Bleeding Obvious Stated; Urgent Action Required

What is it with the news today? I know, I sound like Victor Meldrew. But look at this story from the Beeb:

Campaigners have called for better labels on takeaway food after revealing massive levels of fat, salt and sugar in some of the UK's favourite dishes.

Which? magazine revealed that a woman eating a portion of curry could be consuming more than a whole day's recommended saturated fat intake.

Apparently, fast food is fatty! Who knew?! Why haven't the perpetrators of this crime against humanity been brought to book? It never occurred to me, as I was walking past that monstrous rancid elephant's leg in the window of the kebab shop, that the fluid pouring from it in rivulets might be anything other than zero-calorie. But luckily, Which? magazine has stepped in to the fray and saved me from my own ignorance.

Wise words from Which?:

Neil Fowler, the editor of Which?, said: "We would like people to be aware of just how much of their daily food intake comes in just one meal - a day's worth of fat or sugar shouldn't be ignored.

"Unlike at the supermarket, it's almost impossible to work out the nutritional content of a takeaway. Ultimately we want consumers to have much clearer information about fat, sugar and salt levels."

So, what Which? magazine actually wants is for every single takeaway in the UK to offer 'nutritional information' about the lardburger and chips you're about to gorge yourself on. Will that make people change their eating habits? Will they suddenly say "Ooh, I was going to have a battered saveloy and chips, but I can see it's got 71 g of fat so I'll make do with a ryvita and some salad"? Of course they won't, but it'll give the Elf 'n Safety brigade something else to regulate.

Ultimately, I want Neil Fowler and the Infantilisation Department of Which? Magazine to be boiled in a cauldron of extra-virgin olive oil (calorie counted). If people can't work out the link between that massive swollen belly and stuffing themselves with a burger and chips six days a week, what's the world come to?

Boggle-Eyed Gimp talks Shite

Ed Balls has been parading his credentials as a socialist today, according to the Beeb:

Children's Secretary Ed Balls has attacked academic selection, saying pupils who miss out on grammar school places feel like failures.

He said England's secondary moderns would get extra money to help them overcome problems created by selective education.

In a speech to heads in Birmingham, he said he did not like selection.

Secondary moderns often taught the poorest children in an area and needed extra support, he said.

"Let me make clear that I do not like selection," Mr Balls said.

Dear Ed dislikes selection so much that he spent his youth at a public school, then Oxford and Harvard. Ahh, the rank whiff of a hypocrite.

Auntie, as ever, is on his side, pointing out that of 638 failing schools marked out last week "More than one in 10 of the schools on the list is a secondary modern - a non-selective school in an area where are other state schools are academically selective."

Now, I didn't do Maths at A-level, so forgive me if this seems obvious to me, but that means, surely, that 9 in 10 - 90% - of those schools are non secondary moderns and are still failing?

Is that a searing indictment of the grammar school system? I fail to see how.

Sadly, this is as good as BBC reporting on education gets - verbal barbs at the evils of selection pretty much every time grammar schools are mentioned. I have given up expecting any more from the BBC while Mike Baker is involved. Baker ticks all the boxes of the stereotyped education correspondent - hates selection, believes academic rigour is 'unfair', wants the private sector closed down because it is 'elitist'. And, of course, he received a privileged education at a selective state school and then a top university (Cambridge). Naturally, he writes for that bastion of equality, the Guardian.

Bloke's Cookbook - Pasta in a smothered onion sauce

The allium family is a magical gift. It gives us garlic and onions, which together produce some of the greatest dishes known to man. Our curries would be blander, our sausage-in-a-bun poorer, without them. Is it possible to have too much onion? This recipe will let you find out.

The main - in fact almost the only - ingredient of this recipe is onion. When onion is cooked very slowly for an hour or so it loses its sharpness and becomes very sweet. The rest of the recipe involves giving the sauce some extra depth, but it's dead easy although it is time consuming - a total cooking time of around 90 minutes although only 30 minutes of actual work.

This recipe's one downfall, in my opinion, is its high antisocial rating. It's hard to consume a pound of onions and garlic without smelling of Frenchman. If you're planning to eat this, I advise you not to get close to anyone who hasn't also partaken for several hours afterwards.

The recipe quoted here will serve 2.

You will need:

Pasta (works pretty well with tagliatelle but you need something the sauce can wrap itself around);
6 medium onions, sliced finely (not chopped);
6 cloves garlic, sliced finely;
Olive oil;
Fresh parsley (enough to fill 2 table spoons after chopping);
Salt and Pepper;
Around 1/4 bottle dry white wine;
A large saucepan with a lid;
A second, smaller saucepan.


First, add a good amount of olive oil to the large saucepan and put the heat on medium. Once the oil's hot, but before it starts to bubble, put the onions in the saucpean. Stir them round and make sure they're thoroughly covered in the oil. When they start to sizzle, turn the heat down to low and put the lid on. Leave to cook on this low heat with the lid on for around an hour, checking every 20 minutes or so that nothing's burning, and giving everything a stir.

After an hour, you'll return to find that your half-hundredweight of onions looks rather smaller and sadder than it did. Fear not. Turn the heat up to medium/high and add the garlic, and then boil off all the liquid. You're aiming to get the onions to turn a golden colour (not brown) and this will take around 10-15 minutes. There will be some onion burned on to the sides and bottom of the pan. Don't worry too much about scraping it off since we'll deal with that shortly.

During this time you should start to heat the hot water. If you're having garlic bread with it (just in case there isn't enough garlic and onion) this is roughly the time to put it in the oven.

Once you've achieved this, add your chopped parsley and stir it in. Now season with salt and pepper. Don't stint here since the onions will be very sweet and you need to tone that down a bit. Cook your pasta now if you're using dried, or wait a few more minutes if you're using fresh.

Now add the white wine to the onions. You can use the wine to scrape off the golden oniony bits that are stuck to the saucepan (it's called deglazing). Cook on a high heat, stirring all the time, until all of the white wine has boiled off.

Finally, drain the pasta and toss with the onions.


I must admit that I'm stuck as to what to serve this one with. The white of the pasta and the gold of the onion seem to demand some more colour - perhaps a salad with radicchio in? If you have any bright ideas, let me know. I usually eat it with plenty of garlic bread and some grated parmesan.


Drink with: I'm out of ideas for this one. Please yourself.

Ease of cooking and preparation: 4/5 - Time consuming but very easy.

Mess Factor: 5/5 - Two pans and a colander.

Leftover value: 3/5 - Not great. Eat it all in the first sitting.

The baying mob

David Davis' resignation and last week's Irish referendum have both sharply highlighted for me the increasing disparity between the world in which journalists and politicians live, and the world in which the rest of us live.

On the Davis resignation, the endless stream of verbeage flooding from the keyboard of the newspaper columnists, and the almost-entirely negative commentary they produced, stands in stark contrast to the response of the voters and the comments those voters have left on article after article. The Telegraph has been particularly caustic, with (for example) Bruce Anderson exercising what passes for wit in playing to the authoritarian Tories. And yet, in the comments, there are the libertarians again.

Today, there's David Aaronovitch in the Times, doing the bidding of his Master Murdoch and claiming Davis is a Hitler. In his comments section the majority of replies are still telling him he's wrong. A number of them tell him to stand against Davis. He won't, of course. What journalist could make a living if they had to stand by their words?

Some journalists are wondering where they went wrong and how they made such a wrong-headed call. They were convinced Davis would be laughed out of the country by the electorate and were astonished to find that he wasn't. A few have admitted their mistakes. Others, like Nick Robinson at the Beeb, have tried to justify their own points of view again, in the hope that people will stop verbally beasting them. The comments to his last piece on the subject outnumber the earlier comments by a factor of two to one, and they are mostly a healthy combination of pro-Davis and anti-Robinson.

Interestingly, Trevor Kavanagh's article in The Sun (please feel free to purge your browser history after reading) puts their case perfectly:

Most Sun readers will instinctively support 42 days’ detention without trial for terror suspects if it helps prevent an atrocity on the streets of Britain.
They would accept ID cards as a sensible way of co-ordinating swathes of information already in the public domain if it made life easier as well as more secure.
CCTV cameras can undoubtedly be a force for good and DNA data banks have put killers and rapists in jail who would otherwise have escaped justice.
But along with many Sun readers, I don’t trust this Government, the police or the State bureaucracy to discriminate between keeping an eye out for our well-being and spying on us.
Information is power. And the authorities — national and local — have far too much of the stuff already.
The idea that thousands of anonymous, low-ranking town hall officials can use anti-terror laws to monitor our movements should make us sweat.

There's nothing a Sun reader hates more than an incompetent authoritarian.

On the subject of the Irish referendum, the gulf between politicians and the proles has been revealed to be even wider. With almost every EU government (bar the Czechs) and the entire Eurocracy working overtime now to find a way around the democratic process, the commentariat's opinion of the workings of the superstate has never been lower.

There are still a few cheerleaders for repression, though, such as Steve Richards in the Independent, making the most extraordinary claims:

In the Irish referendum campaign, Europe was blamed on everything from high taxes to abortion and portrayed as a threat to democracy. Yet the referendum and the power it gives to a tiny number of voters in one small country shows the EU is democratic to the point of paralysis.

Firstly, the referendum is a part of the Irish constitution, nothing else. Secondly, no other country in the EU held a vote on the Lisbon Treaty.

According to Steve and his ilk, democracy is too complicated to be understood by the proles, and only really clever people, like journalists, grasp its nuances. They can then spoon-feed the ignorant unwashed snippets of information, but not too much, in case their tiny shrivelled cortexes become overloaded.

Let us all enjoy the result of the Irish referendum, for it will be the last time that any European government runs a vote on the direction of the EU.

Thankyou Ireland

Saved.

Let's wait and see how the Eurocrats spin this one.

Bloke's Cookbook - Spicy Meatballs

One of the slightly vexing things about summer is that so much of my cooking is geared towards traditional bloke foods. Those foods include equal parts of pastry, potatoes, meat and beer. However, the weather's too hot for stodge on toast, so here's my take on an old fave.

This recipe basically takes the ingredients for the classic Spag Bol and does something a bit less dull to them. Preparation is long-winded - since the meatballs have to be chilled in the fridge for half an hour before you cook them - but straightforward. This recipe should serve 2 with some left over for a meatball sandwich for breakfast.

You will need:

Pasta (your preference, works well with tagliatelle, penne and fusilli in my experience);
2/3lb beef or lamb mince;
2 medium onions;
6 cloves garlic;
1 14oz(400g) tin plum tomatoes;
Olive oil;
Paprika, Cayenne Pepper, Salt and Pepper;
Fresh basil leaves;
A food processor (unless you can chop onion and garlic very finely);
A large saucepan, wok or crockpot.
A second, smaller saucepan.

Firstly, make the meatballs. Take 1 onion, quarter it and put it in the food processor. Process until very finely chopped. If you don't have a processor, welcome to the headache of chopping onion very finely. Make sure your knife is razor sharp and chop finely. Now process/chop the garlic with the onion. Now add the mince to the processor, and then add 2 teaspoons of paprika and 1 of cayenne pepper, a grind of salt and the same of pepper. If you're processorless, put everything into a mixing bowl and mix by hand.

With everything mixed, time to create the meatballs. I suggest you make small ones rather than large but it's up to you. To create the right size, I make roughly golf-ball-sized ones first, and then split each one in two and reshape them to give me the right size. Take a chunk of mixture, roll it around between the palms of your hands to give you the right shape. Once each ball is made, place it on a plate or tray.

When you're finished, put clingfilm over the meatballs and place them in the fridge for at least 30 minutes. This helps to keep them firm and stop them falling apart while they cook.

Now, prepare the sauce the meatballs are to cook in. Roughly chop the remaining onion and garlic cloves. Put some olive oil into your large cooking vessel, and turn the heat on, then fry the onions at a medium heat until they start to soften but not brown. Then add the garlic. Keep everything moving in the pan, and let the garlic fry for a couple of minutes. Now add the tin of tomatoes, chop them while in the pan, and add some water - fill the empty tomato tin roughly half way with water and add it to the pan.

Stir this all together, and let it simmer for around 30 minutes. If you leave the lid off the pot for the last 15 minutes then you should end up with a slightly thicker sauce which will coat the meatballs better.

Pour some water into your smaller saucepan, add some salt, and turn the heat on.

Take your fresh basil leaves - a dozen or so - and shred them with your fingers, then add them to the sauce. Stir in.

Take the meatballs from the fridge, and place them in the simmering tomato sauce. If they're the same size as mine, they'll cook right through in 10-15 minutes. Move them around in the sauce every few minutes, to cook them evenly.

When the meatballs are nearly cooked, put the pasta in the boiling water and cook until it's al dente - ever so slightly firm. Then drain it in a colander, shake it, and mix it into the meatball pot, stirring it in gently. This will complete the cooking process and coat the pasta in the sauce. After a minute or so, empty the whole lot into a serving dish, and serve. Garnish with some grated parmesan or some of the leftover basil leaves.

If you're looking for an accompaniment to this, garlic bread is a safe bet. A sharp salad, with little gem lettuces, rocket and chard will work well.

Drink with: A cold crisp white wine or a simple lager like 1664.

Ease of cooking and preparation: 3/5 - Time consuming rather than complicated but worth the effort.

Mess Factor: 4/5 - Washing up a food processor is always a pain in the bum, but everything else is pretty straightforward. Two pans to wash up isn't too bad.

Leftover value: 4/5 - Cold meatball sandwiches are awesome. Cold meatballs and pasta is pretty good, too. Be aware that the cayenne pepper gets stronger the next day so you may want a glass of water to hand.

Send a Gunboat!

Fuck the French. No, really, fuck them. A few weeks ago I booked my trip to Calais on Eurotunnel for today, 22nd May, leaving at 10:20, getting home around 3. It would give me a comfortable jaunt down to Folkestone, time enough to mooch around the shops, maybe a spot of lunch, then enough time to get home to see a client at 4:30.

I reckoned without the massive sense of entitlement that the French have. Today, it manifested itself in the form of the blockade of ports by French fishermen, who think that fuel prices are too high. Yes, they are too high. So what do you do? Well, if you're British then you plan to use less, grumble more and vote the thieving twat Labour Party out as soon as possible. If you're a French fisherman, you make the lives of everyone within 50 miles of you as unhappy as possible in the hope that somehow your lot will improve as a result.

Where does this sense of entitlement come from? How is it that one group of people spend their lives trying to make sure they minimise the inconvenience they cause to one another, whilst another, 25 miles away, do exactly the opposite and with such relentless selfishness? What is it about the French that makes them think that they have any right to bring the UK to a standstill? If it weren't for the effect it has on others, I wouldn't care a toss what they did. They could burn sheep under the Arc de Triomphe and I'd say little more than 'Ahh, The French.' But when it fucks up my day, and the days of thousands of other people, and hundreds of businesses, and they do it all the fucking time just to show how amazing they are, I get pissed off. Your right to dick around all you like ends at the point where you inconvenience me.

That's what it achieved today. Shoved off the M20 at Junction 8, I then spent the next 65 minutes travelling at speeds that would have been appropriate over a century ago, whilst three lanes of the motorway swelled with hundreds of pissed-off lorry drivers and their pissed-off lorries.

This blockading of the ports - and the resulting traffic mayhem in the UK - is so frequent that plans are afoot to build a gigantic lorry park. What we should actually be doing is spending the money on a warship which would go to Calais and blow the crap out of those officious twats. This is exactly the sort of situation which calls for Gunboat Diplomacy in the true sense of the word. I guarantee you that a few rounds of 4.5" from a frigate would get the port cleared for trading in jig time.

Certainly, the A20 is - despite the best efforts of the Health and Safety Nazis - potentially a pleasant drive. In my mood - not improved by the insistence of the cadaver driving the red Rover in front to travel at speeds no higher than 40mph - I struggled to appreciate it, but thanks to my decision to leave 40 minutes early I reached the tunnel with 10 minutes to go before my train stopped accepting new cars.

Fate, however, had different plans, and they involved curling out a steamer on my day. Eurotunnel has a groovy system for people who've pre-booked. There are specific kiosks for them, labelled with brightly lit signs 20 feet high. They drive up to the kiosk, stick their credit card in a machine, and it prints the ticket out. It works really well and takes less than a minute even for the most inept motorist. However, if you don't know how to read simple signs then you can - as somebody did this morning - drive up to the pre-booked kiosk without a booking, and then press the buttons like a poorly trained chimp and stick your card in while wondering why it won't give you a ticket. The reason it won't, you fucking fucktard, is because you didn't pre-book your ticket!

Eventually a helpful lady came over, and had to shut down the automated system and open up the manual system, just for this fucktard. So, if I ever find you, Mr dark grey Renault Megane registration KT55 something something something, I will shove your credit card up your rear iris while shouting "Pre-Book this you mongoloid twat". Thanks to you, you thoughtless, ignorant, worthless piece of skin, I not only missed my train, but the one after that was fully booked, and I had nearly 90 minutes wait in a car park for one that was available.

Thanks to him, and the frogs, I had 55 minutes to do all my shopping. Lunch was a couple of cold croque-monsieurs from the supermarket, not the gastronomic treat I had planned. The final turd in the water pipe was being pulled over by customs and asked whether I was a tobacco smuggler while my car was searched.

So, as a result of the malign influence of the Special Needs Service and the French, my day was dicked to hell and back. I bundled off the return train late, and made it to my 4:30 appointment with minutes to spare. I naturally proceeded within the speed limit for my entire journey. Anything else would be criminal, although not quite as criminal as giving a driving licence to a man unable to follow basic instructions to obtain a ticket.

Fuck stupid people, obviously. But most of all, fuck the French.

Bloke's Cookbook - Chilli

We all know what chilli's supposed to look like. It's a sort of sad brown goo that you knock up with a packet sauce. Lots of tomato and, if you're adventurous, a piece of pepper.

No longer. This is my version of the age-old staple. I took some hints and tips from Americans, who know their stuff about chilli recipes. This recipe is one I've gradually refined and tweaked as the months have gone by, and I'm happy enough with it now to share it. It requires a fair amount of preparation, though, and unless you're well practiced I suggest you chop everything up before you start.

The majority of this recipe is done on a high heat. The reason for this is that peppers have a very high water content. You need to get almost all of the liquid out of the peppers otherwise you'll end up with an unpleasant gruel. It does mean you have to keep stirring, and you can't let your attention waver.

My recipe uses dried beans that you soak for at least 3 hours before use, and then boil for 20 minutes. Dried beans are cheaper than tinned beans, and have a far superior texture. Unless you rinse your tinned beans very thoroughly they'll turn the recipe goopy.

This chilli will easily serve four people. With plenty of rice you can serve 6. For the rice, use my steamed rice recipe. You can start the soaking process before you do the preparation for the chilli.

You will need:

1 large wok, and a wooden spoon. 1 saucepan if you're using dried beans;
1 cup dried kidney beans, 1 cup dried pinto beans, soaked for at least 3 hours;
1 large onion;
4 cloves garlic;
3 bell peppers of varying colours;
2 red, 2 green chillies;
Around 250g diced pork;
100g chorizo;
Olive oil;
Ground paprika (1 heaped tablespoon);
Ground cumin (1 heaped tablespoon);
Fresh coriander;
Juice of 1 lemon;
Tomato puree.

Chop the peppers and chillies - the peppers should be chopped into roughly bite-size pieces, and the chillies into pieces around the size of your thumbnail. Depending on how hot you like your chilli, you can leave the seeds in or take them out. To deseed a chilli, cut the top off, cut the chilli in half down its length, then turn the knife blade side-on to the exposed seeds and run the blade down the inside of the chilli. The whole lot should come off in one go. Set the chopped peppers and chillies aside.

Chop the onion and finely chop the garlic. Set aside.

Juice the lemon.

Dice the chorizo.

Chop the coriander. You can use stalks and roots for cooking, and save the tips of the leaves for garnish.

Put the soaked beans in plenty of water on the stove, bring to the boil. Whilst you're doing this, take the wok, add some olive oil - don't stint - and put it ona high heat until it bubbles.

The beans can be left to cook while you work on other things, but they will foam so don't let them boil over. It's a bitch to scrape off and it stinks, too.

Once the oil is hot enough - you'll be able to tell because there'll be bubbles on the bottom of the wok - put the onion in to the wok. Stir in, covering the onions in a coating of oil, and let them sizzle for a few minutes. Keep them moving.

Once the onions have started to turn golden, add the garlic and the chillies. Stir them in, let them sizzle for a couple of minutes.

Now add the peppers. Cook them for several minutes, keeping everything in the wok moving, and they should start to lose some of their water content.

The cooking so far will have taken you around 15 minutes, and you'll have a wok of rapidly-cooking pepper, onion, garlic and chilli. If, at any point,it looks like it's drying out, add more olive oil. Don't hold back, you can cook it off later.

Now add the diced pork, mix it right in, and let it brown for a couple of minutes. Now add the chorizo. Stir it in.

While this is cooking, drain the beans, rinse them, and put them in the wok.

Now add the chopped coriander.

Sprinkle the paprika and cumin on to the top of the chilli, pour some olive oil over the top if you need to, and stir it in. Keep stirring, and make sure everything's well coated in spices. You can't risk having any unpleasant lumps of spice in there.

Pour the lemon juice over the top, and stir.

Finally, add a large squeeze (at least a tablespoon) of tomato puree, and mix in thoroughly.

Now, turn the heat right down and put the lid on for 15 minutes.

After 15 minutes, take the lid off, and start cooking the rice. There should be a fairly large quantity of liquid left in the bottom of the wok. Turn the heat back up, keep stirring, and keep everything moving until the majority of the liquid has steamed off. With practice, you'll be able to time it so that the rice is cooked at the same time that the chilli is.

Serve the chilli in a large dish, with the rice underneath. I also do a dish of my cumin dip, which goes very well with it.

Drink with: Ice-cold beer.

Ease of cooking and preparation: 3/5 - It's not especially tricky to do, but it'll take practice and organisation to get it right.

Mess Factor: 3/5 - Not much in the way of peelings, but the wok will be a bastard to clean (so soak it for 30 minutes in scalding hot water with washing-up liquid before you start), and the chilli will spit all over the worktop and hob.

Leftover value: 4/5 - The rice isn't ideal, but leftover cold chilli is very good. It works well in a sandwich with some of the cumin dip over the top.