American idol #4
Flowers
Glowers
Conclusions:
- If the picture wasn’t so dark you’d know I got it spot on this time. I even found some birds willing to sign a release form and join in
Potted & cured river trout
My festival version of potted & cured river trout…
Potted & cured river trout
Takeaway fish & chips
Conclusions:
- Batter is better
Two cheated recipes and a cheated make-up look
Another condensed post containing some rather poor attempts at following the Guardian step-by-step.
First of all, the recipe I was supposed to cook for my friends the night after returning from a festival, after a long day at work and not much sleep. As you can imagine, popping to the butcher to buy the ingredients for slow-cooked pork cheeks, crushed Jersey Royals, broad beans & grain mustard sauce wasn’t top of my agenda. However I did try to cobble together something resembling the intended dish.
I wasn’t too fussed about the prospect of buying a pig’s head, what with animal slaughter having been a fairly prominent theme throughout my life. It also would have been highly entertaining to turn up to my friends’ beautifully neat and stylish home brandishing the thing with a murderous look in my eye. I once returned home swinging a floral handbag from which I produced an enormous calf’s tongue, much to the horror of my boyfriend at the time. It still had a big, tough root thing attached and I had to boil it, then peel off the fractal-looking tastebuds, which made a loud rasping sound. We feasted on it for days and quite enjoyed it, although the gristly bits were slightly sickening. Anyway, I digress very far from the path of pig cheeks. As I keep pointing out, I’d been away for the weekend and had to make do with popping to the Tesco Metro near my friends’ home. They had run out of or didn’t stock: pork of any kind but chops, onions, carrots, leeks, thyme, broad beans and mint. What a rubbish shop. Still, they had wine, so I bought some of that, lamely improvised the other ingredients and went round to see Adam and Thomas. What we ended up with was sausages with mashed potato and butter beans. It ain’t pork cheeks, is it. Tasty though.
Slow-cooked pork cheeks, crushed Jersey Royals, broad beans & grain mustard sauce
Let's call a spade a spade: sausages and mash
Last night I stayed late at work and was then supposed to return home to make Cotswold mess, which involved dissolving gelatine and piping mousse among other incomprehensible tasks. I couldn’t wait three hours for meringue to cook or I’d be sugar rushing at bedtime, I have no piping bag (who does anyway?) and I frankly just could not be bothered to tackle this behemoth of a dessert. Emily Watkins obviously enjoys a faff but, as has already been established, I really don’t. I bought a packet of meringue nests, a Rowntree ready-made jelly and an Onken mousse, plus a punnet of raspberries, and arranged some of these ingredients in two glasses to take the photo. Then I emptied it all into a trough and ate it up before me evening bath. Lovely. By the time I was slumbering happily between the sheets, Ms Watson would still have been greasing her piping bag. I think we all know who the winner is in this situation.
Cotswold mess
Mess
As usual, apologies for the low-rent photography. My logic was: if I don’t have time to make meringue, why waste precious moments turning the flash off?
My final cheat to confess to so far this week was with Lauren Luke’s steel blue eyes look. I tried it out at the festival, but I hadn’t actually taken my blue eyeshadow with me. I know, I know, I’m impatient is all. I did everything else she said and it looked much nicer with black eyeshadow anyway. Trust me, I tried the blue one when I got home and I didn’t even look like I was off to an Abba party or anything. I just looked like that girl at school who’s two sandwiches short of a picnic, cuts her own fringe and is slightly sexually provocative.
Steel blue eyes
Steely glance
Conclusions:
- Those recipes left me looking forward to trying Rosie Sykes’ dishes instead. Simpler, tastier looking, much less effort
- Braised pig cheeks are probably delicious, but why bother when you could fry a packet of sausages? The average chipolata probably contains plenty of pig cheek anyway, mashed in with the trotters and snouts and eyeballs and abattoir floor-scurf
- Arranging pre-bought mousse, meringue and jelly into glasses and laying them out all nice is pretty fun as cooking goes, although my lack of kitchen curtain and the close proximity of my neighbour made me feel a little vulnerable. Imagine the sadness you’d feel if you saw the girl next door carefully arranging two little raspberry-topped puddings on a plate, laying two spoons next to them, taking a photo and then eating both alone. And then, even sadder, imagine if that girl was you
- Blue eyeshadow is a bad invention
American idol #1-3
I’m condensing these three looks into one post because the first two were attempted while drunk and in no way resemble the intended outfit/photo, and the third was attempted while coming down with, if not swine flu, then certainly the sniffles, which is enough to kill a good deal of effort when it comes to a) dressing and b) posing. Hark at the fragility of the perfect lifestyle. You get a cold, you can’t be arsed. You drink some wine, you can’t be arsed. Or is that just me?
American
Idiot
What does this prove about the attainability of the Guardian lifestyle? Nothing, it’s just a picture of me drunk in a Primark frock – but one has to keep the momentum going. Also I did enquire as to whether anyone had a few stuffed parrots I could borrow, but with no success.
Idol
Idle
Look, I’m not even leaning in the right direction. And I’m holding pussy willow to represent birds.
Brandon
Random
Hopefully my boss never sees this cos I’m standing on his chair.
Conclusion:
- Time to raise the bar a bit I think
First impressions
This week I was at a festival, so I set my alarm for 6.30am, climbed out of my wet tent and made a trip to the showers followed by the shop to buy my paper, which came with a free packet of Andrex wipes and a cotton bag. I got back to the tent and had a slightly less enthusiastic look to see what was on the cards than has been known in weeks gone by. Being at a festival with a limited selection of clothes squashed into a rucksack and no cooking facilities is fun for a normal life but tricky if you’re supposed to be trying to replicate outfits and cook recipes in pursuit of the perfect middle-class lifestyle. Having said that I was at Latitude. This is where 75% of the Guardian-reading population (and their gaggles of highly styled teenage daughters) were taking their credit-crunch summer holidays. I’d like to point out at this juncture that despite seeing hoardes of distressingly perfect individuals getting festival style bang on in all their wonderful ways, I saw NOT ONE pair of heels and no lace shawls. So the Stevie Nicks style campaign of the other week clearly hadn’t yet filtered through to the masses.
Fashion:
- Initially I looked at the usual All ages pages, thought that was all there was and decided it ‘d be pretty easy. A week of slightly bizarre hairstyles, plus belts tied around otherwise decent outfits. Then I noticed the interview with the Killers’ Brandon Flowers was actually a fashion story too, which meant more suits, more ties, more unattainable hairstyles. It’s a slightly pointless exercise but pleasingly methodical
- Blimey! There are loads this week! A whole 11 pages of recipes. I’ll barely get through any of them but I’ll give it a try, and it’s interesting to note the difference between various chefs and the ease with which you can actually cook the damn recipes. I could instantly see that Rosie Sykes has a pragmatic approach to recipe writing – a description I wouldn’t have thought of as a compliment until I started this experiment. I’ve already begun to wish they’d have just a couple of weekend recipes that require a lot of faff, visiting the butcher, letting things cool and set etc, then publish a load of stuff you can cook in less than an hour and buy the ingredients for in your local shop. I can still see a lot of cream involved in these dishes. Again, times are changing. Once that would have looked like heaven to me but I’m growing tired of the daily richness and slightly concerned about the effects
The Measure (so important that even the Guardian gives it a capital letter):
- Good call on the harem pant pyjamas, as I had enough trouble with the daytime version. However Cari has lent me a pair of silk harem pants in the event that they should emerge in future shoots, so prepare for hilarity on that one. When she texted me saying she’d found them my response was: ‘ooh, just too late for last week’s shoot, but I’m sure Hammertime isn’t over yet.’ Big shout out to my own humour
- The knitting kit sounds great but you can bet your bottom dollar I won’t have time to track one down at a festival/during the ensuing week, in which I have to collect my cat from his godfathers’ house (I know, fag hags eh?), cook 17,000 recipes involving gelatine leaves, try to get an iPhone contract so I can write this blog away from my spirit-crushing desk, wrestle for hours a day with the main object of my hatred Natwest because they failed to change my address SIX MONTHS ago and therefore I cannot get said iPhone as the address I gave Carphone Warehouse didn’t match the billing address and I’m now blocked for fraud reasons until I change my address back to the WRONG one, which takes FOUR DAYS, and work the usual 9-5 hours, get home from work and also attempt a level of human interaction. The knitting kit can probably ____ off
- Pale foundation is unlikely to look terribly fashion forward on top of my summer-tanned body, but the vampire trend will be most welcome come winter
Make-up:
- It has long been my experience that steel blue eyes do not compliment angry red spots, of which I usually have several
- This is a section of the magazine I haven’t got round to copying yet, although I keep fervently wishing to. I blame this on Natwest, and will continue to blame everything on Natwest until they sort themselves out and complete one task with a basic level of competence
Garden:
- Don’t have one, mate
- However – hanging paintings above the bath? Not likely in my little rented studio flat. They’ve only just redone the beautiful peach, watercolour-effect tiled surround. Guess I might just tear the picture of the bathroom out of the magazine and blu-tac that on to the tiles. Same effect, different size, with extra level added to hint at the nature of representation itself
Get a holiday wardrobe that’s packed with style #3
This one looks like it’d be well easy to replicate but I had a few problems finding a very similar shirt and my pale blue jeans were soaked through as I conducted this stage of the experiment at a festival in the rain. I’d like to see more men in cropped shirts I think. Wait, what am I saying? No I wouldn’t.
Style
Vile
Conclusion:
- If there’s anything more potentially troubling than trying to replicate women’s fashion, it’s trying to replicate men’s fashion. At least with womenswear you can accessorise and do your hair differently if you want to get a certain angle. Men have to really pay attention to the finer details/print/colour/cut of their clothes if they really want to ‘get a holiday wardrobe that’s packed with style’ – possibly even grow an entire beard, whereas women just have to go down Primark, get the latest ‘it’ garment and move their ponytail down an inch
Get a holiday wardrobe that’s packed with style #2
I loved this one because it involved trying to look as much like an old, bearded man as possible when I am a young woman with no beard. I rarely feel so feminine. I think he looks really cool and I like my version of his outfit too, even though seeing photos of myself in sunglasses always makes me realise how wonky my ears are.
Packed up
Cracked up
-
I doubt if anyone at the Guardian had me in mind when they were styling this one, so it wouldn’t be fair to draw too many conclusions
-
It’s fun to earnestly imitate photos of old men in magazines while your friends photograph you though, so I won’t stop either
Carrot and cumin burger buns
I took the ingredients for Dan Lepard’s carrot and cumin burger buns to my friends’ house the night before Latitude festival and cooked them by way of saying thanks for looking after my cat. They must’ve been chuffed, eh.
I’d got round there late and we started on some wine while I began my prep (more tearing, scraping and stirring than chopping, peeling and kneading). The recipe called for a considerable amount of rising time, which didn’t suit our appetites one bit, so in the end I just poured in rather more yeast than was required and hoped for the best. I forgot to bring butter so I simply poured in a randomly selected quantity of olive oil instead. I left the dough balls, which looked more like bhajis than buns due to my haphazard and occasionally dangerous chopping style, to rise for about 45 minutes, which was the length of time Adam and Thomas could bear to distract themselves with Youtube clips and yet more empty-stomached wine drinking before they fainted. The ‘buns’ went into a muffin tray followed by a hot oven and came out 25 minutes later resembling cakes. Why does everything I cook turn into a cake? I’m like a slightly rubbish, less rich version of King Midas. According to DL the buns should’ve been bouncy, soft and moist. Moist was pretty much the only one I managed to nail this time. They actually tasted pretty good – if a little yeasty – filled with some herby burgers that were on special offer and a bit of wilting rocket out of the boys’ fridge. They were surprisingly filling, too, which is pretty much my number-one criterion for food.
Here’s how they should’ve looked:
Carrot and cumin burger buns
And here’s the result, photographed in a drunken state as my stomach digested itself in anticipation. As you could see I couldn’t even muster the energy to slice it properly at this point. I just tore at the thing with my claws until it sort of divided in two.
Carrot and cumin cakes
Conclusions:
- Where on earth Sainsbury’s keep their sesame and poppy seeds I don’t know. They must have them
- A point of interest: while I was looking for the seeds, a man standing next to me piped up: ‘Excuse me, do you know if you can make icing sugar by putting normal sugar in a food processor?’ I replied that I had no idea and had never considered it before, to which he replied: ‘Oh well, my cooking has so little hope of turning out right, there’s really no point worrying about it.’ If he’d been within 40 years of my age, I would’ve married him on the spot. Imagine the dinner parties!
- Olive oil seems to work nice in buns
- The further I get from following these recipes, the more fun I have
- Yeast probably isn’t among the many ingredients you can throw into the mixing bowl with gay abandon
Get a holiday wardrobe that’s packed with style #1
My holiday doesn’t start until tomorrow but the task of copying this menswear fashion shoot in the name of experimentation began today. Weirdly I find it easier to imagine myself wearing these clothes than anything I’ve seen on a woman since I started the blog, and I don’t think that can be explained away by my gender issues alone. At least with this lot you just put on a shirt and some trousers and get going. No top hats, no lace leggings – heaven.
However – shorts. I put on a fake Armani shirt left in lieu of rent (no comment) by a guy who lived on my sitting room floor for two months. This shirt manages to be papery and plasticky at the same time, and I suspect I’ll have to wear it tomorrow as well judging by the next picture on the page. Then I put on a pair of shorts to match the picture in question. The shirt covered them almost entirely, leaving me with the impression that if I went to work like that, HR might email the dress code around yet again, pointing out that ‘beachwear is not acceptable’ but with the addendum ‘and neither is semi-nudity’, so I swapped the shorts for my trusty Lee men’s jeans rolled up as far as they will comfortably go. I’ve not bought into the loafer trend so a pair of very unmanly leopard-print ballet pumps was as close as I could get. I feel comfy today but I’ve not hit the dapper note of the silver fox in the magazine.
Holiday wardrobe
Workaday wardrobe
Conclusions:
- Menswear might be easier to put on that womenswear, but it’s probably no easier to rock
- The just-stepped-off-a-yacht look requires a nehru collar and a pair of loafers. It certainly doesn’t involve leopard print
- Clearly girls are not supposed to be copying this fashion anyway but hell, this blog is a CONTROL experiment with very strict rules
Beetroot, yogurt and preserved lemon relish
I hobbled into Sainsbury’s last night. Why was I hobbling? a) I’d walked 11 miles that day b) I had my toes crossed. Why did I have my toes crossed? a) Because just crossing my fingers that there’d be no raw beetroot in Sainsbury’s and I’d have to buy ready cooked wasn’t enough. I was buying the ingredients for Yotam Ottolenghi’s beetroot, yogurt and preserved lemon relish. Luckily my crossing worked and I bought four packets of the shrink-wrapped, boiled stuff.
Arriving home I switched the radio on, famished after the usual long and Forrest Gump-inspired day, and had a proper look at the recipe. I’d thought it was a salad (relish executed with my minimal chopping style) and that it would take minutes to throw together but alas, the recipe called for blackening peppers and reducing tomatoes. I was sorely tempted to be properly lazy, just chop everything up, put it in a bowl, take a quick snap and get to work on the eating bit, but I felt this was excessive cheating – plus I’ve done the pepper-grilling trick before and it makes them so much nicer. I used more fresh herbs than the recipe called for because I didn’t want to freeze the remainder in little bits. This worked out nice. I can never find preserved lemons but I used the juice from the fruit I zested into pastry a few days ago – industrious huh.
As I began toiling over the hot grill, a show came on my favourite station Resonance FM in which two people blew up 99 balloons, intermittently reading balloon-related facts, over a background soundtrack of 99 Luftballons by Nena, slowed down to last an hour. The effect, when combined with a large dish of beetroot, was a bit round and red but the tie-in was pleasing.
Anyway, back to the salad. It tasted very pleasant. By now I’d completely dispensed with the idea of it being a relish, though.
As well as the main dish, YO suggested frying the beet tops with creme fraiche, oilve oil, caraway seeds and garlic. Obviously I didn’t have any beet tops so instead I simply fried the flavourings, including garlic sliced and crisped in the oil like onion bits from the Harvester, stirred in the creme fraiche and ate it like a heart attack soup while I waited for my peppers to char. I feel slightly embarrassed by this and mention it only because it was very tasty and would make a nice dip. Maybe for radishes, to keep with the theme.
I froze the salad I couldn’t eat (whether this will work is a concern for the day it comes out of, not goes into, the freezer), proudly putting it next to the previous day’s remaining raspberry tarts. One day I’ll be receiving guests and will be able to casually defrost beetroot relish (I’ll revert to its proper, more exotic title especially for the occasion) and fruit tart for dessert. They won’t even notice the ring around the bath.
Beetroot, yogurt and preserved lemon relish
Beetroot and yoghurt salad
Mine looks like a dish of kidneys.
Conclusions:
- It would be really helpful if these recipes included one bunch of something rather than four heaped tablespoons of something, but that’s what freezers are for
- Even in Yotam’s picture, ‘relish’ is pushing it a bit. It’s a salad isn’t it? You can have whole sweetcorn kernels in a relish but beetroot halves is borderline petulance
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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