-rimmed specs. But these garms are the closest I could get and, as you can see, tracksuit bottoms (Fat Face 1999 – not really Best Dressed material) an orange top, cropped Primark shirt and fancy-dress glasses do not a professional lady make. I changed into black h-h-h-harem pants and swapped the shirt for my beloved Farhi by Nicole Farhi covering-up mannish shirt thing so I looked less like I’d soiled myself, added a big scarf to make it look like I had some kind of intention for my appearance and headed off to the bus stop flowingly. I do look like a psychodrama workshop facilitator today but that’s probably better than looking like a plain old psychodrama. Today I’d like to add an extra dimension to my snap by providing the soundtrack that was going on in my head as I looked in the mirror. For those who have spotify: http://open.spotify.com/track/1Vchex0xowRj9k59RLvRfo.
Step out
Stay in
Dinner last night, on the other hand, was a steaming success. It was Hugh’s Muhamarra recipe, a very tasty affair involving walnuts, bread, olive oil, baked red peppers, chilli flakes, lime juice and caramelised onion chutney because I couldn’t find any pomegranate molasses. Once I was on Guardian Soulmates – why not, since I outsource every other decision in my life to the Guardian, let it choose me a lover as well? I met this guy and Jesus Christ was he a bore. He was even more smug than me. He was sick with the nation because it promoted cultural low-browism by celebrating Harry Potter. I unfortunately hit upon the subject of his difficult relationship with his father within ten minutes of meeting him – purely accidental – and the tense diatribe that followed was a terrifying to behold, and highly awkward to react to over a conversational pint of Strongbow. Anyway I went home after a while and shortly afterwards decided to choose my own menfolk. But the point of this story is that he harped on at great length about how amazing pomegranate molasses is, and how you can use it to add depth to any flavour, and how you can get it any Turkish shop. But I was in Sainsbury’s in my tracksuit (because I’m now running everywhere in order to maintain this experiment without growing out of the last remaining giantsize harem pants) and I couldn’t find any, so I just bought some Taste the Difference chutney instead. It’s a bit soapy to be honest. ANYWAY, the dip is stunningly delicious. You must make it. If you can’t be bothered to do the bits involving the peppers, the paste made with all the other ingredients is delicious in itself. Walnutty oily rich wonder with bread dipped in. I ate plenty of it before I added the peppers. Hugh told me to add the rest of the ingredients after the peppers but I rebelliously ignored him. I was wating for the peppers to cook so I thought I may as well get the rest ready.
Also I used my hand blender! If you’ve been reading from the start you’ll know this is a great thing as it marks my triumph over the emotional scars I earned during an egg white incident.
Here are the photies:
Muhamarra
Muhm-muhm-ahhh
I know it looks kind of like a feline production here but that’s just any ungarnished dip for you isn’t it? I added extra chilli flakes, chutney and cumin so it’s got quite a kick. It’s making me mildly perspire as I eat the remains for lunch while typing this.
Conclusions:
- I’m taking a long moment to appreciate the fact that I changed out of that heinous outfit before coming to work.
- I strongly recommend trying the dip.
- Peeling red peppers is pretty tricky even after doing the oven/plastic bag trick but the dip doesn’t appear to have suffered by having skins in it.
I've always found it funny when people write letters to the Guardian's Weekend magazine complaining that the recipe ingredients are too middle class and the fashion only looks good on thin people. After all, it's just a magazine. Or is it? I decided to follow its recipes, fashion and lifestyle advice as closely as possible, to see if the aspirations promoted therein can really be achieved by the average reader who is not especially wealthy, not necessarily model thin and is obliged to work regular office hours. This blog has no affiliation whatsoever with the Guardian but I link to the Weekend magazine website for the purposes of illustration. 
Guardian Girl 
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